Super Bowl Monday

by Adam Lazarus

  Eventually, reporters working on deadline had their fill of quotes and let the players and coaches continue their celebration. Buses bound for the team hotel carried Giants players and their families—except Johnie Cooks’ mother, who boarded the wrong bus and was eventually driven there by a Good Samaritan—back for more celebration.

  “The third floor kept rocking until 6:30 a.m.,” Mark Ingram said.

  Separately, Parcells threw a party for his assistants, trainers, the equipment managers, and their families.

  While Giants players drank champagne and their shouts filled the Hyatt Westshore Regency, their field general was nowhere to be found. The battered quarterback preferred the company of his family . . . and a soft bed. In his hotel room with his wife and children, brothers Doug, Ron, Todd, sister Cheryl and brother-in-law Steve, his father Norm, and his mother Dolly—who would pass away unexpectedly six weeks later—Jeff Hostetler sat very still, bags of ice affixed to his entire body.

  “My elbow is killing me and I still have a headache,” he said. “I’m probably as sore as I’ve been in some time. But it’s a good sore.”

  The following morning at 9:30, Hostetler gently rolled out of bed and took the elevator down to the lobby. There, he and most of his teammates—the seven Pro Bowlers boarded a plane for Honolulu hours earlier—waited for their ride to the airport. A few sportswriters waited with them.

  “A couple of us were standing around at the desk,” said Ernie Palladino, the Giants beat writer for the Gannett Suburban Newspapers. “We were talking to Mark Collins, the safety, and we were asking him about a particular play in the game. He stopped in mid sentence and he said, ‘Damn, wasn’t that a great game?’”

  At around five o’clock that evening, the team plane landed at Newark International Airport. Three buses then drove the team to Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, where players and coaches could clear out their lockers.

  And that’s when the Giants’ Super Bowl honeymoon ended.

  Over the previous ten days, the Giants had won two of the most physical, grueling, closely contested playoff games in NFL history. And they had flown just under twelve thousand miles to do so. The tired players just wanted to finish their final task of the 1990 season and head home. Therefore, the buses zipped through the parking lot, headed into the stadium, and unloaded the players inside the stadium.

  The nine hundred fans that waited for hours in parking lots number nine and eleven expected a little more pomp and circumstance upon their arrival.

  “You’d think it would be a little more personal than this,” Newark’s Roger Sanders—who had brought with him his two sons—told a reporter. “I took the day off from work for this. And what do you get? Buses. I wanted to see Bill Parcells and Jeff Hostetler give speeches.”

  “What they did is rude,” said New Jersey resident Lisa Teichman. “It’s like we didn’t exist. They could have at least said something.”

  Those few disgruntled fans could at least look forward to the standard public celebration: a parade or rally to honor the team. But New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins—who had promised to “do something” should the Giants win—decided that there was no room in the budget for a ticker-tape parade. (Similarly, no ticker-tape parade was thrown when the Giants won Super Bowl XXI. Because the team played its home games in New Jersey, Mayor Ed Koch remarked “Let Moonachie [New Jersey] throw them a parade.” At least Dinkins had previously told a local television station, “They may be housed over in New Jersey, but we see them as ours.”)

  “You have to throw a party for your people,” Everson Walls said. “You have to throw a party for Super Bowl winners of the most exciting Super Bowl in history. For them not to celebrate that, it was one of the biggest disappointments of my career.”

  “There wasn’t a whole lot of love there,” Erik Howard added.

  Dinkins did offer to honor the team with a rally at the steps of city hall. According to published reports, the Giants accepted the invitation and even helped plan the January 30 festival, a statement the team’s front office denied. While city workers set up a stage and chairs, and officials prepared “keys to the city” for Bill Parcells and the organization’s co-owners, the Giants issued a press release. Given the fighting in the Persian Gulf, Wellington Mara decided that a citywide celebration was not appropriate.

  Many in the press also sapped some of the newly crowned Super Bowl champions’ joy. Most tossed around praise for the underdog team’s stunning upset over the flashy and seemingly unstoppable Bills. But a few less-impressed media figures summarized the game by saying the Bills lost Super Bowl XXV, not that the Giants won it.

  “There were some who said that Parcells and the Giants got lucky that day, something he would continue to hear about for years,” Bill Gutman wrote in his 2000 biography about the head coach.

  “It would have been a shame had we lost that game,” Parcells later said. “Because—and I am prejudiced because I was the Giants coach; I’m sure Buffalo feels like they should have won the game—but when you really look at that game, I don’t think there’s any doubt who played better. I think our players played better than Buffalo’s players.”

  Naysayers and the absence of a lavish parade and/or rally hardly dimmed the jubilant spirit of Giants players and fans. But less than a week after the Super Bowl XXV win, questions about the 1991 edition began to overshadow the 1990 World Champion Giants. In the eyes of many “experts,” the loss (or expected loss) of coaches and players cast great doubt over the team’s repeat possibilities.

  The coaching staff was slated to lose two assistants: wide receivers coach Tom Coughlin had already accepted the head-coaching job at Boston College, and running backs coach Ray Handley planned to leave the NFL to enroll in law school at George Washington University.

  But the architect of two Super Bowl–winning defenses, Bill Belichick, garnered the most attention. Both the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Cleveland Browns hoped to hire Belichick as their next head coach. In the week following the Super Bowl win, Belichick met with both teams’ officials. At the front desk of downtown Cleveland’s Ritz-Carlton, he registered under the name “Andy Robustelli,” the New York Giants’ Hall of Fame defensive end from 1956 to 1964.

  On February 4, Tampa promoted interim head coach Richard Williamson. The next day, Cleveland’s general manager, Ernie Accorsi—still high on Belichick from their interview in 1989—made the thirty-eight-year-old the league’s youngest head coach. An endorsement from University of Indiana Basketball head coach Bob Knight and (because of his youth) comparisons to Don Shula also helped.

  “Bill is bright, competitive, intense and dedicated to the game. He knows what it takes to win in this league and he’s going to help get us back to where we expect to be in the play-offs, fighting to win the Super Bowl,” Cleveland owner Art Modell told the press upon the hiring. “I’ve been disappointed before. I don’t expect to be disappointed this time. Nor will our fans be disappointed.”

  To fill out his staff, Belichick picked out his own young, fresh assistants, including thirty-three-year-old special teams coach Scott O’Brien, defensive line coach John Mitchell, and University of Toledo head coach Nick Saban. Although the New York press worried that Belichick would poach assistants from the Giants’ already-depleting coaching staff, none of Parcells’ lieutenants moved to northeast Ohio for the 1991 NFL season.

  Around New York and New Jersey, Belichick’s departure was met with apprehension.

  “Belichick is probably the best informed and most imaginative defensive coach I’ve ever had,” retired Giants linebacking great Harry Carson said the week Belichick left for Cleveland. “I honestly don’t know how the Giants are going to recover from losing him.”

  The loss of Belichick was inevitable. For several years, he had been dubbed a “defensive genius.” Given his two Super Bowl rings, a tremendous passion for the game, and the pedigree (a lifelong football coach as a father), NFL teams strongly pursued him.

  The spo
rts world was just as eager to know about the head coach’s future as well. Within an hour of walking off the field at Tampa Stadium, Bill Parcells was answering questions that had nothing to do with the team’s 20-19 victory over Buffalo.

  “The last time we won one of these there was a little controversy about me and it didn’t allow my owners and general manager to enjoy this very much,” Parcells said at the podium. “They’re going to enjoy this one, I promise you. There’s not going to be any controversy.”

  Nevertheless, controversy arose.

  As early as the 1989 season, Parcells contemplated leaving the Giants.

  “The way I feel is if I win another Super Bowl, I’m gone. No chance of coming back. No chance,” Parcells said prior to the Giants’ critical Week Thirteen game against Philadelphia. “If it wasn’t for games like this, I wouldn’t be here. You know what I’d want if I quit? I’d take a year off.”

  The forty-nine-year-old coach allegedly repeated that sentiment prior to the next season.

  Health concerns—apart from the kidney stones in late December—contributed to the chatter. Following Chicago head coach Mike Ditka’s mid-season heart attack in 1988, Parcells told the press: “Any of us in this business can identify with it. I drink coffee, I smoke regularly. I’m 30 pounds overweight. Real smart.”

  A perceived burnout potential clouded Parcells’ future.

  “It’s tough to be a head coach in this league for 10 years,” he said prior to the 1990 season, his eighth as Giants head coach. “I don’t know if I can make it for 10 years in this league.”

  Nearing the end of another long season, his outlook hadn’t changed: “It’s becoming more difficult to do. There doesn’t seem to be any respite in this game,” he said during Super Bowl week. “If you’re in the playoffs, or in this game, you don’t get any break until the end of May. It’s just go, go, go, go, go.”

  A reportedly unhealthy relationship with George Young contributed as well: they often disagreed on personnel choices. Furthermore, only one year remained on Parcells’ contract with the team. History—which Parcells hinted at during his postgame press conference in Tampa—also suggested the coach might not return to spearhead the Giants title defense. Days after winning Super Bowl XXI, newspapers across the country reported that Parcells was trying to break his contract with the Giants so that he could coach the Atlanta Falcons for a substantial raise in salary. An angry Parcells openly dismissed the claim.

  Four years later, Parcells was answering the same questions. Prior to Richard Williamson’s hire, some media outlets stated that Parcells would take the job in Tampa Bay.

  Rumors spread that he might retire, then return—with another franchise that would let him be head coach and general manager—the following season. An analyst job, at ESPN, the Madison Square Garden network, or one of the major networks, was also mentioned. By March, his agent, Robert Fraley, began preliminary talks with NBC, and later that month, the network’s play-by-play announcer, Don Criqui, made an audition tape with Parcells.

  “Everything that’s been written about me is a fabrication,” he said at Monday’s post–Super Bowl press conference in Tampa. “There’s no basis for any of those rumors, I can assure you. I’ve talked to no one in connection with any other possibilities in any other field.”

  His players wanted him back. So did Giants fans, to whom he had now brought two world championships after more than two decades of mediocrity. On the Tuesday night following the Super Bowl triumph, hundreds of New Yorkers crammed into Gallagher’s Steak House on West Fifty-Second Street to see Parcells appear on his weekly radio show for WNEW-AM.

  The crowd repeatedly interrupted him with applause. As the New York Times reported, “The fans made clear they were not there simply to celebrate the 20-19 victory over the Buffalo Bills Sunday night but to urge their adored maximum leader to stay at his post next season.”

  Despite all the turmoil and suggestive evidence, the notion that the New Jersey native would leave his self-described “dream job” seemed ludicrous.

  “He’ll be coaching the Giants next year, I guarantee that,” his mentor Mickey Corcoran said the day after Super Bowl XXV. “He’ll never coach anywhere else. He’s a Giant. He’s got the greatest job in football.”

  Aside from the health issues, reassembling his coaching staff, bristly interactions with his general manager, and potential burnout, another factor rubbed some of the luster off “the greatest job in football.” The Giants’ roster was ready for major reconstruction.

  The multiple surgeries endured by Mark Bavaro in recent years (two on his left knee, along with wrist, toe, and shoulder operations) took a toll on the veteran Giant. During their playoff run, one Giant quietly told Newsday that retirement “would be the best thing for Bavaro. It’s pretty bad. I don’t know how he keeps doing it.” Super Bowl XXV was his final game in a New York Giants uniform.

  At another key position, the Giants also faced major concern regarding one of their proven veterans. Bart Oates—the only New York lineman to start both Super Bowl victories—had already graduated from Seton Hall Law School and passed the New Jersey state bar. During Super Bowl week, he acknowledged that after the season, he would consider retirement. The thirty-two-year-old had recently accepted a summer position at the Morristown firm Ribis, Graham and Curtin.

  On the other side of the ball, four of the defensive starters (Lawrence Taylor, Everson Walls, Perry Williams, and Leonard Marshall) from Super Bowl XXV would be thirty or older by the middle of the 1991 season. And L. T.’s arrest—while in Hawaii for the Pro Bowl, during a traffic altercation with a taxi driver, he allegedly struck the cab with a metal pipe—again frustrated the Giants’ front office.

  The identity of next year’s kicker was even in question. Thirty-four-year-old Matt Bahr had kicked eight tremendously important field goals during the postseason, including three clutch fourth-quarter kicks in the NFC Championship Game and Super Bowl. But in training camp, previously incumbent kicker Raul Allegre would be back to reclaim his job.

  “I think [Parcells] saw what was going on with the franchise,” said Hank Gola, a New York Post sportswriter during the Parcells’ era. “He always used to say, ‘God takes it away from you, with players.’ And I think he saw that God was going to take it from a lot of players . . . that was kind of the last hurrah.”

  Even Ottis Anderson could not sidestep widespread consensus that the Super Bowl had been his swan song. Within seconds of being named the game’s Most Valuable Player, ABC’s Brent Musburger asked the thirty-four-year-old about retirement: “No way, I’m coming back again. I still got work to do.”

  “It’s the player that determines when he’s going to retire,” Bart Oates insisted at the post–Super Bowl press conference. “What he has left, and how he’s going to perform. [Ottis is] a tremendous role model for anyone out there that has somebody telling them they can’t get the job done, that they’re washed up. He was supposed to be washed up when he first came here, before the first Super Bowl. Another five or six years, and I think he’ll be ready to retire.”

  Anderson may have refused to walk away, but that did not mean his place with the 1991 New York Giants was guaranteed. Five days after the win in Tampa, the Giants would have to submit to the league a list of thirty-seven players whom they did not want to become a Plan B free agent.[2] Each of the previous two off-seasons, Anderson had been left off the protected list. Given that Rodney Hampton would return, as would Dave Meggett—who had been a major contributor to the Giants’ Super Bowl victory—Anderson was not protected. Jokingly, Anderson said he “would be insulted if they don’t do it again.”

  But one uncertainty eclipsed all the others. Jeff Hostetler’s exceptional performance in the playoffs, and especially on Super Bowl Sunday, had created a quagmire at the quarterback position.

  Like Hostetler, Phil Simms had also brought the Giants a Super Bowl championship, just a few seasons earlier. The 1991 New York Giants depth chart would be the fir
st in history with two quarterbacks to start and win Super Bowls. And Giants players did nothing to settle the issue either.

  “Jeff Hostetler is a great quarterback,” Mark Bavaro said. “He took over for Phil (Simms) when we needed him and filled in great. This Super Bowl was his game. We’re just very thankful for him, that he was on our team. And I’m not taking anything away from Phil. Phil’s a great quarterback too, but so was the Hoss. They’re both great. We love them both.”

  “[It] doesn’t matter to me which one of them is playing,” added Bart Oates, “unless one of them has really cold hands.”

  Even more so than about his own future, the Giants head coach was noncommittal about who would quarterback the team next season.

  “I’ve got two pretty good quarterbacks, that’s not a controversy,” Parcells said. “I’ll go by what I see at the start of training camp. That doesn’t mean the quarterback’s job is wide open. Quite obviously, Jeff Hostetler has earned a tremendous amount of consideration. But, hey, I’ve got a great veteran quarterback. He’s one of my guys.”

  Simms scoffed when approached about retirement—and with good reason. Although Simms would turn thirty-seven that November, prior to the foot injury, he was enjoying the finest season of his career.

  But to earn their second Super Bowl championship, New York had won its final five games, two in the regular season and three during the playoff. Hostetler took all the key snaps, made all the big throws, and endured all the nasty hits in each of those wins. And without his clutch third-down passing the Lombardi Trophy would have been on a plane back to Buffalo instead of New Jersey.