GaryMrMets
12-18-2005, 04:01 PM
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/giants/story/375571p-319170c.html
Well suited for honor
Daily News tabs Mara as Sportsman of the Year
BY WAYNE COFFEY
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
http://www.nydailynews.com/images/editors/header_endzone.gif
Don Thum's letters would arrive at Giants Stadium every week, as inevitable as traffic on the Turnpike. They would be in the same scrawl, on the same yellow legal paper, from the same rural outpost - Fonda, N.Y. - hard by Exit 28 on the New York State Thruway.
For more than 20 years, Thum, a 64-year-old retired state trooper, would send the letters to the team owner, most of them containing diagrammed plays and assorted personnel and draft suggestions. And for 20 years, the Giants' owner, Wellington T. Mara, would answer them, every one, well over 1,000 in all. He would never use a form letter, or a signature stamp, not for Thum, not for any of the 200 fan letters he would respond to in a typical month.
Once you corresponded with him, you were automatically on his Christmas card list, too.
"Every person who wrote to him was a customer, and he thought it was his obligation to let them know that he cared and the team cared, even if they were ripping him," says son Frank Mara, the Giants' director of promotions.
"You could never find a better man than him," Don Thum says. "He was one of a kind."
Nearly two months after he succumbed to cancer at 89, Wellington Mara remains the standard by which sports owners are measured, an old-school man with a patrician pedigree and a commoner's heart; a man who treated his multi-million dollar franchise as if it were a corner store, spreading grace and dignity as he went. He is not the winner of the Daily News' inaugural New York Sportsman of the Year Award because he died.
He is the winner because of how he lived, and how he treated virtually everyone with whom he intersected.
Every time you want to think that honor and goodness in sports are down for a terminal count, done in by tawdriness and self-promotion and runaway entitlement, you conjure an image of Wellington Mara, and you feel better.
If that isn't a quality to commemorate, what is?
"He was never pessimistic about anything. He was always optimistic," Don Thum says.
"He didn't think he was better than anybody else," says John Mara, the oldest of the 11 children born to Wellington and Ann Mara, and the man who has succeeded his father at the helm of the Giants. "He was just another man who felt blessed to be in the position he was in."
Wellington Mara was a man of devout faith and deep routine. He went to 8 a.m. Mass at the Church of the Resurrection, near his Rye home, every day. He loved his walks around the lower level of Giants Stadium, rosary beads in hand. At every home game, he'd remark at kickoff time how many empty seats there were, recalls son Chris, the Giants' director of player evaluation, and midway through the first quarter, would always say, "Boy, it really filled up."
When the Giants would come off the field after a game, win or lose, the owner was at the locker-room door, with a kind word or a pat of encouragement, before heading straight for the trainer's room, to check on his injured players.
His longest-running routine, though, was kindness. When Hurricane Floyd struck in 1999, Joann Lamneck, his assistant of 21 years, had eight feet of water in her basement. Her boss was the first one to call, and the first to write a check to help her through it. On a walk around the Stadium not long before he got sick, he came back without his Giants hat on. He had given it to a cleanup worker.
A veteran team employee recalls the time Mara found out she was struggling to make payments on a new apartment, and quietly covered it. The employee wants to remain anonymous, knowing that Mara would prefer to keep things discreet.
Mara would even extend his heart to inmates, several of whom were letter-writers. He would send them media guides, autographed photos and other items, and would sometimes mail Christmas gifts to their children.
"I really believe you are the only owner in the NFL whose picture is up in San Quentin," Lamneck used to tell him, teasingly.
"Well, I can think of worse places," Mara would reply.
Only Mara could summon dignity when responding to letters that were not just offensive, but profane, Lamneck says.
"I hope you never get a letter like the one you sent me," Mara would write, before signing off with, "More in sorrow than in anger. . . . "
"It was such a privilege to work for him," Lamneck says.
Bishop William McCormack, 81, grew up just across Park Ave. and 83rd St. from Mara, and was his oldest friend. "I was a 10-year-old brat when he was 17 or 18, and I remember thinking, 'This guy is something special.' And that's the impression I had of him my whole life," McCormack says.
McCormack visited Mara every day at Memorial Sloan-Kettering over the final month of his old friend's life. They rarely talked, but found strength and comfort being together. "It was a faith experience for me just to be in his presence," the Bishop says.
On Wellington's last day at the hospital, his condition worsened and John Mara got a call at 5:30 in the morning. He rushed into the city to be at his bedside. He held his father's hand.
"I will be there when you get there," the father told the son.
Wellington Mara died at home on Tuesday morning, Oct. 25, surrounded by 11 children and some of his 40 grandchildren. One month later, an hour before kickoff of the Seattle game, Judith Kailee Mara, his first great-grandchild, was born to grandson Danny and his wife, Mairin.
Toward the end of Wellington Mara's life, Don Thum could tell the old man's body was weakening. The handwriting on the letters was shakier, harder to make out.
Still, he wrote back. He always wrote back.
Thum was sad that he couldn't make it down for the funeral, but a serious heart condition made it impossible. Five years ago, Thum had his second heart operation - a quadruple bypass - at St. Luke's Hospital. He wasn't there long when the phone rang. It was the Giants' owner calling to see how he was doing.
Don Thum has a bulging box of letters from Wellington Mara in his attic, and cherishes them all. Do you know how it made him feel - a regular fan from a little upstate town who didn't even go to games - to be treated this way by the owner of his favorite team? Do you know how much it lifted him up through all his own health problems, reaching into the mailbox and seeing another Giants envelope?
Thum never asked Wellington Mara for anything, but that didn't matter. Mara sent him tickets to a game in the first Super Bowl season. He invited Thum to visit him in Albany each year and come onto the field during training camp, and would introduce him to players and coaches.
"This is my oldest pen pal," Mara would tell people. Sometimes they would joke about how Thum was right when he urged the Giants to pick Shaun Alexander over Ron Dayne, and about the other times when Thum wasn't so right. They became friends, and it didn't matter that one of them was a small-town state trooper and the other was a big-city owner.
Don Thum came away from every letter and every conversation he ever had with Wellington Mara feeling valued, feeling special, as if he were no less a part of the Giant family than Frank Gifford or Harry Carson. It was a nice way to feel, and he just hopes that Wellington Mara, the owner with the pen and the heart that wouldn't quit, knows how much he appreciates it.
"He was some man," Don Thum says.
Big Apple's best
And rounding out the Top 5 in voting for Daily News Sportsman of the year:
Omar Minaya, 155 votes
The first Latin GM in the sport, the 47-year-old Minaya has returned to his home borough with big energy and an open checkbook, making Flushing a hotter destination than it has been in years. Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran were the marquee pickups for the 2005 season, followed closely by this season's big-name newcomers: Carlos Delgado, Billy Wagner and Paul Lo Duca. He made a strong push to unseat Mara at the top of the list.
Tiki Barber, 130 votes
Thirty-five players were taken before him in the 1997 draft, which is hard to fathom now that the 5-10, 200-pound sparkplug has become the most prolific offensive force (14,551 all-purpose yards, including 8,284 on the ground going into yesterday) in franchise history and one of the premier backs in the game. All this, and the best smile in New York sports, too.
Pedro Martinez, 125 votes
After the most impactful 15-8 season in memory, Martinez is coming up on his 200th career victory and his 3,000th career strikeout, as much of an undersized marvel as ever. There are 2,500 innings on his right arm, but there's nothing to suggest he shouldn't be at the head of the pennant chase for 2006.
Alex Rodriguez, 105 votes
His 48 homers set a club record for righthanded batters, surpassing Joe DiMaggio, and his MVP award was the first by a Yankee since Don Mattingly in 1985. Rodriguez's numbers were other-worldly (.321 avg., 130 RBI, 21 steals and terrific defense) and his philanthropy, particularly in his native Miami, has almost no bounds. He is one of the game's all-time greats. Now if he can just find his way into a World Series. . .
The Finalists
The following results were arrived at by voting from News' editors and writers:
Wellington Mara, 162
Omar Minaya, 155
Tiki Barber, 130
Pedro Martinez, 125
Alex Rodriguez, 105
Joe Torre, 56
Jaromir Jagr, 47
David Wright, 40
Michael Strahan, 12
Larry Brown, 10
First-place vote: 10 points
Second-place vote: 7 points
Third-place vote: 5 points
Fourth-place vote: 3 points
Fifth-place vote: 1 point
Originally published on December 18, 2005
http://www.nydailynews.com/ips_rich_content/199-mara_wellington.JPG
Wellington Mara
http://www.nydailynews.com/ips_rich_content/786-mara_sign.JPG
Giants fans show their appreciation for Wellington Mara in Big Blue's first game after owner's passing.
Well suited for honor
Daily News tabs Mara as Sportsman of the Year
BY WAYNE COFFEY
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
http://www.nydailynews.com/images/editors/header_endzone.gif
Don Thum's letters would arrive at Giants Stadium every week, as inevitable as traffic on the Turnpike. They would be in the same scrawl, on the same yellow legal paper, from the same rural outpost - Fonda, N.Y. - hard by Exit 28 on the New York State Thruway.
For more than 20 years, Thum, a 64-year-old retired state trooper, would send the letters to the team owner, most of them containing diagrammed plays and assorted personnel and draft suggestions. And for 20 years, the Giants' owner, Wellington T. Mara, would answer them, every one, well over 1,000 in all. He would never use a form letter, or a signature stamp, not for Thum, not for any of the 200 fan letters he would respond to in a typical month.
Once you corresponded with him, you were automatically on his Christmas card list, too.
"Every person who wrote to him was a customer, and he thought it was his obligation to let them know that he cared and the team cared, even if they were ripping him," says son Frank Mara, the Giants' director of promotions.
"You could never find a better man than him," Don Thum says. "He was one of a kind."
Nearly two months after he succumbed to cancer at 89, Wellington Mara remains the standard by which sports owners are measured, an old-school man with a patrician pedigree and a commoner's heart; a man who treated his multi-million dollar franchise as if it were a corner store, spreading grace and dignity as he went. He is not the winner of the Daily News' inaugural New York Sportsman of the Year Award because he died.
He is the winner because of how he lived, and how he treated virtually everyone with whom he intersected.
Every time you want to think that honor and goodness in sports are down for a terminal count, done in by tawdriness and self-promotion and runaway entitlement, you conjure an image of Wellington Mara, and you feel better.
If that isn't a quality to commemorate, what is?
"He was never pessimistic about anything. He was always optimistic," Don Thum says.
"He didn't think he was better than anybody else," says John Mara, the oldest of the 11 children born to Wellington and Ann Mara, and the man who has succeeded his father at the helm of the Giants. "He was just another man who felt blessed to be in the position he was in."
Wellington Mara was a man of devout faith and deep routine. He went to 8 a.m. Mass at the Church of the Resurrection, near his Rye home, every day. He loved his walks around the lower level of Giants Stadium, rosary beads in hand. At every home game, he'd remark at kickoff time how many empty seats there were, recalls son Chris, the Giants' director of player evaluation, and midway through the first quarter, would always say, "Boy, it really filled up."
When the Giants would come off the field after a game, win or lose, the owner was at the locker-room door, with a kind word or a pat of encouragement, before heading straight for the trainer's room, to check on his injured players.
His longest-running routine, though, was kindness. When Hurricane Floyd struck in 1999, Joann Lamneck, his assistant of 21 years, had eight feet of water in her basement. Her boss was the first one to call, and the first to write a check to help her through it. On a walk around the Stadium not long before he got sick, he came back without his Giants hat on. He had given it to a cleanup worker.
A veteran team employee recalls the time Mara found out she was struggling to make payments on a new apartment, and quietly covered it. The employee wants to remain anonymous, knowing that Mara would prefer to keep things discreet.
Mara would even extend his heart to inmates, several of whom were letter-writers. He would send them media guides, autographed photos and other items, and would sometimes mail Christmas gifts to their children.
"I really believe you are the only owner in the NFL whose picture is up in San Quentin," Lamneck used to tell him, teasingly.
"Well, I can think of worse places," Mara would reply.
Only Mara could summon dignity when responding to letters that were not just offensive, but profane, Lamneck says.
"I hope you never get a letter like the one you sent me," Mara would write, before signing off with, "More in sorrow than in anger. . . . "
"It was such a privilege to work for him," Lamneck says.
Bishop William McCormack, 81, grew up just across Park Ave. and 83rd St. from Mara, and was his oldest friend. "I was a 10-year-old brat when he was 17 or 18, and I remember thinking, 'This guy is something special.' And that's the impression I had of him my whole life," McCormack says.
McCormack visited Mara every day at Memorial Sloan-Kettering over the final month of his old friend's life. They rarely talked, but found strength and comfort being together. "It was a faith experience for me just to be in his presence," the Bishop says.
On Wellington's last day at the hospital, his condition worsened and John Mara got a call at 5:30 in the morning. He rushed into the city to be at his bedside. He held his father's hand.
"I will be there when you get there," the father told the son.
Wellington Mara died at home on Tuesday morning, Oct. 25, surrounded by 11 children and some of his 40 grandchildren. One month later, an hour before kickoff of the Seattle game, Judith Kailee Mara, his first great-grandchild, was born to grandson Danny and his wife, Mairin.
Toward the end of Wellington Mara's life, Don Thum could tell the old man's body was weakening. The handwriting on the letters was shakier, harder to make out.
Still, he wrote back. He always wrote back.
Thum was sad that he couldn't make it down for the funeral, but a serious heart condition made it impossible. Five years ago, Thum had his second heart operation - a quadruple bypass - at St. Luke's Hospital. He wasn't there long when the phone rang. It was the Giants' owner calling to see how he was doing.
Don Thum has a bulging box of letters from Wellington Mara in his attic, and cherishes them all. Do you know how it made him feel - a regular fan from a little upstate town who didn't even go to games - to be treated this way by the owner of his favorite team? Do you know how much it lifted him up through all his own health problems, reaching into the mailbox and seeing another Giants envelope?
Thum never asked Wellington Mara for anything, but that didn't matter. Mara sent him tickets to a game in the first Super Bowl season. He invited Thum to visit him in Albany each year and come onto the field during training camp, and would introduce him to players and coaches.
"This is my oldest pen pal," Mara would tell people. Sometimes they would joke about how Thum was right when he urged the Giants to pick Shaun Alexander over Ron Dayne, and about the other times when Thum wasn't so right. They became friends, and it didn't matter that one of them was a small-town state trooper and the other was a big-city owner.
Don Thum came away from every letter and every conversation he ever had with Wellington Mara feeling valued, feeling special, as if he were no less a part of the Giant family than Frank Gifford or Harry Carson. It was a nice way to feel, and he just hopes that Wellington Mara, the owner with the pen and the heart that wouldn't quit, knows how much he appreciates it.
"He was some man," Don Thum says.
Big Apple's best
And rounding out the Top 5 in voting for Daily News Sportsman of the year:
Omar Minaya, 155 votes
The first Latin GM in the sport, the 47-year-old Minaya has returned to his home borough with big energy and an open checkbook, making Flushing a hotter destination than it has been in years. Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran were the marquee pickups for the 2005 season, followed closely by this season's big-name newcomers: Carlos Delgado, Billy Wagner and Paul Lo Duca. He made a strong push to unseat Mara at the top of the list.
Tiki Barber, 130 votes
Thirty-five players were taken before him in the 1997 draft, which is hard to fathom now that the 5-10, 200-pound sparkplug has become the most prolific offensive force (14,551 all-purpose yards, including 8,284 on the ground going into yesterday) in franchise history and one of the premier backs in the game. All this, and the best smile in New York sports, too.
Pedro Martinez, 125 votes
After the most impactful 15-8 season in memory, Martinez is coming up on his 200th career victory and his 3,000th career strikeout, as much of an undersized marvel as ever. There are 2,500 innings on his right arm, but there's nothing to suggest he shouldn't be at the head of the pennant chase for 2006.
Alex Rodriguez, 105 votes
His 48 homers set a club record for righthanded batters, surpassing Joe DiMaggio, and his MVP award was the first by a Yankee since Don Mattingly in 1985. Rodriguez's numbers were other-worldly (.321 avg., 130 RBI, 21 steals and terrific defense) and his philanthropy, particularly in his native Miami, has almost no bounds. He is one of the game's all-time greats. Now if he can just find his way into a World Series. . .
The Finalists
The following results were arrived at by voting from News' editors and writers:
Wellington Mara, 162
Omar Minaya, 155
Tiki Barber, 130
Pedro Martinez, 125
Alex Rodriguez, 105
Joe Torre, 56
Jaromir Jagr, 47
David Wright, 40
Michael Strahan, 12
Larry Brown, 10
First-place vote: 10 points
Second-place vote: 7 points
Third-place vote: 5 points
Fourth-place vote: 3 points
Fifth-place vote: 1 point
Originally published on December 18, 2005
http://www.nydailynews.com/ips_rich_content/199-mara_wellington.JPG
Wellington Mara
http://www.nydailynews.com/ips_rich_content/786-mara_sign.JPG
Giants fans show their appreciation for Wellington Mara in Big Blue's first game after owner's passing.