Vikings seek to end the curse
The ‘Minneapolis Miracle’ keeps dream alive for team’s long-suffering fans
Mike Zimmer is a 61-yearold football lifer who waited 34 years for his first head coaching gig in the NFL and, to the best of anyone’s recollection, has never been confused with a zany madcap.
I mean, the dude owns a hunting lodge in Kentucky that he calls his “happy place.” That doesn’t disqualify him from having a lighter side. But it does paint a picture.
It’s therefore understandable that, when asked if he believed the Minnesota Vikings were cursed, the team’s head coach didn’t provide a mirthful sound bite for the assembled media.
“There’s no damn curse,” Zimmer said at the start of the NFL post-season, before taking a bite of glass.
And who knows. Maybe this is the Vikings’ team that breaks the cur ... er, run of bad luck that has haunted this team over its 56-year existence. But whatever you want to call it, that thing that has come to define the Vikings is very real and very scary to its followers.
Maybe it lacks the sweeping, epic quality of curses that befell the Red Sox, Cubs and the city of Cleveland. But to Minnesotans, the curse lives. At least, it did until last Sunday. Now we’re about to find out if Case Keenum, the quarterback nobody wanted, can succeed where the greatest Vikings have failed.
“I know this is what all you guys predicted — a (Nick) Foles versus Keenum NFC championship,” Keenum said this week, referring to the equally unlikely Philadelphia Eagles QB who the Vikes face on Sunday.
Which at least proves he has a better sense of humour than his coach. We’ll see if he’s still laughing after Sunday.
In addition to meeting the Eagles in Philadelphia this weekend, the Vikings will be confronting their own miserable history, which is a storyline the team abhors, but the scribes delight in. That history was brought into sharp focus Sunday when Keenum’s last-play prayer to Stefon Diggs produced a 61-year touchdown that vaulted the Vikes past New Orleans and into the NFC title game; a miracle play that, everyone agrees, has the power to alter the currents of the team’s history.
Well, maybe not everyone. Zimmer will tell you the Diggs’ TD was a product of his team’s focus and determination and not a sprinkling of pixie dust, which just proves he’s never written a column. But for the vast majority of NFL fans, including a sizable contingent in Canada that identifies with the Vikings, that play offers incontrovertible proof that this team is destiny’s darling and it will deliver the franchise’s first Super Bowl, on its home field no less.
The Vikes are actually one of 13 teams to have never won the sport’s biggest prize, but that record represents just a small part of its story. For its fans, the larger theme is the depressing, borderline macabre, manner in which their heroes have avoided playoff success.
It all began in 1969 when a Vikings team coached by the legendary Bud Grant, formerly of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, and quarterbacked by Joe Kapp, formerly of your B.C. Lions, dropped a 23-7 decision to the upstart Kansas City Chiefs. The 12-2 Vikings entered that game as 12-point favourites with one of the greatest defences in the history of the game.
How could they lose to an AFL team, they asked in the Twin Cities? Over the next 55 years, they would continue to ask some variation of that question.
The Vikings would go on to lose three more Super Bowls under Grant. They also lost the 1975 NFC Divisional game on Roger Staubach’s last-second Hail Mary pass to Drew Pearson. Their last Super Bowl appearance came in ’77, when Grant and Fran Tarkenton were pounded by the Raiders.
Since then, they have found other ways to torment their following.
Darrin Nelson dropped a potential game-winning touchdown pass against the Redskins in the 1987 NFC Championship Game. The great ’98 team lost to Atlanta at home when placekicker Gary Anderson missed a game-clinching field goal in the fourth quarter. Of course, it was Anderson’s only miss that season.
In the 2009 NFC title game, Brett Favre served up an interception to the Saints’ Tracy Porter in the fourth quarter as the Vikings were driving for a game-winning field goal.
This was after Favre threw another interception to the Saints’ Jonathan Vilma in the third quarter.
Bleacher Report ran a story on the 10 worst interceptions of Favre’s mythic career. First place went to the Porter pick. Third went to Vilma. Think about that one for a minute.
Two years ago, Blair Walsh missed a 27-yard, game-winning field goal against Seattle in the NFC wildcard team. The core of that team, which includes the NFL’s top-rated defence, is still in place.
The difference is at quarterback, where against all odds, Keenum has brought the Vikes to the edge of glory.
Again, it’s consistent with the larger narrative that the forgotten Keenum would lead the Vikings into Sunday’s showdown. Signed as a free agent insurance policy this off-season, Keenum took over the starting role from the injured Sam Bradford in Week 2 and never gave it back, ultimately finishing seventh in QB rating ahead of such luminaries as Russell Wilson, Philip Rivers and Ben Roethlisberger.
In his first shot as a starter, Keenum lost eight straight games in Houston before he was cut by the Texans. He was brought back to his hometown team and cut again. Then he was cut by the Rams.
Now he’s the man who’ll break the curse for the Vikings.
“You’re trying to get me to put it in perspective man, and I’ll wait until after the season,” he said when asked what all this means. “We’ve got a lot of really cool things ahead of us. That’s where my head’s at.”
And where it should be, even if that other stuff is far more interesting.