We compress lives into moments, and those moments into snippets, and so he’s known for one blooper play. And that’s fine. Even President Obama, when he saw Garo Yepremian in the White House during the 1972 Dolphins’ visit in 2013, handed him a football.
“Can you still throw it, Garo?” he asked.
“Well, I’m one-for-one, the highest-rated quarterback in the Super Bowl,” Yepremian said.
The president began moving down the Blue Room as if a receiver. Yepremian, true to history, turned his back and had the football slip out of his hand behind him just like in the Perfect Season’s Super Bowl. Obama caught it.
“Now I’m two-for-two!” Yepremian said.
He always played that role, right to his death of cancer at 70 on Friday, after which the national headline to his obituary referred to his being, “best known for his Super Bowl gaffe” and ESPN ran that play over and over on its news cycle.
Again, that’s fine. Yepremian learned to laugh about it, too. It was his positive nature to turn something awful into something cute. He joked with Johnny Carson and Bob Hope about it back in the day, entertained corporations with it even in recent years and turned one play into a cottage industry.
But he never talked of the pain that play caused. Nor did anyone ask how an Armenian who grew up in Cyprus, then moved on his own to London at 17 due to ethnic problems and worked in a basement warehouse made the NFL’s All-Decade team of the 1970s.
The truth is Yepremian’s life was always the better story than that one play. He overcame so much. He showed such massive determination inside that little body. He used a machete and cut his own path in a full life to admire in his death.
His visiting brother saw him kick a soccer ball in those weekend games in London and had an idea. “Go to America,” he said. “You can get a free education.”
They heard of scholarships. Yepremian ended up in Indiana, where his brother lived, but realized scholarships weren’t in soccer. He bought a football and a tee and taught himself how to kick on an empty field at Butler University.
The football coach passed by one day, stopped and signed him up. But Yepremian was 22 and had played semi-pro soccer and the NCAA ruled him ineligible. Yes, kids, NCAA wisdom isn’t a new concept.
Yepremian then wrote every NFL team. Detroit signed him. The first pro game he ever saw he played in. He didn’t know how to put on shoulder pads. He ran to the wrong sideline after kicking off.
“I keek a touchdown,” he told the coach, a line that later became the title of his autobiography.
He was one of the NFL’s first soccer-style kickers, and the old guard scoffed at the little foreigner introducing it. He was hung by his jersey on a locker’s hook by Hall of Fame tackle Alex Karras.
He was mocked for his size, cut by Detroit, unemployed for nearly two seasons and signed by Don Shula in 1970. What a signing, too. Yepremian sent the Dolphins to their first Super Bowl by kicking a 37-yard field goal in Kansas City. His 54-yarder in Minnesota that kept the Perfect Season alive.
And, yes, he had that one blooper play in the Super Bowl everyone laughs about today, but that wasn’t so funny at the time. “We lose this game, I’ll kill you,” linebacker Nick Buoniconti told him on the sideline.
When the team celebrated that night, Yepremian was so stressed from that play and how the national chatter mocked him that he left the party early and took an ice bath in his hotel room.
He then went home and refused to come out of his home. For weeks. Then a letter arrived signed by Shula. The letter told how important Yepremian was to the Dolphins, of all the kicks he made and the games he saved.
Years later, at a charity golf tournament, Yepremian and Shula signed autographs together and the kicker mentioned Shula writing, “the most important letter in my life.” It brought him out of his funk, allowed him to function again.
Shula looked at him. “What letter?”
It turned out Shula’s wife, Dorothy, wrote the letter and signed his name. What a moment they had, laughing, upon discovering that. And what a life Yepremian had.
Remember him for one play, sure. But the Aremenian from Cyprus by way of London and Indiana achieved so much more than that.