A NEW DIRECTION

There was not much Wellington Mara and his nephew, Tim, each controlling 50 percent of the Giants, agreed upon in early 1979. In fact, they were not even on speaking terms. They had separate offices at Giants Stadium, had separate philosophies on how the franchise should be run, and even held separate press conferences declaring opposing directions for the team.

After the housecleaning that followed the 1978 season, a dismal rock-bottom of a year that was punctuated by The Fumble in a game in which the Giants had a chance to win a game but a botched handoff between Joe Pisarcik and Larry Czonka led to a game-winning touchdown by Eagles cornerback Herman Edwards, Wellington told reporters he wanted the priority to be the hiring of a head coach. Tim followed him shortly after by telling the same reporters that the Giants should first hire a director of football operations. That title had most recently been held by Andy Robustelli, but the job had almost always been done by Wellington Mara.

“I’m tired of losing,” said Tim Mara, who had inherited his half of the team from his father, Wellington’s older brother Jack, upon his death in 1965. “I want to have a winner. Well wants to have a winner his way. Well’s way has had us in the cellar for the past 15 years.”

The spate of common ground between the relatives and coowners was so small and infinitesimal that when one appeared, it was pounced on. So when Commissioner Pete Rozelle asked each of them to submit potential candidates to become general manager of the Giants and there was one name that appeared on both lists, it was celebrated like an armistice. V.G. Day! Victory for the Giants!

Jan Van Duser would be running the Giants.

The only problem was Van Duser, who worked in the league office, didn’t want the job. He had no desire to be saddled with the job of resurrecting a once-proud franchise from the depths to which it had sunk, attempting to do so while answering to two bosses in a dysfunctional front office. Van Duser was out.

It was time for Rozelle to intervene and end the rudderless embarrassment that the Giants had become, not just to themselves but to the league. He suggested—strongly—that the Giants hire George Young as their general manager.

On Valentine’s Day, 1979, Young flew from Miami to New York for an interview with the Maras. He arrived that morning with only the suit he was wearing, no toothbrush, no change of clothes, and a ticket back to Florida for 9 o’clock that night.

By that afternoon, he had the job.

It was, John Mara said looking back, the most important hire the Giants ever made.

“No question about it,” John Mara said. “George completely changed our football operations, made us a much more professional group. He changed our scouting practices, brought in different personnel. One of the faults we had during that period during the 1970s was that my father was too loyal to too many people. We didn’t have enough true professionals in the building, particularly in terms of scouting and personnel. That’s something George changed completely.”

Introduced at a press conference at Gallagher’s Steak House in Manhattan on the day he was hired, Young was not embraced as the savior of the franchise. Rather, most observers were not sure what to make of the frumpy 6-foot-3 Young who had been Don Shula’s front office guru and worked with Shula for both the Colts and the Dolphins. He had a marshmallow body topped with a tiny balding head and thick glasses. One reporter said he resembled Khrushchev. Another wrote that he seemed like a tourist who had wandered into the press conference.

If he seemed more like a history or political science teacher than an NFL general manager, well, that might have been because he was such a teacher in Baltimore for 15 years before he entered pro football with the Colts.

But Young was up to the task, even if he may not have looked the part. He went to work overhauling the way the Giants did their football business and began putting in place the pieces that would eventually lead to two Super Bowl championships. He hired Ray Perkins as the head coach (over Dan Reeves, another top candidate, who would eventually be head coach of the Giants). He drafted Phil Simms with his first pick (over Ottis Anderson, another consideration, who would eventually be a running back for the Giants). Two years later, he picked Lawrence Taylor with the second overall selection. He was in control of the Giants.

He also navigated the treacherous waters in the hallway between the offices of Wellington and Tim Mara like a veteran riverboat captain.

“One of the things George was able to do when he came in was conduct business and do it by virtue of shuttle diplomacy dealing with both, making both of them feel like they were involved,” John Mara said. “His communication skills were excellent. He understood what he was walking into. Fortunately, it worked out well.”

George Young (left) was brought on as general manager of the Giants in 1979. John Mara called it the most important hire the franchise ever made. (Jerry Pinkus)

Young said he was prepared for the dynamics in the Giants’ front office after having worked for temperamental owners such as Joe Robbie, Bob Irsay, and Carroll Rosenbloom.

“Compared to those guys,” Young would say, “the Maras were choirboys.”

The hiring of Young seemed to signal the stripping of power from Wellington Mara, who had been in charge of the football decisions for decades. And it appeared to be a concession to his nephew, Tim, who wanted a new way of doing things and a fresh outlook to compete in a modern NFL.

But it was actually Wellington who pushed the change forward. It was Wellington who wanted Young, on the advice of former players and confidants Frank Gifford and Tom Scott. But he knew that if he recommended Young for the job, Tim would have balked. There was no way Tim would have approved of any suggestion made by his uncle. The impetus had to appear to come from a neutral party, an outsider. Someone both men trusted and respected.

Someone like the Commissioner of the NFL.

It was after the dueling press conferences that Rozelle called Wellington from Florida, where he had been at a tennis tournament with former Giant Pat Summerall, to tell the Giants coowner that the shenanigans had to stop. Wellington agreed.

He asked Rozelle to recommend Young to the Giants, but to do so as if it were his own idea and not Wellington’s. Rozelle went along with the charade. Tim, unaware that Wellington had orchestrated Young’s candidacy, was on board with the hire.

It may have been the best misdirection play the Giants ever pulled.

Young’s tenure with the Giants was not perfect. After Perkins left for the job in Alabama, he hired Bill Parcells. But he also hired Ray Handley after Parcells left (which he would call “my worst decision”). He put the team in the hands of quarterback Dave Brown. And there were other moves that backfired on him. He never seemed to have a firm grasp on free agency as it became a tool for team building in the 1990s. He made a number of questionable decisions, just as any executive does, and some of them came with wisps of personal vendettas and intangible impressions rather than straight business.

“George was a football purist,” Ernie Accorsi, his eventual successor and close friend for more than three decades, said of Young. “Anything that intruded on that incurred his wrath. He was never into the pomp and circumstance.”

But what is undisputable is that Young saved the Giants at a time when they were a floundering franchise. In his 19 years as general manager, the Giants made eight playoff appearances, had a record of 155–139–2, and won two Super Bowls. He was named NFL Executive of the Year in 1984, 1986, 1990, 1993, and 1997, his final season with the team.

His thumbprint was on the organization long after he left, too, having not only hired Accorsi, who would succeed him as general manager, but Jerry Reese, who would eventually succeed Accorsi. He drafted Tiki Barber, Amani Toomer, and Michael Strahan, and while he was not around to see them blossom into the stars they became, each of them would eventually retire as the franchise’s all-time leader in rushing yards, receiving yards, and sacks, respectively.

“His legacy is obvious,” Accorsi said. “It’s impossible to pinpoint one thing. He spread his aura all through the organization in every way.”

To this day, George Young is quoted or referenced almost daily inside the Giants’ training and business facility.

Young retired after the 1997 season due to health issues and took a less stressful job as senior vice president of football operations for the NFL. Three years later, he was dead at the age of 71 after a brief illness.

As much as Young meant to the Giants, they may have meant more to him.

“I’ve had a wonderful job here,” he said. “We’ve had our ups and downs, but I’ve never had a bad day.”

On December 13, 1997, just a month before he left the organization, the Giants beat the Redskins to clinch the division title. In the locker room, Young embraced first-year coach Jim Fassel, whose hiring less than a year earlier had been met with skepticism.

“He thanked me and he broke down and cried and cried,” Fassel said. “He could not talk and walked out. I think that championship validated everything he’d worked on. I’ll never forget that moment.”

Still emotional and speechless, Young left the locker room and walked out onto the field at Giants Stadium. In the otherwise empty cavern of a building, he eventually made his way over to the Giants’ bench, sat there alone, and scanned the vacant seats that just an hour or so earlier had been filled with Giants fans celebrating another division championship he’d brought to them.

He undoubtedly reflected on the journey he had taken with the franchise, from laughingstock to the pinnacle of the sport. Twice. And he almost certainly would have felt he was leaving the organization heading in the right direction.

But on that day, George Young, the man the New York Times once said “reveled in his image as a good-natured grouch,” the architect of every Giants success in their second half-century, plopped himself on that bench, soaking it all in, and showing once and for all what it had meant to him.

Tears rolled down his face, and his shoulders shook as he sat there and wept.