The Giants Win the Pennant!

I haven't been a huge football fan since Roger Staubach retired to a real estate empire and major Republican donor status, but who couldn't love the Giants' upset win on the frozen tundra of Green Bay (to quote the late, great Art Rust, Jr. one more time)? Reeling from Merrill Lynch's $10 billion loss and the sure-fire disaster year for all of Wall Street, New York's looking into another economic abyss the size of the 1970s. So the Giants' trip to the Super Bowl is a much-needed elixir for this town, a spot of flaming rum punch against the drab winter afternoons. The game itself was one of those rare classics, set at minus-4 degrees with the cold smoke of a northern plains January shimmering from mouths and noses.

Watching from the comfort of my modest room, I worried for Tom Coughlin's skin, Archie Manning's fatherly pride, and kicker Lawrence Tynes' sanity. Yet they pulled it out, forcing me to record the first of the epic Jane Austen series on PBS, Northanger Abbey, on my handy PVR, for viewing at another time. Now, in two weeks, the Super Bowl, with the undefeated - but hideously-uniformed - Patriots versus our Giants (yes, I'm the bandwagon now). And with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers at half-time, I can close my eyes, listen to the music, and pretend old Roger the Dodger will be lining up another Navy jump-pass against the Steel Curtain back in the late 70s.

Speaking of that formative decade, what wonderful news that Jim Wolcott has agreed to write a memoir of his days stage-side at CBGB and other sordid venues, and for none other than Gerry Howard, boarding as he put it, "a graffiti-choked IRT train into the untamed past."

For more on the Jints, take a ride into my untamed pass by reading the terrific Giants blog penned by my one-time sports editor Ernie Palladino of the Gannett Westchester papers. Back in the day when my prose was thin and my waistline thinner, Ernie was the gruff, elder statesman on a late-night sports desk in White Plains, tossing out baseball columns and wisdom about deadlines with both authenticity and profane humor. He must have been all of 30 at the time, but he reminded me of those black and white movie Marine sergeants played by Van Heflin cursing about those God-damned college boys.

I mentioned earlier that the New England uniforms are horrendous, especially given the quality of the team. Yesterday's Giants-Packers tilt at Lambeau showed what good sports design is all about, combining nostalgia and the record book with rock 'em, sock 'em action in high-def. For more on NFL style - and uniforms of all shapes and sizes - there is no more obsessive blog than UniWatch, the Project Runway of professional sports, presided over the Paul Lukas, who captured yesterday's living color tableau (another Rustian term) perfectly:

Could any true football fan of a certain age who watched the Packers/Giants game last night honestly say that their enjoyment wasn’t keenly heightened by the mere sight of those two iconic uniforms doing battle against the freezing backdrop of Lambeau Field? The way the colors and logos so vividly hearkened to championship games played by these same two teams in the NFL’s glory years lent an inescapable air of nostalgia to the contest and a powerful sense of the sport’s past being present, a feeling that all too often seems lacking in this day and age of the league’s generally wretched marketing aesthetic.

Comments

[ninja3000]

Welcome to the Giants bandwagon. I think we may still have a seat for you here...

[OutOfContext]

Hard as it was to accept a N.Y. team as the underdog, I did and was rooting for the upset for two reasons. I love the underdog (go Founding Fathers) and I believed my father had a shot at the Super Bowl ticket lottery. Dad's had season tickets since the early 70's when one of his closest friends and college buddies, Bill Arnsparger, had a hugely unsuccessful run as the Giants coach. After the game I called him only to find that he had been informed of his lottery loss last week by email.
On the negative side, it appears that I will be in NY for Super Bowl weekend and will be exposed to obnoxious (present co. excepted, of course) Big Apple fans up close. The only worse fate would be Boston, where undefeated status will make the fans even more charming than usual.

[Linkmeister]

Congratulations on your bandwagon-joining, but did you have to quote Russ Hodges? It still pains me.

[Slappy]

Patriots: Worst. Logo. Ever.

[bruce b.]

I am a Giants fan since 1962 (Yankees fan since 1961), just so everyone knows what a truly old fart I am. I recall my father criticizing Del Shofner, the star wide receiver (the position in those days was called "Split End", believe it or not) on the 1963 team, for dropping a crucial pass as we watched on our tiny black and white screen the freezing cold championship game at Soldier Field in Chicago. The Giants lost, 14-10, and my Dad used it as a morality lesson for me: Shofner wasn't wearing his gloves! If I recall correctly, he dropped the fateful pass in the end zone. Any dropped pass was rare for Shofner. The Giants quarterback that year was the 37-year old YA Tittle, who had a better arm than both Eli Manning and Brett Favre and the "look and feel" of a balding accountant, which in fact he might have been in the offseason. It would be 1986 before the Giants again won a championship.

In those days, instead of just "running backs", they had the halfback and the fullback. (The fullback still exists in some formations but is a blocking back rarely if ever used for running.) The two great fullbacks were Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns (a team named after their original coach), in a class of his own, and Jim Taylor of the Green Bay Packers. The "wide receivers" were not the current undifferentiated mass but were separated into the "Split ends" and the "flanker backs."

Your headline for this posting raises an interesting question. Have you noticed that the Giants are often referred to, uniquely in the NFL, as "The NY Football Giants?" Noone ever says, "The Dallas Football Cowboys" or "The New England Football Patriots", but last night even one of the Fox post-game announcers said "The NY Football Giants." (They DID used to say "The St. Louis Football Cardinals", but I don't think anyone has ever said "The Arizona Football Cardinals.") This is, of course, a residue of the "NY Baseball Giants", who haven't existed now for 50 years, well before many of the people using the terminology were born! Sometimes language changes so quickly and then again, sometimes it doesn't.

Incidentally, in the late 40s the NFL briefly included, in addition to the Football Giants, the Brooklyn Football Dodgers and the NY Football Yankees. No kidding. Look it up.

[Linkmeister]

bruce b, I think that "NY Football Giants" was brought back by Chris Berman of ESPN. Whatever else one can say about him, he has a quirky sense of humor; other than Keith Olbermann when he was there, I'm don't think anyone else at ESPN comes close to it.

[bruce b.]

thanks, Linkmeister, you might be right.

In the 60s when I first rooted for them, they were almost universally known as the "NY Football Giants."

I enjoyed Tom's posting on this subject. I agree with him that the Giants-Packers game had this "retro" feel to it.