The 1986 New York Giants were a special team. After 30 years without a Championship, the team finally landed another title – the Giants’ first of the Super Bowl era – by beating the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. Led by Bill Parcells, the team put up a 14-2 regular season record and rampaged through the playoffs, destroying the San Francisco 49ers in the Divisional round, 49-3, and shutting out Washington, 17-0, in the NFC Championship Game. In the Super Bowl they trailed at half time 10-9 but scored 30 second-half points to win 39-20.
It was a team packed with big names and big personalities. That started with head coach Bill Parcells, who would go to the Hall of Fame. His defensive coordinator, a guy with a somewhat more subdued personality – Bill Belichick – will one day follow. Their defense featured Lawrence Taylor, perhaps the most dominant defensive player in NFL history. He would go to the Hall of Fame in 1999 and his teammate Harry Carson would join him in 2006. The New York Giants Ring of Honor features seven players from that team: Carl Banks, Mark Bavaro, Harry Carson, George Martin, Joe Morris, Phil Simms, and Lawrence Taylor.
Once A Giant celebrates that team but also looks at their challenges, from playing a game that is both more brutal and less well-paid than today’s NFL, to struggling with money and mental health problems after retirement. Gary Myers has the contacts to gather a wealth of perspectives on that team and how they have fared in the decades since winning the Giants’ first Super Bowl. They talk with notable openness about the cost of an NFL career.
Title: Once A Giant
Author: Gary Myers
First published: PublicAffairs, 2023
Buy the Book: Amazon US | Amazon UK
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Parcells talks about his fatherly relationship with his former players, offering advice and even money when required. Lawrence Taylor discusses addiction and recovery. Several players, including Mark Bavaro, talk about being so low that they considered ending their lives, while wide receiver Bobby Johnson is frank about his period of homelessness. Phil Simms, a steady and good-humoured presence on TV broadcasts, relates back pain so severe that he turned to alcohol and painkillers in search of relief.
It’s not all bleak, of course. There are plenty of stories of locker-room pranks and relentless partying, as well as touching portraits of the team’s ongoing comradeship.
THE AUTHOR
Gary Myers has covered the NFL for more than 40 years, first as a Giants and then Cowboys beat writer and later as an NFL columnist. Once A Giant is his sixth book, following titles such as Coaching Confidential (2012) and Brady Vs Manning (2015).
EXCERPTS
Simms said: “I just thought we had progressed a little further along and knew a little bit more about taking care of ourselves, and we wouldn’t be all crippled when we were sixty years old. Every generation that comes along, we are better than the group before us. But it’s not as dramatic as I thought it would be.”
Banks enlisted the help of locker room manager Kevin Croke, the son of Giants longtime public relations director Ed Croke, to organise a group of ambitious locker room attendants looking to make some money on the side to go from car to car at 8:45am waking up players too hungover to arise on their own.
In [Lawrence Taylor’s] final season in 1992, he made a career-high $2.8 million. If he was a free agent today, coming off production similar to his 1986 MVP and Super Bowl season, when he led the NFL with 20.5 sacks, his contract would be worth more than the $150 million the Giants were valued at in the early ‘90s.
Taylor’s life in the ‘80s is a distant memory for him. He once was asked what he remembered about his draft day in 1981. “I had forty-one Coors Lights the day I was drafted, so I couldn’t tell you,” he said.
Parcells never cared about Simms’s numbers. His standard for measuring quarterbacks was whether he got his team in the end zone. As they walked out of the locker room at Giants Stadium for the 1984 season opener, Parcells told Simms if he didn’t throw two interceptions, it meant he wasn’t taking enough chances.
In what was seen by the league at the time as an attempt to modernise the organisation, the Giants hired cheerleaders in the early ‘70s. During pregame introductions, the cheerleaders made their first mistake: holding up cards to cheer on the team: OG GIANTS OG. The transposing of the letters was comical. The cheerleaders were fired after the game.
“How do you do an interview with anybody where you know more than what they do?” [Pepper] Johnson said. “This is no way of disrespecting Coach Coughlin, but the questions that he was asking me about defense, I don’t know if he understood my answers.”
REVIEW
Many Super Bowl-winning teams have inspired books like this one, where numerous players share their memories of glory days and open up about the times since then. Typically, they’re of interest only to fans of the team. That’s not the case here, however. Gary Myers has written an engaging book that should appeal to more than just Giants fans.
That’s partly because of the calibre of Myers’ interviewees. This isn’t a book that relies on some old quotes from the big names and contemporary interviews with a handful of bit-part players. Myers has gathered everyone you would want to hear from. More importantly, his extensive journalistic experience means he knows which stories are worth a reader’s attention – and how to tell them.
Most of all, though, Once A Giant goes deeper into the dark side of life after football than most books of its type. Giants fans, and fans of 80s football more generally, will enjoy the memories here but they’ll be in no illusions about the cost to the players who made those memorable plays. A worthwhile read.
Shane Richmond, Pigskin Books
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