Ferragamo owns Touchdown Realty and End Zone Mortgage in Anaheim Hills and lives in Orange. He has three daughters, oversees an annual golf tournament that benefits the Special Olympics and runs a football camp.
Every once in a while, usually at the summer camp, someone will play the highlight tape from Super Bowl XIV. Ferragamo will feel the rush of it, even a generation removed. And then, every time, Jack Lambert steps in front of that pass and the Steelers score the last 14 points.
Every darn time.
Ferragamo still isn't over that interception.
"That's a play I'll always come back to," he said. "I'm looking back to that series of plays, we were doing so much. We were moving the ball. It gets to be second nature. Well, you've got to remember, experience always plays a big factor in those games. I didn't have that. It was a mistake. Jack Lambert happened to be in the right place at the right time."
Every darn time.
"A lot of times I feel like turning that thing off early in the fourth quarter," Ferragamo said of the tape. "But that's history. You can't go back and change it. If someone held something back, which nobody did, then you could feel bad about it. There was never a doubt we could have won."
Youngblood, a special consultant to the commissioner of the Arena Football League, lives in Orlando, Fla., where he has two notable keepsakes from his Super Bowl season--a 16-millimeter tape of the game and the original X-rays of the broken bone in his leg.
"Clean through," he said of the break. "Like snapping a pencil."
He said he can feel it still, when the summer storms rise up along the coast. "Then again," he said, laughing, "I feel them in my shoulders, neck, knees, elbows. . . . "
He e-mails his friend, Saul, more than once a week. They talk too. The mention of Saul stalls Youngblood's enthusiasm for a conversation about the old days, the old Rams, an old Super Bowl that feels forgotten.
He sighs deeply.
Playing with a broken leg doesn't seem quite so courageous anymore.
*
A continent away, Saul has a few more chemotherapy treatments and who knows what after that.
"In order to kill the cancer, they practically kill you," he said. "It's a hammer.
"My doctor said if it doesn't come back in 10 years, 'You may die of cancer but not from this tumor.' The thing I want to do is make a mark. If I can put an arm around somebody, encourage some people, just give some people some hope, that's what it's all about.
"If it's taught me anything, I don't sweat the small stuff. I don't care if Eileen squeezes the toothpaste from the top or bottom. I don't care which way the toilet paper comes off the rung."
It only matters that she is there, smiling, caressing, reminding the nurse that his nausea sets in about an hour after his treatments.
"I think I learned a lot more when I was playing on the Rams from the losses," he said, "than I ever did from the wins."
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PACKERS: 20
49ERS: 3
San Francisco assured of first non-winning record since strike-shortened 1982 season. Page 3
REWIND:
WEEK 12
Touching scene: Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson exchanging pleasantries on Thanksgiving. Page 3
