The cheering and the chanting began the moment the goalie with the graying hair and wearing the obscenely red sweater touched the ice that Sunday evening of Nov. 2, 1975, and if you were there that night, inside a Madison Square Garden stuffed beyond capacity, none of it has ever really stopped.
“In my ears and in my heart,” Eddie Giacomin said by telephone Monday, “I hear it still.”
There have been other nights of acknowledgment in New York sports. There was Game 5 of the 2001 World Series, things looking bleak for the Yankees, when the old Stadium stood and cheered for Paul O’Neill as he trotted off the field for the last time. There was the summer afternoon in 1977 when Tom Seaver took the mound at Shea Stadium in a Cincinnati uniform for the first time.
There has never been anything quite like the night that Giacomin returned to the Garden, old No. 1 wearing 31 in the vestments of the Detroit Red Wings, who’d only needed to pay a $30,000 waivers fee to pluck one of the most popular men in the history of the Rangers away from the only team he’d ever known.
That transaction had taken place on Halloween. Two days later, in a remarkable slice of scheduling karma, the Wings were in New York, and as late as two hours before the game they were planning on sparing their new goalkeeper the emotional wringer of playing his instantly former teammates.
“And that’s what I’ve always thought was most remarkable,” Giacomin said. “The fans knew I was going to play before I did. It wasn’t until later that the coach and GM decided I was going to go. But the fans already had their signs ready and hung. It was like it was meant to be.”
And the night played out like a dream, in every sense: equal parts magical, surreal, inexplicable. For two solid hours, the people chanted “EDDDD-DIEEEEE!! EDDDDD-DIEEEE!!” They cheered all six times the Wings beat Giacomin’s replacement, John Davidson. They booed all four times the Rangers snuck the puck behind Giacomin.
At one point, Steve Vickers beat him with a backhand and was immediately shrouded with boos. A few minutes later, on his next shift, Vickers approached his old teammate during a stoppage in play.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
Giacomin, who’d spent the night crying under his mask (after openly blinking away tears during the initial wave of thunder) said, “It’s just a job. We both have one.” The Wings wound up winning 6-4 — “Thank goodness the game didn’t last 10 minutes longer, I couldn’t have kept it up much more,” Giacomin says — and by the time Giacomin was finished showering and answering questions, it was close to 12:30 in the morning.
It was 1:30 by the time he got back to his house in Manhasset. Waiting for him there? Most of his old Rangers teammates: Rod Gilbert. Walt Tkaczuk. Brad Park. On and on. And together they stayed up, and toasted each other, until it was time for all of them to go to the airport and finally head in different directions.
“The most amazing night I ever had as an athlete,” he said.
Thirty-nine years on, it remains the gold standard for all time for all returning icons. It is a tougher town now, a tougher time, so it is unlikely there will be as much love awaiting Robinson Cano Tuesday night, when he returns as a Mariner. There was some residue of rancor that will linger forever; the Yankees, after all, didn’t surrender Cano for a $30,000 waiver fee, they simply under-bid Seattle with a mere $175 million.
And Giacomin’s appeal was that he was the diametric opposite to how many perceived Cano: he was blue-collar to his bones, a lunch-pail guy whose connection with Garden fans still resonates; Cano was forever shadowed by the ease with which the game came to him.
“And there’s one big difference to remember, too, about when I came back and what Cano will get Tuesday,” Giacomin said. “They’ve had a lot of time to prepare for him and to consider what their feelings are. For me, it was immediate, bang, two days later I’m back, and there was just a spontaneous outpouring of emotion.”
Yankee Stadium will likely rise to its pedigree Tuesday night. It has cheered Reggie Jackson as an Angel, Tino Martinez as a Cardinal, Hideki Matsui as an Angel. It even managed to survive David Wells and David Cone wearing “Boston” across their chests. History suggests Robbie Cano will be treated kindly.
But it isn’t likely anyone will still hear those cheers 39 years from now.