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    'Our Town': The Giants Who Won a Super Bowl and a Battle for New York
    'Our Town': The Giants Who Won a Super Bowl and a Battle for New York
    'Our Town': The Giants Who Won a Super Bowl and a Battle for New York
    Ebook126 pages1 hour

    'Our Town': The Giants Who Won a Super Bowl and a Battle for New York

    By Greg Hanlon

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    Hakeem Nicks’s grim running joke with his high school coach about how he would keep working hard and thus never “wear the paper hat” of a menial fast-food worker. Chris Canty’s Bronx early childhood as the son an accomplished administrator of government programs. Will Beatty’s childhood speech impediment, which caused him to turn inward and cultivate an impressive array of artistic talents. Antrel Rolle’s faithful adherence, both while playing football and conducting interviews, to abide by the recklessness of that inner “dog.” Eli Manning’s second Super Bowl-winning drive as the requiting of a long ago love letter from the Giants’ general manager.

    Lost amid the frantic, soap-operatic coverage of the NFL is the fact that each player is the star of his own compelling drama. Here is the story of the 2011 New York Giants, told through the stories of the team’s players themselves.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJul 12, 2013
    ISBN9781483503738
    'Our Town': The Giants Who Won a Super Bowl and a Battle for New York

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      Book preview

      'Our Town' - Greg Hanlon

      posterity

      Introduction

      The 2011 football season brought with it a realization of a lifelong goal for me: I was to write about the Giants and Jets after every game. My pieces were due at noon on Mondays, and I would get a check for them—a small one, of course, but a check nonetheless. I was a professional football writer, writing about the Giants, my favorite team since I was six.

      It’s an odd thing, being a 30-something professional fan, and it’s an unusual form of making it to work in a locker room surrounded by guys a decade younger than you who suffer your cloying questions with grudging forbearance.

      So what’s really going on here? Why would a grown man obsess over, to borrow a line from Annie Hall, a bunch of pituitary cases trying to move a ball down a field?

      I’m aware of the absurd nature of sports as emotional outlet and organizing principle. I’m also aware that my continuous obsession with the Giants might be a sign of my own regressiveness and clinginess. But as with any religion, the pull has actually gotten stronger as I’ve gotten older.

      Writing has taken on a similar role for me. Putting words to thoughts represents my best attempt to stave off the nagging feeling that I’m watching life pass by too quickly and shapelessly. Given this, writing about the Giants is profoundly meaningful to me, in a way that I love sports, and I want to do what I love professionally doesn’t quite capture.

      ⁂

      I set out to write about one player, on both the Giants and Jets, after each game in 2011. Beyond that, there weren’t many parameters for my assignment. I could do profile pieces, or I could focus on the nuts and bolts of the action. The only requirement was that I use the individual player as a jumping-off point for the best piece I could produce in the limited time I had.

      Part of the reason for this conceit was utilitarian: it allowed me to pre-report and even pre-write parts of the pieces during the week, which alleviated some of the deadline pressure. And part of the reason was that it seemed like a way of covering the teams that was distinguishable from the bounty of coverage that was already out there every week.

      Mostly, though, I felt that writing in depth about the players would be a good way to appreciate the sport more, and to convey that appreciation. Lost amid the post-game rapid reactions, and the overpraise or overcondemnation that made up the Greek chorus of regular coverage, is the fact that each of these players is the star of his own compelling drama.

      That’s how I wound up focusing more intently on the  individual 2011 Giants than I would have otherwise. And it was my good fortune, both as a fan and as a writer, that those Giants wound up winning the Super Bowl.

      The 2011 Giants would have had a special place in my heart even if Tony Romo had hit Miles Austin in stride during the fourth quarter of that Week 14 game in Dallas, thus eliminating them from playoff contention. But I’m glad things worked out the way they did.

      A member of the Giants’ 1986 championship team once told me that the best part of winning is that it enhances the relationships between the players. I think the same thing applies between fans and teams, and writers and teams.

      The following is a collection of some of those pieces on the individual Giants from that 2011 season, plus some other relevant articles. I’ve annotated the originals to give a better sense of the writings in the context of the season as it was happening.

      I hope that reading them makes your memories of the 2011 season, and your Giants fandom, just a little bit richer.

      Week 1: Redskins 28 – Giants 14

      Antrel Rolle lets his inner dog out, and this time, the Giants get mauled

      "That dog."

      Giants safety Antrel Rolle thinks good teams need it. He thinks good players need it. It’s that nastiness. It’s that freewheeling abandon that makes football fun, at least for those who, like him, have the instincts and the aggressiveness to be good at it.

      He said as much after an unsightly loss last year in Indianapolis, Rolle’s second game in a Giants uniform after signing a lucrative free-agent deal. It was a criticism of Giants coach Tom Coughlin, and not Rolle’s last, it turned out, about the regimented, old-fashioned way in which the N.F.L.’s oldest head coach runs his football team.

      Things have got to change, he told reporters. "If you want a team that has a competitive attitude and to have that dog mentality, sometimes you have to let them be that dog. Everything can’t be controlled. And right now, everything is controlled within this organization."

      Antrel Rolle lets that dog loose on the field, and the results are generally very good. He made the Pro Bowl with the Giants last year, just as he did the year before as a member of the Arizona Cardinals. More impressively, he did this while essentially playing two positions, even though his position was listed simply as safety both years.

      With Arizona, he mostly patrolled the deep reaches of the field. With the Giants, he played along the line of scrimmage. He blitzed the quarterback more than all but several defensive backs, and, according to FootballOutsiders.com, led the league with 12.5 quarterback hurries, an unofficial stat not kept by the N.F.L..

      But letting that dog loose has its consequences. Like in the fourth quarter of yesterday’s opening game against Washington, with the Giants down seven points. Washington’s Fred Davis caught a pass on third down, but he fell to the ground, and was well short of the first down. All that was needed was for a Giant to touch Davis with his hand to register the tackle and end the play. But, well, see, that dog was loose, and everything can’t be controlled, so Rolle speared the defenseless Davis with his helmet, resulting in a 15-yard penalty and a first down. The Giants defense never recovered. Several plays later, Washington scored to clinch the game.

      ANTREL ROLLE ALSO LETS THAT DOG OUT WITH the media. It’s refreshing, actually, especially coming from a player on the Giants, who have made a tradition out of being buttoned up and boring with the press. The organization’s two front men—coach Tom Coughlin and quarterback Eli Manning—have, with respective grouchy and benign demeanors, been leaving reporters disappointed since coming to New York in 2004.

      By contrast, Rolle is endearingly but recklessly chatty with the press. While most athletes walk a fine line between being as polite and as uninformative as possible, Rolle actually tries to relate, uninhibited and without a filter. He strives for the honest answer and not the elusive cliché.

      This quality got Rolle in trouble last season, and resulted in his being slapped with that passive-aggressively pejorative tag, controversial. Rolle’s relationship with the press last year typified a tired and toxic dynamic between athletes and the media: Whenever athletes let their words get away from them, the media plays up the sensationalism to the hilt. This, in turn, reinforces the cycle in which players and coaches are paranoid about their words, and reporters desperately try to solicit from them a salacious soundbite around which to base their stories.

      The media is definitely … Rolle paused during an interview with the N.F.L. Network at the Pro Bowl last year. They blow up a spot for me.

      He explained, I’ve never been a part of something so huge for saying so little.

      Twice last season, Rolle criticized Coughlin, although both times, you got the sense that Rolle’s comments were more the product of excessive gabbiness and not the premeditated attempt to undermine the coach most media portrayed it as. (Later, Rolle tenderly called Coughlin very honest, and a caring guy.)

      Another time, while passionately making a case for why home fans shouldn’t boo their team’s players who are risking their bodies on the field, Rolle compared football players to soldiers in Iraq. He wasn’t the first athlete to do this, but he was the latest to reignite this flashpoint of exaggerated indignation, reinforcing the media punchline about how disconnected from reality pro athletes are.

      (The radio interview, on WFAN’s Joe Beningo and Evan Roberts show, contained the following priceless exchange:

      Rolle: [Repeatedly] You don’t boo your team. You don’t boo your team.

      Benigno: But Antrel, it’s booing out of love.)

      After a sit-down at the Pro Bowl with Justin Tuck, the upholder of the Giants’ Classy Guys self-image and the unofficial leader of the defense, Rolle has vowed to tone it down this year.

      I’m only answering questions that’s only gonna benefit the team and benefit myself, he said. I’m not gonna say anything that’s gonna cause any kind of controversy.

      Rolle’s plan to stay away from controversy hit a snag in August, when he was one of the most prominent players mentioned in a scandal about improper benefits scores of former University of Miami players were alleged to have received. To their credit, local reporters realized that some cash and trips to a strip club Rolle may or may not have gotten

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