When the boss says to throw a freestyle article together, you shoot for the moon. So here goes the story of my viral Buccaneer moment that can be seen on YouTube. Here is the old-school twist: the video is from 1994! Yes, you read that correctly. If you were to go back in time to when the only way you could sign on to the internet was with AOL minutes and a modem took five minutes to connect, I had a Buccaneer moment that will be searchable online long after I am gone.
It was October 4th, 1994. The Detroit Lions were in town. It was an unusually warm day in Tampa Bay, but aren’t they all? My season tickets were near the south end zone, west side, 12 rows up, just above the goal line. I had just walked back out of the tunnel as Detroit was getting ready to punt. The Bucs had gone 18 years and had not yet returned a punt for a touchdown, but all of that would change this fateful Sunday afternoon. When the high-sailing punt landed in Vernon Turner’s hands, little did we all know we were about to see #20 on the list of top 100 Buccaneer plays of all time. I was just returning from getting a beer and decided I would stand near the wall on the first set of stairs to watch. To this day, I swear I could feel the breeze as Turner blew past. It was a great moment. Later that evening when I got home and I rewound the VCR to watch the play, there I was, in all of my mullet glory, one fist raised high, the other holding a beer as Vernon Turner raced by and into the record books.
Google Vernon Turner Buccaneer punt TD; the video is two and a half minutes long. If you watch VT crossing the goal line at regular speed you will see the back of a dude with a mullet, wearing a white t-shirt and dark shorts and carrying a beer. If you wonder why I was walking so fast, I had already spilled a lot of that beverage, still had a lot of high-fiving to do, and needed to get to my seat gang so we could all finish celebrating! We won that game to go to 2-3 for the season, but that afternoon, for that special moment, we felt like champions.
