The turning point of the Giants' 2000 season, as everyone of course knows, was Jim Fassel's "guarantee" of a playoff berth the day before Thanksgiving, after which the Giants won seven games in a row.
Like many moments that appear pivotal in retrospect, though, that one didn't seem all that historic at the time.
The day after the guarantee, Newsday led its section with an Islanders-Rangers game, the Daily News led with a Knicks-Hawks game, the players were only vaguely aware of what Fassel was talking about and the Star-Ledger's account of the "guarantee" angered Fassel and his family by mockingly comparing him to Choo Choo Charlie and Amarillo Slim, among others, as far as I can recall. He also didn't appreciate The New York Times invoking Mr. Rogers in its account.
It was only after consecutive road victories over the Cardinals and Redskins that the legend of the "guarantee" began to take hold.
Whatever.
Comments (4)
Neil,
Imus asked Jim Nance to work in "One more cow" in his football commentary and he did he is a genius. Since then they added a crawl for Imus in the morning. Take a look what the Imus fans think would be a good idea.
http://imustruth.typepad.com/index/2008/01/its-about-time.html
Here is Jim Nance working in One more cow into football commentary. Imus decided after Craig Crawford mentioned watching RFD TV and being addicted to the online auctions...Craig mentioned he really had stuff he needed to do but he kept telling himself just one more cow, this would become Imus's mantra for RFD TV
"Just one more cow"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9T2aNgWnKo
Wolf Warner, is on vacation for two weeks and they are really giving the temporary sports guy from 1050 ESPN, a difficult time.
If I recall correctly, you wrote a story for Newsday.com about the guarantee after it happened. And that was way back in 2000, when the Internet was still essentially considered a toddler in the media world. So you immediately realized the importance of "The Guarantee."
I wrote it fairly seriously, but the editors didn't take it that seriously. We did have a ref on the back page, but that was about it. That was back when I used to whine like crazy to you about writing three graphs for the Web. Now look at me. Weird.