Some Giants fans in New England trace their loyalty back to "The Greatest Game Ever Played" in which the Colts' Alan Ameche scored the winning TD.
(Associated Press)
It's about 15 degrees out and Gary Romancewicz, 41, is willing to run down the street and knock.
"I'm not sure who lives there, but I've seen the Giants banner hanging," he says, standing outside, on his cellphone. He swears he's done this kind of thing before. "I'm the kind of guy who would do that. I'd like to know another real Giants fan in this neighborhood. But otherwise, around here, I don't know one of 'em."
Around here is Waltham. And any "real" New York Giants fan from Massachusetts has a story like Romancewicz's. There just aren't many left.
When he was 10, Romancewicz didn't understand why the Giants were on television every week, and he became fascinated. He would tiptoe to his bedroom and crank his dial to Channel 4 while his father watched the Patriots on Channel 7. This sort of rebellious behavior was probably a tipoff that he would grow into a man who would run down the street in the dead of winter to knock on a door because there was a department store sports flag hanging there.
But this wasn't rebellion. Romancewicz was rooting for the home team. Sort of.
"He calls us, 'The Direct Descendants,' " says Romancewicz, rustling through five-year-old newspaper clippings written by the Globe's Dan Shaughnessy and others. The torn-out columns are little pieces of scripture. They got him through the years of losing earlier in the decade and will explain away the worn-out Giants jerseys to curious co-workers in the days leading up to Sunday's Patriots-Giants Super Bowl.
"And here: 'New England's other pro team.' "
Really, they were New England's only pro team. Before Patriots owner Billy Sullivan brought pro football to Boston in 1960, New England pigskin was New York Giants pigskin.
A club is founded
Barry Belotti grew up in a big Italian family in Providence. There was an even bigger Italian dinner every Sunday. There was a color TV set propped up in the living room, and Uncle Angelo wouldn't miss a week of hometown football if it killed him.
"He would say, 'Barry, this is the New York Football Giants,' just like Howard Cosell used to," says Belotti, 48, who grew up in Watertown. He chuckles.
"Color TV was new, so he had the picture as bright as can be. The grass was so electric green. It was like watching something in 3-D."
Then the real thing came, and it was better than TV with badly adjusted contrast settings. The American Football League, underfunded and saddled by local TV blackouts and poor attendance, merged with the National Football League. The Patriots moved to a stadium in Foxborough in 1970 and fans started spending their Sundays there, especially when the Patriots started making the playoffs toward the end of the decade.
Giants fans were left out in the cold. But there were no flags, no places to run and knock.
Ronnie Anderson tried to fix that.
If you listened to Boston sports talk radio in the 1980s and '90s, you may remember him as Malden Ron. He would call in and talk only Giants football.
There's an old story that Tewksbury native Rich Rooney remembers about Malden Ron. After a game sometime in the '80s, Ron went out to buy a bag of manure for a Giants lineman. "When he handed it to him, he said, 'You played like crap, you deserve crap.' " Rooney says.
Anderson wanted to know people like that.
He compiled a list of Giants fans, diehards who didn't defect when the Patriots came. He wanted a banquet every year with a player, a coach, a sportswriter to enlighten them, to tell them that they were doing the right thing all this time. He called it the Giants Fan Club of New England.
They still have that banquet today, and Rooney is the treasurer of the club. Giants coach Tom Coughlin came and raffled off tickets once, Rooney says. They liked that; they felt like the home team again for a few minutes.
But attendance dwindled because of the Patriots' three Super Bowl wins. The club, which had up to 600 people in the '80s, was down to about 200 last year. The newsletter was already getting hard to pay for when Malden Ron died in 2005. A generation was passing and there was no one to replace it.
"Children grow older and, whether they're a Pats fan or a Giants fan, I don't even know, but I know we're on a decline," says John Berti, the group's chairman. Berti, 70, says he has been a fan since 1948. He was at "The Greatest Game Ever Played," the 1958 NFL championship between the Giants and Baltimore Colts.
"Right now we have enough money for another banquet or two, but after that it's eventually just going to, well, go away."
But there's a group in Boston that meets in Kenmore Square, Berti says, and it's giving them hope. Young kids, he says, really young kids have been getting together.
Rebuilding years
Patrick McCrosson, 31, isn't worried about the future of Giants fans in New England. He's just worried about getting kicked out of the Kenmore Square Pizzeria Uno on Super Bowl Sunday.
"Look, it's like the stock market," says McCrosson, a banker, speaking from experience. "The Giants have been horrible and they will be again. Eventually the Patriots will be horrible, too. Sports is very much traditional, but there will always be people who root for a team just because they're good."
But the group is primed to extend the Giants generation. They have a burgeoning Facebook group. Word has caught on so quickly that McCrosson now needs a "partner in crime," Marnie Joyner, to wrangle newcomers. And they're even wooing Patriots fans.
"Last week, a Patriots fan sat in our group because they wanted to see who they were playing next week," he says. "We told him to come back next week. It would be so boring if they were playing the Arizona Cardinals or something. I mean, if [the Patriots] win, we're happy for them."
So there will be doors to knock on in New England again. And Gary Romancewicz has proof.
A couple of days ago, his daughter Nicole stumbled over to him. She was probably decked out in a Patriots shirt at the time - she seems to have been covered in that sneering silver logo since her birth three years ago, compiling more and more apparel from her grandfather with every Patriot accomplishment: AFC East champions. AFC champions. Super Bowl champions.
But Nicole wanted to tell her dad that she was a Giants fan.
Just like him.
"I might not want to tell too many people that story. It might set too many people off," Romancewicz says. "But this is the last few years of real New England Giants fans around here. We're a dying breed. We need her."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
