Ira Berkow - Giants Among Men: Y.A., L.T., the Big Tuna, and Other New York Giants Stories

For Dolly

Also by Ira Berkow:

Counterpunch

Wrigley Field

Autumns in the Garden

Summers at Shea

Summers in the Bronx

The Corporal Was a Pitcher

Full Swing

The Minority Quarterback

Court Vision

To the Hoop

The Gospel According to Casey (with Jim Kaplan)

How to Talk Jewish (with Jackie Mason )

Hank Greenberg: Hall of Fame Slugger (juvenile)

Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life (editor)

Pitchers Do Get Lonely

The Man Who Robbed the Pierre

Red: A Biography of Red Smith

Carew (with Rod Carew)

The DuSable Panthers

Maxwell Street

Beyond the Dream

Rockin Steady (with Walt Frazier)

Oscar Robertson: The Golden Year

Contents

I. Giant QBs, Pocket-Size and Otherwise

II. A Clutch of Big Blue Coaches

III. On the Line, or Thereabouts

IV. A Cluster of Kickers

V. On the Run

VI. Rival QBs

VII. Coaches across the Field

VIII. Legends across the Ages

IX. At Issue

X. A Trio of U.S. Presidents and Shoulder Pads

XI. Prior to the Pros

XII. Strictly Personal

Introduction

Little did I know that I began, as it were, covering New York Giants football in Minneapolis even before I arrived in New York to write sports. I was a young sportswriter for the Minneapolis Tribune when I was hired by Newspaper Enterprise Association, a Scripps-Howard feature syndicate based in Manhattan, in the fall of 1967.

It was about the same time that Fran Tarkenton, Scrambler Nonpareil, sometimes called Frantic Fran, was traded from the Minnesota Vikings to the Giants (for two first-round draft picks and two second-round picks). We had a few things in common. One, we were the same age, 27 in 1967, about the same height and weight, 6'0", 185 pounds, and he enjoyed talking to the press, and I enjoyed listening to him. He was bright, affable, and hugely talented. He was a remarkable sight on the football field. While virtually all quarterbacks from the beginning of time would drop back to pass in the pocket, Tarkenton broke the mold by running around like, as he once said, a lunatic. He seemed to leap from the movie screen of the Keystone Kops, flying from the grasp of would-be tacklers from one side of the field to the other, avoiding them as though he was larded with grease, and some of the behemoths seeming to collapse of exhaustion in their madcap pursuit.

In one of Tarkentons last games for the Vikings, in late November 1966, against the Green Bay Packers, I began my sidebar story this way: A teeth-chattering, wind-whipped crowd of 47,426 craned their necks and a curious, big-yellow moon stood tiptoe over the east stands in Met Stadium as the Vikings tried to razzle-dazzle a come-from-behind victory in the closing minutes.

Tarkenton led the charge, but this time, unlike so many other occasions, he didnt succeed, as his pass in the last seconds was incomplete. Tarkenton is the hardest quarterback in the league for a defensive back, said the Packers Herb Adderley after the game. You dont know what hell do next.

And the sheer spine-tingling pleasure he brought to fansand the press, including me, to be surewas transported to the Giants games, and many of those that I covered in Yankee Stadium (before the Giants moved to Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands in New Jersey in 1976). Tarkenton, with a backdrop of the rattling elevated 4 train nearby, and under the iconic roof faadethe scalloped white frieze that ran above the scoreboard and the billboards of legendary Yankee Stadiumwould quarterback a team that had had a losing record to decent seasons. He wouldin blizzardy snow, in rain-soaked mud under the Stadium lights, or under a blazing hot Indian summer sunbe in the process of breaking numerous passing and quarterback-rushing records as he went scampering along. He played five seasons for the Giants, until, in 1972, he was again traded back to the Vikings. He would lead Minnesota to three appearances in the Super Bowl without, oddly enough, winning any of them.

Curiously, in Tarkentons second year with the Giants, NEA hired him to write a once-a-week football column. I was assigned to edit it. It worked this way: we would talk on a Sunday night for the Monday column (either I was at the Stadium or, if a road game, by phone). I would take notes and then type up the piece, and call him back and read it to him. He was nearly able to talk out the column from beginning to end! One of my favorites was his description of playing against the Los Angeles Rams, and putting the reader in his shoesand most quarterbacks cleatson the field: You look across the imaginary dividing space called the line of scrimmage and you see assembled on a four-man front more than half a ton of aggressive humanity1,088 pounds to be exact. When youre squeezed to make 190 pounds, like I am, thats a problem to start with.

But when the ball is snapped, that 1,088-pound barrier represents the defensive line of the Los Angeles Rams, called the Awesome Foursome or some such silly namefellows like David Jones (better known as Deacon), Merlin Olsen, Roger Brown, and Lamar Lundy.They can destroy you psychologically as well as physically if you let them.My old coach Norm Van Brocklin used to say that I ran out of sheer terror.Against the Rams, you try to confuse them with different formations and backfield sets and occasional rollouts. Frankly, I run more against them than I do most teams because Id just as soon see those big guys with their tongues hanging out.

(Tarkenton was the forerunner, so to speak, of such out-of-pocket operatives as Michael Vick, Robert Griffin III, Russell Wilson, and Johnny Manziel.)

The years would roll on, and it wasnt until the mid-1980s when Bill Parcells (known widely as Big Tuna for his outsize personality and build) became the Giants head coach that they would become Super Bowl winners, on the arm of another terrific quarterback, Phil Simms. Parcells could be tough and he could be sweet. He could also be funny, particularly after a game in which the Giants won. I remember being in his office after a victory with other writers, including Frank Litsky, then the Giants beat writer for The New York Times , with whom Parcells had a friendly relationship. Frank happened to be bald. When Litsky and the reporters entered the office, Parcells said to Litsky, Frank, can I borrow your comb? Everyone, including Litsky, laughed.

Parcells once told me that at first his parents werent happy with his decision to be a football coach. Even when he was named head coach of the Giants in 1983 at age 41, his mother, Ida, asked him, When are you going to get a real job like your brother Don, the banker?

He would hold himself as well as his players accountable, and learned that lesson from his father, Charles. Growing up, whenever I was around some trouble, Parcells told me, Id tell my father, It wasnt my fault. Hed say, Yeah, its never your fault, but youre always there.

The Giants would have their good days and their less than good days. They would win two Super Bowls under head coach Tom Coughlin, in 2008 and 2012. Quarterback Eli Manning, boyish looking, even-tempered, often battered with criticism from fans and journalistsand sometimes even coachesas well as abiding the occasional mauling from a 300-pound defensive lineman, would emerge nonetheless, in 2008 and 2012, with the Most Valuable Player trophy in each of the Super Bowl wins.