The first New York City team to repeat as world champions also went by the name of “Giants” and they, too, had to contend with an outsized personality sharing their territory. The year was 1922 and the city belonged to John McGraw’s crew, even as the larger-than-life fellow named Ruth began to steal so much of the city’s baseball thunder.
Remember how proud you were to be wearing blue last Christmas Eve, when the football Giants began their mystical journey from 7-7 to the Canyon of Heroes by putting the Jets in their place, by shutting up Rex Ryan and stepping on the Jets’ necks and rendering them a battered footnote?
Multiply that by four and you have the satisfaction that filled Muggsy McGraw in October of ’22, when the Giants smeared the Yankees four games to none (with one tie) and Giants pitching held Babe Ruth to a .118 batting average and one lousy RBI.
Brandon Jacobs on Rex Ryan, 2011: “They got a big-mouthed coach, a big-bellied coach that talks too much and now it’s finally time to shut up.”
John McGraw on Babe Ruth, 1922: “That big monkey, you wouldn’t even hear about him if he played in the National League. Leave the winning to us, we’ll be doing plenty of it for years to come.”
The reality, of course, is that McGraw never again won another championship and soon enough Ruth’s Yankees would become the second New York team to repeat, in 1927 and ’28. And while the Yankees have tried to prove over the decades that repeating is something less than an impossible task, the fact is only one other championship New York sports franchise not nicknamed “Yankees” has managed to repeat since 1901 — the Islanders dynasty of 1980-83.
Repeating, in a word, is a bear.
“It’s always harder when you come back after winning a championship because other teams are tired of hearing about you,” Justin Tuck said last week. “They get tired of hearing about the ‘champions of the world’ stuff and like knocking you down a few notches.”
“Teams like to humble the champions,” Eli Manning said. “I know when we’re playing the defending champs, that’s how we are.”
So tonight, the Giants open defense of their championship against a Cowboys team that has made little issue of being sick and tired of hearing about their intra-divisional rivals and their glorious little era. Jerry Jones has been talking smack and the rest of the operation has followed, and if all teams aren’t quite as brash as Dallas … well, they all surely feel the same way.
They get to chase after the Lombardi Trophy.
But only one team gets to keep it until it’s taken away from it. And the Giants know all about how treacherous the Season After can be. The past three times they defended their title, their seasons became soap operas despite the best-laid plans to stay as hungry and as humble as they’d been during their title quests.
The first time, the Giants were 0-2 before the 1987 players’ strike ripped the heart out of the team. George Young fielded a non-competitive collection of scabs, the Giants were 0-5 when real games began, and the season was a non-starter. Four years later, Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick fled, Ray Handley was the coach, and … well, two words: dunce cap.
The most brutal of all, of course, was the last one. It was as if the summer break never happened, as if the Giants picked up in September of 2008 where they’d left off in January and February, they were 11-1 and … well, two words: Latin Quarter.
The Giants were just the latest team to understand that as hard at it is to win once, it’s that much harder to win twice. The ’01 Devils found that out, and so did the ’95 Rangers, and the ’87 Mets, and the ’69 Jets, and even the sainted Knicks teams, in 1971 and ’74. It’s what makes what the Yankees did in the ’90s (and the ’60s, and the ’50s, and the ’30s) that much more remarkable.
And what lies ahead of the Giants, starting tonight, that much more fascinating.