Super Bowl LV in Tampa turned out to be not such a super game. But as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were winning their second Super Bowl Championship (and Tom Brady his seventh Super Bowl ring) I started to reflect back on some memories of the Buccaneers and of Tampa.
First I thought back to their 2002 Super Bowl win and I still have the Sports Illustrated after that game. Here it is alongside the team’s first ever home game in 1976 (and my ticket from that game).

The second memory is former Bucs quarterback Doug Williams. When I was a 19-year-old college student and sports reporter and photographer for The Sanford Evening Herald I interviewed him in the off-season. (Williams, Tim Raines, and Jack Billingham were the first pro athletes I met working on that job. Heady stuff for a teenager.)

Williams had a rough few years playing for Tampa Bay, and ended up playing in the USFL, before eventually starting for the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XXII where he lead his team to victory and was awarded the Super Bowl MVP. (Williams also had a solid run as a head coach at Grambling State University, and is an executive with the Washington today).
And lastly as a video producer I was hired to do a freelance shoot with Reggie White in Tampa just before Super Bowl XXXV in 2001. White had recently retired from his Pro Football Hall of Fame worthy career. White and Lawerence Taylor are at the top of the list when mentioning the greatest defensive player in the history of the NFL.
Reggie White (who was known as the “Minister of Defense”) signed his book for me which I still have to this day.
When I was a walk-on with the Miami Hurricanes there was a freshman on the scout team with me named Stanley Shakespeare. He went on to have a solid UM career and started at WR in the 1984 Orange Bowl game in which Miami beat Nebraska on their way to their first national championship. Shakespeare played the last game of the season with the Tampa Bay Bucs in 1987.
Former University of Miami quarterback Jim Kelly is the only QB to lead a team in the NFL to four straight Super Bowls. In Super Bowl 25 (1991) in Tampa, Kelly got the Buffalo Bills into field goal range in the final seconds of a one point game against the New York Giants. Scott Norwood missed the field goal, but the game was ranked a few year’s ago by Sporting News as the 3rd best Super Bowl of all time. Even though I was pulling for the Bills, it was a super Super Bowl.
And my last Tampa memory was going to a Bucs game in 2016. We had seats in the upper bleachers where you mostly watch the game on the jumbotron screen. But late in the third quarter the Atlanta Falcons had a healthy lead and people had already started clearing out because it was a night game. So we walked down closer to the field and got a great view of Mike Evans making a catch that ended up being voted the catch of the year.
P.S. As a kid growing up in Orlando before they had a major pro sports team—and even before Disney World opened—I could never have imaged that one day the top athletes in the world would be talking about coming to Orlando after winning the big game.
Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles