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From the first day he showed up at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' summer encampment, you knew he had that certain something, specifically, he was the coach’s son.
The Seattle Seahawks were going with experience, the jokers were saying and the Bucs were going with nepotism, Of course, it had the same way five years earlier when Johnny McKay (nee JR.McKay) had first suited up for the University of Southern California. But the chuckles soon turned to cheers when McKay started grabbing hold of Pat Haden touchdown passes and the Rose Bowl invitations started rolling in.
UNTIL SUNDAY at Tampa Stadium, though, there had been few cheers for the post-graduate
Johnny McKay. And no touchdowns. Neither for the National Football League Buccaneers nor for the World Football League Southern California Sun year ago.
Be it know, however that with 10 minutes and 55 seconds left in the Bucs' 28-19 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, Steve Spurrier did indeed fling pass into the end zone and Johnny McKay, doing a little Nureyev near the sidelines to stay in bounds, squeezed it for an eight-yard touchdown, He promptly jumped to his feet and executed the first spike of his career.
“I always wanted to do that," said McKay when it was all over. "In college you couldn't do it. I think almost killed the referee.”
The ball did take a wicked hop past the snoot of some striped shirted bystander, but resulted ill only near-miss. McKay, meanwhile, was raising his arms exultantly into the air. The pressure was visibly lifting off his young shoulders. He had not only not caught a TD pass until then, but had no catches at all in the game.
I was concerned," he readily admitted. "We get paid for catching the football. And when you go through a half and haven't caught one, you begin to press.”
With the pressing out of the way, McKay returned to catch another pass moments later. This one was a long 38-yard heave from Spurrier that ended up on the Chiefs' two when McKay's effort to tightrope the sideline into the end zone failed. But it would be 26-12 two plays later and the Bucs were on their way to making a respectable showing, at least on the scoreboard.
"IT'S PROBABLY the most unusual game I've ever played in," McKay said. "A lot of weird things happened. We got off to a miserable start, then moved the ball for a lotta yards near the end. We moved the ball at will in the fourth quarter."
McKay suggested that his own tendency to press in the face of adversity is a fault reflected in the offense as a whole. "If we get off to a bad start three downs and a punt— then we start pressing and it's three downs and a punt again. It takes us a long time to get going. It seems like if can get some things going, from there we move."
Johnny McKay, for one, finally has something started to move in the TD league which should come as no surprise to those who were made believers back around the USC campus. If his fourth-quarter feats are indicative of better things to come, he might yet make nepotism a good word around NFL fireplaces.
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