When the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl on Sunday night, there will be more than the National Football League title at stake. The Giants will be trying to stop the Patriots from making history by finishing the season undefeated and staking a very plausible claim to the title of the greatest American football team ever.
But the Giants will also be trying to restore a bit of sporting pride to a city that has had nothing to be proud about this decade. Of late, New York has been no more than a provincial backwater in American professional sport. This decade New York has won fewer national titles in the three leading sports than “famous global” cities such as Indianapolis, San Antonio and St Louis.
Far, far worse for New York fans, their teams have dropped to also-ran status at the same time that their hated rivals up the northeast coast in Boston have triumphed. And this weekend, Boston’s sports-crazy fans will be expecting their beloved Patriots to deliver one more humiliation to the city that never sleeps - and never seems to win, either.
The rivalry between Boston and New York has been part of American sporting folklore for generations. It goes back to 1918, when Babe Ruth, the baseball great, was traded by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees and New York began a run in which they won 23 World Series to the Red Sox’s none.
The heartbreak continued for Boston until the early 2000s. The Red Sox endured a series of almost comical failures, often at the hands of New York teams, not just the Yankees, but the disdained Mets, too. And it was not just baseball. When American football’s end-of-season spectacular rose to prominence as the biggest sporting event in the US, New York continued to lord it over Boston. The Giants and the other New York team, the Jets, won three Super Bowls, while the Patriots were a national laughing stock. Occasional periods of dominance in basketball and ice hockey by the Celtics and Bruins could not compensate for the irrelevance in America’s leading sports.
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But this century has belonged to Boston so far. New York has not won a national title in a sport since 2000; Boston has five. The Red Sox have won the World Series twice, while the Patriots have won the Super Bowl three times in the past six years. This year, after years of ineptitude, the Boston Celtics look like the best team in the National Basketball Association, while the New York Knicks have been little more than a punchline for late-night comedians.
It’s even worse when you consider that New York has two teams in each of football, baseball and basketball, and Boston has only one in each. And since New York is the media capital of the US, home to a fiercely competitive tabloid newspaper war, the scrutiny (a polite word for abuse) to which the city’s teams have been subject has made the failures more painful.
This week, as both teams prepare for Sunday’s game, the Patriots, the most ruthlessly disciplined and focused team in the history of the sport, were calmly playing down the idea that this game had any real meaning for the cities represented.
“No, I don’t think there’s any real rivalry,” Tedy Bruschi, one of New England’s defensive stars, said, adding that, since the two teams have rarely played each other, there is a lack of intensity to the relationship. But, perhaps predictably, the Giants seem much more animated by civic pride. “New York is a town that wants a championship,” David Diehl, an offensive lineman for the Giants, said. “When you strap on that helmet, you definitely realise you represent a city that is bigger than you.”
And Plaxico Burress, the Giants wide receiver, revealed that he had received a text message from Nate Robinson, the Knicks guard. “We need this for the city,” it said.
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One winner is guaranteed. The level of interest in these two teams, together with the Patriots’ attempt to secure history, mean this is expected to be the most-watched Super Bowl ever.
Gerard Baker is US Editor of The Times.