Mike Celizic

Wellington Mara could have spent his life with the Chicago Bears and his obituary would still start the same: He was a Giant.

They don’t make owners like Mara anymore and never will again. Like George Halas and Paul Brown and other legends of the early NFL, Mara’s business was running a football team. Unlike them, he tried never to be the public face of the team, preferring to work in relative anonymity, delighted to have his coaches and players get the credit.

No owner was ever more intimately involved for a longer time than Mara. For years, he had more personal involvement with the day-to-day operation of his team than George Steinbrenner has ever had with the Yankees. You just didn’t notice it or hear about it. Making noise and headlines and elevating blood pressures wasn’t his way.

Mara’s career with the Giants was a lifelong commitment that began in 1925 when he was nine years old and his father, Tim Mara, piled the family into the car after going to Sunday Mass and said, “Let’s go see if we can put football over on New York.”

Tim Mara was a bookie, a legal occupation in those days, and he had been offered a franchise in the young National Football League for $500. Remarking that “a franchise in anything in New York has to be worth $500,” Mara laid out his cash. In the process, he created a lifelong obsession and devotion in his youngest son.

Eighty years later, Wellington Mara was still putting football over on New York. Not every one of those years was filled with trophies and success or even the love of the fans, but they were all conducted with the same grace and dignity that marked everything Mara did.

Along the way, he was as instrumental as anyone in making the league what it is today. He backed Pete Rozelle for the commissioner’s job, and Rozelle took a sport that was little more than a diversion and made it the most popular sport in America.

In the 1960s, when the league was trying to decide what to do with television contracts, Mara, who was making far more in television revenue than most other teams, urged the owners to sign a national contract and split the money equally. A man interested in himself would never have done that. Only a man dedicated to his sport could push such an idea. Such a man was Wellington Mara.

And if you had to find one single act that made the NFL as competitive and successful as it is, it was that decision to share all revenue equally.

The Giants weren’t a hobby for him. He was always there with his team, doing whatever needed to be done.

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In the 1950s, Polaroid came out with a new one-minute photo process. At the time, there was no way for coaches to get a birds-eye view of the defenses being used against them, and Mara realized he could sit in one of the metal boxes hung from the mezzanine of Yankee Stadium with one of the new-fangled cameras and take pictures. After timing the developing process and getting a finished print, he’d put the picture in a sanitary sock with a roll of tape and throw it down to the bench. For the time, it was high technology.

Even in his sunset years, he went out to watch practice, often doing laps around the field while the team worked on the game plan.

After the games, he would be in the locker room, quietly congratulating his players after a win or thanking them for their effort and encouraging them after a loss. He was easy to spot, a dapper and white-haired gent in a chesterfield coat with a quick smile and an Irish twinkle in his clear blue eyes.

If a reporter asked him about a big win, he’d give a polite answer, but never held court. He wanted his players and coaches to get the credit and himself to stay in the background, and he’d tell the writers to go and talk to his players because they were the ones earned the victory, they were the ones who played the game.

After two Super Bowl victories and a trip to a third, Mara had become a beloved figure in New York. But it had not always been so. There was a time, in fact, when New York desperately wanted him to go away.

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The situation had built up slowly. He and his older brother, Jack, had taken over the team after World War II from their father and had split the duties of running it, Wellington working the football end and Jack the business end. When Jack died of cancer in 1965, his son, Timothy took his place on the company masthead, but Wellington started trying to run both ends of the team.

He couldn’t do it but stubbornly kept on trying. The Giants won an NFL title in 1956, but would finish as runner-ups between 1958 and 1963. After Jack’s death, the Giants struggled mightily. At first, a few losing seasons didn’t appear that alarming. But they kept building until the unbroken skein of seasons without a playoff appearance reached 14.

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