Eagles fans call it the Miracle at the Meadowlands.
Fuck that.
It was the fumble.
It is my first real Giants memory.
Not the first Giants game I ever watched. I know I watched them before that.
But this is the first one I can still walk into.
Sunday, November 19, 1978. I’m ten years old, at my grandparents’ house in Bricktown, New Jersey.
Sandy Point Drive. A lagoon directly across the street. If you walked down to the end of the road, you came to the Metedeconk River. Beyond the river was the barrier island, and beyond that, the Atlantic.
Before the Shore, my grandparents had a dressmaking business in Bayonne. My grandmother made clothes in their sewing factory and sold them to Bloomingdale’s.
They’d escape Bayonne’s heat and humidity at Holsey’s Landing, near the area I knew as Breton Woods. In their stories, the roads were dirt and there was hardly anybody around.
They sold the business and retired to the Shore. My parents bought a house down there, too, and my father commuted to New York.
But when I go back, I’m inside. I can smell the Kent cigarettes.
My grandfather smoked them one after another after another. He sat in a green upholstered recliner. His hair was oily, and it left a stain where his head rested against the back. Eventually, the chair would get covered in blankets. There were cigarette burns in it, too.
There was a little table between his chair and mine. A place for my glass of water, my little stuff. His ashtray was beside him. The table had its own cigarette burns, from the ones that got away.
I imagine a lot of people my age can picture that table without much help.
My grandmother used to yell at him. She swore he was going to burn himself alive, falling asleep in that chair with a cigarette still going.
So I watched the ash.
You know the kind. The cigarette keeps burning, and somehow the ash keeps hanging on. He’d doze off with it in his hand, and I’d see how long it was getting.
Sometimes I’d pick up the ashtray and bring it right up under the cigarette, then knock the ash off for him. Sometimes I’d take the cigarette and put it out.
He wouldn’t even know he’d fallen asleep. I’d go back to watching the game.
That was part of sitting with him. The football was on, and every so often I checked the cigarette.
The televisions changed over the years. We started with a little black-and-white set, maybe thirteen inches. Eventually there was a nineteen-inch black-and-white. I honestly can’t remember whether we’d made it to color by the time of the fumble.
I remember the antenna, though.
A box sat on top of the television, with wires in the middle and these long rabbit ears sticking up. Much better than the little antennas that came with the set. There was a dial you could turn to change the reception.
What the fuck that dial actually did, I couldn’t tell you. But we turned it.
We got pretty good reception down there. There was a lot of open water between us and the signals, and we could pick up the Philadelphia stations, too.
Which, looking back, seems like more access to the Eagles than our household needed.
My grandfather had played semi-pro baseball and football when he was younger. They got paid next to nothing. They played because they loved it.
That was the man in the chair beside me.
By the time I knew him, he worked security at Ocean County College. My grandmother worked there with him. Selling the business hadn’t meant they were finished working.
He’d take me to the bar with him, and I knew enough sports to win bets. I liked knowing things he knew. I liked being there with him.
I also had a little pewter mug. It had a black leather wrap around it and said something like “Little Slugger.” The mug was for me.
He’d pour a little shot of beer into it. Then, sometimes, another.
Every once in a while, Little Slugger accumulated enough little shots to get drunk.
My grandmother would get pissed at him and start banging pots. You could follow the progress of her argument without leaving the room.
Those are the Sundays that surround this one in my memory: the mug, the pots, the cigarette ash, the two chairs. I can’t assign every detail to the right afternoon anymore.
The fumble has its own date.
The Giants were beating Philadelphia, 17–12. The game was almost over. The Eagles had no timeouts left. We had the ball.
We were going to win.
I was so fucking happy. Happy about the Giants. Happy to be sitting there with my grandfather, watching them win together.
There was a whole other audience waiting for the result, too. He had his bets and the people he’d have to face at the bar. I had the school bus.
There seemed to be more Eagles and Jets fans on that bus than Giants fans. Everybody gave everybody shit. A win meant you had something to say on Monday.
This one was right there.
Then Joe Pisarcik tried to hand the ball to Larry Csonka.
The ball came loose.
Herman Edwards picked it up.
You can watch the play now and know exactly what’s coming. You can know the names, the score, the whole miserable history of it.
The first time, I was ten. I was watching it happen.
My grandfather was furious. The swearing started. I was devastated.
A moment before, we’d been sitting there with a win almost finished. Now the Eagles had the touchdown. By the end, it was 19–17, Philadelphia.
I had to get on that fucking bus. He had to face his people. Neither of us could do a thing about what had just happened on that television.
That’s the game I remember first.
But when I think about it now, I spend a lot more time in the room than I do on the play.
I remember the stain on the chair. The burns on the table. The little mug. My grandmother banging pots because her husband was giving the kid beer again.
I remember watching a cigarette ash get too long and getting the ashtray underneath it.
My grandfather eventually died of lung cancer. I had to watch that, too.
The Kents belong to both memories. I can still smell them when I think about sitting beside him, and I know what came later.
I wish I could have another afternoon with him. I’d put up with the antenna dial and the pots and whatever the Giants decided to put us through.
Even that game.
I’d sit in my chair. He’d be in his.
The little table would be between us.
If he fell asleep, I’d take care of the cigarette.