Ernie Accorsi was talking one time about the job interview he and John Mara conducted with Tom Coughlin. Of course the three of them would ultimately share a lasting bond because of Eli Manning. Ernie was the one who would make the Draft Day trade with the Chargers that made Eli a Giant. John and his dad, Wellington, were the ones who would sign off on that deal. Then Coughlin would coach Eli and the Giants to two more Super Bowls.
This was before all that.
Ernie joked how over-prepared Coughlin was, how it seemed as if he was trying to tell both him and John Mara everything about his vision for the Giants in the first few minutes they were all in the room together.
Fortunately it got lot better for Tom Coughlin from there. The rest is Giants history and football history and New York sports history. When the meeting ended, Ernie said this to Coughlin:
“Well, you double-bogeyed No. 1. But still managed to break par.”
It was just another way of Ernie showing why he was so much more than a football man, even if he is the football man who pulled off one of the most important deals in the history of New York sports with Eli. Ernie was interested in just about everything he thought made the world, and not just the sports world, more interesting. And, as everyone who knew him has been saying since we got word of his passing has been saying this weekend, he usually seemed to have a story — and a good one — about it all afterward. Nobody ever loved this life, and not just the football life, more than the kid from Hershey, Pa.
It was George Young who hired Bill Parcells to be his coach, and everybody knows Parcells coached the Giants to their first two Super Bowls. Then George hired Ernie to be his assistant general manager. When George retired, it was Ernie who was in charge, and so he was the GM who hired Coughlin, and Coughlin sure did win the Giants two more Super Bowls.
Parcells was saying on Sunday that he was no longer in the building when George brought in Ernie to work down the hall from him.
“I didn’t really know him that well,” Parcells told me. “But I knew of him.”
Everybody who crossed paths with Ernie Accorsi for nearly 60 years knew of him. He worked for the old Colts, and had what felt like a thousand Johnny Unitas stories. He worked at Penn State and then was the general manager of the Colts when John Elway didn’t want to play football for them. He went to Cleveland from there, and gave Bill Belichick his first head coaching job. Finally he was with the Giants. And even when the Giants made it to Super Bowl 35 before getting rolled by the Ravens — of course it would have to be a team from Baltimore — he knew that if they were ever again going to win the big game, they were going to need a bigger player at quarterback than Kerry Collins, as tough an out as Collins was.
Eventually Ernie decided that quarterback would be Archie’s kid. He always talked about a game he attended between Ole Miss and Auburn, one more scouting trip to the Deep South, this time to a freezing cold Nov. afternoon in Oxford.
“The sides weren’t close to being even,” Ernie said. “But Eli gave them a chance. That’s the one game I always remembered best.”
Five-and-a-half years later, there came the Sunday night in Glendale, Ariz., Super Bowl 42, when the Giants produced what John Mara would describe during the trophy ceremony later as “the greatest victory in the history of this franchise,” against the 18-0 Patriots of Belichick and Tom Brady. Ernie was no longer the Giants general manager by then. But so many of these Giants were his. He had long since become a member of the family, and would remain a wise and decent and kind member of that family until the day he died.
Not only was this about his bond with Coughlin and the Mara family. This was about his bond with Eli Manning, because the two of them — the Hershey kid and Archie and Olivia’s kid — would change the course of Giants history.
When the Giants began the drive that would beat the Patriots and ruin their chance at 19-0 and put the Giants back on top, Ernie was sitting in the stands with his son, Michael.
“If he’s what I thought he was going to be, he’ll do it right now,” Ernie said to his son. “Doing it on October 15 is fine. But he’s got to do it now.”
That is exactly what Eli did, then and there. The oddsmakers didn’t think the sides were even for that one, either, having established the Patriots as a 12-point favorite. Only then came a drive that will be remembered. In the middle of it, Eli somehow got away from Richard Seymour and threw it to David Tyree, who somehow trapped the ball against his helmet. Finally Eli was throwing it to Plaxico Burress in the left corner of the end zone and the Giants were about to win the trophy named after the guy that John Mara’s mom, Ann, always called “Vinny” Lombardi.
Then came all the years in the last decade when Ernie, who ended up in the Giants’ Ring of Honor, suffered as much as every Giants fan through all the losing seasons. But kept hoping that there would be another young quarterback to come along, never dreaming it would be another Ole Miss kid like Jaxson Dart.
The last time I spoke with Ernie, last month, he said, “I’ve always said it was a coach’s league. But it’s a quarterback league, too. And now I think we’ve finally got both again.”
They may have both. But the Giants will never have anybody quite like my dear friend Ernie Accorsi, dead now at 84.
Today is the first official day of autumn. Always Ernie’s favorite time of year. Just starting without him this time.