Aunt Eleanor Got Me There

My Aunt Eleanor got me front-row seats on the fifty-yard line for a Giants game.

My friend Tyler and I tore up the tickets and stayed outside.

We were picketing with the Giants.

That takes a little explaining. A lot of my Giants memories do. But this one starts with my aunt, because she made it possible for me to be there.

Aunt Eleanor.

She started at the Meadowlands, working at Brendan Byrne Arena, and worked her way up. As I remember it, she eventually ran the entire sanitation operation. The exact title is something I’d want to check with her. How people felt about her is clear in my memory.

Everybody loved Eleanor.

Beautiful woman. Still is. She’s still here, and I want her to have a place in these stories while I can tell her what those things meant to me.

She found ways to get me tickets. For a Giants fan growing up with this team, that was a hell of a thing to have an aunt doing for you.

I had the television. I had the school-bus arguments. Thanks to Eleanor, I also got to be in the stadium, with the game right there in front of me and my own voice somewhere in all that noise.

She got me into the playoffs, too.

December 29, 1985. San Francisco at Giants Stadium. Our first home playoff game in more than twenty years.

I was there, courtesy of Aunt Eleanor.

The Giants beat the defending Super Bowl champions, 17–3. After all those years of waiting for this team to get back to winning, I got to be in the stadium for that.

The school-bus arguments were one part of those years. This was another. I was there for a playoff win, with the Giants becoming the team that would win it all the following season. Eleanor made it possible.

The Flipper Anderson game.

Four years later, I was there for the Flipper Anderson game, too.

January 7, 1990. The Rams beat the Giants 19–13 in overtime, and Anderson caught the winning touchdown and kept running into the tunnel.

That one.

I know exactly why Giants fans remember it. I was in the building, courtesy of my aunt. Some of the games somebody gets you into stay with you because of how much the ending hurt.

But I got to be there. Even with that ending, being able to say that means something to me.

Front row. Fifty-yard line.

For one of the strike games, Eleanor got me those seats. Think about that for a minute. Front row, right at midfield. Those were the tickets we had.

Then Tyler and I met some of the Giants outside. The players were picketing.

We ended up joining them.

We ripped up our tickets and picketed with the Giants instead of going inside to watch the game. The seats could stay empty. We were out there with the players.

I went to the stadium with one kind of day available to me and came home having had another one entirely.

Tyler and I had picket signs from the Giants that day. Actual signs we could keep. Something to hold onto from the day we gave up the best seats we’d ever need and stood outside with our team.

The program.

Eleanor also got me something I wish I could put in front of you now.

A game-day program, sometime around 1984 or ’85. She had the players sign it on their own pages. Carl Banks and the other Giants. Autographs made out to me.

She went down on the field and played catch with Phil Simms, too.

My aunt was playing catch with Phil Simms and getting these men to sign a program for her nephew. You can understand why I’m still talking about it.

Those were the players I followed. The names I defended. There they were in the program, with their handwriting on the pages and those signatures addressed to me.

Eleanor had done that.

What I can still keep.

Years later, my father burned down our family home before taking his own life.

The program and the picket signs were lost in that fire.

I wish I could open that program here and show you the signatures. I wish I could hold up the sign Tyler and I brought home. I’d love for you to see them.

I still remember them.

I remember who got me there. I remember what we did when we got there. I remember that my aunt took the time to get those players to write their names for me.

That belongs in the story of being a Giants fan every bit as much as the scores do. Somebody cared enough to make it possible for me to have these memories.

Her name is Eleanor.

Thank you, Aunt Eleanor. I still remember.