They don't make 'em like Mara anymore
No one did as much for NFL as old-school, gentlemanly Giants owner
Kathy Willens / APNew York Giants owner Wellington Mara was one of the NFL's most influential owners for more than a half-century and the last of the league's founding generation.
It came to a head in 1978, when the Giants, whose strong start had started to sputter out in a 5-6 record, had the ball and the lead against Philadelphia with time running out.
Normally, that’s time to take a knee, which the Giants did, leaving time for one more play. But a scuffle after the previous play convinced the coaches to call for a handoff instead of another knee.
The quarterback was Joe Pisarcik, who was incredulous, but dutifully called the play for fullback Larry Csonka. Only instead of handing off, Pisarcik dropped the ball. A Philadelphia cornerback named Herman Edwards, who even then knew you play to win the game, picked it up and ran it into the end zone for the score that dropped the Giants to 5-7.
When the Giants came back home two weeks later, a cadre of angry fans stayed outside, burning their tickets in a barrel. The following week, they hired a plane to fly over the stadium during the game towing a banner that read: “Fifteen years of lousy football. We’ve had enough.”
The ticket burning and banner hurt Wellington Mara to the core. He felt he’d failed not just himself but his fans and his city. Some people in that situation would be too proud to seek help, but Mara was too proud not to, because it wasn’t about him, but about his Giants.
There was trouble on other fronts as well. After Jack died, his son, Tim, inherited his half of the team and moved into the Giants’ executive offices. Tim didn’t agree with his uncle and didn’t respect him. In time, the acrimony between the two grew so thick that Wellington installed blinds in his office window to shut off the view into Tim’s office.
Only Tim’s death from cancer ended the divide. Robert Tisch, who would buy Tim’s share of the team, found Wellington to be the ideal partner.
After the 1978 season, Mara turned to his friend and the commissioner of the league, Rozelle for guidance. Rozelle who suggested that Mara hire a man who had begun his professional life as a history teacher in Baltimore and had become a vital executive with the Dolphins. The man was George Young, and from the day he took over as general manager in 1979, things began to change.
Mara took the blame for the bad times. “In trying to scramble out of a hole, it sometimes digs it deeper,” he once said in talking about those days.
And he didn’t take the credit for what Young would do as G.M. He just took Rozelle’s advice and it worked out. But more than anything, he gave Young the job, then got out of the way, even when the new general manager made his first official act picking somebody named Phil Simms from somewhere called Morehead State with the first pick of the 1979 draft.
A couple of years later, Young added North Carolina linebacker Lawrence Taylor. The final piece of the puzzle came along in 1983, when he hired a former Giants linebackers coach, Bill Parcells, to lead the team. Two Super Bowl wins followed.
Mara no longer had to run the team, and there really wasn’t a reason for him to come to the stadium every day. But he had been around the Giants nearly his entire life and he was an old-fashioned owner. He’d stand on the practice field or do laps around the field while the team practiced. After practice, he might visit the locker room, never to exhort or badger, but just to show his support and to learn more about his players as people.
It all began on that late summer’s day in 1925 when a nine-year-old boy watched his day put football over on New York.
His own father, Tim, didn’t want Wellington to spend his life with a football team. Tim felt his son should be a lawyer. But when Wellington graduated college in 1937, he said he wanted to work with the team. He had been doing that anyway, and in 1936 was responsible for drafting fullback/halfback (the generic term “running back” hadn’t been invented) Tuffy Leemans, a future hall of famer and the a key to some of the Giants’ greatest years. Mara always said Leemans was the best thing he ever did for the team.
So when he came back from school, Wellington told his father he’d work one year with the team then go to law school. A dozen years later, the father finally observed, “I guess you’re probably not going to law school.”
No, he wasn’t. But he did go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where he is enshrined alongside his father, the only father-son team in the game’s pantheon.
He’s died now at the age of 89, but in New York, he’ll never be gone, a true gentleman, a great innovator, a beloved friend and a Giant of this or any game.
Mike Celizic writes regularly for NBCSports.com and is a freelance writer based in New York.
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