E-GIANTS
Dave Klein was the Giants' beat writer for The Star-Ledger from 1961 to 1995.
He is the author of 26 books and he is one of only three sportswriters to have covered all the Super Bowls. Dave has allowed TEAM GIANTS to reprint some of his articles.

THE SUPER BOWL COUNT IS THREE - SPORTSWRITERS, THAT IS, JUST 3

By Dave Klein
And then there were three. Three sportswriters, that is, who have covered all the Super Bowls played. For several years there were four, but this year one - Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald - just wasn't well enough to make the trek to the cold, blustery location.

So that leaves three of us - Jerry Green of the Detroit News, Jerry Izenberg of the (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger, and your correspondent, who spent the first 36 Super Bowls in the employ of the Star-Ledger and then took early retirement and continued to staff the game for E-GIANTS.

It's kind of sad, because there were so many who started, so many good guys, friends, experts in their field, and they all fell by the wayside because the calendar pays no attention to any of us. So forget the compliments, this is not an achievement. It is merely a tribute to longevity, and despite more and more frequent bouts of various ailments and injuries, the three of us are still there.

I like to use the story of the small group of soldiers who served in the U.S. Army during World War II. They found themselves, eight of them, in the basement of a broken down farmhouse in the French countryside, and vowed that if they made it home - and chances didn't look that good - they would meet once a year at a central location.

The meeting place was decided to be Chicago, and an arrangement was made with a hotel that green to honor the strange, once-a-year gathering. One of the soldiers found stacks and stacks of bottles of wine in that basement and put one in his duffel bag. It was, as it turned out, a 1936 Chateau Lafite Rothschild. He brought it with him the first year the group got together - yep, they all got out - and the hotel management put it away in a locked cabinet. The rules were these - When they all showed up, the cabinet remained locked.

But when there was only one who appeared, he would get the key from management, open the bottle in the private conference room set aside for the aging soldiers, and drink a farewell toast to, as they say, departed friends and comrades.

And one year, many, many years later, on the prearranged date of the annual meeting, only one man appeared. He waited two days until it became obvious that he was, in fact, the sole survivor.

So he summoned the hotel manager for the key after delivering the sad news, extracted that old, old bottle of wine and uncorked it. He poured a glass of the rich, red liquid, held it high, delivered the toast but when it came time to drinking it, he found that he couldn't. He threw the glass into the fireplace, poured the rest of the wine into it, and left.

The arrangement is called a tontine, once a financial coup devised by an Old World Italian-French banker named Lorenzo Di Tonti in 1653. It was an investment of sorts, in which several potential investors put up a fixed amount of money which was invested annually. When one of them died, his shares were divided into parcels for the survivors.

The rules insisted that when the penultimate investor died, all the funds and shares were to be taken over by the last survivor.

We don't have a bottle of wine saved, nor do we celebrate an annual caucus except for greeting each other in the media hotel. Green and Izenberg are most retired these days, coming out of hibernation to pen occasional columns during the year - but they always make sure to be present at the Super Bowl.

Your correspondent still works on a daily basis, but so what? It's all the friends, the departed friends and colleagues, who matter. This shouldn't have taken on the aspects of a contest, and none of the three survivors ever tried to make it that.

So we'll go to Super Bowl 48, then wait a year to see how 2014 treated us. With any luck at all, we'll be back - but the key is that we'll still be there, not that we'll make yet another Super Bowl.

Check out Dave's website at E-GIANTS where you can subscribe to his newsletters which run much more frequently than what is available here.
- Team Giants

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