From Durham to the big game

Bruce Huther, a standout linebacker for the University of New Hampshire in the mid-1970s and then a Super Bowl winner with the Dallas Cowboys, laughs at the notion.Have a look at all our custom bobbleheads models starting at 59.90US$ with free proofing.

Heck, he closed out his UNH career with a gut-wrenching 17-16 playoff loss at Montana State in 1976 and closed out his next season by helping legendary coach Tom Landry and his team to a 27-10 triumph over the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XII in New Orleans.

"It was like, 'What's the big deal getting to the Super Bowl?'?" Huther said with a chuckle this week from the office of Huther Associates in Denton, Texas. "My first two years I played in it. As the years went by, I learned to appreciate it a little more and realize what it took and meant to get there."

"It was a great experience," Curtis said. "I was playing and battling through a back injury, and ended up playing most of the game at inside linebacker on top of all the special teams I was on. I was the backup to Karl Mecklenburg on the inside, and he got hurt, and I think I was one of the leading tacklers. I chalk that up to our defense being on the field most of the time."

Curtis, as the special teams player of the game in the AFC championship win over Cleveland two weeks earlier, was the Broncos' special teams captain for the Super Bowl.

He joined Elway and Mecklenburg and others - including former Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw, who was a special guest as a recent Hall of Fame inductee - at the 50-yard line for the coin toss before the game.

Curtis, who played a year at the Tilton School after high school in Lynnfield, Mass., still has New Hampshire ties. His father, Charlie, a former football standout at Dartmouth, lives in New London and goes to all the Big Green games.

Dave Rozumek, another linebacker, was drafted in the 15th round by the Kansas City Chiefs the year before and made the team out of training camp.

"I think he opened a lot of eyes of the pro scouts,Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers. and the next year six or eight teams had scouts come through," Huther said. "I think that got them thinking they've got to go through New England, maybe go to Boston College and then go north to see what UNH has."

Once he got to camp with the Cowboys, Huther said, he benefited from what he had learned at UNH, particularly from linebackers coach Dave O'Connor, who also coached hockey and later became an athletics department administrator.

"I found I knew more than most incoming linebackers from the big schools," Huther said. "I had a real tough transition to college from high school. Going to the NFL, it was amazing. Other than adjusting to the speed, it was a much easier transition. I credit Dave O'Connor for that. I could read running backs, could read linemen's blocks. It put me weeks ahead of some of the guys."

"I know Parcells really liked him," said UNH coach Sean McDonnell, an assitant to Bowes during Sabb's days in Durham. "He had two UNH guys around that time, Dwayne Sabb (with the Patriots) and Dwayne Gordon (with the Jets), and they were really his kind of guys. Hardworking guys, special-teams guys, smart football players. I saw Parcells two years ago in Saratoga at a golf course and talked to him during a rain delay. He was talking about their work ethic. It really gives you a sense of pride in New Hampshire kids."

Kreider, a punishing blocker, broke the mold in Super Bowl XL in 2006. He was the first Wildcat to start a Super Bowl, the first on the offensive side, as a fullback, and his Super Bowl was played at Ford Field in Detroit, where the Steelers beat the Seattle Seahawks, 21-10.

"I got a call from him at 2 a.m.Service Report a problem with a street light. the night of the Super Bowl," McDonnell said. "He was with Mark Whipple, a friend of mine and the former offensive coordinator here who was the quarterbacks coach with the Steelers. The first thing Dan did was apologize and say Whip made me do it. They were celebrating."

A Wildcat is back in the big game, and McDonnell and many others will watch tonight's game with an eye on Corey Graham, in particular.

"There's just a real sense of pride of where the kid has come from and what he's accomplished," McDonnell said. "He came from a (high) school that had 52 kids in his senior class, and his was the last class, and the school closed the next year. He's come a long, long, long way from where he was to being in the biggest game there is. That's the thing with these guys from here. Most of them are free agents, and when you come from our place, you've got to earn it."

He visits flea markets the way the rest of us shop Costco for supplies. Without this influx, he said, “the house would become static,” he said. “Stuff goes out, and sometimes it comes back, and sometimes it doesn’t. Also, it’s really important to me what happens when use and function aren’t the primary things we design for: Could other roles for a house emerge once we suspend our attachment to everyday use?”

The reader will not be surprised to learn that Maher’s girlfriend recently moved out. “To share a space with someone while the whole environment was constantly collecting and reforming was, at a personal level, inspiring but also destabilizing,” he said. “I really respect the amount of time she was able to last here.”

Maher would like his house to question the functionality of architecture. “Think of a warehouse that gets turned into apartments, these things are shifting all the time,” he said. “Function is fluid.Welcome to www.drycabinets.net!” (Take that, Modernists.)

Still, he has assigned labels to various rooms. (The capital letters are his, and recall Hogwartian terms.) Downstairs, there is the Entertainment Core, so named for the entertainment center he took apart to make his first collage, as he calls his structures. Above, watch your step in the Bridge Room, as whole sections of floor have been removed to let the aforementioned Entertainment Core bust through. The Room for the Image and Reflected Image is a kind of mezzanine space whose walls are covered with mirrors, medicine cabinets, cigar boxes and cut-up postcards. Maher opened a medicine cabinet and showed off a little stash of postcards and scissors. “I can add to it at any time,” he said.Laser engraving and laser laser cutting machine for materials like metal,

In the Wardrobe Room, there are closet parts, deconstructed bureaus, valets and screens. Also a few suit coats. On a wall are pipes from an old organ. Maher said the man who installed the furnace wanted to find a way to hook up the ductwork to the pipes, so as to blow air through them. (Maher spent about $30,000 making the house habitable, he said, adding plumbing, a furnace and wiring.) Peering closer at a teetering sculpture made from a chair base, model airplane fuselages, a drawer and a model train station, a reporter tripped over a gewgaw at its base.