THE PAPER BLIZZARD

The 1986 Giants hadn’t won anything yet, but they already knew they weren’t getting a parade. New York City Mayor Ed Koch had made that clear, calling the Giants a “foreign team” just a little more than a decade after they had moved to New Jersey and saying if they wanted a ticker-tape celebration for any achievement they might garner, they were welcome to have one … in Moonachie, New Jersey.

That would deprive the team of a rite that almost every other sports champion with the words “New York” in their name had been granted, a trip down the Canyon of Heroes on lower Broadway with throngs showering them with confetti and other bits of paper (actual ticker tape, as it were, having been obsolete since the 1960s). More importantly, it would rob the fans of the Giants from participating in the time-honored tradition.

But just like the 1986 Giants on the field, Giants fans found a way.

With 35 mile-per-hour winds howling through Giants Stadium for the NFC Championship Game against the Redskins on January 11, 1987, the second half of a 17–0 shutout victory was played in a paper blizzard as napkins and programs and anything else the fans could tear up into little pieces and set free into the teeth of the gusts whipped around the building to create a snowstorm of celebration.

It was the wind that helped the Giants beat the Redskins, and the wind that allowed the fans to give the team a proper sendoff to their first Super Bowl.

“It was a carnival-like effect,” said Mark Bavaro, the tight end for that team. “The fans were going crazy. It was like having a ticker-tape parade for our victory. The ticker-tape parade we never got as a Super Bowl champion, really.”

Ferocious winds at Giants Stadium created a snowstorm of paper and debris at the 1986 NFC Championship Game that came to signify the celebration of long-suffering Giants fans sending their team off to their first Super Bowl. (Copyright © New York Football Giants, Inc.)

Harry Carson, who had been there with the Giants through some of their misery, recalled the feeling of release as those scraps swirled.

“For the jubilant fans who supported the team and finally after all those years—especially in the late ’70s when people were flying planes overhead and burning tickets and all of that stuff—we were the NFC Champions,” he said. “That was big stuff. That was really the thing that made me happy, that we did that at home. It’s one thing to go on the road and do it, but we did that at home in front of our fans.”

The Giants had no doubt they would win the game. They had already beaten the Redskins twice during the regular season, and while no NFL team had ever before beaten an opponent three times in a single season, the Giants felt confident about their chances. During the week, they asked themselves: What can they do that we haven’t already seen? They couldn’t come up with anything.

Playing the Redskins in the playoffs gave them a familiar foe. They’d already beaten one of those the previous week, trouncing the 49ers, 49–3, and now they had another one.

Any insecurities the Giants might have had going into the game were literally blown away when they arrived at Giants Stadium on the day of the contest. Sure, at first they were nervous. Phil Simms walked onto the field and had to lean forward just to walk into the gusts.

“I’m thinking, ‘I finally get to play in an NFC Championship Game, and these are the conditions I get?’” he said.

Phil McConkey knew it was going to be a heck of a chore to catch punts in conditions he recalled as “horrendous,” with the winds whirlpooling in the bowl of the stadium to send any football in the air darting from one direction to the next.

But when he walked into the locker room four hours before kickoff, he saw Bill Parcells and was greeted with a huge smile.

“Why are you so gleeful?” the stressed-out McConkey asked his head coach.

“Because,” Parcells told him, “you’re going to catch them all and they’re not, because they’re going to be afraid of the wind.”

He was right.

“[Parcells] calculated that there was over 100 yards of hidden field position in that game because of the punts,” McConkey said.

All of the Giants’ specialists rose to the occasion that game. Raul Allegre kicked a 47-yard field goal in the first quarter for the opening points in the game, and Sean Landeta, who a year earlier had whiffed on a punt attempt against the Bears at windy Soldier Field as part of the Giants’ 21–0 loss, averaged 42.3 yards on his six punts.

Special teams wasn’t the only aspect of the game affected by the winds, though. When the Giants won the toss, they did not decide to receive the ball first, and they did not defer to the second half. Parcells knew, from all of the years he had spent at Giants Stadium, what the most important strategy element was going to be.

“We’ll take the wind!” Carson, the captain, shouted, pointing to his left, when asked by the officials for his decision after winning the coin toss.

The Giants decided to kick off and defend the east goal. That gave the Redskins the ball to start the game but also had them facing into the gusts.

“Who has the courage to do that in a championship game?” Simms said of Parcells’s tactic. “Not many people.”

It immediately became clear that it was the right call.

“They didn’t know which side of the field the wind was blowing from, which end of the field to pass the ball,” linebacker Carl Banks said of the Redskins. “We practiced it. We went out, we knew what end of the field we would be able to take our shots, which side of the field if the wind was blowing across we’d be able to throw out routes. They had no idea. They were just trying to run their game.”

Quarterback Jay Shroeder threw 50 passes in that game. Fifty! Many of them were five or more yards off target, altered by the elements. He completed just 20 of those passes. Simms, meanwhile, threw the ball just 14 times and completed seven of his passes. One of them, though, was an 11-yard touchdown to Lionel Manuel. The rest of the Giants’ offense went through Joe Morris, the windproof running back who gained 87 yards and a touchdown on 29 carries.

“Parcells had talked to me about the fact that we were going to have to run the ball and run the ball effectively,” Morris said. “He said: ‘Look, gear it up.’”

The Giants did.

There was no scoring by either team in the second half of the game, but that’s when the party started. Giants fans who had lived through the dark ages of the 1960s and 1970s, and had followed the team from the Bronx to Connecticut to New Jersey, were finally rewarded with an NFC Championship.

They would be going to Super Bowl XXI, which was being played 3,000 miles away in Pasadena. This, in some ways, was bigger.

“With the Super Bowl, you know, there were so many Bronco fans there,” Carson said. “We saw some Giants fans. But that was the biggest celebration that I was a part of, when we beat the Washington Redskins. We knew we were going to the Super Bowl.”

“I think that moment, it was our Super Bowl celebration,” Bavaro said. “We thought we were going to win the Super Bowl. But for those fans, I wasn’t very aware of it at the time, but I didn’t realize how long-suffering they had been before that ’86 season. For them, it must have been a great night to just go crazy, especially winning the championship game at home.”

Giants fans used to hold signs expressing their frustration with the players and management. At the NFC Championship Game, they were able to give their team a raucous send-off to the Super Bowl in California. (Copyright © New York Football Giants, Inc.)

This was an era, remember, when there had only been one Super Bowl team from New York… and it was the Jets. The Giants hadn’t won a title since 1956, so there was an entire generation of fans who had grown up knowing only misery and pain and embarrassment.

All of that was carried away by the wind on that blustery January day in 1987.

Two weeks later, the Giants did win the Super Bowl. And when they returned, they were presented with an offer for a parade in Manhattan. A credit card company had stepped up and offered to cover the costs to the city for the celebration. The Giants declined. Instead, they held a rally in what they called “the only logical place for a Giants celebration” … the parking lots of Giants Stadium.

Besides, they’d already been showered with confetti.

“The Super Bowl is the Super Bowl,” McConkey said. “But celebrating in front of those fans who were starved for 30 years in that environment, that was our ticker-tape parade. Ed Koch screwed us on a ticker-tape parade in the Canyon of Heroes, but that celebration was as good as it gets. The torn-up papers blowing, it was insanity. It was so good.”