Watchdog

I too missed the original call on CBS. While you were hoisting a few in Ithica, I was confined to the backseat of my parent’s 1969 lime green Ford LTD. We were on our way to my grandmother’s farewell dinner (no she wasn’t dead, just being forced to move to a senior community in Dunedin, Florida) and I was a high school senior with a bad hair do listening to Jim Gordon and Dick Lynch calling the action on WNEW. We listened to the 2nd half of the game in the car and as we neared our destination, the Gordon announced the 2 minute warning and the station ran their commercials.
My father was usually in a vile mood on the days he had to have dinner with his mother in law, but the combination of her imminent removal to Florida and a rare Giant victory over the hated Eagles produced a rare smile on his face as we exited off of Route 80. I too smiled, thinking that not even the Giants could lose this one.
Then within a mile of our destination, it happened. The color drained from his face as he absorbed one of the most devastating sports moments of his 53 years. Not only that, but he would now have to listen to people yelling at my grandmother (not out of anger, but due to the fact that she was too vain to use a hearing aid) for about three hours. It was almost too much for him to bear. The radio went off and rolled into the driveway.
Instead of rolling his eyes and making snide comments, he sat silently at dinner, never making his usual reactions to my grandmother’s inane comments. She saw his composed demeanor and remarked that he must have been sad about her impending move. This was completely off the mark as he had previously told me that news of her move to Florida ranked with VJ Day as one of the happiest moments of his life (when you realize that he was on Saipan in 1945, you get a sense of his feelings towards my grandmother).
After vowing to never watch another Giant game again, we were glued to the set in the following weeks as the “25 Years of Rotten Football” banner led to the hiring of George Young and Ray Perkins the following year. As for my grandmother, she spent the next 10 years in Florida policing her community’s “must wear tennis shoes while using the court” edict and insuring that other people’s grandchildren did not stay in the community pool 10 seconds after the hours for residents’ use only rule went into affect. Naturally she and the other widows in the place never went swimming or played tennis.