The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [48]
Before the autumn of 1925, Mara had never seen a football game. In that season he became the owner of New York's first bigleague professional football team. Bookmakers, like clergymen and physicians, are famous for their susceptibility to new forms of investment. So when promoters of the National League of Professional Football Clubs, which had begun in the Middle West, decided to invade New York, they offered the franchise to Mara. He bought it because it cost only $2500. He hired Bob Folwell, former coach at the Naval Academy, to assemble a team.
The first edition of the Giants included a glittering set of names, but wasn't a particularly good team by professional standards. Mara's publicity man distributed vast numbers of complimentary tickets. He even supplied a band and a cheering section of small boys to simulate college atmosphere. But the Giants lost money until the postseason game against Red Grange and the Chicago Bears. In 1925, Grange was America's leading hero. When, at the end of the 1925 intercollegiate season, he turned professional and his New York debut was announced, the ticket line began to form at Mara's office in the Knickerbocker Building. Thousands of enthusiasts were turned away from the Polo Grounds on the Sunday of the game. The contest drew $56,000 and gave Tim such a millennial vision of what professional football might eventually be that he became an irrepressible football fan. On one occasion, when his Giants beat the Bears in Chicago, 30, he rushed out on the field like a freshman to grab the ball from the referee. “The winning team gets the ball!” he yelled, a stickler for campus tradition. The referee didn't know him and waved him away. Tim grappled with him; some Chicago players joined the scuffle, and when Tim broke away, there were cleat marks on his habitual spats. But he had the ball under his arm.
The president of Mara University, as those whimsical fellows, the sports writers, sometimes term the football Giants, usually watches the games from a window of the baseball Giants' clubhouse behind center field. He gets enough fresh air at the race track in summer, he says. Ever since Tim started the team, his immediate family has gone footballmad. Mrs. Mara, an attractive, younglooking woman whom Tim married in 1907, made an important suggestion at the first game she saw. She noticed that the Giants' bench was on the south side of the field, and as twilight came on was in shadow. She said the Giants ought to move to the warm side and let the visiting postgraduates suffer. Tim's sons, although neither played football at Fordham, have developed into subtle theorists from attending Giant practice.
Mara's most startling peculiarity does not at once meet the eye. It takes time to explain, and most people are incredulous even after he explains it. Mara is destitute. His only assets are about one hundred dollars in pocket cash and two watches. This poverty, in which he takes a good deal of honest, jovial pride, stems from another law suit, which closely followed his wrangle with Tunney. In 1928, after Al Smith had been nominated for President on the Democratic ticket, outoftown Democrats showed a marked reluctance to contribute to the Smith campaign fund. John J. Raskob, National Chairman of the party, turned for aid to the County Trust Company of New York, a bank friendly to Tammany. A state law forbids banks to lend funds to political parties. The County Trust officers, however, said they saw no objection to lending money to responsible Democrats on their own notes, endorsed by Raskob. In spite of Smith's having disappointed him in the Tunney affair, Mara signed a note for $50,000, and the bank turned the cash over to the Democratic National Committee. Other Tammany men of substance signed similar notes. After the election, the bank moved to collect on the