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Broncos and Hines Ward, Pittsburgh Steelers.

There are many who wore the Red & Black who also wear Super Bowl rings, and then there are those who made it to the big dance and came away without winning a championship.

In Super Bowl history, there have been a lot of outstanding players who did not win a ring such as Jim Kelly who led the Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls but lost each game. Fran Tarkenton, former Georgia quarterback was 0-3 in Super Bowls with the Minnesota Vikings which brings up interesting flashbacks.

Sonny Jurgenson of the Washington Redskins made it to the Super Bowl but was on crutches when his team played in the Super Bowl in 1972, losing to the Miami Dolphins 14-7. He has never resorted to complaining, saying, “I had a good long run and had a lot of fun and good success. I did my best.”

It bothered Tarkenton, initially, taking him a long time to get over his not winning a Super Bowl ring. “I hated it for my teammates,” he has maintained. “You have to have a lot of luck to win a championship.”

For years, I would see Jurgensen at a Redskins’ game in December and on other trips to Washington and at the Masters in April. When I told him Tarkenton had frustrations with his Super Bowl record, he asked, “Why?”

Then he said, “He had a tremendous career and a lot of success. Losing that one game does not define his career. It is not always the quarterback’s fault when a team loses the Super Bowl. What about his teammates who dropped passes, the linemen who missed blocks, the defensive backs who missed critical tackles?”

Ted Williams never won a World Series and in a long conversation one spring a couple of years before he died, he said that he felt that his body of work defined his career.

As he gets longer in the tooth, that is the position that Tarkenton takes with his Super Bowl legacy. He is beginning to agree with Sonny Jurgensen.

It is interesting that there is great head shaking assessment with some sports anomalies. How does Orville Moody win a U. S. Open and Sam Snead not?