John Delach

My first encounter with “Say It Aint So” stunned me in 1957 when the Brooklyn Dodgers announced that the team would be moving to Los Angeles forever after this season ended. Even worse, they also convinced the baseball New York Giants to join them on the West Coast by moving to San Francisco. Since I lived in Ridgewood Queens, two blocks from the Brooklyn border, few of my friends and neighbors cared that the Giants were leaving, but they adored the Dodgers.

Walter O’Malley, who owned the Dodgers and who engineered their abandoning Brooklyn, became public enemy number one overnight and his actions became the basis for the following joke:

You find yourself in a room with Hitler, Stalin and O’Malley and you have a gun, but with only two bullets. Who do you shoot?

You shoot O’Malley twice to make sure you kill him.

My next encounter with “Say It Aint So” was in August of 1964 when the Giants head coach, Allie Sherman, traded our hero, Sam Huff, to the team that used to be called the Washington Redskins. Giants’ fans were so out raged that they began to serenade Sherman at the many losing games with:

Good bye Allie,

Good bye Allie

Good bye Allie

We hate to see you go.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, etc.           

In March of 1971, Mayor John Lindsay announced that the City of New York would buy Yankees Stadium so that needed improvements could be made to retain the Yankees and the Football Giants. Almost three weeks later, New Jersey Gov. William T. Cahill told the press that he had a verbal commitment from Giants to move to a new sports complex in the Hackensack River meadowlands.

This set off all kinds of frustration, noise and disbelief across the Metropolitan area. Wellington Mara reacted by side-stepping whether or not he intended to move his team. “We have a commitment to stay in New York until 1974. By then we’ll have the luxury to sit back and see whether New York or New Jersey has the best offer. We’ll go wherever it is best for our fans.

“Bullshit!” This became my biggest “Say It Aint So” in August when Mara committed to the move. Red Smith commented on the move in his classical fashion:

 “There is rich poetic justice in the decision to haul the New York Giants across the Hudson to a New Jersey garbage dump. It is a move made in heaven.

“When he (Mara) finally defected, the only surprising thing was Lindsay’s indignatio. Evidently, Fun City’s burgomeister has been so busy wondering whether he’s a Republican or a Democrat that he hasn’t read the football scores for six or seven years.

“Selfish, callous and ungrateful’ were his words for Well Mara. That’s pretty strong language to use about a guy who came into this world naked and had to inherit everything he’s got.

“With no football team as a tenant of Yankee Stadium, opposition is growing to Lindsay’s plan to sink $24 million into that playground. The Yankees may have to move perhaps only to Shea Stadium, possibly as far away as Dallas.

“The Jets, Mets and possibly the Yankees would operate in Flushing Meadow and the Giants wouldn’t be far away. Maybe not far enough.”

I was totally against the move and I even wrote to the mayor because I strongly believed the team belonged here in the five boroughs. Long story short, Lindsay kicked the Giants out of Yankee Stadium in the fall of 1973 as soon as the baseball season ended forcing them to relocate to Yale Bowl for the remainder of that season and for all of the 1974 season. They lost every game played there. With Lindsay gone in 1975, Mayor Abe Beam didn’t have a grudge allowing the Giants to play all of their home games at Shea Stadium.

The Giants moved into Giants Stadium in 1976 and its replacement, Met Life Stadium in 1991.

Looking back at my opposition in 1971, I now know I was right, but for all the wrong reasons.

The Giants should have stayed in New York City. They could have remained in the Bronx, moved to Long Island City, or even the West Side Railroad Yards in Manhattan. And if they had, do you know the one thing that I would have missed and been so happy that I missed?

“Traffic,” TRAFFIC,” that “f****ing TRAFFIC” both in New Jersey and on the bridges  going back to Long Island that turns what should have been a forty-five-minute drive into a two-hour slog!

I could have taken the Long Island Railroad and, even if I drove, I would have avoided any and all bridges.

(This is my last piece for two weeks. I will resume in August with a to a two-part piece on our June trip to Alaska.)