A Move to the Meadowlands

The New York Giants. For decades the very name was one for opponents in two sports to reckon with, a source of joy (and sometimes sorrow) to New York's football and baseball fans. Who can forget the little miracle of Coogan's Bluff, when Bobby Thomson's ninth-inning home run in the old Polo Grounds beat the hated Dodgers in a 1951 play-off and won for the baseball Giants an impossible pennant? Or the frigid December day in 1934 when the football Giants, playing on a frozen field, switched from spikes to sneakers at halftime and ran away from the mighty Chicago Bears 30-13, to win their first National Football League championship?

Those days are long gone. What used to be the Polo Grounds is now a housing development, and the baseball Giants have been in faraway San Francisco since 1957. The football Giants have been playing in Yankee Stadium for 15 years, drawing capacity crowds of 62,892, win or lose. Last week, however, they too served notice that they would leave New York. Beginning in 1975, the Giants will play their home games in a 75,000-seat football stadium that will be the core of a new $200 million sports complex in the Hackensack Meadowlands of northern New Jersey, an area currently composed of swampy, smelly mud flats dotted with dumps.

Selfish and Callous. At a press conference, Giants' President Wellington Mara piously insisted that he was moving to New Jersey only to provide Giant fans with a better place to watch the team play. Clearly, though, a main motive was money. The Mara family has run the Giants on a shoestring since Wellington's father Tim bought the New York franchise in 1925 for a piddling $500. Said Tim at the time: "A New York franchise in anything is worth that much, including one for shining shoes." It certainly was. Though the football Giants were subtenants all their lives, both in the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, the franchise made millions for the Maras. But despite handsome TV revenues and a $10 million indemnity for allowing the New York Jets to share their territory in the A.F.L.N.F.L. merger, Mara wants still more. In New Jersey, he not only will pay the same rent as at Yankee Stadium (15% of gross ticket receipts) but will also get all the program revenue, half the concession profits and 20% of parking proceeds--all lucrative extras he does not get in New York. Then there is the income from those 12,000 or so additional seats.

New York's official reaction was immediate, justifiable anger. Mayor John Lindsay attacked the Giants' ownership as "selfish, callous and ungrateful"; he insisted he would pursue the city's present plan to buy Yankee Stadium and renovate it for $24 million, in order to keep at least the Yankees in town. Lindsay also said that he would seek another National Football League franchise to cohabit with the Yankees, but the odds on that seemed slim. For one thing, unanimous approval of all N.F.L. teams is required to shift one franchise into the home territory of another, and both the Giants and Jets would surely veto any such effort. Though the Giants have a lease to play in Yankee Stadium through 1974, some city officials favored canceling it as soon as possible. Snorted Bronx Borough President Robert Abrams: "If they want to play in a swamp, let them play in a swamp right now."

The Giants' move put President Michael Burke of the Yankees on the spot. "It's a whole new equation without the Giants," he admitted. "We shall now have to take new and realistic readings of our options." Implicit in that statement is the prospect of moving the Yankees' franchise to New Orleans, Dallas or even Toronto if New York decides not to improve the stadium for a single tenant. The "House that Ruth Built" has grown shabby with age, and so have its Bronx surroundings. Its oddly angled playing field is particularly poor for football watching, and parking facilities are terrible. The plant is still serviceable, though it needs a full-scale face-lifting, but if only the Yankees play there, the city might never recoup its planned $24 million investment.

Jersey Giants? In the past five years, no fewer than eleven N.F.L. teams have moved into bigger and more modern stadiums. The Giants insist that they are not abandoning their faithful by moving to the Meadowlands. They point out that their new home in East Rutherford, N.J., will be only seven miles from midtown Manhattan, as opposed to six miles from midtown to Yankee Stadium. A Giant-sponsored study has shown that 30% of the team's fans are from New Jersey in any event, and another 23% are from New York's Nassau and Westchester counties, which are roughly as convenient to East Rutherford by car as Yankee Stadium now is by public transportation. "This is the age of the highway," says Sonny Werblin, chairman of the organization that will develop the new complex. "We no longer live in an age when proximity to a trolley car or subway is a necessity. Some people have no sense of history."

History, it would seem, is on the other side of the argument. The football Giants have been a New York fixture for nearly half a century, and although Wellington Mara says he will keep the name New York Giants after the move to New Jersey, Mayor Lindsay has angrily threatened to go to court, if necessary, to prevent it. Mara may have to settle for Jersey Giants, or, if the team does not improve--its first three preseason games of 1971 ended in humiliating losses--Giant fans may be quite willing to dub their erstwhile darlings the Hackensack Horrors.

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