LIVING WITH THE GIANTS

It’s been a rough year for the Giants, but nothing like the Seventies when they won only 50 out of 124 games.

I drove a Toyota Corona through most the decade. It probably wasn’t that great a car to begin with, since everybody back then called them “Toy-motors,” but I really beat the shit out of it. It was covered with dings and scratches, it tended to overheat in the summer and when it was cold, you needed to have the manual choke pulled out. Great tape deck though.

At some point a Giants bumper sticker came into my possession and I proudly stuck it to the rear bumper. If must have been summer, since I was driving with the window open, and while waiting for a light, another car pulled up next to me. I was likely staring at the engine heat gauge when the guy next to me yells, “The Giants? Ya gotta be kiddin’ me” and drives off with the light change.

I decided I wouldn’t wear my fandom on my sleeve anymore, while also acknowledging that this beat car I was driving was somehow a metaphor for the Giants’ current condition. When I got home, I peeled off the sticker and tossed it. .

After hitting the 50-year mark of being a Giants fan this past September, here are a few of my favorite players:

HOMER JONES: My first sports crush. Fast, 6-4 and a terror to cover. In these days of silly, often

fussy and pre-meditated touchdown celebrations, Homer invented the spike. When he crossed the goal line (as he did 14 times in 1968), he threw ball down. Nothing flamboyant, just a flick of the wrist, as if to say, “I don’t need this anymore.” I went to an autograph-signing session at Korvettes and stood in absolute awe while he signed his name for me. I still have it.

RON JOHNSON: Homer was traded to the Browns for Johnson and I learned that when one door closes, another opens up. Until Johnson arrived, the Giants relied on lumbering white fullbacks who, as they used to say, could be timed for the 40-yard dash using a sun dial. As luck would have it, Johnson worked in the same office building as my mother and Mom arranged for me to interview Johnson for the high school newspaper. He answered my well-meaning, if sometimes cringe-worthy questions (like did he know anything about homosexuality in NFL locker rooms; I really asked that) thoughtfully and honestly. A year or so later I saw him in the record department at Korvettes, flipping through jazz albums, thus concluding my Korvettes/Giants circle of life.

LAWRENCE TAYLOR: The absolute pleasure in knowing that the greatest defensive player in the history of the league was ours helped make all those losing years (almost) palatable.

ELI MANNING: Here’s the list of Giants quarterbacks for the ten years between Phil Simms and Eli: Dave Brown, Danny Kanell, Kent Graham, Kerry Collins, Kurt Warner, Jesse Palmer. Eli’s consistency and durability kept us from wandering the wilderness looking for a quarterback, a reality that has defined the fortunes of way too many NFL teams, sometimes for decades. Along with the two Super Bowl wins, Eli saved us from being the Jets.

ODELL BECKHAM: Non-Giant fans hate his haircut and histrionics. They’re also scared shitless when their team has to cover him.

Otis

How did two white 13-year olds in the middle of suburbia discover, and bond over, Otis Redding? Me and McKenzie did. It’s not like we heard him on the radio. Otis’ music played outside the Top 40, so WABC didn’t touch him. Neither did WMCA. We might have caught him on WWRL, between breaks in the storm of static that made listening to New York’s R&B channel a challenge, but I doubt it.  

What I think drew us in was an album cover. We had a habit of going to Korvettes or Modells, with their monster record departments, to flip through looking for records that struck us as “different.” We’d hold them up to get the other guy’s reaction, and sometimes buy them (49 cents from the cut-out bin) if they invoked the right response.

McKenzie bought a record by Sister Rosetta Tharpe; we liked saying her name, but didn’t care for gospel music. Olatunji’s Drums of Passion, a field recording of African chants and drums, worked for us. We played it to death and were thrilled when Santana covered one of its songs. Hey, someone else bought this record too.

The album cover that may have hooked us was Otis Redding’s Dictionary of Soul. As a recruitment poster for dopey, impressionable kids, it’s perfect. But the music, on that record and all the subsequent ones we bought, hit us square. Gutbucket blues. Imaginative horn arrangements. Otis’ voice, moving from pleading ballad to all-out roof raisers. Referring to himself in song in the third person – and as “Big O” yet. The “got-ta, got-ta” and “Lord have mercy” asides.

And the songs. Aretha had taken “Respect” to the top of the charts. The horn-driven “I Can’t Turn You Loose” (better known today as the Blue Brothers’ theme). Pain In My Heart, covered by the Stones. Otis mined Depression-era Tin Pan Alley for “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” and “Try A Little Tenderness,” covered BB King (“Rock Me Baby”) and the Beatles (“Day Tripper”), then returned the favor to the Stones with “Satisfaction.”

We played Otis’ duet with Carla Thomas, “Tramp,” over and over. I had a friend who memorized some of Bill Cosby’s album routines, and he’d recite them as we walked home from school. “Tramp” was funnier than Cosby and not nearly as long-winded.

Otis’ fame grew beyond the two blocks in Hackensack where me and McKenzie lived. Otis played Scandinavia. The Hippodrome in London. The Monterey Pop Festival. The Whiskey A Go-Go. Then, with his star steadily on the rise, it crashed.  

McKenzie and I were having one of our stupid lover’s spats when Otis died. We weren’t talking and then we passed each other in the hallway between classes. We actually said, “Otis,” to each other almost simultaneously.

Otis died at age 26, one year short of membership in the half-baked concept of the “27 Club,” but he had the brightest future – and the clearest head – of anyone on that list. When his plane went down into Lake Monona in Madison, WI 50 years next month, we lost so much. He had just written and recorded an introspective song unlike anything he had done before called “Dock of the Bay.” He was said to be listening to Dylan and wanted to cover “Just Like A Woman.” He wanted to remake a bunch of his old songs, speeding up the ballads and down-shifting the fast ones.

I used to travel to Madison frequently for work. Once, we held an offsite at a conference center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a terrace that overlooked Lake Monona. Although the weather there is normally mercurial, it was a warm October day and I spent quite a bit of time on a bench staring out at the water. It felt like a pilgrimage.

McKenzie and I went our separate ways a long time ago. I’m sure that by now he’s forgotten about Olatunji and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But I’d like to think that if he ever finds himself in Madison, and the weather is right, that he would park himself on that same bench. The dock of the bay.