The Final Season @ the Meadowlands thread.

Great stuff !! :metal:

 

Plenty of Meadowlands memories as Giants Stadium enters final season
BY Gary Myers
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Thursday, September 10th 2009, 4:00 AM

It was the site of The Fumble.

It's where the SpyGate scandal was uncovered.

It was the place where Jim Burt and Harry Carson started the sideline Gatorade dumping of Bill Parcells, prompting a national craze of dousing the winning coach after a big game that still exists.

The Jets had the Gate D flashers, playing in a stadium with another NFL team's name on it, the worst coach in franchise history - Rich Kotite - getting a beer bath from disgusted fans as he came off the field, the Monday Night Miracle and the Dennis Byrd Miracle.

The home of the Giants since 1976 and the Jets since 1984, The Swamp was the perfect place for fans, but not for the owners who are moving their teams a short punt away in the Meadowlands parking lot to a state-of-the-art $1.7 billion football palace with luxury boxes, club seats and PSLs, leaving behind many memories and too many loyal fans who could not afford the move.

"I have a lot of tremendous memories there," Parcells says. "A very large part of my career was spent there. There is a lot of nostalgia. But that is the way things are now. They are leveling those stadiums all over the country."

There was nothing distinctive about Giants Stadium, built for $78 million, other than great sightlines, a biting wind and the first football-only home for either team.

When Giants owner Wellington Mara signed a lease on Aug. 27, 1971 to move his team from Yankee Stadium across state lines, it angered many traditionalists, but changed everything about New York football. His friend Leon Hess, in search of cleaner bathrooms for his fans and tired of the Jets being second-class citizens to the Mets at Shea Stadium, joined Mara and the Giants eight years later.

Parcells spent 10 years with the Giants, two as an assistant and eight as the head coach. He won two Super Bowls and left after the second one following the 1990 season. He returned to the home sideline in 1997 when Hess engineered a brilliant move to bring him to the Jets from New England. In his second season, Parcells coached the Jets to within a victory of the Super Bowl.

But Parcells' top moment at Giants Stadium is not what you might think.

"For me, maybe knocking the 49ers out of the playoffs in 1985," he says of the Giants' wild-card round victory. "That was the first playoff win in Giants Stadium. That was pretty good. With the Jets, it was the day we beat Jacksonville in the playoffs (to advance to the AFC Championship game in the 1998 season) for Mr. Hess."

The stadium will join Shea and Yankee Stadium as the third in the metropolitan area to close in 14 months. It never had the aura of Yankee Stadium and never had the "it's a dump, but it's our dump" ambiance of Shea, but there's lots of history in Giants Stadium that can't be packed into boxes.

It had a cancer scare in the 1980s when four players in seven years were diagnosed and then one more 11 years later. Two of the players died - running backs Doug Kotar and John Tuggle - prompting a study commissioned by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which concluded that there was no connection between Giants Stadium and cancer.

About 30 minutes before kickoff of the Giants' recent preseason game against the Jets, co-owner John Mara came off the field, walked through the tunnel and turned into the hallway near the Giants locker room. If anyone gets teary-eyed, it will be Mara.

"This stadium was his baby," Mara says of his late father Wellington. "He took a lot of abuse when we announced we were moving here in 1971. We've had a lot of great moments here. Super Bowl teams have played here. There is a lot of nostalgia every time I walk in here."

***

Charm? Personality? The dimensions for football fields are standard. There are no nooks or crannies. So unless there's a hole in the roof like at the old Texas Stadium, it's all about the teams.

The Jets never felt at home playing at Giants Stadium. That displaced feeling in part explains why the Jets are a game under .500 at home in a league in which home-field advantage usually is huge.

A few years ago, the Jets started putting up large team banners on the east and west side of the building right under the blue Giants Stadium signs and incurred the wrath of the Giants when they failed to follow the agreement and remove them in time after a home game. To try to make it feel like home, the Jets hang green bunting over the blue walls that separate the lower level from the playing field.

"It was our home," former Jets defensive lineman Joe Klecko says. "It was our fans."

Greg Buttle, who played only the final year of his nine seasons with the Jets at the Meadowlands, didn't mind the stadium, but hated the commute. "It was miserable," he says of the drive from Long Island to East Rutherford. "You get on the Cross Bronx and it was three hours on a Saturday night. Everyone was late to the hotel. It was pathetic. I became the human GPS system. I knew every shortcut."

Last season, the Jets moved their headquarters from Hofstra in Hempstead to a beautiful $75 million complex in Florham Park.

Lawrence Taylor used to say - only half-jokingly - that Jets fans were Giants fans who couldn't get season tickets. But the Jets had a fan base that followed them across the Hudson River. "I always felt at home playing there because our fans were there," Buttle says. "I'm not sitting there looking at a Giants sign. I just didn't like the travel over there. That's why I hated it. Of course, we had cleaner bathrooms, but at that point it didn't matter."

The Jets fans, while always loyal, had their share of infamy in their adopted digs.

Whether chanting "Joe Must Go," encouraging management to fire Joe Walton, which it did after the 1989 season, or burning seats in the upper deck during a 1988 Monday night game against Buffalo, Gang Green's faithful pressed the limits of acceptable fandom. The worst of it may have been a long-time tradition on the spiral ramps near Gate D, where hundreds of - usually drunk - male fans congregated and harangued female fans who passed by to expose their breasts. Some of the women played to the crowd and complied; others lodged complaints that - after a thorough flogging of the stadium's lack of security in the media - led to the end of the lewd legacy.

***

The Giants Stadium press room during the week was down the hall from the locker rooms and had no windows, leading to it being dubbed "The Dungeon" by writers who spent hours down there, unaware of whether the sun was shining or a hurricane was blowing through Northern Jersey. It became the scene of the most memorable press conference ever, spawned, in part, by arguably the worst moments in Giants history.

On Nov. 18, 1978, Joe Pisarcik tried to hand the ball off to Larry Csonka instead of taking a knee to run out the clock against the Eagles. Herm Edwards scooped up The Fumble and ran it in for the winning TD. The next day, Bob Gibson was fired as Giants offensive coordinator. After the disappointing 6-10 season sputtered to a close, John McVay was fired as coach, and director of football operations Andy Robustelli resigned.

Wellington Mara and co-owner Tim Mara didn't have much use for each other and could not agree on a replacement for Robustelli, which led to the NFL version of The War of the Roses. On Feb. 8, 1979, the Maras held dueling press conferences in The Dungeon, airing out the team's dirty laundry while tearing each other apart. That prompted commissioner Pete Rozelle to step in days later and recommend George Young for Robustelli's gig. Young went on to help engineer the team that won the franchise's first Super Bowl seven years later.

After beating the Redskins in the NFC title game en route to that maiden Super Bowl title, the Giants ran off the field through the west end zone, the same one that the Rams' Flipper Anderson would sprint through when he broke the Giants' hearts in the 1989 playoffs. It's the end zone where legend has it Jimmy Hoffa is buried.

The most intimidating person at the stadium was not the ghost of Hoffa, Joe Klecko or Taylor, though. It was Mother Nature.

 

contunued....



"In December, when you had teams from the West Coast come in, that could be a difference-maker," Carson said. "When we beat the Redskins to get to the Super Bowl, we were all one: the team, the fans and the stadium."

Giants punter Sean Landeta remembers practicing in the stadium to get acclimated to the conditions. "There were leaves or strips of paper airborne blowing in a circle, three or four feet off the ground," he said. "It was almost like magic."

Nothing was as magical as Dennis Byrd's return to the Meadowlands.

On Nov. 29, 1992, Byrd's head collided full force with the chest of teammate Scott Mersereau after Chiefs quarterback Dave Krieg stepped up in the pocket. A hush went over the stadium as Jets medical personnel rushed onto the field.

Byrd suffered a broken vertebrae in his neck and was paralyzed from the waist down. It was feared he would never walk again. Team orthopedist Dr. Elliott Hershman helped stabilize Byrd on the field, which was crucial as Byrd eventually regained the use of his legs in the hospital.

Less than a year later, on Opening Day of the 1993 season, Byrd walked unassisted to midfield. There were tears on the sidelines and in the stands as Byrd received one of the largest ovations in the stadium's history.

Hershman recently was asked, as he looked through the tunnel that Byrd came through that September day 16 years ago, if he will always think of the Jets when he thinks of Giants Stadium.

"I look out and think of a lot of the injuries I've taken care of on the field in different spots," he said. "Dennis, of course, being the most dramatic and having the greatest feeling about the outcome."


Gratuitous Linky !

 

You know what's sad is that GIANTS fans preach that and whats even more pathetic? the People who actually believe that and still say it as fact :lol:

 

Welcome!

Is there a site of your travels? Keep us posted and come back and let us know how your game was... :beer: