The season for the New York Football Giants is on the line later this afternoon. Here’s wishing good things for Big Blue and all of their fans…

For today, anyway, let’s go Football:

The Knicks lost their third straight last night, but UConn Women’s goes for a record-tying 88th consecutive win today. This afternoon also brings Giants and Eagles as well as Jets and Steelers. Greinke to the Brewers and also some big names moving in the NBA.

Should be a good sports Sunday, Cha-Cha. Enjoy.

Slow weekend round here at the Banter but nice day of NFL action on tap: Jets at 1, Peyton vs. Brady at 4, and the Giants vs the Eagles tonight.

Today’s local NFL action begins with thoughts of Jill Clayburgh.

From the New York Magazine archives, here’s a 1969 piece on Joe Namath by Jimmy Breslin:

In the world of Joe Willie Namath, location and time really don’t matter. They are trying to call this immensely likeable 25-year-old by the name of Broadway Joe. But Broadway as a street has been a busted-out whorehouse with orange juice stands for as long as I can recall, and now, as an expression, it is tired and represents nothing to me. And it certainly represents nothing to Joe Willie Namath’s people. His people are on First and Second Avenues, where young girls spill out of the buildings and into the bars crowded with guys and the world is made of long hair and tape cartridges and swirling color and military overcoats and the girls go home with guys or the guys go home with girls and nobody is too worried about any of it because life moves, it doesn’t stand still and whisper about what happened last night. It is out of these bars and apartment buildings and the life of them that Joe Willie Namath comes. He comes with a Scotch in his hand at night and a football in the daytime and last season he gave New York the only lift the city has had in so many years it is hard to think of a comparison.

When you live in fires and funerals and strikes and rats and crowds and people screaming in the night, sports is the only thing that makes any sense. And there is only one sport anymore that can change the tone of a city and there is only one player who can do it. His name is Joe Willie Namath and when he beat the Baltimore Colts he gave New York the kind of light, meaningless, dippy and lovely few days we had all but forgotten. Once, Babe Ruth used to be able to do it for New York, I guess. Don’t try to tell Namath’s people on First Avenue about Babe Ruth because they don’t even know the name. In fact, with the young, you can forget all of baseball. The sport is gone. But if you ever have seen Ruth, and then you see Namath, you know there is very little difference. I saw Ruth once when he came off the golf course and walked into the bar at the old Bayside course in Queens. He was saying how f’n hot it was and how f’n thirsty he was and he ordered a Tom Collins and the bartender made it in a mixing glass full of chopped ice and then handed the mixing glass to Ruth and the Babe said that was fine, kid, and he opened his mouth and brought up the mixing glass and there went everything. In one shot, he swallowed the mixing glass, ice chunks and everything else. He slapped the mixing glass down and said, give me another one of these f’n things, kid. I still never have seen anybody who could drink like that. After that day, I believed all the stories they told about Ruth.

It is the same thing when you stand at the bar with Joe Namath.

Nicholas Dawidoff has a long profile on Rex Ryan in this week’s New York Times Magazine. For those of you who, you know, dig the pigskin:

Late spring in Florham Park, N.J., under a cloudless sky on a bright green lawn lined for football. It’s too hot, there’s only one lonely shade tree, and Rex Ryan’s latest diet isn’t working out. The New York Jets’ head coach is up over 345 again. Across the way from Ryan is his most valued employee, the magnificent cornerback Darrelle Revis, who is so “frustrated” about his salary that he sometimes seems undone. Living in Ryan’s attic back at the house is Ryan’s best friend since his Oklahoma youth, Jeff Weeks, the Jets’ outside linebackers coach, who is going through a divorce. Down on the farm in Kentucky, Ryan’s father, the pioneering defensive coach Buddy Ryan, has been ill with diverticulitis, while out in Cleveland, Ryan’s twin brother, Rob, is coordinating the defense for Browns Coach Eric Mangini, who had Ryan’s job until he was fired for what holdover Jets delicately call “negativity.” That, at least, will never be Ryan’s problem. “How great is this!” he cries, looking around. “My life is perfect.”

Jets practices are all planned to the minute long before they take place, with the formal responsibilities delegated to the various positional coaches, as well as to the team’s offensive coordinator, Brian Schottenheimer, and its defensive coordinator, Mike Pettine. As these worthies exhort their charges, it’s easy to imagine them all astride wheeling horses on some military parade ground, hardening their regiments for the long campaigns of autumn. Ryan is left to do exactly what he pleases, which almost always amounts to meandering from group to group, being enthusiastic. Wherever he wanders, Ryan is hard to miss. An immense man whose thick foothills of neck and haunch swell into a spectacular butte at the midsection, he possesses a personal geography that, from first-and-10 distance, assumes a form that follows his function — Ryan looks like nothing more than an extra-large football.

A Bronx Banter Interview

By Hank Waddles

I can pinpoint the exact date when I became a Dallas Cowboys fan. On January 15, 1978, I was a young boy living in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, but without any attachment to the Lions when my Aunt Hazel and Uncle Tommy came over to watch Super Bowl XII between the Cowboys and the Denver Broncos. Uncle Tommy had bet money on the Broncos, so each time the Cowboys scored his face would twist into a painful grimace. Since I was an eight-year-old smart aleck, I thought it was hilarious and soon found myself quite naturally rooting for the Cowboys and against my uncle. When Dallas scored its final points, putting the game out of reach for the Broncos, Uncle Tommy actually slid off the couch in disgust, making me laugh out loud until my mother shushed me. My uncle passed away only a few years later, so that night remains my strongest memory of him. I’ll never know how much money he lost that night, but I gained a team.

Perhaps because I took pleasure in my uncle’s pain, the Cowboys rewarded me with a string of painful losses: to the Steelers a year later in Supe XIII (thank you, Jackie Smith); to Montana and Clark; to Riggins and the Hogs. Soon enough they descended into mediocrity and irrelevance, until Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson came to the rescue and rebuilt the franchise.

Any football fan can tell you what happened next. Jerry and Jimmy turned the team upside down, traded Herschel Walker, drafted Aikman and Emmitt, and started winning Super Bowls. Author Jeff Pearlman starts with what we know and goes deeper, talking to everyone who had anything to do with the team during that era, ranging from the players and coaches to the reporters who covered them to the women who slept with them. The result is Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty, a revealing and engaging look at one of the greatest teams in NFL history. Recently Jeff was kind enough to talk with me about the book. Enjoy.

BronxBanter
I’m guessing that this book was kind of a perfect storm – high profile football players that haven’t yet faded from the public consciousness, lots of Super Bowls, lots of sex, and lots of drugs. How long after you started this project did you realize you had hit a goldmine?

Jeff Pearlman
I would say I actually knew even before I started it. I’ll be totally honest with you – I haven’t even said this to anyone. I had a really, really, really good feeling about this book early on. Early on. This was basically my way of thinking. My first book about the ’86 Mets made the Times best seller list for six or seven weeks, and I didn’t expect it to. I had no expectations at all because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, it was my first book, and it made it. My kind of way of thinking with this, the Cowboys were like the Mets on steroids. You’re talking about a team that’s probably the most popular sports franchise in the country, much more famous figures. With the Mets, yeah, you’re talking Gooden and Strawberry, but then Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter are big New York figures, but they’re not national guys. With the Cowboys – Aikman, Deion, Emmitt, Irvin, Switzer, Jerry, Jimmy… it was pretty bountiful.

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