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Norm Snead, Bob Tucker, John Mendenhall, Jack Gregory, Spider Lockhart, UConn’s Vince Clements, scrap book names for the Giants fan of a certain age. Oh, they were the best of times and the worst of times. A New Haven sportswriter, Tom McCormack, who was obsessed with traffic, would get a laugh 25 years later by chortling, “The last car from the last Giants game at the Yale Bowl is just now reaching the Merritt Parkway!” The fans from New York and New Jersey would arrive via the Merritt Parkway and Route 34, and it was hopelessly clogged before and after games.

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because there were no lights, and Yale did not accept the Giants’ offer to install them. I went and disconnected all the heaters and the players got pissed off at me.” “Because the players weren’t into the game, they were all huddled together. “He said, ‘I want you to go and disconnect all the heaters,'” Mara said. In the second half, Mara, who was a freshman at Boston College working games for the team his family founded in 1925, driving to New Haven from Boston on Sunday mornings in a Ford Maverick, was roaming the sidelines when Webster called him over. I really wanted to do that more than anything in the world.’ We all loved him, and it was a very sad moment.”

He pulled me aside and with tears in his eyes and hugged me and said, ‘I’m sorry, I really wanted to give you guys a winner. “It was a cold day and I remember going to the locker room at halftime and we were behind. “That was Alex Webster’s last game as head coach,” Mara said. The ex-Giant quarterback Fran Tarkenton helped crushed them, 31-7. In the last game of the season, the vaunted Vikings came in an epic ice storm. In the first game at The Bowl, a glorious day on Oct.7, 1973, they had the Packers beaten, but gave up a last-minute drive and lost 16-14 on a field goal by Chester Marcol, and it was all downhill from there. The Jets won the first overtime game in NFL history, 26-20, a game that was emblematic of the Giants two seasons of futility at the Yale Bowl, their temporary home. Joe Namath risked his chronically bad knees and scored a touchdown on a bootleg, completely fooling the Giants defense on Nov. The Giants were 8-6 in 1972, then went 6-0 in the preseason – people paid attention in those days - then won the season opener at Yankee Stadium over Houston. What was attractive about Yale Bowl was the size of it, we could accommodate all our season ticket holders and we had played preseason games there. “We were basically thrown out of Yankee Stadium, the Jets were playing at Shea and the Mayor, John Lindsay, had evicted us. “We did not have a lot of options,” Mara said.

The Giants and Jets played had their annual preseason games at Yale Bowl, a charity event, starting in 1969, and preseason games were hotly contested then, especially when it was AFL upstarts against establishment NFL. With Giants Stadium two years from completion, Yankee Stadium being torn apart for renovation, New York City, angry about the franchise relocating across the Hudson, wouldn’t let the Giants share Shea Stadium with the Jets. Tailgating in Lot D was fabulous at Yale Bowl.” “But when there was an opportunity to see them here? Wow. “I was actually upset that the Giants were leaving New York for New Jersey,” Barletta said. He got the jump on everyone when the state started issuing vanity plates with six letters in ’73, and has had G-I-A-N-T-S on his cars ever since, first affixing it to his ’65 Ford Galaxy, which he had painted Giants blue by the popular discount body shop Earl Scheib (again, ask your grandparents). “It was kind of surreal, it was almost too good to be true,” said Jack Barletta, who came from Hamden and is as still as avid a Giants fan as you will ever meet. They were futile, forgettable, but a lot of fun. But it was the NFL, the Giants, playing in our backyard.

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