Five Signature Moments From New York Giants History
Seismic sacks, miraculous catches and relics from a lost era, plus one regrettable moment that captures the current state of the franchise.
The Giants, one of the NFL’s oldest franchises, won championships in 1934 and 1938. Two titles, four years apart, under a legendary coach (Steve Owen) and a “quarterback” (Ed Danowski) who had some great years but wasn’t quite a Hall of Famer. (Danowski replaced Harry Newman as the Giants’ A-formation tailback late in the 1934 season.) Sense a pattern?
Here is some footage from the 1938 championship game.
If we were discussing baseball history, Babe Ruth’s called shot or Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech would certainly qualify as Signature Moments. But the 1930s Giants are subjects of paleontology. They don’t even exist in the inherited memory of movies and tall tales. So let’s acknowledge that the distant past is prologue and focus instead on Five Signature Moments which still possess some degree of resonance.
5. The Decline and Fall of Y.A. Tittle
Date: September 20th, 1964
It wasn’t a championship game.
Tittle got beaten up so badly in the 1963 NFL Championship that he had to be helped off the field and given both novocaine and cortisone to finish the game. This moment exemplifies three straight championship losses, but it did not occur during one.
It wasn’t even an important game. The Steelers beat the Giants 27-24 in a September contest between two teams destined for the bottom of the standings. The Giants were at the start of a collapse that would consume two decades. But no one could know that at the time.
The New York Giants’ longtime habit of making the big plays that win football games has disappeared. In their contest with Pittsburgh today, it was not the Giants but the Steelers who made the big plays, and they won a game that other Giant teams of recent years would have taken easily. The score was 27-24 for the home side as a crowd of 35,053 looked on in Pitt Stadium.
The Giants lost more than just a game. They also lost their No. 1 player, Y. A. Tittle, who went down under a vicious tackle by John Baker, a defensive end, near the end of the second period.
Tittle's face was white and etched with pain when he got up and the Giants quickly removed him to their dressing room. He did not reappear.
Tittle, hit when throwing a screen pass that was intercepted for a Steeler touchdown, took a hard blow to the rib cage. He flew back to New York with the team and was immediately taken to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for X‐rays.
At the hospital early Monday Dr. Francis Sweeny, the team physician, said the X‐rays had shown bruised cartilages of the three lower right ribs, but no fractures. He said Tittle “was pretty well beaten up.”
Dr. Sweeny said it was “doubtful” that Tittle would be able to play against the Washington Redskins at Yankee Stadium Friday night. He estimated that the quarterback would be ready to play “in a few weeks.” — William N. Wallace, New York Times, September 21st, 1961
Tittle did play the following week. He was in and out of the lineup with various injuries, including concussions, for the rest of the year. The Giants, one of the glamour teams of the 1950s, would not survive the British Invasion.
The Yankees would lead the World Series just a few weeks after Tittle was laid low. They would not return for over a decade and would actually finish in tenth place a few years later. Joltin’ Joe (and Mickey/Yogi/Whitey, et al) had left and gone away.
A few months later, on November 28th, the Jets selected Alabama sensation Joe Namath with the first pick in the “1965” AFL draft. The epicenter of New York sports would soon shift, shockingly, from the Bronx to Queens.
A few months after that, Bob Dylan would release as a single the title track to his 1964 album whose name should be obvious from the context.
My initial instinct was to sift through the archives to find a great Giants moment from the 1961-63 seasons to include here, or to unearth something from the 1956 champions. (The 1958 NFL Championship contains moments for a different franchise.) But it should not take archeology to unearth a Signature Moment.
We know a mighty empire once occupied New York because it left behind a worship object, a totemic image with which we can identify, even though we may not fully comprehend its significance: a bloody, muddy, paunchy warrior fallen to his knees, contemplating the end of what was, in some ways, the end of his world, the anguish on his face still tempered by his determination and pride.
Nothing more remains.
4. Jim Burt KO’s Joe Montana
Date: January 4th, 1987
The Giants of my early childhood were utterly irrelevant. They enjoyed three winning seasons and just one playoff berth from 1964 through 1983. They were charmless and dull the way only bad teams of the era before free agency and around-the-clock coverage could be. The Giants played at the Yale Bowl in Connecticut for two years. Then they moved to the Meadowlands, and there was a period when neither side of the Hudson really wanted to claim them.
Even the successful Bill Parcells teams of 1984-85 lacked a personality of their own. Sure, Lawrence Taylor and company generated a million sacks. But the Jets were the New York Sack Exchange; “Big Blue Wrecking Crew” reeks of a second-choice nickname. And the Bears were the NFL’s marauding bad boys. When the Bears faced the Giants in the 1985 playoffs, it was a 21-0 no-contest. The Giants were second-to-fourth bananas.
Ah, but the rapidly-improving Giants were also getting a gimmick. Defensive tackle Jim Burt, feeling ornery after a week of excessively old-school coaching from Parcells (Burt was singled out among defenders to punch a padded wall while holding 20-pound dumbbells, and for extra two-on-one full-contact drills), dumped a jug of Gatorade over his coach’s head after a victory in October of 1984. The prank humanized Parcells and rebranded the Giants as something akin to a band of lethal-yet-merry pirates.