INTRODUCTION

It was a crisp fall day, one perfect for the playing or watching of football—the kind of day Wellington Mara would have loved to spend walking laps around the practice field while his boys put the finishing touches on the game plan to beat that week’s opponent.

Only this crowd wasn’t there to see a sporting event. They were there to mourn Wellington Mara.

The Giants’ owner, the son of the team’s founder and the inaugural squad’s first ball boy, had died at age 89. St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan was packed with those who came to remember him on October 28, 2005.

Edward Cardinal Egan conducted the mass. John Mara, Wellington’s oldest son, delivered the eulogy. The pews were filled with a who’s who of luminaries, not just from sport, but from New York society. Tiki Barber, one of Wellington’s favorite players, had led the 2005–06 team into the church. He looked around the cavernous building, looked at the Hall of Famers and owners, the past and present commissioners who had assembled, looked at the regality of the event.

“It was unbelievable,” Tiki told me. “Anybody who was anybody was there. And that place is so magical and massive and ornate and beautiful. You kind of forget sometimes how big the Giants are, how important and meaningful they are to the city of New York. That was a reminder of the impact that the Giants have had on the city over the history of their existence.”

It is easy to forget. We follow the Giants’ exploits on a daily basis. Back page to back page, victory to defeat, defeat to victory, embarrassment to ecstasy and back again. It’s been that way for nearly a century, and it tends to blend together into a Big Blue blur.

But there are moments—like the one in St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Tiki Barber—when the enormity of the Giants becomes clear. When they rise from the cacophony of noise that the city creates and remind everyone just how special the franchise is, the unique relationship it has with the area and its fans across the country and around the world. These are the Miracle Moments.

I’ve tried to keep that quote from Tiki in mind while I worked on this book, which attempts to collect as many of those moments as possible and present them in a package that spans the history of the organization.

Some of them were easy to pick out. There are games that were decided by sneakers, games in which an aging quarterback threw seven touchdown passes, games in which iconic players were knocked cold and retired from the sport only to come back, and games where it felt like the whole region was salsa dancing. There were draft-day decisions that yielded titles, backroom conversations that brought in or replaced head coaches and general managers, and there was a $500 investment that started it all.

This book has been sourced via a diverse array of channels. I spoke with dozens of former players, coaches, and executives. I poured over newspaper and magazine articles that have been published over the decades and touched base with some of the men and women who wrote them and were witnesses to history. I watched numerous television interviews and documentaries, listened back to classic radio calls on a few of the most significant games in NFL history.

There are some chapters where I can tell you firsthand about what happened. Since I was immersed in the team’s locker room and on its sideline since 2008 covering the Giants for Newsday, much of the information on more recent events comes from details I reported personally at the time they took place. There are other chapters where all the major characters are long deceased and I’ve relied on previously published accounts to give them their voices. And then there are chapters like the one on Y. A. Tittle’s seven-touchdown game against the Redskins where I spoke with Joe Walton, the tight end who caught three of those passes including the final one, and I basically got the heck out of the way to let him tell the story.

Throughout the course of reporting for this book, I would often ask sources what they thought was the biggest Miracle Moment in Giants history. Most pointed to championships. Many said that David Tyree’s helmet catch would never be topped. “That,” Carl Banks told me as succinctly as possible, “that’s the moment.”

But others had more personal recollections. Things like studying the winds at Giants Stadium for a strategic advantage, seeing a lone captain walk to midfield in a Super Bowl like the marshal from an old western movie.

There are, undoubtedly, Miracle Moments that didn’t make the cut here. And that’s okay. Miracles don’t have to be enjoyed by everyone to prove their worth. Sometimes they happen in private and are more special because of the fewer people who know about them. Personal miracles. You may remember watching the ball go wide right while sitting on your grandfather’s knee or retweeting the video clip of the craziest one-handed catch anyone had ever seen. You may remember visiting a cemetery to share the news of a big win or making a trip as a kid to watch a training camp practice and gawk at the in-person immensity of the men who looked so small on the television screen. Maybe you recall the first time you bundled up and walked into Yankee Stadium to see a football game, the first time you made your way up the spiral ramp at Giants Stadium, or, God help you, the first time you sat in the Yale Bowl to watch the worst team in the NFL.

When I asked John Mara for his Miracle Moment, he, like more than a few others, said it would be hard to top winning Super Bowl XLII, a game against the previously unbeaten Patriots in which no one gave the Giants a chance to even compete. But then, after a quick pause, he was able to.

It was the last game of the 1981 season. The Giants beat the Cowboys at Giants Stadium, and they still needed the Jets to win the following day to make the playoffs for the first time since 1963 (which they did). Somehow, that wasn’t as important as the feeling that for the first time in 17 years, they were pointed in the right direction.

After the game, the elevators from the press box level where he and his father had watched were broken, so the two of them had to walk down one of those winding spiral ramps that stood in each corner of the building. This was just three years after The Fumble against the Eagles, three years after people were burning tickets and flying banners and hanging Wellington Mara in effigy from the upper deck. Now he was among the fans who had voiced that dissatisfaction so loudly and so clearly.

“To walk down with him, to have people congratulating him and slapping him on the back and all that stuff, that to me is a moment that probably compares with any of the Super Bowl wins,” John Mara said.

You want a personal Miracle Moment? There’s one. One of many.

“There have been a lot of them,” Mara said, sitting in his office, reflecting on a life spent not just in football, but in Giants football, “and hopefully there will be a few more to come.”