1978 - a cold, dark era ended by a hot fire ...

[kartanoman]

When I think back to my childhood, and following the Giants, few memories burn vividly in my brain as the game that would be the final victory of the John McVay era: a 17-0 shutout over the Cardinals in sub-zero Giants Stadium.  As I type this, feelings of perpetual cold work their way through my fingers and into the rest of my body. I can never remember being so cold to the point of crying in pain. During a day when adults brought their brandy, schnapps or other self-heating elixir, along with their pissed-off attitude, to keep the proverbial mojo flowing and help them forget the -1 degree wind chills, not even my hot chocolate and father's Army blanket could keep me focused on a day when one of the most bizarre events in team history took place.

Going back to the place ... back to the time, the scene is three weeks removed from "The Fumble" when the tenuous progress of the Giant organization in the Robustelli/McVay era completely crumbled.  As if the Giant fans hadn't enough to revolt about on that fateful day in 1978 on November 19, they became further disenfranchised following the second half collapse the following week in Buffalo when a 17-7 lead disintegrated into a 41-17 trouncing and the week after when the weekly beatings on Joe Pisarcik finally took their toll as the Rams put him in the hospital and Randy Dean's pick returned for a TD proved to be the difference in a 20-17 loss to Los Angeles. By then, the fans had already expressed their displeasure by inviting the television cameras into the porta-potties outside the stadium for a ticket-burning ceremony intent on capturing Wellington Mara's attention. It was an organzied protest initiated by Giants fans who had long had enough of promises of better days that always ended in disappointment. The following is a 2003 artcle by Steve Politi of the Star Ledger which was intended to relive the infamy of the '78 season as the Fassel era came to a close in '03. The article brings insight to what actually happened nearly 30 years ago:

Giants: Burning Mad

Wednesday, December 03, 2003

BY STEVE POLITI
Star-Ledger Staff

Ron Freiman is a businessman, a middle-class guy who owned a printing business, and a sports fan. He is not some leftover hippie from the '60s, not the kind of person to stir things up for a cause.

But he was angry.

Oh, he was angry.

His Giants were bad and had been bad for years. Then, one cold Sunday afternoon in 1978, he sat in his Giants Stadium seats and watched quarterback Joe Pisarcik fumble away the football with 30 seconds left, leading to a seemingly impossible Eagles touchdown in the most embarrassing loss in team history.

Freiman had to do something, so he took out an ad in The Star-Ledger. He encouraged fans to send him their tickets for a public burning. He figured if a few fans followed through, at least he knew someone was sharing his misery.

"I took out the ad and I totally forgot about it," said Freiman, who now lives in Florida. "Then I got a call from the classified people at the paper: 'Mr. Freiman, your box is full. Hurry up and come get your mail!'

"I couldn't possibly predict such a silly thing would make such a commotion."

He started the Great Giants Fan Protest, a movement of frustrated season-ticket holders who decided they could no longer sit idly in their seats and watch their favorite team lose game after game. They took action.

Twenty-five years ago today, more than 100 fans burned their tickets in a urinal outside the stadium.

So, if Giants fans this season believe they are taking a stand by booing the team's poor effort, leaving home games early -- if they show up at all -- and chanting for coach Jim Fassel to be fired, they are following Freiman's example. His group was the first to get justice -- and action -- for suffering Giants fans.

One week after the ticket burning, another group organized into the Committee Against Mara Insensitivity To Giants Fans. They passed a hat around a Route 3 motel and, for $236.50, hired a small plane to fly over the stadium with a message.

"15 Years of Lousy Football -- We've Had Enough!"

Three years after the protests, the Giants made the playoffs. Five years after that, in the 1986 season, they won their first Super Bowl.

In the opinion of the men who organized the fan movement, this was no coincidence.

"Who did that? We did that," said Morris Spielberg, a Newark furniture store owner and a key participant. "A lot of people said, 'Mind your own business.' Well, it was our business.

"It was our team. We're the ones who turned the thing around, because what we did caused so much turmoil."


BLAMING MARA


The ironic part? The Giants of 1978 had a better record before the protests, at 5-7, than the Giants of 2003, at 4-8, do now.

The difference, however, was the constant losing. The Giants reached the playoffs last season. In '78 the team was on its way to a sixth straight season without putting a winning team on the field. It was the darkest era in franchise history.

Many fans placed the blame on Mara, the venerable Giants owner. They watched the Cowboys and Dolphins, newcomers in the NFL compared to the established Giants, come into the league and have dominating seasons. These were teams with modern scouting practices and a new generation of football men running their teams.

The Giants?

"They used to field a team that, frankly, was not competitive," Freiman said. "If they won, it was luck. They weren't doing things the right way."

Freiman placed his ad to raise awareness. He did not anticipate becoming a parking-lot celebrity at the Meadowlands, a fan whose one small advertisement would lead to media requests from across the country.

"Good Morning America" called. So did all the major newspapers from the area. His mother, a Palm Beach, Fla., resident, would use the sports pages for one purpose: to empty the coffee grinds every day.

One morning, she poured the grinds on her son's face.

"People wanted my tickets revoked. They said it was an outrage, this and that," Freiman said. "It was crazy. It was one thing after another."

Finally, the big moment came that Sunday. With the Giants set to host the Los Angeles Rams, Freiman delivered a short speech for the fans and the cameras before putting his ticket fragments into a urinal and setting them on fire.

The Giants lost, 20-17. A few days later, as promised, Freiman put the ashes in an urn and mailed them to Mara.

"Yeah, I remember," Mara said in the locker room after his current team's most recent debacle, a 24-7 loss to the Buffalo Bills. "It was just an expression of dissatisfaction about the team."

It wasn't the first time Mara heard from the fans. It wouldn't be the last, either.

"I guess I can top that a little bit now," he said. "I had a letter from a fan two weeks ago who said he'd been a Giant fan for so long, the usual stuff. He said, 'After what happened yesterday' -- I don't know what game it was -- 'I got every piece of Giants clothing in the house, took it out into the yard and burned it.'

"He might be the son of the guy who burned the tickets," Mara added, cracking a smile. "I don't know."


TAKING TO THE AIR


Mara can smile now. He was not smiling, however, when one week after the ticket burning, a small plane flew over the stadium with another message from more angry fans. This time, Mara was fuming.

He had this exchange with Dave Anderson, a New York Times columnist, after that game, which the Giants actually won, 17-0, over St. Louis:

"Did you see the plane?"

"No."

"But you must've heard about it."

"Yes."

"And what did you think?"

"I didn't think."

This protest was the work of Spielberg, the furniture store owner, and Peter Valentine, a Maplewood resident and a lawyer. The two men, inspired by what Freiman had done with his ad, placed their own advertisement in The Star-Ledger.

This ad encouraged disgruntled fans to join them at an organizational meeting for a new committee. A few fans showed up for the first meeting at the old Claremont Diner on Route 3 to map out their strategies.

There were doctors, lawyers, businessmen and other professionals, and Spielberg expected a different type of protest. Burning tickets in a urinal? No, this would not be their approach, he thought.

"We wanted to avoid being off the wall," Spielberg said. "We were trying to approach it on a legal basis. We wanted to be very sophisticated. Go to the Supreme Court with it or something."

Then Arthur Milne, a dentist from Basking Ridge, came up with an idea.

"Let's fly a plane over the stadium!" he told the group.

"What are you, nuts?' Spielberg said.

"Well, if you don't do it," Milne said, "I'm going to do it myself."

So they went to work on the idea. Valentine collected the money and contacted a company at nearby Teterboro Airport. They decided on the message, "We've Had Enough," which came from the hit movie, "Network."

That meeting broke up, and Spielberg placed another advertisement in The Star-Ledger -- fan protests apparently were good for newspaper revenues back then -- inviting all Giants fans to attend a "gigantic protest breakfast" at the Ramada Inn on Route 3 the morning of the St. Louis game.

About 100 people paid $3 for their continental breakfast to gripe about the team. One man stood up and told the crowd that the Giants were giving him chest pains. Several other men agreed: The team was making them physically ill.

A plan was set in motion to distribute fliers at the game, encouraging fans to chant "We've Had Enough!" when the small plane flew over the stadium. The plane was an hour late, but when it arrived, the fans did as they were instructed.

Valentine calls the price of the advertisement and airplane "the best investment I ever made."

"It's 25 years later, and you're still talking to me," Valentine said. "A million judges know who I am. When I come into the courtroom, they'll ask me, 'How are the Giants going to do this year?'"


SUPER BOWL-BOUND


The Committee Against Mara Insensitivity To Giants Fans never met again. Freiman soon became just another fan.

But the Giants did exactly what the fans had hoped when they started the protest: The team hired George Young as general manager, took a modern approach to the game and reached the playoffs in 1981.

Soon, Phil Simms, Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks were drafted, and the three protest organizers found themselves at Super Bow XXI. All three still have season tickets -- nobody ever gives up Giants tickets -- but they rarely attend games.

"I let my son suffer now," Valentine said. "My suffering is over. We had those Super Bowl years, and then we have those teasers. That's what I call them -- teasers. You could do a 90-minute movie of Giants' blunders."

Would they encourage the fans to protest this team? On this topic, the men are divided.

Spielberg believes the current situation is much different, and that the leadership is in place to turn the team around. If he protested anything, it would be co-owner Robert Tisch's role as co-chairman of the Loews Corporation, which controls nearly 8 percent of the U.S. tobacco market.

"The guys who are in charge, they're strong men, they're bright men," Spielberg said. "They have the guys who know what to do."

Valentine disagrees. If he were attending games, he could see himself placing more newspaper ads, forming another committee and burning more tickets.

The airplane? In the post-9/11 world, he knows there could never be another protest like that.

"I think it's time! It's time to do it again -- and then to stay away!" Valentine said. "Hit them where it hurts. You know where? The wallet. Sometimes, they listen, and you get results."

While I do not agree with these protesters in that they believe their actions were the catalyst in the changes that took place soon afterward, I do not doubt for a single second that their message was heard.  I cannot forget just how scary a place it was for me back then, a nine-year old boy, to attend a game under those circumstances. The atmosphere was brewing in the parking lot as drunk fans were cursing Mara and the team and I, at times, feared my life as I stayed very close to my father as we headed for the turnstiles. In the stadium, the boos rang loudly and hearing many of them pointed in John McVay's direction was as unbelievable as it was disgraceful and inappropriate. Despite the fact that the Giants' defense came to play, and the fact that Randy Dean running the option play was the Giants' biggest offensive strategy, the fans continued to express their discontent. Finally, about six minutes into the third quarter, the infamous plane finally made its way overhead. Reading the "cue card" (i.e. flyer that was passed out to all the fans), the fans completely lost it and started yelling like crazy. As the banner which read "Fifteen Years of Lousy Football - We've Had Enough" made it's way over the stadium, the chant began ... "we've had enough ... we've had enough!" Too young to comprehend what was going on, I remember being more scared than I was cold. At that point, even my father had enough of the fans and mercifully dragged me out of the park and back to the warmth of the car. The twenty minute ride back down the Turnpike to exit 13 (Elizabeth) seemed like forever as I couldn't wait to get in the house and under the covers! We ended up watching the rest of the game wrapped in blankets on the sofa in the TV room.  Watching the rest of the game, not even Gary Bender and Hank Stram could identify what the ruckus was all about or what the fans were cheering and yelling for; but my father and I could. We were witness to the fire that was lit by frustrated Giants fans of the day in hopes of erasing an era of cold, darkness and hopelessness that was every season in recent memory at that point in time.

Of course, we all know how the story played out. Though it took a few seasons after the changes were implemented in 1979, the Giants became winners and, eventually, champions. Even today, as Giants fans yell and complain about every move the Giants make, or didn't make, that results in their inability to win the grand prize, I say not one of them has the intestinal fortitude of the Giants fans during that cold, dark era in 1978 who went to absolute extremes to communicate their feelings in hopes of letting the owners know that it wasn't working and to alter the course. As I go back, and play the video of that game in those freezing conditions, it shows an absolutely crazy bunch of folks who demonstrated their unadulterated love of their football team and offered team ownership a light from a fire that they hoped would guide the team onto the right path.

Mission accomplished!

Peace!

[retrojint]

Kart:  Read it earlier this afternoon.  Enjoyed it a lot.  Captured the essence of some of that youthful insouciance that we had in the day when we hug in through those lean years.  Randy Dean running the option.  There's an image that I'd like to shake tonight.  A nightmare.  Thank you for taking the time. 

[LennG]

Just a wonderful write up and if I may say so, so accurately captures the times and the feelings of so many. I have copied it and forwarded it to my son, so he can relive waht we, as Giants fans, had to deal with and how we felt.
Terrific.

[NapoleonBlownapart]

I am laughing... 3$ breakfast at the Ramada on rt 3 ?