New poll: Democrats are more positive about the 2012 campaign

By Richard K. Barry

That's right. Any excuse to post a picture of the New
York Giants with the Super Bowl trophy.

I truly have no idea what to make of polls like this, or what the implications of such findings might be in November, but the Pew Research Center asked the question, so I suppose we should know the answer:

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 7-9 among 1,012 adults, finds that 66% of Democrats say the presidential campaign is interesting while just 27% say it is dull. Among Republicans 50% say it is interesting while nearly as many (45%) describe it as dull. The gap is about as wide in opinions about whether the presidential campaign is informative – 68% of Democrats say it is informative, compared with 49% of Republicans.

In September 2008, nearly identical percentages of Republicans (75%) and Democrats (74%) said the campaign was interesting. And similar majorities of both groups viewed the campaign as informative (62% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats).

Again, I'm not sure what this means. I will say that, as a football fan, when my team, the New York Giants, is doing well, I'm very interested in the football season, want to know everything that is going on, and find it all very exciting. When they are losing, I find everything about the season dull and don't care to be informed.

Could that be the point? Are Democrats starting to feel that success is within reach with the thought in mind that it's always fun to be engaged when victory is close at hand?

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

The New York Giants crushed the Jets last weekend

By Richard K. Barry

Stop poking me in the eye!

I know preseason games mean nothing, or next to nothing, but given the fact that the New York Giants are Super Bowl champs and the Jets still get way too much ink because some second-stringer got signed in the offseason, this one was a little sweeter.

The Giants offence wasn't all that sharp, but the defense made up for it. And the G-Men got to chase Tebow around for some of the game. Anyway, the Giants smacked around the Jets 26-3. I liked it.

Back-to-back, baby! (I can dream, can't I?)

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

The 1966 New York Giants: A long way away from any Super Bowl

By Richard K. Barry

By 1966 I was already a huge New York Giants fan and had exactly 20 years of disappointment to look forward to. Neighbourhood kids used to knock on my door on Sunday afternoons to see if I would come out and play or, they used to ask, was I going to stay inside and "watch the Giants lose."

Yes, it was that bad. 

But stay inside to watch the Giants I did, and it's something I've been doing ever since. 

You may know 1966 was a special year for the New York Giants, sort of.

A Bleacher Report article this past summer listed the group that year as number 26 of "The 30 Worst Team in NFL History."

So, what, you may ask, is the relationship of that woeful season to today's Super Bowl? Well, as the Green Bay Packers were finishing an impressive 12-2 regular season record and on their way to beating the Kansas City Chiefs in the very first Super Bowl, the Giants were going 1-12-1.

What made this even more difficult was the fact that the Giants previously had two assistant coaches, Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry, who would face each other in the NFL championship game that season as head coaches when the Packers beat the Cowboys.

My guess is that the 20 lost years for the Giants would never have happened if they had been able to hold on to either one of these legends. 

Just to add a little insult to injury, the Giant's quarterback during that stellar 1-12-1 season was Earl Morrall, who left the team two years later to go to Baltimore where he stepped in for the injured Johnny Unitas and proceeded to lead the team to a 13-1 record and an appearance in the Super Bowl (albeit to lose to the Jets).

And then Morrall went to the Dolphins in 1972 and played a pivotal role in their undefeated season. 

Just some fun facts to think about.

Here's the entry from the Bleacher Report on that terrible 1966 season for the Giants:

The 1966 season got off on an indifferent note for New York. But any indecision one had about how the Giants were going to do that year would be solved after watching the remainder of the regular season. 

A 34-34 tie on the road in Week 1 against the Pittsburgh Steelers was followed by a 52-7 thrashing at the hands of the Dallas Cowboys one game later. Big Blue then broke through with a victory against the Redskins on Oct. 16. That was followed by an eight-game swoon to end the season. 

The defense, once the pride and joy of Giants football, was awful. They gave up 501 points in 14 games, including allowing 72 to Washington on Nov. 22.

I mean, the Giants were so bad they even tied, then lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers that year, who were 5-8-1 (inside joke).

Long time ago, but interesting to remember it all.

Here's to hoping for better things for the Giants at today's Super Bowl.


(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Reveries of football past and future: Thoughts on the Giants, the Steelers, and the return of the NFL

By Richard K. Barry and Michael J.W. Stickings 

RKB:

I was clicking around the channels yesterday afternoon and came upon an NFL Network segment about the New York Giants win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII on February 3, 2008.

In one of the more famous games in Super Bowl history, my beloved Giants, huge underdogs, beat the previously undefeated Patriots 17-14 -- but you probably knew that.

It will always be one of the most exciting days of my life.

It looks like the lockout is expected to end next week, which pleases me. I never really paid much attention to the relative merits of the positions of management vs. the players. On principle, I always side with the union and hope these guys can get as much out of their careers before the inevitable sixth concussion or blown knee sends them back home for good.

Referring to a long-forgotten sports strike of years past, some wag once said, "no one ever showed up to watch the owners play." Quite so.

But I do love my football, and watching the rehash of how the Giants beat the Pats reminded me how much.

For me, it's all about the cycle of life. My year doesn't begin on January 1st. It begins with that first kick-off of the first game of the regular season.

Yes, I'm a Giants fan. The first superstar for the team I recall was quarterback Y.A. Tittle. There's even a family story about me at about 5 years old being angry with my dad about something and, knowing that he was a big Giants fan too, blurting out, as if to sting him in some way, that "Y.A. Tittle's not very good, either, so there."

And even suffering through some really bad Giants' football in the 60s and 70s doesn't matter. I've loved it all.

It is an amazing thing that grown men and women can obsess about their favorite sports team and have a lousy day or week because their beloved franchise lost a game - not necessarily a big game, just a game. But, I'm one of those. My wife even knows that if the Giants lose she should offer sincere condolences as if something really bad happened.

Crazy, I know.

As I said, I'm glad the league looks like it's getting back to business. When the weather starts to turn, and the leaves along with it, with the fireplace raging in the living room and the game on the big screen television, I am a happy man.

Let's get to it.

**********

MJWS:

I was happy the Giants defeated the Patriots that day, but of course my focus is on my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers. (The Giants? Whatever. I prefer to ignore them. As long as they beat the Cowboys, I'm fine.)

(Yes, that's Terry Bradshaw over there, their great QB of the '70s, one of my favourite players when I was a kid and fell in love with them.)

Now, it's been a rough stretch for the Steelers of late. Hines Ward -- arrested on a DUI. James Harrison -- saying some not-so-nice things about Commissioner Goodell and his own teammates. And, of course, Big Ben -- that whole saga last year. Not to mention Rashard Mendenhall's controversial tweets, though I'll still defend him.

But this is still the best and classiest franchise in the NFL, starting with the Rooney family, right on down through Coach Mike Tomlin and the players themselves. Ultimately, I trust they'll get their act together when it matters. Coming off a Super Bowl defeat earlier this year, I worry they'll collapse into mediocrity this year, as they have after recent Super Bowl victories, but, if they play up to their potential, they should compete for a playoff spot and could just make another run at the Super Bowl.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. For now, I'm just happy the league -- owners, players -- seems to have come to its senses. There are billions of dollars to be made. Surely sacrifices can be made on both sides. Surely they can come to a deal that benefits everyone. And it looks like they have. This means we football fans can start focusing again on what we love. Well, we never didn't, but it's official again -- almost.

Honestly, what was I supposed to do without the Steelers? So much of my time, especially in the fall, is spent obsessing about them. And what was I supposed to do without fantasy football? I already have tickets for a game in Pittsburgh, and now I can look forward to that knowing it won't be cancelled. And, to me, there's nothing like going to Pittsburgh, a wonderful city with wonderful people, for a Steelers game. And I can also get my fantasy league going. That's serious business. I hardly wanted to face the emptiness of no season and -- gasp! -- no fantasy season.

So it's back. The NFL. Football. Football!!!!!

There is order to the universe again, a purpose.

Happiness indeed.

A picture worth a few million words

By J. Thomas Duffy



There's a great article today, in the Murdoch Street Journal, from writer Joshua Prager, on the infamous Bobby Thompson homerun ("The Giants win the pennant! ... The Giants win the pennant! ...) that is well-worth reading

The Man Who Shot 'the Shot Heard 'Round the World'

On Oct. 3, 1951, in the upper deck of the Polo Grounds, a little man with a big camera snapped a portrait of Yankee outfielder Hank Bauer seated nearby. Rudy Mancuso had just one more exposure. And so, as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants waged their final playoff game in Harlem, the amateur photographer let pass 77 balls and 142 strikes, at last clicking his Busch Pressman at 3:58 p.m., a split second after Giant Bobby Thomson pulled an 0-1 fastball from Dodger Ralph Branca with one out in the bottom of the ninth.

Unbeknownst to him, the 31-year-old Mancuso had just taken what is arguably the most famous photograph in the history of baseball (see nearby). "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" coalesced hours later in a tub of dektol on East 79th Street. Mancuso had stilled a Spalding some 280 feet before it cleared a green wall, won the Giants the pennant (won the Giants the pennant!) and commenced inspiring so much prose as to imperil, wrote Daniel Okrent, "great stretches of Canadian pulpwood forest."

[snip]

Many years passed. Mancuso's pencil moustache turned from black to white as newswires and then vendors and then Web sites hocked an inexhaustible supply of his photo. He made no money from his shot and held no proof that it was he, an embosser and die cutter living in a Lower East Side walk-up, who'd most famously preserved baseball's greatest moment.

"It was one of those family legends," says his nephew Peter Vincent. "You wondered if it was true or not."

Then, in January 2001, I wrote an article for this newspaper describing how the Giants stole the signals of opposing catchers in the months leading up to Thomson's homer. Messrs. Thomson and Branca discussed it with me that fall at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center in Montclair, N.J. Mancuso, 80 years old and pink-faced, approached me and told of his supporting role in their mid-century drama. He had no proof. But Hank Bauer confirmed that he'd sat where Mancuso alleged and I eventually found that Sylvania ad. And so, I put Mancuso in "The Echoing Green," my 2006 book about the home run.

There's a lot more to read here, the arc of a mans', and photos', life ... Of fame lost, then found ... Of a legacy delayed

Go read The Man Who Shot 'the Shot Heard 'Round the World'


Bonus Bonus

The Shot Heard 'Round The World




Special Essay - Play Ball! ... Batter Up! ... Could You Please Tell Me, What Is This Thing Called Baseball?

(Cross Posted at The Garlic)