The Buddy Ryan Eagles made a rap video 35 years ago. Then the Bounty Bowl delivered a real hit.

One in an occasional series. The Eagles will wear throwback kelly green uniforms for the second time this season in Sunday’s game against the Bills. These are some essential stories from the Birds’ kelly green era.

The special teamers were on the field early on Thanksgiving afternoon, practicing punts and kicks at Texas Stadium before the Eagles played the Cowboys.

Luis Zendejas, an Eagle four weeks earlier and now the kicker for Dallas, received a warning that week that his old team was gunning for him. He chided Buddy Ryan, the bombastic head coach, after the Eagles released him in October of 1989. That didn’t sit well with Ryan.

Zendejas said Eagles special teams coach Al Roberts called him the night before the Thanksgiving game, tipping the kicker off that Ryan had instructed players to hit their former teammate while offering a cash reward.

“You know Buddy,” Zendejas recalled Roberts saying.

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Zendejas, a few hours before the 1989 game that became known as “The Bounty Bowl,” needed to know if it was true. So he found David Little, the captain of the Eagles’ special teams, during warm-ups.

“He’s like, ‘I know you guys have something,’ ” Little said. “I said, ‘Come on, man. You know Buddy.’ ”

Ryan arrived in Philadelphia in 1986, coming to the Eagles after winning the Super Bowl with the Bears as the architect of the 46 defense. Two years later, the Eagles had a title contender, a mean defense, and a cast of stars. But they were missing something that the Bears had: an anthem.

“Buddy was like, ‘You guys need to do a video.’ It was that era where everyone was doing rap videos,” Little said. “He picked out a group of us to perform something.”

The 11 players — Zendejas, Little, Randall Cunningham, Mike Quick, Jerome Brown, Reggie White, Andre Waters, Roynell Young, Wes Hopkins, Keith Jackson, and Greg Garrity — met on an off day in November 1988 at Kajem/Victory Studios in Society Hill to make a song with Bunny Sigler, best known for working with Gamble and Huff.

West Coast Video, the old movie rental shop, was the producer. Eugene “Lamb Chops” Curry made the beat. Ryan’s Bears cut the “Super Bowl Shuffle.” His Birds made “Buddy’s Watching You” 35 years ago in the same studio used by Patti LaBelle, Teddy Pendergrass, and Will Smith.

“We thought we were good,” Quick said. “And we thought we had a team that could win the Super Bowl.”

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Sigler, who wrote for The O’Jays and produced Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, wrote the raps and handed them to the players when they arrived.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God. This sucks,’ ” Little said. “But I was late that morning and I had five minutes until I had to go on. ‘I need to write something different. This is dumb. This sounds stupid.’ ”

Little, an undrafted tight end from Middle Tennessee State, was the team’s special teams ace but struggled to make that rhyme. Then he found a way.

“He rhymed special teams with busting spleens,” Quick said. “I wasn’t sure if we wanted to go there.”

The Cowboys received the ball to start the game on Thanksgiving in 1989 and entered halftime without a point. Zendejas — a season after rapping about Ryan — forgot about the warning, thinking it was something the Eagles would only do early in the game. He buckled his chinstrap, kicked the ball to start the second half, and immediately saw a kelly green blur headed his way.

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“I was the first one Buddy came to,” Little said. “He said, ‘I want you to go after Zendejas on the kickoff.’ I was like, ‘Hell no. I’m not doing that. First, he was with us last year. No way. I respect that guy. Ask a rookie.’ He was like, ‘All right [expletive].’ Buddy wanted us to hit him. There was no question that he wanted us to intimidate him. That’s the way Buddy coached, intimidation. Whether or not we did anything, didn’t matter to Buddy. What mattered is that Luis thought we were going to do something.”

The rookie was linebacker Jessie Small, a second-round pick from Eastern Kentucky. He went straight for Zendejas, who was so far away from the action that most players didn’t see the hit. They only heard it. Zendejas, unable to dodge, ducked and tried to cover up.

“The thing was that when Luis bent down, he hit his own head on Jesse’s knee,” Little said. “Jesse really didn’t get a good shot on him.”

“Buddy was like, ‘You guys need to do a video.’ It was that era where everyone was doing rap videos.”

Since Zendejas lowered his head, he was penalized for a low block. The kicker was knocked out, and the Eagles were awarded 15 yards. Zendejas got to his feet and walked toward the Eagles sideline, yelling at his old coach. The warning came true.

“That whole day is blocked out,” Zendejas said. “I don’t know who kicked after me that whole game. It was Thanksgiving, and I don’t even know what I ate. I don’t know where I went. That whole day is blocked out. All I know is what I’ve seen on video. When I throw up on the field. They say I’m going to the wrong bench. I don’t remember anything.”

The VHS for “Buddy’s Watching You” was released on Black Friday in 1988 for $9.95 just as the Eagles were marching to their first playoff trip in seven years. The Birds were finally good again. The video simply showed the players recording the song, rapping and dancing in the studio while Sigler directs from behind the glass as if they were his next big act.

“It was so cheesy,” Little said. “It’s very ‘80s. It was definitely a sign of the times, but it was fun. When I look back at it, I have pride in it just because of the guys who were there. All those guys in the video were super cool, and I loved them. I was always in awe of them every day. Like, ‘I can’t believe I’m playing with these guys.’ It was amazing, and then the video was a lot of fun.”

They also cut a record, and the song received some radio play. A portion was donated to charity, and the players even received royalties.

“We got a couple coins for it,” Quick said. “It wasn’t much. Probably enough for a beer.”

Gary Delfiner, who worked for West Coast, said all the players were into it. It failed to match the success of the “Super Bowl Shuffle,” but it meant enough to Quick that he still has copies of “Buddy’s Watching You” for his grandkids to watch.

“We had a fun time,” Quick said. “Zendejas, we didn’t know what to do with him. He had no rhythm, no rhyme. Him and Andre Waters. They were the most difficult ones. Andre had no rhythm either. He had no timing. He would jump in off beat. He made it a challenge.”

The ‘88 Eagles won the division on the final day of the season, rollicking the Cowboys at Texas Stadium. Ryan hated the Cowboys, ever since they used their usual starters to roll over a team of replacement Eagles during the 1987 players’ strike.

The teams played again two weeks later, just after the strike ended. Still peeved, Ryan ordered Cunningham to fake a knee at the end of the game and throw a deep ball to Quick in the end zone with seconds remaining and the Eagles ahead by 10 points.

“It was so unnecessary, but it was fun,” said Quick, who drew a penalty on the play before the Eagles ended that 1987 game with Keith Byars rushing for a goal-line touchdown.

A year later, the Eagles were headed to the playoffs after another win over their rivals. “Buddy’s Watching You” would become iconic if they went all the way. But instead of the Super Bowl, the season ended with the Fog Bowl as the Eagles fell on New Years Eve 1988 against Ryan’s old team at Soldier Field.

The Eagles never won a playoff game with Ryan, who was fired after the 1990 season. The ‘88 squad may have been his best chance.

“We had a Super Bowl team,” Zendejas said. “It was the fog that killed us.”

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Zendejas told reporters after the Thanksgiving game in ‘89 that Roberts and Little told him there was a bounty on him. A player, Zendejas said, would receive $200 if they took him out. Little returned to Philly and went straight to Ryan’s office to clear the air.

“Buddy goes, ‘Hey, snitch. How ya doing?’ I was like, ‘Come on, Buddy. You know I didn’t do that. I didn’t say a word,’ ” Little said. “I tried to explain it to him, and he said, ‘I don’t care. I was expecting you guys to tell him. I just wanted him to be scared.’ I didn’t say anything to him. Just told him to pay attention.”

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Little met Ryan two years earlier when the player introduced himself after finishing a drill at Ryan’s first training camp. “I know who you are, 89. Now get back in line,” Ryan said. Little became one of Ryan’s guys, a player the coach respected for doing the grunt work on special teams.

“If Buddy didn’t care for you, you knew you weren’t one of his guys,” Quick said. “He would test you. He would try to poke you and see if you could become one of his guys. Some guys won him over. Some guys never did. He was that way and you would know if he cared for you or if he didn’t.”

Ryan, Little said, was a player’s coach, which explains the money he personally paid out each week during team meetings. The meetings would start with a highlight reel from the previous game, showcasing the Eagles’ biggest hits and best plays.

“You would actually get your name called, and you’d run up to the front of the room and you’d get an envelope,” Quick said. “There was money in those envelopes for big hits and big plays.”

The Eagles, Little said, were instructed to target players like Zendejas, but a cash reward was never attached to the request. The Bounty Bowl, he said, didn’t exactly have a bounty. But there certainly was an envelope waiting for Small at the next team meeting.

“That’s just the way it was,” Little said. “No matter what, we knew Jesse got paid because I got paid every time I got a big hit. It wasn’t really a bounty, though.”

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“There was something in it for taking a shot on Zendejas,” Quick said. “No question.”

Ryan, who died in 2016, always denied that a “bounty” was paid to Small for his hit on Zendejas. Small said after the game that he was just doing his job and hit Zendejas in case the return man broke free. Reached last month, Small asked a reporter to call back in a few hours. He didn’t answer. Roberts, the special teams coach, did not return several messages.

“It was completely legal,” said Mike Golic, a former Eagles defensive lineman. “You’re allowed to hit the kicker, but you usually didn’t waste time hitting the kicker because they normally weren’t making the tackle anyway. But he sent him after him to hit him, and he did. He hit him clean. Hit him fair. I remember Zendejas was really pissed off, and he came stumbling over to our sideline to cuss out Buddy. That was that one play. Buddy wanted him to get that hit, and he got that hit. Clean, above board, all legal.”

Zendejas’ NFL career ended after that season, and he has since lived near Phoenix. He saw Ryan again in the 1990s after Ryan was hired to coach the Cardinals. The kicker was over what happened on Thanksgiving.

“I buried the hatchet,” he said. “You know what, he does what he does. I didn’t care. The day of, I was heated. But after that, I didn’t care.”

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One year, he was rapping about Ryan. The next, the coach was asking his players to hit him. The rap video, Zendejas said, is something he laughs about now with his kids. But did he ever ask Ryan if there was a bounty?

“We all knew,” Zendejas said. “You didn’t have to admit to it. We all knew. … If you played for him, he’s amazing for you. If you played against him, he’s just a crazy, crazy guy.”

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