Super day for true-blue Giants fan
My team is in the Super Bowl - the G-Men, Big Blue, the Jints.
I bleed blue when the Giants lose. This year I didn't bleed much. It's the third time we've gone to the Super Bowl. And we're going to win ring No. 3 on Sunday in Tampa, Fla.
The New York Giants have been my team since baseball's Brooklyn Dodgers pulled down the stars, broke my boy's heart, and moved to California. Since then, I'd root for a Canadian team over any California team.
My Giants loyalty deepened in 1958 - apropos for any Brooklyn Dodger fan - with a loss. Title game. Sudden death overtime. Alan "The Horse" Ameche of the then-Baltimore Colts plowed into the end zone. The game was on national TV. Move over baseball - football owned the camera.
There is no New York without the Yankees, Broadway, Wall Street, the Empire State Building - and the Giants.
The Giants ownership is also the class of the NFL. Since 1925 the franchise has been in the hands of one family - the Maras.
When my team plays this Sunday, you won't see 200 parolees dressed up as Darth Vader in the stands, like at an Oakland Raiders game - or 2,000 cross-dressing ice fishermen in long blonde tresses, as if auditioning for "Ride of the Valkyries," like they do in that big ice-fishing tent in Minneapolis. We wear Giants hats on our heads, not cheese blocks like Green Bay Packer fans.
For this fan, former Giants linebackers Sam Huff and Lawrence Taylor, and now Jessie Armstead, are as lovable as junkyard dogs. If you can't love a junkyard dog, you can't love pro football.
Over the years, we've had some real lemon coaches. But when bigger-than-life Bill Parcels, "the Tuna," goes into the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, he'll go in as the Giants' coach who won two Super Bowls.
Coach Jim Fassel roams the Giants sidelines now. He is a regular, life-size guy - who wins. And when he wins this Sunday, he gets to sit down with the Tuna.
On Sunday, Big Blue gets bigger and bluer.
Go Jints.
(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Publishing Society
