Sports feeds
E-mail sports alerts
DDN sports mobile
Sports TwitterReggie Williams: 'Our defense let down'
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
In Bengals' lore, it is known as "The Speech" — authored by linebacker Reggie Williams at halftime of Super Bowl XVI with Cincinnati trailing, 20-0. Williams is a native of Flint, Mich., so this was personal. He played 14 years (1976-89) for the Bengals, served as a Cincinnati city councilman and is currently vice president of Disney Sports Attractions in Orlando, Fla. He recalls Super Bowl XVI in a chat with Bengals beat writer Chick Ludwig.
In his words
Extras
"At halftime, I erupted into a 'We-can-win-this-if-we-all-bring-our-talents-and-capabilities-to-the-field-NOW' speech. It was a personal plea to each and every player. It's a great memory. It's been a quarter of a century. That's appropriate pause for reflection.
"The time to really exhort would've been when we walked on the field after the San Francisco 49ers' goal-line stand, which in my mind is the greatest goal-line stand in Super Bowl history. Stepping on that field, our defense was let down. We were so de-motivated. That was the time to dig in instead of letting San Francisco out of the hole, and we didn't.
"The lesson for me, that I've used even to this day, is that motivation needs to be continuous. At the end of the day, we made a valiant, second-half effort. You look at what occurred on Sunday with Indianapolis. They were down 18 (21-3) and came back. We were down 20 and closed that gap. If we had scored on that goal-line effort, there is no doubt in my mind that we would have won that game.
"But that's what life is. There are walls. To be ultimately successful in this game, you need to run through them or that wall's going to run through you. In that particular case, the wall ran through us.
"You can blame the traffic going up into the stadium because of Vice President Bush's cavalcade; the fact that our bus got to the locker room so late that we weren't able to do on-the-field, pre-game warm-ups. All those are distractions. The game is played between the end zones for 60 minutes. That's what counts. Anything else is an excuse."
