SUPER BOWL XXI : DENVER vs. NEW YORK : Think They Tok Odd? Wait Till Giants Scaw Maw Than D’Broncs

At last, a Super Bowl game that’s super!

The Denver Broncos? Forget the Denver Broncos. They’re just the piano in this recital. They just have to stand there and hum.

It’s the New York Giants that make this a happening.

After XXI years, the Super Bowl is finally on Broadway. It has arrived. We’ve finally gotten rid of all those Miami Dolphins, Cincinnati Bengals, all those funny little teams that weren’t even here a couple of decades ago. Those Johnny-Come-Latelies.

The team that had Ken Strong, Tuffy Leemans, Mel Hein, the team that put the game in the Palace and center ring in the first place has finally made it to the party.

Listen, you think a World Series can call itself a World Series if it’s not in Yankee Stadium? You think a Super Bowl can call itself a championship if all it ever has are things such as Raiders and Vikings and even Cowboys and Colts in it? That’s all Bridgeport. Barn-dancing. New York is what counts. If you don’t do it in New York, you might as well not do it. Name 14 great plays in World Series history, think of 10 great championship fights. They were all done in or for New York.

What you have to understand about the New York Giants anyway is, it’s not a team, it’s a cult. A religion.

They consider themselves the elite of the game and they always have. In fact, they feel they are pro football. Everybody else is a parvenu. The Vulgate.

You have to remember that before there was a Denver Bronco, there was a New York Giant. In fact, before there was even a Green Bay Packer, there was a New York Giant. The only team on a social footing with a Giant is a Chicago Bear.

The Giants are kind of like the Hapsburgs of Football. The Bourbons. Everybody else is a peasant.

George Halas might have invented professional football, but the Giants made it public. They put it in New York, where the hype is, where it has to happen if it’s to matter.

The Giant fans made pro football the “in” thing long before it swept the rest of the country. It was the darling of the upper crust from Locust Valley and the lower crusts from Canarsie well before it found its way to mountains of Colorado or the restaurants of Melrose.

The Giants took the game away from the colleges. New York U., Fordham, Columbia, even Yale and Harvard faded into the woodwork, became Division II or non-existent. Even the Army-Navy game became irrelevant.

New York gave the world the “line,” the “spread” before Las Vegas was a gleam in Bugsy Siegel’s eye. New York was the first to give a new twist to Grantland Rice’s words to make them read “It’s not whether you won or lost, it’s by how many points.”

A Giant fan is like no other in the world of sport. He considers he belongs to a very secret club. If you don’t think he does, try to get a season ticket. When the Giants lose, which has been often of late years, he just goes underground. He pays lip service to the reigning monarchs of the game, but he secretly thinks they really are beneath him. And the Giants.

You think the Jets took the town away from the Giants in the gaudy era of Joe Namath and Sonny Werblin? Guess again. The Jets don’t count. Interlopers. No true Giant fan would be caught at a Jet game.

Dallas may be America’s Team, but a Giant fan sniffs. He doesn’t want his team to be America’s, just New York’s. What else is there?

They’ll be in Pasadena in force, these representatives of Homo Gianticus species.

You’ll have no trouble recognizing them. They’ll be the ones elbowing you aside in restaurants and bus lines, they’ll be in a terrible hurry, and they’ll yell at you if you ask them what time it is, they’ll look as if they’re mad all the time. They’ll sneer at the Rose Bowl. (“Where’s the second deck?”) They’ll pretend not to be impressed with celebrities. (“I’d ask for your autograph, but I seen your last picture.”)

But, most of all, they’ll bring their own language. So, in the interests of bridging that barrier, I would like to bring you my quadrennial public service of a glossary of translations of New Yorkese into everyday English.

“Scaw”--touchdown.

“Raw”--loud cheer. What the crowd does when the Giants scaw.

“God”--position on a football team. Deodorant. As in “nose god” or “right god.”

“Caught”--a place where criminals go to get sentenced or plaintiffs go to sue.

“Lore”--jurisprudence. It’s practiced in the highest caught of lore in the land, such as, the Supreme Caught.

“Hot”--vital organ. Seat of emotions. Bumper stickers have hots in them for “I New York.”

“Lodge”--huge. Lawrence Taylor is a very lodge football player.

“Maw”--additional. As in “Tell me maw.”

“Paw”--the norm, in golf, a 4 on a 400-yard hole. Can also mean “decant” as in “Paw me a glass of milk.” A coach who wins 50-3 is said to be “pawing it on.”

“Faw”--number after three.

“Caw”--the family sedan.

“Daw”--what you enter a room through. A caw usually has faw daws.

“Pot”--what you do to your hair or what Moses did to the Red Sea. He potted it.

“Potty”--what they give you on your birthday, a birthday potty.

“Shock”--a terrifying animal of the deep. They made a movie about one. Called “Jores.”

“Dock”--what it gets when the sun goes down.

“Flaw”--what you walk on. In New York, some of the buildings have 100 flaws, but some elevators don’t stop on the bottom flaws.

“Jaw”--what you put cookies in.

“Sauce”--a reliable informant or a fountainhead as in “The sauce of the Nile is in the mountains of Kenya.”

“Nurse”--what a crowd makes when it raws.

“Pock”--where they play baseball or where you get mugged, as in “Central Pock.”

“Hod”--difficult.

“Cod”--what you play poker with, a deck of cods.

“Cot”--goes before the horse.

“Mock”--distinguishing feature as a scar which is “The mock of the squealer,” or the Mock of Zorro.

“Haw”--female possessive, belonging to a woman as in “We took haw caw to the game as mine was in the shop.”

“Shop”--finely-honed edge.”

“Hop”--stringed instrument or a player of Irish extraction.

A woman’s handbag is either a “parse” or a “poise,” depending on which side of the Gowanus Canal you were brought up, but if you’re going to sit among ‘em and root for Denver, just remember you may need a helmet more than John Elway does. Venom travels well.