Football: Winner Take All

Measured by the emotion it inspires among fans, no other U.S. sport quite compares with pro football. And no team compares with the National Football League’s New York Giants. As Eliot Asinof puts it in a new book on the Giants, Seven Days to Sunday (Simon & Schuster, $5.95): “If you are a Giant fan, you have a turbulent heritage of soaring ecstasy and abject humiliation—but never indifference. You are one whose loyalty is unquestioned, whose joy is resounding, whose abusiveness is devastating. You are black or white, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile. You are a janitor or a Wall Street broker, an artist or a truck driver, a college dean or a housewife, a motion picture star or a social worker. You represent every facet of American life with a completeness no other gathering in the entire country can duplicate.”

The New York Giants’ own cast of characters is as varied as Author Asinof’s fans; the list reads like a city ward-heeler’s notion of the perfect political ticket. The coach is a Brooklyn Jew. The quarterback is a WASP—a Pentecostal minister’s son from the Deep South. And the star pass receiver is a Negro. But whatever their differences, the Giants have one thing in common: an unpredictable flair for the dramatic.

From First to Last. During Allie Sherman’s eight years as their head coach, the team has not been noted for consistency. In 1963, it won a conference championship; in 1964, it finished dead last. This season, the Giants have won when they were 14-point underdogs and lost when they were favored by 17 points. They even managed to lose to the Atlanta Falcons—the only game the Falcons have won all fall. But when they are good, the Giants are very good indeed.

No team in pro football was better than the Giants when they played the high-riding Dallas Cowboys. With a display of offensive wizardry and defensive ferocity, they scored an upset 27-21 victory over a squad that has been picked by many experts to win the N.F.L. championship. All afternoon the Giants belted the Cowboys with abandon. And as usual, the stars of the show were Quarterback Fran Tarkenton and Split End Homer Jones—the most explosive passing combination in the game today.

Two more dissimilar types would be hard to imagine. Tarkenton is a devout perfectionist who views winning as an extension of the Christian ethic. “A team must have soul,” he told Asinof. “It must be rooted in love for each other. There’s just no other way to play football and win.”

By contrast, Jones, a Negro steelworker’s son from Pittsburg, Texas, is a happy-go-lucky prankster whose speed (9.3 sec. for the 100-yd. dash), disconcerting agility and uncanny ability to catch a football are matched only by his disdain for discipline. He has been known to run one play while all the rest of the Giants were running another. And he loves to tell the story of the time he was a track star at Texas Southern University, running the anchor leg in a one-mile relay—and crossed the finish line carrying two batons.

At Dallas, Tarkenton connected on 16 out of 24 passes for 187 yds. and two touchdowns. Four of those completions went to Jones—and one was the biggest play of the game. With the score tied 14-14, the alert quarterback picked up hints of a blitz by Dallas linebackers; he changed his play call with an “audible” at the line of scrimmage and hit Homer with a soft, quick toss over the middle that went for 60 yds. and a score. Even when he was not catching passes, Jones was helping the Giant offense by drawing off as many as three Dallas defenders every time he zigzagged downfield. New York’s first touchdown was scored by Tarkenton when he looked for Jones, found him blanketed with Cowboys, then scrambled 22 yds. himself for the TD.

With Tarkenton and Jones sparking an offense that has averaged 25 points per game, and a rapidly maturing defense that is beginning to resemble the fearsome, head-butting New York squads of the late ’50s, the Giants are on their way to their first winning season in five years. They left Dallas with a record of six victories and three loss es, trailing the Cowboys by only one game in the race for the N.F.L.’s Capitol Division title. And they have one more date with the Cowboys on Dec. 15. The way the schedule shapes up, it could be winner take all.