Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [88]
The triumph gave New York their first world championship since 1956. That Giants dynasty of the 1950s, headlined by Hall of Famers Frank Gifford and Sam Huff, made five successive appearances in the NFL title game and were defeated in each one. Of course, it was the first—the overtime loss to the Baltimore Colts in 1958—that became legendary.
That Colts’ 23-17 victory at Yankee Stadium forever changed the destiny of the National Football League. NBC broadcast the drama of that late-December game, with forty-five million Americans watching. The game is often labeled the birth of the modern NFL, the moment when football overtook baseball as “America’s Game.”
For one seventeen-year-old sitting in the stands at Yankee Stadium, that game was just as transformative.
The son of an FBI agent, Duane Charles Parcells grew up in New Jersey’s Hasbrouck Heights, roughly four miles from where Giants Stadium would later be erected. He was a Giants fan, but football was not his passion.
“Baseball was my best sport. I thought I was gonna be a baseball player. I had an opportunity to play [professional] baseball coming out of high school, my dad wouldn’t let me do it,” Parcells said in 2010.
Although he continued to pursue a career as a major league catcher, witnessing the 1958 NFL title brought football to the forefront of his life.
“At that game, I decided [coaching the Giants was] what I wanted.”
Parcells—who as a child preferred to be called “Bill” rather than his given name—was a standout quarterback, running back, tight end, and linebacker for River Dell Regional High in Oradell. He also excelled as a center and forward for head coach Mickey Corcoran’s basketball team.
As a sophomore, Parcells scored three touchdowns—one rushing, two on defense—and tossed another during the Golden Hawks’ 26-13 win over Fair Lawn. (Once he reached college, he was placed with the linemen “10 minutes after I stepped on the field and they saw me throw.”)
In 1959, he graduated from River Dell and played football and baseball for Colgate University. But, yearning for a more competitive brand of athletics, he left the Chenango Valley for Kansas, enrolling at University of Wichita in the fall of 1961.
For a program that played games against top-notch teams like Tulsa, Louisville, and Arizona State, Parcells became a starter by his junior campaign. The next year, he was one of the top linemen in the Missouri Valley Conference and was named (Honorable Mention) to the all-conference team in 1963.
“We won the conference that year, and we had seven kids off that team that were either drafted or went as a free agent to the pros. We had some real talent on that team,” said Bob Long, who attended Wichita (now called “Wichita State”) on a basketball scholarship but joined the football team as a senior. “Our quarterback Hank Schichtle was drafted by the New York Giants; he played on the taxi squad behind Y. A. Tittle. We had a kid named Miller Farr, who was a great halfback. But in those days, guys played both ways; they played both ways in the pros too. So Parcells played both ways; he was a great linebacker and offensive tackle. I remember he made a lot of tackles [20] against Tulsa [in 1963].”
Off the field, Parcells kept busy. He was a dedicated student and earned a few dollars on the side, as a comanager at a budding nearby pizza franchise.
“It’s called ‘Pizza Hut.’ It was founded by some Wichita ex-football players,” said Parcells. “Several of the guys who were on the current team worked for them. And I did work for them. And when I graduated from college, they offered me a job in their organization.