DAY IN THE SUN
This Giants trip to L.A. won’t be nearly as Super as 35 years earlier
ON THE subject of the Giants: What is there to say about a 4-8 team that counts Mike Glennon and Jake Fromm as its best available options at quarterback? Giants fans are suffering again, and after a brutal decade, the older ones surely are being reminded of the franchise’s 17-year run of playoff-free football that brought the paying
customers to the brink of mutiny.
“It’s not all that different, to be honest with you,” co-owner John Mara confessed last spring, before even knowing what the first dozen games of this season would look like. Mara was right there with his old man Wellington through the darkest days, from 1964 through 1980.
“I’ve said things in the past like, ‘I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again,’ yet here we are,” Mara said nine months ago, “four losing seasons in a row, we haven’t won a playoff game since Super Bowl XLVI.”
Four losing seasons in a row will now almost certainly become five, and Giants fans need the kind of break from the misery that their team just took in Tucson, Ariz., before arriving in the Los Angeles area, where the Giants landed 35 years ago next month to end their 30-year championship drought. The fans need something more than an assurance that general manager Dave Gettleman won’t be returning next year to temporarily forget about Daniel Jones’s injury, the ungodly mess that is the offensive line and Saquon Barkley’s failure to honor the terms of his employment as a No. 2-overall draft pick.
They need an extended reminder of that glorious, sunshiny day in Pasadena, when in the middle of winter, the Giants became the boys of summer. That day — Jan. 25, 1987 — altered everything about the franchise and started notarizing the legacies of three of the greatest defensive forces the sport has seen: Lawrence Taylor, Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells.
For starters, after shutting out Washington amid 35-mph Meadowlands winds for the NFC title, the Giants desperately wanted to escape the North Jersey climate for that of Southern California. Just feeling the California sun on their bones, quarterback Phil Simms said, was “a tremendous psychological lift.”
Speaking of lifts, those Giants’ defensive coordinator, Belichick, was given one off
the Giants Stadium field after his unit forced Washington to go 0-for-18 on third and fourth downs with the bid to Super Bowl XXI on the line. Once mocked and completely disrespected by Giants veterans who saw him as a nerd who hadn’t earned his place in the league, Belichick, then 34, was wearing a hoodie beneath his red Giants jacket when he was carried on the shoulder pads of the Parcells players who now saw Little Bill as irreplaceable. The New York Times ran a photo of the scene on its front page.
Though the boyish-looking Belichick had arrived, Taylor didn’t much care. He wore sunglasses and a cap pulled over his eyes during Super Bowl-week meetings while the coordinator droned on about Broncos quarterback John Elway’s strengths and weaknesses. After LT twice failed to respond to Belichick’s instructions in one session, Little Bill walked over to the motionless linebacker, removed his glasses and found him sound asleep. He didn’t do anything about it, of course.
“Bill was standing on a long line of individuals who gave that broad latitude to Lawrence,” defensive end George Martin said.
Parcells was also on that line. The NFL had never seen an explosive defender the likes of LT, and the head coach wasn’t about to derail that train with an unnecessary application of some unnecessary team rule.
Plenty of Giants struggled to sleep the night before the big game. Simms got three hours’ worth, tops, before taking an early cab to the Rose Bowl with offensive linemen Brad Benson and Chris Godfrey.
During warm-ups, Simms was thrilled that the ball didn’t feel like an NFC East ball (cold and rock-hard) in his hands. “Hey Blondie,” receivers coach Pat Hodgson called to him, “you are smoking.”
Simms only got hotter during the game. He threw for three touchdowns and completed 22 of 25 passes, including all 10 in the second half. Simms said years later that he was inches away from going 25-for-25 against the Broncos, which would’ve been the Super Bowl’s answer to Don Larsen’s perfect game in the World Series.
Elway had a much tougher time against a Giants defense that had already spent that postseason just crushing Hall-of-Fame offensive minds (Bill Walsh, Joe Gibbs) and literally knocking out a Hall-of-Fame quarterback (Joe Montana).
Soaked by a Gatorade bath after the Giants’ 39-20 victory, Parcells shouted at his players in the locker room: “The rest of your life. The rest of your life, men. Nobody can ever tell ya that ya couldn’t do it, because ya did it.”
Belichick walked back onto the field to soak it all in, just in case he never got the chance to coach in another Super Bowl. As it turned out, he got to coach in another 11 and counting, nine as a head coach of the Patriots.
Meanwhile, his former Patriots assistant Joe Judge is merely trying to secure his future in his second year leading the Giants. They will play the Chargers on Sunday at SoFi Stadium, site of the next Super Bowl.
Judge’s Giants have no shot of being there in February. So that’s why today was a good day to revisit the old Rose Bowl in spirit, for the sake of those older, beleaguered fans who remember a time when the Giants landed in greater Los Angeles and had their day in the sun.