I FIGURED Allie Sherman would know, but he didn’t. He figured Wellington Mara would know, but he didn’t.
Then I figured old-time newspaper men would know, but those I asked didn’t.
Then I figured, the heck with it, no one cares, anyway.
But then again, I figured, ya never know. Besides, I need to get this off my chest.
It’s the word, “Jints,” as in the written and spoken nickname for the New York Football Giants. For as long as I can remember, Jints has appeared in headlines and has been mouthed as the team’s nickname. But along the way, I firmly believe – but can’t prove – Jints has become misunderstood, then widely mispronounced.
Jints, I reckon, was the creation of a headline writer who years ago mimicked the accents of New Yorkers in squeeze-pronouncing, “Giants” while distinguishing the baseball N.Y. Giants from the football ones.
If one were to say Giants quickly and with a local accent, two syllables become one, thus we get “Jynts,” which rhymes with “pints.” But through the years, “Jynts” has come to be spoken as Jints, which rhymes with “mints.” And that, I’m almost positive, is wrong, or at least not what was originally intended.
The headline writer, way back when, could not shorten Giants to Gints, or the soft G would have been pronounced as a hard G, which would’ve made no sense at all. All he or she could do to shorten the team’s name as it’s pronounced here was turn it into “Jynts,” as in pints.
And so, as the Giants take the field late this afternoon in Tampa, you might want to consider that “Jynts” has been mispronounced and misunderstood here for at least 40 years. “Jynts” has come to be pronounced as Jints, as in mints. And that’s wrong. I think.
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B ECAUSE elected officials from all 50 states, advertising executives and their clients, TV and radio executives and their clients, the indiscriminately wealthy, plus all of the above’s families don’t make as much noise as devoted fans of teams, one can expect another subdued live audience at today’s Super Bowl.
The elitist reality that the NFL has generated and sustained for the Super Bowl has long found tickets winding up in all of the wrong hands. But it’s likely more than an elitist reality; it’s likely a criminal reality, as well.
And the ’97, Packers-Patriots Super Bowl in New Orleans remains one of the most in-yer-face of unsolved big game ticket mysteries.
The Packers, the NFL’s only publicly-owned team, refused to say why, how or how many, but as many as 3,000 of its league-allotted ’97 Super Bowl tickets, according to a Milwaukee newspaper, were delivered by the team to a Texas-based travel agency. The agency then attached a single ticket to Super Bowl travel packages that it sold for $2,500 each.
If people within the Packers organization weren’t scalping thousands of tickets, then we’re left to believe that the Packers, instead of selling those Super Bowl tickets to their local fans, chose to sell them at face value – $275 each, back then – to a travel agency 1,000 miles from Green Bay.
And that’s simply impossible to believe.
Now let’s work some hypothetical numbers.
Let’s say the Packers sold 2,000 tickets, a conservative number, to that Texas travel agency. Now let’s say that each of those 2,000 tickets was sold to that agency at $50 over face value, another conservative number. That means that a person or persons within the Packers organization pocketed a nifty $100,000 on that transaction – and again, those are very conservative numbers.
Sounds like something a state attorney general’s office might want to sink its investigative powers into, provided of course, that attorney general’s office got would want the public to know from where and how it and its political benefactors got their 1997 Packers-Patriots Super Bowl tickets.
And four years later, all remains quiet on the NFL’s Midwestern front.
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OF COURSE Dennis Miller will return next season to Monday Night Football. Having taken such a leap, did you think ABC was about to allow anyone to think it made a mistake? Unless Miller wanted out, his return next season was virtually assured from the start of last season.
Meanwhile, as ABC’s MNF ratings continued in decline, the Westwood One/CBS Sports Radio network reports a 16-percent rise in its MNF radio numbers over last season. A bad reaction to Miller? America’s Boomer Esiason lobby checking in?
Meanwhile, with MNF radio regular Matt Millen now running the Lions, Westwood/CBS must decide whether it wants to go with a two-man booth – incumbents Esiason and play-by-player Howard David – or replace Millen. Expect a three-man sound. And expect Cris Collinsworth or Dan Dierdorf, but mostly Collinsworth.
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CHRIS Schenkel, the Giants’ original TV voice (1954-64), now semi-retired in Indiana, will be pulling for the Blue today. “This team seems to have come together as a group of overachievers,” he told us. “And if you look at the history of the Giants, most of its best teams weren’t known for size, or speed, but for achievement.”
Super Bowl Lookalikes: Paul Giannone of Warren, N.J. submits Ray Lewis and singer Aaron Neville . . . MSG Network, which shines extra brightly when local teams play postseason games on other networks, will have a full-length Supe postgame show, as opposed to “Survivor 2.”
Phil Mushnick appears regularly in New York Post Sports Week.