Wellington Mara, 89, Led Giants for 8 Decades

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The New York Sun

Wellington Mara, who died yesterday at 89, was the owner of the New York Giants, a craggy and beloved sports patriarch of unsurpassed professional longevity.


On Sunday, at the end of 80 years with the Giants, Mara watched the team stage an improbable comeback to beat the Denver Broncos 24-23 as time ran out in the fourth quarter.


Mara had been with the team ever since its founding in 1925, when he huddled on the bench alongside his older brother, Jack, and his father, Tim, at the old Polo Grounds.


Entranced with the game, Mara quickly moved up from water boy and ball boy to scout, secretary, and soon president. It didn’t hurt his chances of promotion that his father transferred ownership of the club to his two sons in 1930.


Mara helped assemble the legendary Giants clubs of the 1950s and early 1960s, including stars like Frank Gifford, Y.A. Tittle, Sam Huff, and many others. The Giants won championships in 1934, 1938, and 1956.


In the 1960s, the team’s fortunes took a downward turn for a generation, especially after the death of Mara’s brother, Jack, who had been in charge of the business side while Mara concentrated on football. Mara moved the team to the Meadowlands in 1976, but his personnel moves were less successful.


“I tried to do both to the detriment of both,” Mara admitted in 1978. The nadir of the team’s fortunes came during a 1978 game against the Eagles, when quarterback Joe Pisarcik fumbled away certain victory, running a play when he could have kneeled to let time expire. The play, known ever after as “The Fumble,” came to epitomize years of frustration. Weeks later, a dentist from New Jersey hired an airplane to fly over Giants Stadium towing the banner “15 Years of Lousy Football – We’ve Had Enough.”


Mara eventually hired George Young as general manager, and the team’s fortunes had an uptick that culminated in Superbowl victories in 1986 and 1991.


The glory played out against a background of family feuding, in which Jack’s son, Tim Mara, who had inherited half of the franchise, clashed with the elder Mara over the team’s management. Ironically, it was Jack’s insistence on more professional management that carried the day, even he suffered in the public eye and eventually sold out his interest to Preston Robert Tisch.


But Mara’s place in the game depended on more than his ownership of one of football’s premier franchises. “We have lost the conscience of the league,” said Art Modell, the longtime owner of the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Colts.


Long an important presence at owners’ meetings, Mara is widely credited with having initiated the historic television agreement of 1962 mandating that every club receive an equal portion of television revenues. This was despite the fact that his own club, located in the nation’s media capital, had a contract worth several times that of the smaller clubs, such as Green Bay.


So greatly was he esteemed in the league that his nickname, “Duke,” after the hero of Waterloo, also became the name of the standard professional football.


Mara was raised on Park Avenue. His father was a prosperous bookie, considered a legal occupation at the time, with significant interests in horse racing and boxing but who claimed never to have seen a football game before purchasing the Giants. He paid $2,500 (some accounts claim just $500) to the fledgling National League of Professional Football Clubs and founded the Giants to play at the old Polo Grounds, where the baseball Giants played. He was quoted as saying, “Any sports franchise in New York has to be worth $2,500.”


Mara attended Loyola High School and Fordham University. While still in college, he began scouting college players, and signed Tuffy Leemans, an early Giants star, in 1938. Jack Mara became club president soon after graduating from Fordham law school in 1930, and Wellington became secretary. One of Wellington’s early duties was filming games and screening them for players. Later, he would pioneer the practice of photographing opposition defenses with Polaroid cameras from atop Yankee Stadium and dropping them via weighted socks to Vince Lombardi, the offensive coach.


In 1933, the Giants lost the championship game to Chicago, 23-21. The teams met again for the championship in 1934 under icy conditions at the Polo Grounds. The Giants came back in the second half to win, 30-13, thanks to a change in footwear in what has become known as the “sneakers” game.


Mara served in the Navy during World War II, and returned to assemble the great teams of the 1950s. He also served in a number of administrative positions with the NFL, including as chairman of negotiations with the players’ union.


His degree of involvement with the team was unusual, and he was a regular at practice, where he would silently watch the players from the sidelines, often while walking a dozen or more circuits of the playing field, or sitting in a portable golf chair. He was also a presence in the locker room, shaking players’ hands, even after losses.


In recent decades, Mara passed on responsibility of his side of the Giants operations to his son John, the co-CEO, as well as two other sons, who are high executives on the team.


Timothy Wellington Mara
Born August 14, 1916, in New York City; died October 25 of lymph node cancer at home; survived by his wife, the former Ann Mumm, 11 children, and 40 grandchildren.


The New York Sun

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