The Miracle Bowl

I started at the football office in April of 1980. That fall we were having a good season and were invited to play in the Holiday Bowl for the third consecutive time. In fact, the Holiday Bowl started in 1978 and BYU had played in each of the prior games. We
had lost the first two (Navy in ’78 and Indiana in ’79), but we joked that the losses was one of the reasons I was hired!

Now it’s December 19th, the day of the miracle bowl. I take all the credit! Kidding, of course. We were way behind SMU with less than 4 minutes left and thanks to Jim McMahon and others we staged a furious comeback and won the game. It was LaVell’s first bowl victory as a head coach.

The school had let my mom and dad and brother, Boyd, come as well. My brother had rented a car and after the game we went to return the car at the airport while everyone else went on the buses. No one at the airport knew what to do with us. Finally they told us that the charter airplane had arrived so we went out and we got on board. Not wanting to be in the way, we went to the very back seats and waited. Since this was well before 9/11 there weren’t a lot of travel regulations so we hadn’t really had to check-in or anything.

We waited and waited, thinking the team must be having a grand celebration back at the stadium. Eventually the team and coaches boarded but not until a very long time had passed. We truly couldn’t figure out what had taken them so long. The irony was that apparently they had been looking all over for us, concerned about what may have happened when we were nowhere to be found after the game. This was well before the days of cell phones or pagers so we didn’t have a chance to call anyone to let them know we were already on board. When we were discovered, they took off immediately and we had a happy and raucous trip home. Thank goodness we had won the game or everyone may not have been so understanding about the time they had spent searching for us.

LaVell always made a point to include me and my family in everything the team did, even though we made them look for us for quite awhile after that game, and I’m forever grateful for that.