McConkey Is Cashing In Big on Giants’ Super Bowl Victory

NEW YORK — Somewhere between Madison Avenue and Walter Mitty is where you’ll find Phil McConkey slumming it these days.

It’s an irrefutable fact that there is no greater stage to announce the change of one’s address from obscurity to the big time than in a Super Bowl. Just reach out and touch the Roman numerals while 130 million of your closest friends tune in on the tube.

That’s precisely what McConkey, the New York Giants’ frenetic wide receiver and punt returner, did against the Denver Broncos about a month ago. He not only seized the moment, he grabbed it by the throat.

In less than one year, McConkey has ricocheted across the extremes, from the Giants to the waiver wire to the Packers in Green Bay, back to the Giants, to Super Bowl heroism to an off-season marketing blitz that will earn him, he said, “more money than I ever thought of.” McConkey said it is not unthinkable that he might earn $1 million this off-season alone.

Then come summer, McConkey knows there’s a chance the Giants could cut him again. “At least I don’t have a fear of the unknown about that,” McConkey said. “I know this could all end for me tomorrow.”

McConkey is the quintessential fringe player, “an afterthought guy who could only succeed in a system where he’s not absolutely needed,” one NFL scout says.

He had scored four touchdowns in three seasons (one by falling on a fumble in the end zone) and caught 50 passes in 48 career games before the Super Bowl. He is to the Giants what the “surprise inside” is to a box of Cracker Jacks: a nice little extra.

He is the son of a just-retired Buffalo vice squad cop, he turns 30 next week and he was so exuberant when the Giants reacquired him in a midseason trade from Green Bay in exchange for a 12th-round draft pick in 1987 that Giants General Manager George Young recalls, “On his first day back, he wrote on our locker room chalkboard, ‘The grass is greener, my butt. P. McConkey.’ ”

Carrying his own humble history, the former naval helicopter pilot who never overcame seasickness in the Mediterranean (“That’s the only battle I ever lost”), and who didn’t enter the NFL until age 27, after he had finished his five-year naval commitment, stepped forward into Super Bowl XXI.

McConkey waved his towel on the sideline, firing up the Rose Bowl crowd. He helped break open a tight game with the Broncos in the third quarter when he made a 25-yard punt return, then caught a 44-yard pass from quarterback Phil Simms off a flea flicker.

McConkey took the ball to the Denver one-yard line on the play, where a tackle flipped him head over heels. McConkey then punctuated his feelings about not reaching the end zone with a fall-to-the-ground-hands-to-the-heavens gig a la Bjorn Borg winning at Wimbledon. And he still insists he wasn’t hamming it up.

Early in the fourth quarter, McConkey caught a six-yard touchdown pass that had deflected off the hands of tight end Mark Bavaro. “The ball just tumbled down towards me,” McConkey said. “It was like catching a snowflake with your mouth as a kid.”

Then as McConkey walked off the field, TV cameras were rolling as he found a gun, which a police officer had dropped in a scuffle with a fan, according to both police and the NFL. McConkey returned the gun to a security guard, although he kidded after the game, “Some people thought I pulled it out of my helmet or something.”

The Giants won Super Bowl XXI, 39-20, and the legend of McConkey--he now joins Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach as the only former Naval Academy player ever to win a Super Bowl ring--was assured.

So what if McConkey wasn’t the first player to wave towels on the sideline? (The Celtics’ M.L. Carr did it a few years back.) And so what if he wasn’t the first fringe player in New York ever to seize The Moment? (Mets second baseman Al Weis, a career .219 hitter, hit a key homer and a team-best .455 in the ’69 World Series.)

So convincing was his effort that day that Ronald Reagan, the former Eureka College offensive guard, cited McConkey by name in a White House ceremony for the Giants last week. “I always was partial to the flag-wavers,” Reagan quipped.

Now, sitting in the Manhattan office of agent David Fishof, McConkey still seems flabbergasted by it all. He said, “For the president of the free world to even know you exist . . . I mean, the man knows I exist.”

“As an athlete you’re always faced with a challenge of proving yourself over and over again. What this game does is allow a tremendous weight off my shoulder--same with Simms and (tackle) Brad Benson. Never again can they say that I--or that we--can’t do it, because we’ve done it. It’s almost a relief.

“It reminds me of a gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Somebody pops up and you shoot him. Then another guy comes up and you shoot him. Then a guy on the roof, and you get him. Now, you’ve shot them all and you’re standing there cocking the gun and double-clutching, waiting for the next one and he’s not there. You don’t know what to do because you’re so used to taking them on from each way.”

McConkey added, “Super Bowls don’t go away. Those plays I made will forever be on NFL Films. They make the plays legendary. I’ve watched the old games on ESPN myself. They make everything larger than life . . . My parents were at the game and they said it was the happiest day of their lives. I’m very fortunate to be where I am. It’s something I’ve dreamed about and fantasized about and now I’m living it.

So now the American Dream becomes the American Way for McConkey, who admitted, “I know this isn’t going to last forever. I want to take advantage of every possible situation.”

Translation: time to cash in. Like the Eagles used to sing, “They will never forget you ‘til somebody new comes around.”

“I won’t get into numbers, but let’s just say Phil McConkey will have a great offseason,” Fishof said. McConkey’s $64,000 playoff share was a handsome addition to his $115,000 salary.

Meanwhile, a book is in the works, to be written by Dick Schaap and tentatively titled “From Simms to McConkey,” although it might be more aptly titled “From Simms to Bavaro to McConkey.”

Sometime soon, McConkey and teammate Jim Burt will appear on “The New Hollywood Squares.” (They’ll share a square.)

McConkey says he is making an average of four to five appearances per week, including motivational speeches for which he is paid between $5,000 and $7,500 a pop, according to Fishof. There is the just-finished Pontiac commercial and “a lot of other things in the works that I can’t talk about, because they are not finalized yet,” McConkey said.

McConkey also is certain to say, “People tell me, ‘You ought to make hay while the sun shines’ or ‘Get it while you can.’ But I’m not going out whoring myself by any means. We’re very selective. I’ve got a guy (Fishof) I trust immensely, and I’ve got veto power over anything. . . . I won’t associate my name with anything that’s not worthwhile.”

McConkey said he has received “two Hefty bags full” of letters since the Super Bowl, some from overseas, some marriage proposals. When he appeared at the Sports Illustrated unveiling of the annual swimsuit issue for corporate sponsors, he reportedly received more applause than cover model Elle MacPherson. He said he walks into Manhattan restaurants now “and people start waving their napkins at me.”

Then there are the letters he has received from his own heroes: Jack Kemp, Bart Starr and Staubach. McConkey grew up in Buffalo and said he admires Kemp, then a Bills quarterback and now a congressman. McConkey said he now hopes to work for Kemp’s presidential campaign.

McConkey has a similar admiration for Staubach “although he seemed so far removed from my situation. He was a Heisman Trophy winner and a legend at the Naval Academy, both on and off the field. When I got out of the Academy (in 1978 as honorable mention All-America) nobody knew about me.”

McConkey said he even might be interested in dabbling in politics himself. And then there’s the acting class he plans to take soon. “But I may not like it and I may just quit after the first class,” he said.

McConkey said his on-field enthusiasm and towel-waving is genuine, not contrived.

“I can’t try to hide or suppress those things because if I did I would be phony. We’re in entertainment. People come to see humans and human emotion. Too often the game gets homogenous where everything is the same and the players all look alike. There’s not much expression shown. I’m a very emotional person.

“I think all football players are freaks because they are different,” McConkey added. “The way I look at it, I’m a freak among freaks.

“People see me waving the towel in the Super Bowl trying to generate excitement and enthusiasm, but what they didn’t see was me doing the same thing in Green Bay. I got positive feedback from the fans there, but the players kind of looked at me odd.”

McConkey becomes a 5-foot-10, 170-pound billboard of seriousness when he says, “I didn’t just arrive at this point. It’s not like some fairy godmother came down and all of a sudden waved some magic wand over me. People tend to see other people in a successful position and they think they were hatched. But they weren’t with me when I was going through those rigorous hours and hours and days and days of sacrifice, sacrifice. So it’s hard for them to know what I went through to get here.

“If I had to worry about what people thought, I’d never be where I am because they told me I’d never be able to do anything. When I told them I was going to try pro football they laughed. I will get it done. I’ll find a way.”