THE BIRTH OF NO. 10
As Giants get set to retire Eli’s jersey, don’t forget the man who made it all happen
Ernie Accorsi, who is about to turn 80 and still too worried about COVID to be there on Sunday at MetLife Stadium when Eli Manning’s No. 10 is retired, is talking about the day he traded up from No. 4 to No. 1 in the 2004 draft so the Giants could get Eli. And he is saying that it wasn’t just the history of the Giants that changed that day, when Eli and Ben Roethlisberger and Philip Rivers were all on the board.
“I think about it all the time,” Ernie says. “If San Diego holds on to their pick, it’s not just our history. It’s the history of three franchises: San Diego’s, our, Pittsburgh’s.” But the Chargers didn’t hold on to their pick. Roethlisberger didn’t have to be Ernie’s fallback position. The Giants got Eli. And it will be the same on Sunday as it will always be: There has never been a more important trade for the Giants, all the way back to 1925. There really have only been a handful of trades like it — Dave DeBusschere from the Pistons to the Knicks comes to mind, of course — in New York sports history.
Ernie changed everything. Eli changed everything. And so did a great football coach named Tom Coughlin. Their own Ring of Honor.
“You can’t do it without the coach,” Ernie says. “But the coach has to have a quarterback.”
And that coach had that quarterback. Archie’s kid. Peyton’s brother. The one who took the Giants down the field in Glendale, Ariz., to beat the 18-0 Patriots when the Giants got their first Super Bowl off Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. And then threw one of the best passes you will ever see in your life, in Indianapolis later, to Mario Manningham and the Giants had done it to the Patriots again.
It is worth telling this one again, about Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, when the Giants, behind 14-10, got the ball at the end. Ernie has been replaced as Giants GM by Jerry Reese by then, even though that team was Ernie’s, too.
Ernie is sitting with his three sons at University of Phoenix Stadium on that Sunday night. But he is sitting next to Michael Accorsi, who had coached at Virginia and Maryland.
And Ernie turns to Michael and says, “If he’s what we thought he was going to be, he’ll do it right now. Doing it on October 15 is fine. But he’s got to do it now.”
Then Ernie Accorsi is telling a Johnny Unitas story, because that’s where Ernie came in, in the late ’60s. His first week with the Baltimore Colts, they’re training in Golden, Colo., because they’re playing four preseason games in the West. And Ernie is standing with Milt Davis, who’d been a corner for the Colts in the 1958 sudden death championship game against the Giants, still one of the most famous football games ever played. Just maybe not as famous as beating the Patriots when the Patriots were 18-0.
Unitas’s elbow was shot by then, and Ernie is watching him throw and says to Davis, “Can we still win with him?”
And Davis says, “I’m going to tell you something and I don’t ever want you to forget it. You ultimately judge a quarterback on whether or not he can take his team down the field with a championship on the line and get them into the end zone.”
Eli took them down and finally threw one to Plaxico Burress in the left corner of the end zone and the Giants won. And all of the drama of April 24, 2004, when the trade with the Chargers was consummated and Ernie had stood strong against making Osi Umenyiora part of the deal (“Quarterback is the most important position,” Ernie says now, “but pass rusher is right behind”) had been worth it. And the Giants, with No. 10 behind center, had won what owner John Mara said that night was the greatest victory in the history of the franchise.
A few years ago, while the Chargers were waiting to move into their fancy, space-age SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, Eli got an award in Ernie Accorsi’s name from the National Football Foundation. And that night Eli grinned and said, “If it wasn’t for Ernie Accorsi, I’d be playing in a soccer stadium in Los Angeles.”
By the way? Coughlin was once asked if he agreed with Ernie on the trade for Eli.
“I did,” Coughlin said. “But Ernie didn’t give a damn.”
The day of that ’04 draft, I was in the back of the press box at Yankee Stadium, and called Ernie to congratulate him. And I was talking with Brian Cashman, the Yankees general manager later, and told him that if you have the kind of job that he and Accorsi had, and that kind of belief in a player, you have to make the trade.
“He must really like him,” Cashman said. “Trust me,” I said. “He does.”
Accorsi had started following Eli at Ole Miss on the chance that he might come out as a junior. And remembers an Auburn game that year, and how the only player making the sides even was Eli, who kept taking his team down the field until he threw an interception on Ole Miss’ last drive. But there is another image from that day that has stayed with Ernie, apart from the football, about Eli Manning.
“A receiver turned the wrong way, and caused him to miss,” Ernie says. “And the first thing Eli does is go over and put his arm around the kid.” ccorsi pauses and says, “I think maybe one other kid on his team might have gotten a cup of coffee in the league. But the next year Eli took basically the same group to the Cotton Bowl.”
Now, on Sunday, Eli Manning, who was tough and good and had a world of grace, gets his Giants number retired. It all started when he got traded to them on Draft Day one April Saturday in 2004. Ernie Accorsi made that trade. He won’t be there Sunday. But he really will be.
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