Willie Wood Made the Most Memorable Play of Super Bowl I. He Has No Recollection. [View all]

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The Green Bay Packers’ agile, lissome safety, Willie Wood, snatched the wobbly pass thrown by the Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback, Len Dawson, and zigzagged to the doorstep of the Chiefs’ end zone, setting up an easy Packers touchdown. Green Bay never looked back in a 25-point rout of Kansas City in the first Super Bowl.

Wood’s interception is one of the most famous plays in Super Bowl history.

Fifty football seasons later, Dawson, who played 19 years of pro football, recalls it well.

“Maybe the No. 1 play I wish I could have back,” he said.

Wood remembers nothing of the play.

He does not even recollect playing in the first Super Bowl, on Jan. 15, 1967, or ever being on an N.F.L. roster.

Wood, who spends most of his time in a wheelchair, has been at an assisted living center in his hometown, Washington, for the last nine years, first for physical woes — debilitating neck, hip and knee operations — and later because dementia robbed him of many cognitive functions.

Nonetheless, Wood, 79, likes to wear a green Packers cap most days now as he sits in his sunny room listening to jazz and 1950s doo-wop. Wordlessly and impassively, he will point to the logo on the cap as if he knows it has some shadowy meaning in his life. But specifics elude him.

When asked about various photographs on the walls next to him — pictures of his wedding or the day in 1989 when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame — Wood stares vacantly.

“Do you remember going into the Hall of Fame, Willie?” Dee Dee Daniels, an assistant living coordinator at the center where Wood lives, asked one morning last month.

Wood cast his eyes downward and shook his head side to side: no.

“You were the best of the best,” Daniels said.

Wood, who sometimes goes days without speaking, suddenly looked up, his eyes glistening as he raised an eyebrow as if to say, “I was?”

Len Dawson, a Hall of Fame quarterback with the Chiefs, at his Kansas City home last month. He said his pass that was intercepted by Wood was “maybe the No. 1 play I wish I could have back.” Credit Christopher Smith for The New York Times

Dawson earned a spot in the Hall of Fame, too, and has spent much of the last five decades as an award-winning national and Kansas City-based television and radio broadcaster. At 80, he is a Midwest sports institution.

As fluent as he is, Dawson, who has not seen Wood since 1967, grew quiet when the conversation turned to the troubles of his football peers.

“I’ve got teammates who have some problems like Willie Wood,” he said. “I think maybe from concussions and things like that. It’s, well, it’s a rough game.”

He paused.

“They all have problems, particularly the offensive and defensive linemen,” Dawson said. “I’ve been lucky. The game has been good to me.”

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I'm a big football fan but they have to fix the concussion problem