Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [128]
“You have to throw a party for your people,” Everson Walls said. “You have to throw a party for Super Bowl winners of the most exciting Super Bowl in history. For them not to celebrate that, it was one of the biggest disappointments of my career.”
“There wasn’t a whole lot of love there,” Erik Howard added.
Dinkins did offer to honor the team with a rally at the steps of city hall. According to published reports, the Giants accepted the invitation and even helped plan the January 30 festival, a statement the team’s front office denied. While city workers set up a stage and chairs, and officials prepared “keys to the city” for Bill Parcells and the organization’s co-owners, the Giants issued a press release. Given the fighting in the Persian Gulf, Wellington Mara decided that a citywide celebration was not appropriate.
Many in the press also sapped some of the newly crowned Super Bowl champions’ joy. Most tossed around praise for the underdog team’s stunning upset over the flashy and seemingly unstoppable Bills. But a few less-impressed media figures summarized the game by saying the Bills lost Super Bowl XXV, not that the Giants won it.
“There were some who said that Parcells and the Giants got lucky that day, something he would continue to hear about for years,” Bill Gutman wrote in his 2000 biography about the head coach.
“It would have been a shame had we lost that game,” Parcells later said. “Because—and I am prejudiced because I was the Giants coach; I’m sure Buffalo feels like they should have won the game—but when you really look at that game, I don’t think there’s any doubt who played better. I think our players played better than Buffalo’s players.”
Naysayers and the absence of a lavish parade and/or rally hardly dimmed the jubilant spirit of Giants players and fans. But less than a week after the Super Bowl XXV win, questions about the 1991 edition began to overshadow the 1990 World Champion Giants. In the eyes of many “experts,” the loss (or expected loss) of coaches and players cast great doubt over the team’s repeat possibilities.
The coaching staff was slated to lose two assistants: wide receivers coach Tom Coughlin had already accepted the head-coaching job at Boston College, and running backs coach Ray Handley planned to leave the NFL to enroll in law school at George Washington University.
But the architect of two Super Bowl–winning defenses, Bill Belichick, garnered the most attention. Both the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Cleveland Browns hoped to hire Belichick as their next head coach. In the week following the Super Bowl win, Belichick met with both teams’ officials. At the front desk of downtown Cleveland’s Ritz-Carlton, he registered under the name “Andy Robustelli,” the New York Giants’ Hall of Fame defensive end from 1956 to 1964.
On February 4, Tampa promoted interim head coach Richard Williamson. The next day, Cleveland’s general manager, Ernie Accorsi—still high on Belichick from their interview in 1989—made the thirty-eight-year-old the league’s youngest head coach. An endorsement from University of Indiana Basketball head coach Bob Knight and (because of his youth) comparisons to Don Shula also helped.
“Bill is bright, competitive, intense and dedicated to the game. He knows what it takes to win in this league and he’s going to help get us back to where we expect to be in the play-offs, fighting to win the Super Bowl,” Cleveland owner Art Modell told the press upon the hiring. “I’ve been disappointed before. I don’t expect to be disappointed this time. Nor will our fans be disappointed.”
To fill out his staff, Belichick picked out his own young, fresh assistants, including thirty-three-year-old special teams coach Scott O’Brien, defensive line coach John Mitchell, and University of Toledo head coach Nick Saban. Although the New York press worried that Belichick would poach assistants