The images of the 1986 Giants’ team are emblazoned in my mind like the Stations of the Cross on stained glass. My father’s, too. Amid all his troubles, when the Giants started to win, he found a kind of peace…and a soulmate in #56.
It was hard to explain the importance of the New York Giants 1985 season to my (then) nine-year-old son. How they’d come so far, only to lose it all to the Chicago Bears, was a toughie. And it happened as we lowered my grandfather into his grave. My grandfather had died of a heart attack just a week before the playoffs.
Courtesy: Playball
The night of his wake, my father, my brother, and I stepped out to a bar across the street to watch the playoff game with the Bears. The snow pouring in Soldier Field on the bar television felt like it was numbing my soul.
That year the Giants looked promising. After drafting Lawrence Taylor (LT) in 1981, Coach Parcels built a phenomenal defense around LT’s unique roaming linebacker style. 56 was already an important number to my father. My sister, Lynn, was born in 1956. And, now, LT would earn the association with my sister’s birth year. He was the last NY Giant to wear that number.
LT changed defensive pass-rushing strategies and the role of the linebacker. He forced offenses to reckon with his previously unseen attack style. As far as we were concerned, LT was the best thing to happen to the Giants in a very long time. LT became my father’s favorite sports figure of all time–above DiMaggio and above Tom Seaver.
“They have to protect Sims,” pleaded my father, his eyes swollen from an already long day.
“Don’t give up yet, dad,” I said, trying to console him.
Then Richard Dent, the Bears’ linebacker, ripped through the Giants’ offensive line, tossing Sims to the ground like a toy figure. Not a drinker, my father sipped his gin and tonic, distressed by one certain death and the other in progress.
“I hope the season doesn’t come to this,” he said, looking only at the television perched in the corner nook of the bar. That year the Giants had given him relief from the many worries of his life. He’d just been laid off by Pan Am after working there for 30 years. Now in his late fifties and with a future uncertain, he had a heaping debt staring him in the face. The Giants had become his refuge.
“The entire year comes to this,” he said, like a man who had just been given a death sentence.
He couldn’t look at me.
Sam Huff (photo, SI)
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my father and grandfather had seen Sam Huff, Jimmy Robestelli, and Frank Gifford take the Giants to several championships. Of course, my father felt a pang in his heart for his father-in-law, but the Giants fading was yet another spike to his flesh.
As the Bears put the last nail in the coffin of that 1985 season, my father sighed, putting his half-finished drink on the bar. “Let’s go see how your mother is doing,” he said.
We all marched over together, back to the wake.
And here I am now, in 2005, with my son, Theo. I replay my father’s VHS recorded tapes of the 1986 season and, then, we watch the 1986 Superbowl, Giants versus the Denver Broncos.
“Dad, I thought you said that the Giants killed the Broncos,” he asked, doubting my knowledge of the game. (But this is a recording, I think to myself. They can’t lose on the playback.)
True enough, the Giants look horrible in the first half, allowing Denver’s Elway to escape their defense. While the score is only 10-3 going into the half, the Giants seem outplayed.
“Dad, but you said that they killed them.”
That’s the way I remember it. I had forgotten all the anguish and pain and only held onto the win.
“Watch it. It’s a tape. They win. You’ll see.” I say slightly doubting myself.
“When are they going to start winning?” His questioning begins to grate on me. He’s not learned the hardship of fan-hood, including the hours, days, and months of waiting, and the miracle of your team finally winning the big one.
“They will. Believe me,” I say with my father’s anxiety coursing through my blood.
“Dad, when ….” “Look now,” I say, pointing to the screen.
Just then, the Giants call a trick play formation. Instead of punting on the 4th down, the ball placer, Jeff Rutledge, takes the ball in for a first down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8PtBeeCRWw
From that point on, the Giants can do no wrong, running over the Broncos defense, and shutting down Elway’s passing.
With 56 seconds left (yes, miraculously) in the game, the camera pans the crowd.
As I watch the rerun tape with my son, my throat tightens from emotion, and tears well up in my eyes. The player’s celebrations on the sidelines remind me of my father looking upwards with his hands pressed together thanking God.
With all the contradictions of football – the injuries and the violence – the images of the 1986 team moments are emblazoned in my mind like the Stations of the Cross on stained glass. Amid his troubles, when the Giants started to win, he found a kind of peace … and a soulmate in #56.
But in 1991, out of nowhere, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The Giants started 10-1 and went on to finish with 13-1. In the National League Playoffs against the 49ers, LT recovered a fumble setting up Matt Bahr’s game-winning field goal.
The Giants went on to defeat the Buffalo Bills in one of the closest, nail-biting Superbowl games ever. That year LT had a Pro-Bowl season.
My father had watched that season like his life depended on it. And after an intense three-month battle with pancreatic cancer, my father died in 1992. 1991 would prove to be LT’s last great season as if he’d been nourished on my father’s admiration all along. His playing slowly declined when my father’s fandom died with him.
And it was fitting that LT’s #56 jersey draped my father’s casket at the wake. I could tell that it made some people uncomfortable, but our family knew.
My father was delivered to the heaven he had always wanted.
