There was a moment, many beers into the Fox party on Super Bowl Eve, that seemed to sum up the conspicuous question mark known to New York Giants football fans as Eli Manning.
Up onstage the band kicked into Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean,” and in visual counterpoint to the relentless bass line, two beautiful dancers wriggled on either side of the stage. They wore skimpy cheerleader outfits, white thigh-highs, and tight Eli Manning jerseys. Twin No. 10s.
Ass-shaking and Eli Manning have never gone hand-in-hand, is my talking point here. He is laughably unflamboyant and has been criticized for it.
But not 24 hours later, Eli and the Giants put together a much hotter show on a much bigger stage—the greatest upset in Super Bowl history.
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With barely more than two minutes left in the game, having watched New England’s Tom Terrific march down the field for what everyone except 53 Giants players thought would be the winning touchdown, Manning led Big Blue onto the field 86 yards from history. On the key play in that drive, a third-and-five that will live in Big Blue lore for as long as the franchise exists, Manning eluded four Patriots in the backfield, staggered free and lofted a pass toward the seldom-used and seldom-trusted receiver, David Tyree. Tyree hauled in a remarkable catch for a first down and, a few seconds later, with just 35 ticks on the clock, Manning found Plaxico Burress in the end zone for the winning score. Eli Manning handed Bill Belichick and Tom Brady and the rest of the 18-0 Patriots, as well as the city of Boston, which had already begun planning its victory parade, a big goblet brimming with hemlock.
Next to me in the stands, two Patriots fans sat there, stunned as the clock wound down. They were weeping.
“I found a way to get loose, and just really threw it up,” Eli said in his determinedly uncolorful manner afterward, describing what may go down as one of the greatest plays in Giants history. “He made an unbelievable catch and saved the game.”
No one, of course, except for me, thought the Giants could win this game. Having driven from Santa Monica across the desert, fueled by Kosher salami and Red Bull, I found myself on Friday night standing unsteadily on a hillside above the teeming ESPN party. There were five seconds left in a knotted-up Knicks-Blazers game on the ubiquitous plasma monitors. At which point ESPN switched away from the game to televise Ludicrus, the evening’s entertainment, who obviously represented more to ESPN than the results of a basketball game.
There were about 5,000 writhing bodies squeezed onto the dance floor. Cris Carter, the former wide receiver for Philadelphia and Minnesota and now a football commentator on HBO’s Inside the NFL, walked in with his wife, surveyed the Inferno below and said, “Which way’s the men’s room?"
“Hey, man, that’s not the first thing you say when you step into a party like this,” I said to Carter, whose bladder might well have been jumpy because he was awaiting word on whether or not he’d been elected to the Hall of Fame.
I also told Carter what I’d been telling everybody since last August, including everybody in Phoenix all of last week: that the Giants were going to win the Super Bowl, and that it would be the greatest win in Super Bowl history.
Carter said he thought some Jets fans might disagree with me.
I responded that if you beat an unbeaten team to win the Super Bowl, it’s the greatest Super Bowl victory of all time.
At which point Carter looked at me and said: "They’re going to get crushed."
I said, nonplussed: "Huh? What?"
“They’re going to get crushed," he repeated slowly. “The Giants are going to get crushed.”
“Oh, and good luck on getting into the Hall of Fame tomorrow,” I muttered to myself as Carter ran a post pattern toward the men’s room.
No, nobody thought the Giants would win. They all thought the Giants would be crushed. Especially after the Boston Herald broke that story about how the Patriots secretly taped a St. Louis Rams pre-Super Bowl practice walk-through a few years ago.
That would only make the Patriots angrier, which would make the crushing worse. The Giants were 12-point underdogs, although maybe, you kept hearing, when Giants fans got you alone in a corner and gave voice to their worst fears, the game would be an embarrassing blowout. 61-0. Something like that. After all, the Pats hadn’t lost. No one had beaten them. They were perfect. Eighteen straight wins. A points-scoring juggernaut. The greatest team of all time, comparable already, you began hearing, to the ’27 Yankees. The Pats had a team of all-pros. They had Tom Brady, who averaged over three scoring passes a game on Sundays and who knows how many every other night of the week with supermodel Giselle Bundchen. And in Belichick they had a coach who not only took nothing to chance, he planned every breath he took. The Pats had already beaten the Giants once before this season. The Pats had their victory parade all planned.
