The Pro Football Hall of Fame announced its nominees Wednesday, and among the spate of quarterbacks and cornerbacks and coaches was a new category for "contributors." Bill Polian — who built the Bills, Panthers and Colts out of ash, was one of those nominees. Ron Wolf, who brought the Packers back to dominance after decades of dormancy, was the other.
All due respect to Polian and Wolf, who certainly had worthy careers, if the first name produced for this category wasn't George Bernard Young, then they shouldn't have even bothered. Because all Young did in his career was turn the New York Football Giants from a dysfunctional mess to a perennial model. The fact that he isn't already a decade into his stay in Canton is ridiculous enough.
The idea that the Hall custom-fit a voting category for these men apart from players and coaches because, too often, executives through the years (including Young, a three-time nominee) almost always get lost in the blur of the voting process — and let's be brutally honest: the new category could be NAMED for him — tells you only one thing:
George Young did his job TOO well.
Because when we think of the Giants now, we think of consistency and we think of professionalism, we think of regular excellence on the field and clockwork precision off. And it has been that way for decades. The Giants have won four Super Bowls but it's the way they've won them that stands apart. And if you don't happen to have a memory that extends beyond the Reagan Administration, it's easy to believe it's always been that way.
But it wasn't always that way. In the '60s and '70s, the Giants became a vast wasteland of underachievement and cheap drama. There was the family feud between Wellington Mara and his nephew, Tim, that nearly destroyed the franchise's foundation, and the fact the Giants bailed on New York City for a sweetheart deal in the New Jersey Meadowlands, at exactly the moment the city was going broke and could least afford that defection.
There were years of wasted drafts and lost seasons, entire generations of fans lost to the Cowboys and the Dolphins and the Raiders. And, of course, there was The Fumble, which led to the airplane flying overhead and a message — "15 YEARS OF LOUSY FOOTBALL — WE'VE HAD ENOUGH!"
Those Giants marinated in the kind of turmoil to which we've grown accustomed with the modern-day Mets and Jets and Knicks and Islanders. And they may have stayed that way but for Pete Rozelle's gentle (or not-so-gentle) insistence the Maras agree on the obvious: they needed a fixer.
George Young was The Fixer.
Young was the one who somehow managed to juggle the warring Mara factions for 10 years. Young was the one who, on the day Ray Perkins bolted for Alabama in 1982, informed Tim Mara: "I'm going to announce Bill Parcells right now so there won't be weeks of speculation. And because the head coach of the Giants should be a job people want to run to, not walk away from."
And, yes: there were the two Super Bowls on his watch, XXI and XXV, and the five Executive of the Year awards, all of it done in New York City, and if you don't think that counts for extra credit you're kidding yourself.
"George's legacy is greater than two Super Bowls," Wellington Mara said upon Young's death in December 2001. Said Parcells, with whom Young often sparred and quarreled: "Without his support and help, it would have been impossible for anyone to succeed there."
What Young started in 1979 — with the Giants' playoff drought already at an extraordinary 16 years — lasts still, 35 years later, was handed down to Ernie Accorsi and then to Jerry Reese, an organizational belief that there's a right way to play football games and a right way to conduct football business. That was always Wellington Mara's credo, even in bad times. It took Young to make it real.
And he did that job well. Too well, apparently. Because the only reasonable explanation why George Young wasn't nominated for the Hall of Fame on Wednesday can only be this: everyone assumed he was already in.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
The man who rescued the Giants should be in Hall of Fame
Dengan url
http://bahayaprostat.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-man-who-rescued-giants-should-be-in.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
The man who rescued the Giants should be in Hall of Fame
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
The man who rescued the Giants should be in Hall of Fame
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar