WHITE PLAINS CITIZENETREPORTER 3,374,995 VISITS IN ONE YEAR—65,000 VISITS A WEEK BY 985,281 VISITORS

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WPCNR COMMON COUNCIL CHRONICLE-EXAMINER. January 23, 2008: The Common Council will hold a special meeting Thursday evening at 6 to discuss the following items:

1.                        126 Barton Road – community residential facility for developmentally disabled.

2.                        Consolidated Edison – New Street

3.                        55 Bank Street – site plan revisions.

4.                        Renaissance Square – traffic island.

5.                        Air Rights Building.

6.                                          Zoning Ordinance – proposed amendment – additional story.

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WPCNR POLICE GAZETTE. From The Mayor’s Office. January 22,  2008: Mayor Joseph Delfino announced today that the City of White Plains has reduced overall, serious or Part 1 Crimes to their lowest levels in 42 years. The numbers of specific crimes such as robbery, burglary and auto theft are the lowest since 1965. Most importantly, there were no homicides in the City during 2007.  The last occurred in May 2006.

The city said these statistics are reflective of the success of several initiatives implemented over the past few years, such as:
   
–    Weekly CompStat meetings
–    Neighborhood Conditions Unit
–    Traffic Unit
–    Community Policing Division 
–    Partnership with the Pace Women’s Justice Center
–    Step-Up and Youth Police Initiative
–    Training of Police Officers as Emergency Psychological and/or
Crisis Intervention  Technicians

The Commissioner of Public Safety and Mayor Joseph Delfino have announced they will be available for media interviews on the crime statistics Thursday.

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WPCNR VIEW FROM THE UPPER DECK. By Bull Allen. January 20, 2008: Congratulations are in order tonight to Eli Manning for quarterbacking the Giants to the National Football Conference Championship.  But also my admiration goes to Mr. Manning for the awesome poise he has shown under the scorn and criticism heaped upon him by the underachieving vultures of the New York sports press which only five weeks ago were saying the jury was out on him “in a big spot,” that he has not shown he can lead and that the Giants needed to go in a different direction. They killed him for clock management, interceptions, not calling timeouts. Well we want to hear from those “experts” tomorrow. It is time for them to eat big time crow — but crow is not good enough — a whole turkey is in order.

Mr. Manning now has the last laugh on  all the experts, the armchair coaches  the babble-heads who have made fun of him in print and on the air since he arrived in New York. As Cole Porter wrote, who has the last laugh now? I admire that kind of inner strength.

Kudos to the kid for his cool handling of adversity Sunday night in Green Bay. His precise Quarterbacking performance — and too, for Plaxico the Magnificent who lit up the Packer Al What’s His Name? for a zillion acrobatic catches all BIG.  Mr. Burress snagged 11 catches for 154 yards. The Weapon!  

 Hat’s off to to the New York Giant defense that exposed an overrated Packer offense as unimaginative when a game plan did not work. But mostly it is Eli Manning who should be pointed to by mentors everywhere as how to react and work through adversity: believe in yourself and play and work on to the prize.

 Last night the ghosts of Huff, Svare, Lynch, Patton and Tunnel  were in those Giant whites.

The Packers kicked away break after break. The Giants found a way to try and hand the game to the Packers, thanks to the incredibly lousy officiating, and Mr. Favre threw the rookie mistakes tonight, not Mr. Manning. I mean the Packers had no plays! No answers. The Packer coaching staff did not make adjustments in the second half. You had to double team Plax and they did not. You had to stop the run and they did not. They could not overpower the Giant line which gave Mr. Manning protection beyond the call of duty. One sack the entire game.  

The only drawback to the game was as usual the uneven NFL officiating which had Favre not thrown the pick in overtime — would have been excoriated for all time. You know the one I’m talking about — the hold on a Giant that took away the winning touchdown from the Giants in the last minute of regulation. That was an astounding bad call — as if the officials were trying to give one back to the Packers.

The Giants got the benefit of two key penalties too that helped their third quarter drive to take the lead. One was reasonable; the late hit on Manning was very disputable.

But despite the amateur NFL officiating — and it is amateur — always has been, without which the Giants would have won this in regulation — the night belonged to young Mr. Manning.

Mr. Manning has been treated  the way the jackels of  the NY sports “press” treated Phil Simms in the Parcells era here in New York. Simms was blasted until he won. Then he became brilliant.

I have never seen the scorn heaped on anyone the way the talk show guys and the writers have slammed Manning for courage, lack of game sense etc. Mr. Manning was, week after week, subjected to dripping, superior invective from scribes, talkshow hosts and color analysts. He  treated like the Ed Whitson of football.

But Eli Manning was stronger than the critics were. What a magnificently brought-up and prepared young man.  (Updating this piece on Tuesday — not one writer or talk show host has apologized or admitted they were wrong,  that I have heard — the mark of the cowards and underachievers, the parasites of the press box.)

Well, they can never say  Eli Manning cannot win again after last night. Eli Manning ate up the clock, moving the ball steadily against a Green Bay defense that could not adjust. The Giant ball control was dominant. Manning made no mistakes.

I believe the way Mr. Manning comported himself under the onslaught of character assassination, physical criticism and downright meanness that he had to take from the press since being in New York is a valuable lesson.

When you’re criticised, your best effort is to ignore it and try and do better. It is what a professional does. Every writer every loudmouth talkshow host  who has written and said on air how Eli Manning cannot get it done, owes him a personal handshake and thank you since they can now free load to Glendale on his achievement and the Giants’ achievement last night.

No team has been criticised as more underachieving than the Giants the last several years and they answered that in the last six weeks.

Mr. Manning has such class and poise. A lesser man could have broken under the scorn.

Believe me criticism really hurts and it makes you hard because you can never answer it except by being right all along.

Mr. Manning did that last night.

Did he gloat?

No.

Was he satisfied?

Oh yes. He has earned the right to feel good.

Because the press has made him the scapegoat for so long.

Eli Manning showed what a real winner is last night.

Class. Poise. Focus on the next play.

Last night made up for 49 years of overtime heartbreak.

Thank you Mr. Manning and Mr. Burris and all those guys.

Now it is time to burst the bubble of the New England Cheat Squad.

(Does anyone know whether New England had to turnover the last 5 years of secret sideline tapes?)

If ever a team needed beating it is New England which has been cheating for years before the Jets exposed them.

They need to be taken out so they can be forgotten and go down in infamy for the cheaters they were.

 Their coach could possibly have had foreknowledge of plays in previous Super Bowls New England has won, thanks to his cheating system of stealing signals. My colleague Denny Hatch has raised this very possibility.

The press has not written about that aspect of New England’s vaunted defense as just possibly why they were so successful in those Super Bowls.

So it is up to the New York Giants to stand up for truth justice and fair play and take New England off the glory pedestal the sports press is so eager to place them on. Miami would kill them.

And one final word on officiating: there is no other professional sport where the officiating is so egregiously bad and such a factor in the game. Game after game is decided by flags thrown inconsistently and killing or aiding big drives. It needs to be addressed.

I have to apologize myself for thinking the Giants should have been out to Green Bay earlier to get used to the cold. Just trying to help out, guys.

Now if there is any justice we will run into a monsoon in Arizona — it’s getting to be monsoon season in Arizona, isn’t it?

Congratulations, Mr. Manning.

Thank you for showing who and what  a real winner is.

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WPCNR VIEW FROM THE UPPER DECK. By  Bull Allen.  January 20, 2008: Nobody mentions The Greatest Football Game Ever Played any more, but it was played forty nine years and three weeks ago in Yankee Stadium, December 28, 1958 on a cold day in The Big Ballpark in the Bronx between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Football Giants  (there were a baseball Giants back then just moved that year to San Franciso – but they are dead and gone now). The Football Giants were the team along with the hapless Knicks and Rangers that everyone in New York turned to for inspiration and to feel good about themselves. We lived and died with Charlie Conerly,Sam Huff,  Frank Gifford, Andy Bathgate, Lou Fontinato, Gump Worsley of the Rangers, and Sweetwater Clifton, Kenny  Sears and Carl Braun of the Knickerbockers.

Old Yankee Stadium, 1958

WPCNR COLLECTION

This was when the Giants played in  helmets with NY on them and the uniforms were a lighter blue than they are now, that some how made them seem vulnerable, approachable. The players all seemed so cleancut.  The days of Frank (Gifford), Kyle (Rote), Mo (Dick Modzewlewski), Sva (Harland Svare) and Svo (Bob Svoboda),  Cliff (Livingston), The two Rosies (Grier and  Brown), Jack (Stroud)  No 70 Sam (Huff), Chuckin Charlie (Conerly), Bob (Schnelker), Mel (Triplett), Alex (Webster), Dick (Nolan), Jimmy (Patton), Em (Tunnell) and Pat (Summerall) and Andy (Robustelli). You knew them all.

They were known for their great defense. They were characterized by  Sam Huff whose mobility and classic red dog forays into opposition backfields glamorized the middle linebacker position.

The offense was studded with names which sounded like football: Conerly, Triplett,  Rote,  Schnelker, Gifford.

 These  players had just come from overtaking the real Cleveland Browns (coached by, yes, Paul Brown), tying for the Eastern Division Championship on a 49 yard field goal by Summerall in a snowstorm to tie the Browns then beating them 10-0 in a playoff to earn the right to play the Colts. They were storybook.

When they played on Sundays at 2 PM  on Channel 2, (on the road, of course, due to the NFL blackout policy), the best television football announcer, Chris Schenkel, was behind the mike and Jim Gordon did the radio on WNEW.

Blackout

You could not see the 1958 Championship game on television because of NFL blackout rules in home markets then. I listened to Bob Wolff’s radio play-by-play of the game at my grandmother’s house during a family New Year’s party. Being forced to socialize, then drifting back to the radio in my grandmother’s upstairs bedroom.

The field was different then. No synthetic turf. Hashmarks and infields and dust and mud.

This was a time when the wooden goal posts had two uprights and the goalposts stood on the goal line, not the back of the endzone. The field was real on infield dirt in one end. The game seemed much grittier then and the players human-sized.  The other thing was the games were much better defensed. Though the offenses made big plays, the scores were lower, the defenses holding leads – but even then the prevent defense was bad and often cost leads in waning moments

Rematch

The Giants had beaten the Colts earlier in the season, 24-21, and this championship was a rematch. It was a game to this day that is second-guessed by Giant fans, much like the 1951 playoff in baseball.

Ultimately, this game see-sawed back and forth into the first sudden death game the NFL ever had.  But, to this day, every Giant fan remembers this game. It was  termed by Sports Illustrated (then just four years old, and struggling) The Best Football Game Ever Played.

Why? It had turnarounds, takebacks, lead changes,  and come-backs-from-the-brinks by both teams. Ultimately, it is given credit for winning hundreds of thousands over to the game of pro football and its unprecedented growth – a lot like the 1975 World Series did for baseball. Sports Illustrated’s coverage of this game, in my opinion also won it widespread acceptance as the sports authority of record in years to come. The game changed as lot of perceptions about professional football.

Cold and Relentless and Dark

The game was played with temperatures in the low thirties and the original high grandstand with its great facade, assured that the lights had to be used early. An aura of grandeur cloaked this game with dramatic vistas and action photographs evoking gladiators in the Roman Coliseum.  No Hollywood director of today could recreate the El Greco images this game evoked.

The First Quarter ended with the Giants ahead 3-0 on a Pat Summerall  36 yard field goal. But not before Baltimore’s Johnny Unitas had completed a 60 yard bomb to Lenny Moore to set up a blocked field goal by Baltimore’s Steve Myhra from the Giant 25. Frank Gifford’s sweep around left end for 38 yards set up the Summerall three pointer.

In the Second Quarter the magnificently towering stands grew silent. Baltimore  recovered a Giant fumble on the New York 20 on the first play of the quarter. Five running plays later, Baltimore took the lead on a 2 yard Alan Ameche touchdown. Myhra kicked the point and it was Baltimore 7, New York 3.

The Giants recovered a Colt fumble on the Baltimore 10, only to cough the ball up on Frank Gifford’s seond fumble in the backfield at the 14. From the Colt 14, Unitas with less than 4 minutes to go in the half marched Baltimore down the field on runs by Lenny Moore and Ameche and three passes for 28 yards to the Giant 13. On the next play, Unitas connected with Raymond Berry in paydirt on a 13 yard strike to put Baltimore on top at the half, 14-3 (with Myhra’s point).

The Stand

In the gathering dusk of the late afternoon, punctuated by the glow of the  lights, the big stadium was buzzing with anxiety as Baltimore taking the second half kickoff, drove methodically down the field picking the Giant Dee apart, trying to put the game away, bleeding clock, marching to the Giants 1.

On 4^th down and goal at the 1, he Giants held in a magnificent goal line stand with Ameche being stopped at the 5 on the key play. The Stadium could be heard all the way to Baltimore.

“The Stand” invigorated the Giant offense. From the 5 after the stop, New York came back.

86 Yards to Glory

After three plays, Conerly went deep to Kyle Rote hitting him in stride at the Colt 25. Rote fumbled but Alex Webster gathered it up in stride racing to the Colt 1.  Triplett plunged in for the score. Summerall converted and the Giants were back in the game, trailing 14-10 with 4 minutes to go in the Third Quarter. As the teams started play in the final stanza, it was 14-10, Colts.

The Great Quarter

Baltimore was forced to punt in the beginning of the Fourth Quarter, and the Giants took over on their 19. Charlie Conerly completed two passes to Bob Schnelker for 17 yards and then 46 yards to the Colt 15. The place was going crazy. By this time, on radio, Bob Wolff could hardly be heard over the steady roar of the fans. The atmosphere was alive with unbearable anxiety and tension  as the violent ballet of competition unfolded below.

Conerly found Frank Gifford in the endzone for 15 yards, Summerall converted and the Giants were giddily ahead, 17-14 with 14 minutes to go.

The Giant offense could not get more points. Play after play the Giant defense doggedly held off the Colt offense. With the Giants driving in the waning five minutes of the game, they had a third down in their own territory. Gifford swung wide cut back and was hit by Big Daddy Lipscomb and Gino Marchetti of the Colts, getting a crucial stop, forcing the Giants to punt. Don Chandler boomed it to the Colt  15.

The Colts were 85 yards away with 2 minutes to go in the game. Unitas using Raymond Berry as his primary receiver threw 7 times, marching the Colts to the Giants 13, hitting Berry three times on third and long for 25 yards, 15 yards and 22 yards to get to position to tie with 10 seconds to go.

Bob Wolff’s call was riveting for Giants fans. Myrha had been blocked on a similar attempt in the First Quarter. Could the Giants do the impossible again? Wolff barked the play-by-play.

“Just 10 seconds left to go…Myhra will attempt to tie from the 20 yard line…Here’s the boot. It’s high…It’s good! He makes it! Myhra makes it with seven seconds to go Steve Myhra ties the ball game, 17-17! How about that?” Note how close a Giant came to blocking the equalizer. Photo World Wide Phot from the WPCNR Collection

Steve Myhra had kicked a  20 yard field goal to tie up the game and send it to Sudden Death for the first time in NFL history.

Fans became very aware of the sideline step out in the waning moments thanks to Mr. Berry.

Sudden  Bittersweet Victory

The Giants won the toss to start Sudden Death.  The Giants went three and out, Conerly being stopped short of the first down by 2 yards.

Taking over on their own 20, Johnny U and the Colts began a march of artistry and “what might have beens” for Giant fans for the last 49 years.

The Key Play in the Sudden Victory Drive: It’s 3rd and 15  on the Colt 36 at the start of the drive. Unitas is waving receiver Raymond Berry farther down field with the ball in his right hand as the Giants desperately go for the sack and new life. Unitas zips the ball to Raymond Berry on the sideline, bottom picture for a first down on the Giant 43 for 21 yards and the beginning of the end. Photo, Worldwide Photo from the WPCNR Collection 

The Colts ran off 12 plays, picking the valiant Giant defense surgically apart. The Unitas-Raymond Berry connection was magic. Unitas hit Berry twice for 33 yards. With the ball on the 1,  after a pass to Jim Mutscheller, had put the ball on the 1,  Alan Ameche plunged across on third down for the winning touchdown.  No stand this time. The small Baltimore contingent of fans cheered wildly while a sigh of silence could be heard over the radio broadcast, as Bob Wolff chanted into the mircrophone,

“It’s third and 1 yard to go for the Championship. Third and one, a pass to Mutscheller put them on the 1 yard line. Unitas barking out the signals for the Baltimore Colts…gives to Ameche…The Colts are the World Champions…Ameche scores!”

So ended the Greatest Football Game Ever Played.

Perhaps this evening there will be another chapter to add to New York Giants’ lore.

But I’ll never forget this game and neither will anyone who saw it or heard it.

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WPCNR’S VIEW FROM THE UPPER DECK BY  BULL ALLEN. January 19, 2008: Amid the gushing praise, and reams of analysis on tomorrow’s NFC Championship game between Big Blue and The Pack  from the mainstream New York Sportswriting “Press” — read “Public Relations Agents,” who have been singing the praises of the New York Giants, their coaches and players all week for their win over Dallas last Sunday putting them in the Championship game, I missed something.

Tom Coughlin who just a few weeks ago was being beaten up by these same writers is even being extolled as having changed, won over his players.

What a difference a win makes.

But I realized this just this afternoon: the interviews, the commentary, the reporting of press conferences have all been taking place in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Not Green Bay.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The game temperature for the Super Bowl is going to be well below zero in Green Bay Wisconsin tomorrow night where the game is going to be played.

If the Giants win, fine.

But, is this another instance of the traditionally cheap New York Giants management not sending the boys out early this week to practice in Green Bay weather?

When east coast skating teams went to Denver last year, they went two days early to practice their stamina in mile-high altitude. They acclimated.

I automatically thought the Giants would be practicing in Green Bay to get used to the conditions. Perhaps they are practicing tonight as we speak in Green Bay. Perhaps it will be all they need.

It would prepare them better. Get them used to executing in perpetual frigid cold.  Get them used to making cuts on the Lambeau tundra – and how the pigskin feels when you can’t feel your hands.

But perhaps they do not need it. Maybe they feel performances in Chicago and New England in the cold was sufficient. Soldier Field, Chicago was grass. Gillette Stadium in Massachussetts is synthetic turf.

 Lambeau Field is grass, according to the Stadiums of the NFL website.

Perhaps Lambeau’s grass  is harder than synthetic turf. Will it feel different to cut on? Run routes? Throw off your plant leg? Will the frigid air and prevailing winds make the pigskin aerodynamically different?

Just win, baby.

If I were the coach I’d have had them out in Green Bay on Tuesday to acclimate, eliminating the excuse of “it was too cold out there.”

But, again, I mention this now, because if the Giants do win Sunday then this will be an even greater achievement and if they lose, they cannot use the weather as an excuse.

But seriously now.

Is the NFL really using it’s head here in how the playoffs and Championships are decided?

Shouldn’t these playoffs all be played in warm weather and domed stadia? 

Could the National Macho League tell the networks to get real once  and play these games in daylight in cold climates?

It is like when baseball plays World Series games in 40 degree weather and pouring rain. There is no need. It’s just for television. It’s just business.

Sunday night fans will most likely develop frostbite and players probably will, too. Despite the heated sidelines, you let a little wind kickup out on the frozen tundra and those stiff fingers and tearing freezing eyes are going to be affected.

Forcing 60,000 plus people to sit outside in glorious tribute to football macho is a crime.

Just win, baby.