If Vegas is right, the child may become father to the man this Sunday, as the New England Patriots remain double-digit favorites over New York's Football Giants in the days leading up to Super Bowl XLII.
The Patriots were begotten of Boston businessman Billy Sullivan's persistence throughout the late 1950s, along with a hand from Big Blue. After repeated snubbings from the NFL put it on life support, Sullivan's brainchild rose from the ashes of the Giants' loss in The Greatest Game Ever Played. The inspiration evoked by that one game was enough to cause a change in course; within a year, Sullivan founded the Boston Patriots as the last entrant into the rival AFL. Sullivan's son Patrick, himself a former Patriots GM, keenly remembers the passion of those early years.
"What stimulated my father to really push this was the Giants/Colts game in 1958," he recalls of Billy's intent to bring football to Boston. "He was so amazed at the drama of that game that he said, 'This is the future of sports in America, and we've got to be involved.'"
But that decision was a small step in comparison to the challenges that lay ahead. Carving a presence within the Giants' Northern Empire, which at that time stretched to the rocky shores of Maine, was an arduous process.
"Every weekend, CBS was pumping Giants games in, whether they were home or on the road," explains Sullivan of those formative years when the Giants were dominant on the gridiron and the NFL's blackout of home games did not affect much of New England. "An enormous fan base built up here because of that concentration of media that was really kind of rare around the country. There wasn't a better team to watch than the Giants."
More than two hundred miles away in a remote corner of New England, Raymond L'Ecuyer, a lifelong Giants fan and resident of Winooski, Vermont, was connected by that same lifeline.
"In the '50s, everybody was a Giants fan," says L'Ecuyer, now 80. "Every Sunday afternoon, CBS Channel 3 had New York Giants football. That's the only game you saw."
Winooski's partisanship was ultimately rewarded when the Giants established summer training camp at St. Michael's College in the mid-1950s. For L'Ecuyer and his neighbors, it was a magical time in this sleepy Green Mountains community. Sam Huff walked its streets; Frank Gifford taped shaving cream commercials; and within its borders were assembled a coaching staff featuring Jim Lee Howell, assistant Allie Sherman, and Hall of Famers Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry, who were all known to paint the town.
"Those four used to come into Winooski every night," recounts L'Ecuyer. "At seven o'clock, a car would pull up at the drug store, and there they were. They'd walk in and get their newspapers from the pharmacist, and they'd walk out."
As Winooski reveled in its celebrity, the rest of New England settled for unabated television access to the Giants. But in its southwesternmost reaches, another windfall was intensifying interest. Unable to get into home games at Yankee Stadium or even watch them on television, scores of fans would pierce the blackout bubble by heading for motels and pubs along the Connecticut Turnpike. These immigrant regulars became to the locals the fleshly confirmation of a phenomenon they had hitherto witnessed only through cathode rays. And the Giants community felt right at home in their new surroundings, so much so that in 1960, amid brewing competition from the AFL, the Mara family brought summer training camp out of the Green Mountains to the extended backyard of Fairfield County.
"They left Winooski when the American Football League was formed and the New York Jets became a team in that league," L'Ecuyer laments about the Giants' move. "The Jets were going to be training closer to New York City. That meant that most of your sportswriters would probably spend a lot of their time at Jets' training."
The new kids were known as the Titans in those early days and weren't to establish an organized camp until after they took their present name in 1963. The Giants nevertheless settled in for eight summers at Fairfield University and anchored that corner of New England's allegiance. But by then, the Patriots' influence was reaching beyond Boston proper.
"It started in 1963 when we played in the AFL championship," Sullivan says of the swell of interest in his family's team. "I think it was between 1963 and 1966 that the tables turned a little bit, and we started to develop a good base of Patriots fans as opposed to Giants fans. During the mid-1970s when the Giants struggled and we had several pretty strong teams, that kind of flipped it over. By then, a generation had passed."
It was a flip that reached the faraway stronghold of Fairfield County, where generational lines were being drawn down the middle of blue blood Giants households such as the Rooneys. The CBS correspondent and anchor leg of 60 Minutes has been a Giants fan his entire life, an influence of both his native New York and earlier generations.
"My father used to take me [to Yankee Stadium]," reflects Rooney, who raised his own family near Norwalk. "That's how I got started. Then I got my own tickets, and I think I've had my own tickets since the late 1950s."
When it came time to pass down the tradition, Rooney found a less than enthusiastic member among his clan.
"We did go to the games a couple of times," acknowledges Rooney's daughter Emily, the former executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight" and current host of WGBH's "Greater Boston," "but I wasn't a football follower back then."
Now that she is, Rooney backs the Patriots. Nonetheless, the ensuing civil war doesn't mean the two don't speak.
"I usually call to razz him when the Giants lose," she admits with no hidden satisfaction.
Even the First Family of New England football is not immune to a little light-hearted rift.
"It's all in good fun," is how Amanda Belichick describes her Big Blue devotion, which germinated well after her famous father Bill's years as defensive coordinator in East Rutherford. "Most of my memories from when my dad was with the Giants were of my friends in kindergarten. I went to a Super Bowl, but that's not the memory I recall."
In the late 1990s, as the Belichicks bounced between the Patriots and Jets, Amanda sought neutral ground, not quite sure if the team she settled on might once again become her father's chief rival. Her search led her back to her childhood and the Giants, a non-binding referendum that found ratification when high school classmate Zak DeOssie was drafted last April.
"At this point in my life, one of the big reasons [for being a Giants fan] is because Zak plays for them, and he is one of my best friends," she says. "Being in the kind of business that my dad is in, you meet a lot of people. You're a fan of people."
Even one of the principal architects of the Patriots' football dominance knows split loyalties. Vice President of Personnel Development Scott Pioli grew up in New York as an avid Giants fan. In fact, his success in New England is in no small way indebted to those days. While attending Giants training camp at Pace University before his senior year of college, Pioli was introduced to Belichick. The two have remained together since, even as Pioli maintains close ties to his community and his Giants roots. Each year, Pioli joins the Giants in supporting the WEL Foundation, a non-profit established by high school football teammate and continued Giants fan John Luedke to assist the needy in their native Orange County and beyond.
"Scotty's a very caring and giving person," says Luedke of his lifelong friend. "That's one of the things that have made our relationship so close."
Like so many on opposite shores of the Hudson, it's a relationship that thrives because of its differences, rather than in spite of them. Even as the Patriots were walking through an undefeated regular season, Luedke imagined Pioli's Patriots reaching Sunday's Super Bowl but nevertheless refrained from booking his flight to Arizona so as to avoid jinxing his good friend. And now that the time has come, he could not be happier that the week's festivities include his Football Giants.
It will be a clash of the old and new guard of New England football. It will ignite familial and friendly rivalries. And by week's end, one team will be NFL champion, leaving the other to call them Daddy.
For a year, anyway.
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