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Promoter. Except for a few players, the most spectacular personage in professional football is a beefy, sandy-haired Irishman named Timothy James Mara who owns the New York Giants. Before he bought his team, Tim Mara had never seen a football game. A onetime newsboy, theatre usher and racetrack bookie from Manhattan's East Side, he bought a franchise in the National League for $500 in 1925, the year before Charles C. ("Cash & Carry") Pyle invaded New York with Red Grange and an "outlaw" league. By preserving his New York franchise during a feud with Pyle, Mara saved the organization which, set up in 1921, is now indisputably the sport's major league.
In 1926 the Giants lost $80,000. Since then they have made money almost every year, won the championship in 1927. In 1930 they raised over $115,000 for Unemployment Relief in a game against the Notre Dame Alumni. In addition, they have helped Owner Mara to enter sidelines like coal, liquor-importing (Timara Whiskey), fight promoting. In 1926 Owner Mara paid West Point's famed back Gene Vidal, now U. S. Director of Air Commerce, $100 to play for 15 minutes in a Florida exhibition game. He has set the fashion in hiring highly-publicized college stars, done more than any other one club-owner to aid professional football.
Sing Sing's football team, whose star back, Alabama Pitts, may get a job with the Giants next autumn, is also a Mara sideline. At the end of the 1932 season, Mara presented Warden Lawes with a set of old Giant uniforms, suggested starting a prison team. The Sing Sing Black Sheep, coached by Giant players, have made $10,000 a year for the prison.
Tall, husky, vigorous, Promoter Mara is the picture of a onetime college athlete. He left school at 14, never played baseball, dislikes card games. He belongs to the New York Athletic Club but has never seen its gymnasium. For recreation he goes to the cinema or astonishes his friends by solving intricate arithmetical problems without pencil & paper.