Issue(s): Amazing Spider-Man #153
Cover Date: Feb 76
Title: "The longest hundred yards!"
Credits:
Len Wein - Writer
Ross Andru - Penciler
Mike Esposito - Inker

Review/plot:
In what turned out to be a somewhat less cheesy issue than i originally thought it would be, a college football star turned computer expert named Bradley Bolton is forced to give a computer part to some thugs because they've kidnapped his daughter. When they decide to keep his daughter anyway, he grabs her and runs across the football field holding her body in a parallel to his final college game where he failed to make a touchdown. He himself gets shot to death in the process, but his daughter survives. Spidey comes in a little too late and mops up the bad guys. Sounds really cheesy, but it wasn't really that bad.

Len Wein is writing Mary Jane like a complete "chick". Every time Peter has to leave the room or talk to anyone but her, she starts freaking out and getting angry and stupid. It's really annoying.

Although it is fair to complain when Peter leaves you to dance with the crazy guy.

MCP gives the Kingpin a "behind the scenes" for this issue, but i don't see any obvious reason for it, even if he is ultimately responsible for ordering the goons in this issue.

Football-history footnote. The comic depicts to me what looks like regular ordinary football goalposts, but the ex-football player refers to them as "fancy" and looking like "op-art designs".

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References:

• Peter tells MJ she doesn't sound like the girl who was upset at the thought of losing him to the clone of Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man #146.
  
• As Mark notes below, the villain of the piece is interested in "the final component of the computer... constructed with Dr. Armstrong Smith to catalogue all worldwide-habitual offenders". A footnote says "As seen in recent issues of Daredevil, right?". We started seeing the computer in Daredevil #124.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Marvel Tales #130

The villain also gets a footnote referring to current issues of Daredevil.

Thanks. That footnote was removed from the reprint.

Len Wein seems to have recycled a few narrative captions from this book in DC Universe:Legacies#4(2010).

Cheesy, I know. But it still made a positive impression on my 11-year old self when I read it in 1976.

The goalpost comment makes sense to me. If Bolton played college football in the fifties, the goalposts would have been wooden and shaped like capital "H"s.

The bit near the end where Spider-Man says the mobster's not worth punching only to decide "the hell he's not!" is lifted straight from a memorable scene in the John Wayne movie McClintock.

The story's title sounds like a take on the 1974 football/prison film "The Longest Yard" starring Burt Reynolds.

Regarding Fnord's confusion about the goal posts: Football goal posts used to be "H" shaped before they were changed to the "tuning fork" design.