Jets And Giants To Battle For Least Worst?

By Dan Rattiner

Well, it's autumn and the football season has begun, and lots of folks are glued to their TVs Sunday afternoons watching the Giants and Jets. In case you haven't noticed, our local New York teams have each played two games in two weeks and have lost all four. And not only have they lost all four, they have lost all four in a series of humiliating thumpings.

At first, the sportswriters for the big New York dailies didn't think much of this when the dust had cleared at the end of these four routs, because, as they said, the season is young and there are still fourteen more games to go for each team. Having said that, however, it began to sink in. This has never happened before that both New York teams get thumped like this. And so toward the end of the week they began to rise to this concept and find all sorts of new ways to say GIANTS AND JETS LOSE AGAIN.

I, on the other hand, think of this as a blockbuster movie plot. The season goes on and on, and with one game to go, both teams have still not won a game. It's thirty games lost and just one game left.

Well, because of the way the season has been scheduled by the league in advance, this last game is to be between the Giants and the Jets. Somebody has to be the winner. Right?

Of further interest is the fact that these two teams each play in the exact same stadium in the Meadowlands in New Jersey. Up until then they have alternated home and away games. So if it isn't one team losing it's the other.

So the stadium is packed. Who will be least worst? Both teams have not only been kicked and beaten in every game up until this one, they have also had almost all their players injured. Players in wheelchairs are on the sidelines. There are players in casts and head bandages and on crutches. Two people (one on each side) are receiving bottled oxygen, but they are bravely there to watch and root for their team in the hopes that if and when they leap up, their oxygen bottles don't fly off.

It's sort of a Bad News Bears plot, I know. But there are twists. Most of the players on the field are from the minor leagues and are less than 140 pounds dripping wet. Even the coaches are injured, having been popped on the sidelines by wayward enemy tacklers in prior games. There are substitute coaches, all with bad eyesight wearing inch thick glasses. As for the regulars who have escaped injury, there has been an epidemic of anorexia. They look just awful.

In my plot, after two scoreless overtimes, the game ends in a tie. So neither loses every game. Like it?

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