Neil Best has done a commendable job offering some memories of the one and only Giants Super Bowl he previously covered, although I doubt he can top the story from our first Super Bowl back with the '86 Giants.
It was a hellish week as a journalist, mostly because it was the Giants' first-ever Super Bowl appearance, and the interest level was through the roof. I was working for the Gannett Westchester Newspapers at the time (Peter King was Newsday's NFL columnist, and he is now a world famous NFL reporter for Sports Illustrated) and we didn't have a large staff, so I can't calculate how many words I wrote.
Anyway, after an incredibly exhaustive week of writing and reporting, a few scribes were sitting around the lobby of the team hotel in Costa Mesa, Calif., our minds and fingers numb from the pre-game buildup.
Within a few minutes, a Giants fan came over, beer in hand, and wanted to talk. It appeared he'd had many, many beers prior to the one he now carried.
"Hey, man, you guys pulling for the Giants or what?" he began, his words slurring badly.
Our strategy was to simply wait him out and have him move on to someone else, which is usually how these things go. But one of the fellows in our group, former Asbury Park Press reporter Judson Hand, was growing impatient with the fan. After trying to reason with the guy, Hand blurted out:
"We mean you no harm. Leave now."
It was as if he'd poured gasoline on a fire.
The drunk fan poured his beer in Hand's face, then rubbed the bottle in Bridgeport Post writer Mark Faller's face. Faller grabbed the dude. The two were wrestling one another for a few seconds before another writer (whose name I can't recall, but whom we nicknamed "Rocky" afterward) grabbed each man and pulled them apart.
I told King about the incident later that day, and he cracked up. He actually put an item in his Newsday column about it with the headline: "Big Apple Scribes in Tiff."
Comments (3)
You aren't angling for the vacant back page of S.I. are you?
tenn tom:
You caught me.
That fan was Neil Best!