IN 1959, my father told me he had a special bar mitzvah present for the following year - a professional football team. He knew it bothered me that Boston didn't have a team in the NFL despite being one of only six cities in the NHL and one of eight in the NBA. And, of course, there was the pitching-challenged Red Sox.
So now we finally had an NFL franchise? No. He explained that the Boston Patriots were going to be part of a new league, the American Football League. It didn't matter. I loved everything about the Patriots and the AFL from the beginning. I'd read up on the new players - Butch Songin, Jimmy Colclough, Gino Cappelletti, Ron Burton. I felt a sudden kinship with cities I had barely heard of - Denver, Buffalo, Houston. I couldn't have been happier if Ursula Andress had walked off the screen in "Dr. No" and into my arms. My heart belonged to the Boston Patriots and the new league.
You would think most Bostonians of my vintage would share in the same nostalgia as the New England Patriots vie for an undefeated season and its fourth NFL Super Bowl title.
You would be wrong. The beloved team in the Boston area throughout the early to mid-'60s was the very team that 99 percent of the folks around here will now be rooting against on Saturday: the New York Giants.
Back then, CBS continued to broadcast the Giants games here every Sunday while the AFL, at first, was on the aptly spunky ABC. The Patriots were so intimidated by the Giants' popularity that they played most of their home games on Friday and Saturday nights. All but a handful of my friends refused to take the new league seriously and went on worshipping Y.A. Tittle, Frank Gifford, and all the rest.
Frankly, I always hated the Giants. Even before the AFL, my father and I were Cleveland Browns fans, since Channel 5 broadcast their games as part of a syndicated package and Jim Brown was a more intriguing player to me than anyone on the white-bread Giants.
In general, the NFL represented conformity, short hair (Johnny Unitas), dull defensive games. Richard Nixon could have been its commissioner.
The AFL represented rebellion, long hair (Joe Namath in 1965), flashy offensive games. Johnny Cash could have been its commissioner. (OK, Jack Kemp was in the AFL, too.)
Meanwhile, Boston remained split. At the end of one early season, the Patriots missed the playoffs but romped over the Chargers, then the best AFL team, in the final game. Coming home on the school bus the next day, a friend, a Giants fan, said, "The Patriots played really well yesterday, didn't they?" I was elated that they had at last found recognition in the eyes of this jock, particularly when he added, "They probably could have beaten the Giants, don't you think?" I nodded like a puppy.
He was only setting me up. He turned and announced to the rest of the bus, "Siegel thinks the Patriots can beat the Giants." Gales of laughter went up. And this was a Boston Latin School bus. Imagine if it had been Boston English. I would have been thrown onto Huntington Avenue.
It didn't matter. My father, friends, and I continued to trudge from Boston University - where the Boston Braves used to play - to all the other places the itinerant Patriots found a home, including Fenway Park. The players got better, the league got better, and when in 1969 Namath led the Jets over Unitas's and Earl Morrall's crew-cut Colts in Super Bowl III, the AFL's first victory, I couldn't have been happier if it had been the Patriots who had won. The Giants weren't even the best team in New York anymore.
Now, like the boomers who grew up with them, the rebels have become the establishment. Songin and Babe Parilli, the team's first two quarterbacks, would have thought that a date with a super model meant putting time aside to build a big toy airplane. The new Patriots are poised to make history, but only if they win another Super Bowl.
Still, Saturday's game has special meaning to me, my old friends, and my father if they have football in heaven. (And let's face it, it wouldn't be heaven without pro football.)
Today, nobody is laughing when I say, "Siegel thinks the Patriots can beat the Giants."
Ed Siegel is former theater and television critic for The Boston Globe.
