Rich Hofmann | Let's be candid

0 Comments | Philadelphia Daily News, September, 2007

THE STORY was told after the death of Wellington Mara, the co-owner of the New York Giants and an NFL patriarch. It was the story of how the Giants' bench came to be positioned in their home stadium.

For decades, that bench has been on the sunny side of the field - at Giants Stadium, and at the Yale Bowl before that, and at Yankee Stadium before that, and at the Polo Grounds before that. The reason was that Wellington's mother, way back when, saw her young son sniffling on the sideline during a loss to the Frankford Yellow Jackets and decided that she wanted him to stand in the sun and stay warm; no lie. This was in the days of leather helmets, by the way, but it has stayed the same for eight decades.

At Giants Stadium, this means that the bench is across the field...