New Book on Giants Gets Medal

They’re not America’s Team. For a while, they weren’t even New York’s. The Jets were.

But the New York Giants belong to the Ivy League of pro football. This is not a commentary on their prowess, merely their vintage. This is not where the game began. But this is where the game came of age.

They fell on hard times. They wound up playing in the Yale Bowl before a hard corps of loyal fans who presumably showed up in raccoon coats and beaded dresses and looked as if they had just stepped out of a John Held Jr. cartoon.

The Giants are a holdover from the era of bootleg gin, speak-easies and flappers. They are a reminder of a better time in the big city. They are as socially correct as white wine with fish.

They are hardly Yale-Harvard. They don’t play a finesse type of football. They’re not the Cowboys, the Denver Broncos. They come right at you. They play an old-fashioned game, power football, but they play it well. They represent the old verities on the field, too. They were almost the last to drop the single wing. Don’t look for them to rush to the run-and-shoot. The Giants are like old money. They invest in the safe, secure, the long term.

They were supposed to be involved in the matchup that would dwarf the Super Bowl this coming Monday night. Their encounter with the San Francisco 49ers was supposed to be football’s Armageddon. A whole season, a whole decade, in 60 minutes.

They blew that, partly because they abandoned the tried-and-true Giant way to play football--the six- or seven-minute touchdown--the body attack. They went instead right-hand crazy. And got jabbed to pieces by Philadelphia Eagle quarterback Randall Cunningham, who played Giant football.

How the Giants get ready for a big game is brilliantly described in a new book by a colleague, Jerry Izenberg. It’s called “No Medals For Trying,” which is an aphorism of the New York coach, Bill Parcells, who likes to remind his team that trying is taken for granted--it’s winning that brings medals.

The book is an hour-by-hour account of the behind-the-scenes preparation for a game against the Eagles last year, but it could as well fit this week of preparation for San Francisco. The cast of characters is the same.

The problems a year ago were whether star linebacker Lawrence Taylor would play at all (he did--all he had, after all, was a broken ankle) and whether quarterback Phil Simms would play effectively (he didn’t--his ankle wasn’t much better).

The author gives an insight on how much pro football is run like a large corporation these days. Coach Parcells is the president and Chief Executive Officer, but he relies on his panel of assistants who run the various divisions of the company (tight ends, secondary, offensive line, etc.).

Parcells is astonished at what coaches have done to themselves: “What we’ve done in this business is take a nine-month-a-year job of 10 or 12 hours a day and turn it into a 12-month-a-year job of 15 hours a day--and that’s what gets us. I could do this job right now with a fax machine on the beach in Florida and probably not flop it up. I feel like it’s a boring job most of the time except for game day.”

Parcells’ view of San Francisco Coach George Seifert is not known, but his view of his opponent of last week, Buddy Ryan, is that he “is a Neanderthal and he attracts Neanderthal players. Neanderthals can win certain kinds of wars, but they lose some they should win if you find a way to make them make enough choices.”

Parcells lost to the Neanderthal men last Sunday, 30-13, and lost to them last year, 24-17, when, after a week of X’s and O’s and coffee sent to the screening rooms at 10 p.m., his quarterback fumbled away a touchdown on the third play of the game and then threw an interception for another touchdown on his next possession. No one ever factors fumbles and interceptions into the game plan.

The insecurities of even the greatest players come in for a full airing. Listen to Simms, who in one shining afternoon in January, 1987, set Super Bowl standards of 10 completed passes in a row and 22 out of 25 with three touchdowns: “Your body betrays you. In the off-season, I work much harder than the average quarterback. I’m always scared that, if I don’t, I won’t be good enough to play. It comes from the fear that I have to do more than he does--whoever he is--because I want to make sure I’m better than him. Everybody is scared. . . .”

Adds Simms: “I don’t know if there’s ever complete satisfaction in this (game). You win the Super Bowl and, God! It’s the greatest feeling in the world. And then, all of a sudden, it’s like you never did it and it doesn’t mean spit if you don’t win it again.”

Sometimes, you get no medals for winning, either.