The familiar smiting of foreheads continues with New York football fans. Ahead by 11 points with fewer than seven minutes to play last week, the Giants managed to lose to Philadelphia, 22-21.
Cue Mark Twain—“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”—and I’ll tell you about covering a striking preview to current gridiron developments in 1976 as Newsday’s Giants beat writer.
In ’76, the Giants had at last won a game—in their 10th try—at home against Washington, whereupon they immediately lost the next week. By one point. This year, their first victory—much earlier; sixth game—also came in the Jersey Meadowlands, also against Washington, also followed by this latest failure, also by a single point.
Furthermore, in each of the long overdue, skin-of-the-teeth first-of-the-season successes—in 1976 and 2020—the Giants barely had escaped yet another defeat in the final minute vs. Washington.
In ’76, with the Giants ahead by 3, Washington set up for a final offensive play at the Giants’ seven-yard line with 41 seconds remaining. An option pass, the potential winning score, was tipped by a rookie Giants linebacker named Harry Carson (who went on to a 13-year NFL career and a place in the Hall of Fame) and was intercepted in the end zone.
In 2020, ahead by 1 with 36 seconds left, the Giants were faced with a Washington two-point conversion attempt after the apparent tying touchdown. That went awry under defensive pressure from Giants defenders and, combined with Washington coach Ron Rivera’s risky decision not to play for the PAT and overtime, saved the Giants’ bacon.
Followed by the next week’s close-but-no-cigar let-down. Now as then. An echo from 44 years earlier.
The famous George Santayana quote—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—may not apply so much as novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s rejoinder: “I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana. We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”
Not that re-runs are exact. In ’76, there was no sports talk radio for anguished boosters to let off steam. No social media, either. Of course, here in 2020, with fans homebound by the coronavirus, there isn’t instant in-stadium Monday-morning quarterbacking via the old raspberry. And one other minor, extraneous difference: The Washington Football Team no longer has an offensive nickname, as in 1976.
So the Giants are 1-6, a smidge ahead of their ’76 record of 0-7, then on their way to 3-11. Another non-playoff season apparently is assured, which would make four in a row and eight in the last nine years. While, by the way, their co-tenants at MetLife Stadium, the New York Jets, who were 1-6 at this point in ’76, also headed for a 3-11 record, now are 0-7. Sort of neighboring mirror images.
“History is a poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water,” Canadian poet/novelist Anne Michaels wrote. “It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, or precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history; an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.”
Whoa. In 1976, after a seventh consecutive loss, the Giants fired head coach Bill Arnsparger, a brick of potential that appears about to hit winless Jets coach Adam Gase in the back of the head. And in ’76, the Jets had a first-year head coach, Lou Holtz, who resigned in hopelessness after the team’s next-to-last game. That idea wouldn’t be resurrected by this year’s first-year Giants coach, Joe Judge, would it? More rhyming history?