Rooting For My Tribe, The Jersey Giants

Hell must have frozen over, the world must be about to end, it has to be a blue moon — I’m actually writing about sports. Even I have to put my two cents in about Super Bowl XLII. 

I am the world’s biggest non-sports fan. I don’t think I’ve ever watched ESPN, or any of the New York regional sports channels, on my TV at home. At my old gym, I used to fight with guys who tuned the communal TVs to sports services, instead of CNN or The Today Show.   

About 99.9% of the time, sports bore me to tears.

But where was I Sunday night? I was one of the 97.5 million people who watched the New York Giants rewrite history, sending the finally defeated New England Patriots back to Beantown with their premature “19-0” dreams.

So why did a sports-hater like me watch the game? It was for the same reason that ESPN was one of the early drivers of cable TV, for the same reason that regional sports channels can command some of the highest license fees in the business.

Like it or not, cable operators are under pressure to carry RSNs because subscribers adamantly want them. Customers want to see their local teams, pro and college. 

I’ve had this discussion with affiliate-sales execs at Fox Cable, which owns more RSNs than I can shake a stick at: Sports transcend intellect. They appeal to our tribal instincts, even mine, as they did on Sunday. Your team is your clan, your extended family, and you can’t help but root for it.

How you define “your” team, the factors that tie you to it, varies person to person. For me, even a sports-hater, to be pulling for the Giants Sunday was a no-brainer. I was a cub reporter in New Jersey when Giants Stadium was just completed in East Rutherford, N.J. I feel instilled in the team’s history in the Garden State.

Now the Giants are another reason to be proud of my much-maligned state, along with David Chase, James Gandolfini and the best TV show in history, The Sopranos. New Jersey is Giants country.

The team plays about 15 minutes from my home in Montclair, which, by the way, is where David Tyree was raised and played high school football. Tyree, of course, is the Giant who literally used his noggin to hold the ball and make that miraculous catch Sunday.

Tyree is a hometown hero now, with profiles about his Montclair upbringing in The New York Times and the Daily News today. I read that Tyree’s mother died Dec. 15 of a heart attack. Roughly a week later last December, my dad had a heart attack, which he is now recovering from, so my sympathy is with Tyree right off the bat.

The fact that Tyree was coming out of that tragedy made Sunday’s events, and upset Giants’ win, especially poignant. I don’t care how corny it sounds, I say a Higher Power had a hand helping Tyree make that catch, and that his mom – in the sweet hereafter – saw it.

Today, the Giants will be enjoying their ticker tape victory parade in lower Manhattan, later going back to their true home – New Jersey – for a ceremony there.      

That young whippersnapper Eli Manning, who offered a textbook lesson in leadership and grace under pressure during that final minutes of Sunday’s game, could live anywhere in the New York metro area, I suspect.

But Manning didn’t opt to live in a high-rise in the glitzy Big Apple. He lives across the Hudson River in humble Hoboken, N.J. That says volumes about the guy, right there.

So for those who were stunned, surprised and shocked by Sunday’s events — this victory by a group of underdogs who wouldn’t give up despite the odds — chew on this: That’s just how we roll in New Jersey.