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Standing Room Only. With such support, the Giants are drawing an average of 65,026 (capacity of Yankee Stadium: 67,101), running 33% ahead of last year. But enthusiasm is not confined to the Giants. Last year league attendance increased for the seventh season in a row to hit 3,006,124 for a twelve-game schedule (major-league baseball attendance for a 154-game schedule: 17.5 million). This year's attendance seems likely to go higher yet, although the stands in many cities simply cannot be jammed any fuller; e.g., Detroit, which has sold out 54,000-seat Briggs Stadium since 1953, this year peddled 42,000 season tickets.
Such crowded stadiums are understandable, for the calculated skill and violence of pro football is a sight to be seen. "No team from the past could take the field against the brand of football we play now," says Owner George Preston Marshall of the Washington Redskins. "The game has never been finer or faster."
Rowdy Beginnings. Professional football is now so respectable that even such ingrained skeptics as big-time bookies are convinced of its integrity. The Giants are not even allowed to swear in their locker room. "We don't enjoy living with people who eat like pigs," Cleveland Coach Paul Brown annually tells his players. "Please don't keep your head lowered in the soup or otherwise conduct yourself in an offensive manner."
Today's air of gentility is far removed from the rowdy beginnings of pro football. For years, pro football was a wildcat game played in the coal-mining camps of Pennsylvania and the factory towns of Ohio by former college stars who seldom gave their right names. The sport was the refuge of the tramp athlete. After World War I, the terror of the game was a grizzled, aging halfback named Jim Thorpe, sometime star of the Carlisle Indian school, who thoughtfully reinforced his shoulder pads with sheet metal.
Booked for New York. In 1920, pro football seemed promising enough for a group of men to meet in an auto agency in Canton, Ohio and organize eleven of the game's strongest teams (Canton Bulldogs, Massillon Tigers) into what later became the National Football League. Franchises were selling for only $2,500 in 1925 when an enterprising New York bookmaker named Timothy J. Mara started the Giants. That year, playing the Chicago Bears and Red Grange, the Giants drew pro football's first big gate: 74,000. But two years later, when the Giants beat the Bears, 13-7, to gain the league championship, the Polo Grounds held only 80 paying spectators.
Through the years, as the pass and the T formation opened up the game and the fans began to pack the stands on Sundays, the Giants stubbornly stuck to a tradition of rib-cracking defensive play. This year, as usual, the Giants' attack is plodding, depends almost entirely on the passing of elderly (38), leather-faced Quarterback Charlie Conerly of Mississippi ('48). When Conerly is on target and versatile Halfback Frank Gifford (University of Southern California, '52) is sound of wind and limb, the Giants can move the ball. With Conerly out with a sprained ankle, the Giants ignominiously failed to score a touchdown in two successive games.