SAN DIEGO - From where they sit, amid 70-degree warmth and gentle Pacific breezes, there is no fear of growing cold. Instead, the Chargers have sounded reveille in advance of their 3,000-mile, coast-to-coast trip to take on the Patriots in Sunday's AFC Championship game.
"It's going to be cold for them, too," said Jeromey Clary.
"When you're focused, you don't notice the weather," said Nick Hardwick.
"Doesn't matter what the weather is," said Stephen Cooper.
"Guys find a way to adapt to it," said Norv Turner.
"It doesn't matter what the conditions are," said Shawne Merriman.
Throughout the Chargers' locker room, the sentiment is the same. There is an ambivalence about the weather forecast for Sunday afternoon in Foxborough, Mass. Bitter cold? The chaps from the climate-control capital of the continental United States insist they won't turn to icicles, that they will handle the assignment with a warm embrace. But their words ring hollow to a voice of experience.
"It will impact players emotionally. No question. It will definitely be a factor in the game. A lot of players have never played in [bitter cold] weather. There's a different feeling when you get hit in that sort of cold."
Reggie Williams presents the words with the conviction of a man who has earned the right to offer perspective. His body of work - a College Football Hall of Fame career at Dartmouth and 14 NFL seasons - includes a most emphatic badge of honor for service above and beyond the call of duty. He was, you see, in uniform that unforgettable Sunday 26 years ago when pro football returned to the ice age.
"I'll never forget the cold that day," said Williams. "I can still feel it."
The 1981 AFC Championship game at Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium is officially entered into the NFL record book as the coldest game ever, with the temperature listed at minus-9 degrees and a windchill of an unbearable 59-below. A move to Florida a few years ago helped him thaw out, Williams laughs, but at 53 he lives with memories permanently frozen in his mind. In no way will they melt away and, in fact, the prospect of bitter cold weather for Sunday's AFC Championship game only stirs the emotions. What he remembers first and foremost from Jan. 10, 1982 is this:
"The Chargers had played in 80-plus weather in Miami the week before [an epic 41-38 overtime victory in which Dan Fouts completed 33 of 53 passes for 433 yards and 3 TDs], gone all the way back to warm San Diego weather, then turned around and came back to Cincinnati where it was 59-below. It was a weather change of about 130 degrees, so you almost felt sorry for the Chargers."
The key word being "almost," because Williams stopped his compassion short that bitter day. After all, "the prize for winning was so big."
As it will be Sunday when the Chargers and Patriots play, what was at stake 26 years ago was a date in the Super Bowl, and that was enough to warm Williams's emotions, impossible as that might have been that day.
Lighting a fire
Williams and his teammates were in no rush to get things going the morning of the game. "Everyone was scared to go out," he said, so Bengals players huddled in their hotel lobby. They were some 25 minutes outside of the city, and the plan was for them to drive their cars to the stadium. But as they stood around looking at one another, their coach, Forrest Gregg, came marching into the lobby."He gave us that look, like we were a bunch of softies, and we watched him charge through the [hotel] doors," said Williams. "For seven or eight minutes he tried, but he couldn't start his car. Now Forrest had a twitch when he got excited and when he came back inside, that twitch was frozen to his face."
After some failed attempts to start other cars, the decision was made to use hotel vans to transport the players to Riverfront Stadium. "They brought [the vans] right into the hotel lobby, too," said Williams, who felt the impromptu maneuver worked to his team's benefit.
"In a way, it became all or nothing. It was like, 'We can't leave the stadium - we don't have our cars' - so it was as if we knew we were all in this together."
That became even more of a rallying cause once they entered the locker room. Williams had grown up in Flint, Mich., where winters can be cruel, and his football days at Dartmouth had offered plenty of demanding New England days. "I had used cold weather as a vehicle to demonstrate that I was a tough linebacker. It really was beneficial," said Williams, and when the players huddled around Gregg the emotions spilled over.
The Bengals knew that Gregg had played in the mother of all bad-weather games - the legendary "Ice Bowl" of 1967 between Green Bay and Dallas - so when he conceded that this day was even colder than what he had experienced, well, "it inspired us," said Williams. "It was the ultimate way to bring us together."
Many of them were also on the same page in regards to their uniform - or, more specifically, what wouldn't be part of their uniform. The offensive linemen - "The biggest, toughest guys on the team," said Williams - weren't going to wear long sleeves beneath their jerseys and neither was Williams.
"I went bare-armed. It was so cold that day we didn't bother with pregame warm-ups, but when we came out for the game and saw the Chargers, we could see it in their faces. They had just a little glimmer of false hope and we knew it was over. They saw us bare-armed; the intimidation factor had worked. It was worth it, from that standpoint."
Cincinnati won the game, 27-7, as it limited Fouts to just 185 yards passing, and Williams has no shortage of memories. There was, for instance, a teammate named Eddie Williams, "a kid from Miami" who was in no way prepared for that sort of weather. The league had introduced heated benches for the first time that year and Eddie Williams found a spot and anchored himself close to the heating coils. He apparently got too close, "because his pants caught fire," said Reggie Williams. "We said, 'Eddie, your pants are on fire.' He said, 'I don't care.' "
Reggie Williams is convinced that being able to handle bitter cold weather is a mind-set and a lot of players don't have it because of where they grew up or where they currently play.
Clary, San Diego's starting right offensive tackle, isn't sure about that. He's a Texas kid who played at Kansas State, but he nods to different corners of the Chargers' locker room. Granted, he and his teammates have just come inside from 70-degree weather and yet another day of pulsating sun, but "not all of us went to school out here," said Clary. "We've all played in cold at some point in our careers. Just because [the Patriots] live there doesn't mean they're used to the cold. You don't ever get used to the cold. If you're cold, you're cold."
Mind-set matters
Williams's experience tells him otherwise. The Patriots and other franchises who play outdoors in cold locations - the Packers, the Bears, the Steelers, and the Bills, just to name a few - do get used to it. "They not only will play in [cold weather], they will shop for groceries in it," said Williams. "They have the mind-set that it's part of them. You have to get used to [cold weather] by living in it."Plenty of players will concede that they never could get used to it. Take Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman, for instance. He'll work Sunday's NFC Championship game for Fox and when it was announced that the forecast in Green Bay called for 30 percent chance of snow with temperatures around 6 degrees, he shuddered. It prompted him to recall his first bitter-cold NFL experience as a rookie with Dallas. Aikman prefaced it by announcing, "I'm not proud of this," but his story reinforced the notion that some players aren't necessarily equipped to handle adverse weather.
"We were getting beat pretty good [by the Giants] and I got in the huddle late in the game and said, 'Let's run three plays and get this over with and get back to the bench. This is ridiculous,' " said Aikman.
Cold weather will impact the Chargers, said Aikman, "because they're out of Southern California, a place where they don't play in those conditions very often." He knows he's not breaking new ground with that suggestion. In fact, the Chargers have heard all week that bitter cold weather will work against them far more than New England.
Some, like Hardwick, the Chargers' center, will debate the issue. "I don't think it matters at all. [What matters is] executing your assignments," he said. "I've never thought much of the cold [issue]. I grew up in Indiana so it's not like my first time being in cold weather ever. When you're focused, you don't notice the weather. It doesn't bother you. You just go get the job done."
Others, like Merriman, seem more interested in putting the topic to rest. "I hope it's freezing and Tom Brady can't feel his fingers to throw the ball," he said. "But if not, we have to prepare for whatever we're going to get."
What they're going to get, in all likelihood, are cold and uncomfortable conditions. But in no way will it match what their predecessors had for the AFC Championship game 26 years ago. That day was so unbearably cold, there was talk of postponing the game. Williams, however, said, "we didn't spend two seconds thinking they would; we knew we were going to play."
That, said the Dartmouth graduate, hits at the essence of football.
"It's what differentiates the game from our other sports," said Williams. "It validates our toughness and our love for the game. We don't call them off. We play them, no matter what the weather. It's why we share a pain that cannot be replicated."
Williams thinks the Patriots will handle the weather conditions better than the Chargers, simply because they are acclimated from living in it. He would not be surprised if the Patriots players look around Gillette Stadium and get an emotional charge similar to what he received when he first walked onto the field at Riverfront Stadium 26 years ago.
"The reality is, I learned that day so much about the passion of our fans. More than 50,000 of them sat there in that weather. It was 59-below. I said to myself, 'There's no way we could lose with home fans like that.' "
"That game," said Williams, "became the ultimate challenge."
The memories from which are frozen forever.
