December 9, 1934: The Sneaker Game

The starting offense of the 1934 New York Giants.

Back row, left to right: 18, Dale Burnett; 23, Bo Molenda;

22, Ed Danowski; and 50, Ken Strong.

Front row, left to right: 1, Ray Flaherty;

29, Red Badgro; 10, Potsy Jones; 7, Mel Hein;

11, Butch Gibson; 27, Bill Morgan; and 21, Ike Frankian.

December 9, 1934, 90 years ago: For the 1st time, a New York football team wins a championship game. And they proved the old adage that revenge is a dish best served cold.

The New York Giants, named for the baseball team of the same name, were founded in 1925, and won the NFL Championship in 1927, at a time when the title went to the team that finished 1st in a single-division League. The Giants went 11-1-1, outpacing the Green Bay Packers at 7-2-1.

For the 1933 season, the NFL split into 2 Divisions, Eastern and Western. The Giants won the East, and the Chicago Bears won the West. While there had been a Playoff for the League title the season before, and the Bears had won it, 1933 was the year of the 1st official NFL Championship Game. It was played at Wrigley Field in Chicago, and the Bears came from behind to beat the Giants, 23-21.

The Giants won the East again in 1934, with an 8-5 record. The Bears won the West again, going 13-0, and riding a 17-game winning streak. With Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski, who would become charter members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the Bears were favorites.

In spite of a much more pedestrian record, the Giants were every bit as loaded as the year before. Center Mel Hein would also be a charter inductee in Canton, and would be joined by running back and kicker Ken Strong, and ends Red Badgro and Ray Flaherty. Each team's head coach would also be elected to the Hall of Fame: Steve Owen of New York and George Halas of Chicago. Each team's owner also would: Tim Mara and Halas.

As the Western winner hosted the Championship Game the year before, now it was the Eastern winner's turn to host. But the night before the game, a freezing rain hit New York, and when the Giants got to the Polo Grounds, they found the field frozen solid. The bad weather kept the crowd to 35,039, about 20,000 short of a sellout.

Flaherty came up with an idea: The Giants should wear sneakers, to get a better footing on the field than the standard football cleats. But it was a Sunday: Sporting goods stores were closed. So Owen sent Abe Cohen, a tailor who served as the Giants' clubhouse attendant, to Manhattan College, 5 miles Uptown, to see if he could get some sneakers.

The athletic director -- contrary to legend, not the original Brother Jasper who founded Manhattan's athletic program and gave rise to the teams' name, the Jaspers, as he would have been long dead by this point -- gave Cohen the sneakers belonging to the basketball team, 9 pairs.

But by the time Cohen got back to the Polo Grounds, the 2nd half was already underway. Strong had opened the scoring with a field goal, but the Bears answered in the 2nd quarter with a Nagurski touchdown and a Jack Manders field goal. The Giants switched to the sneakers, but another Manders field goal made it 13-3 going into the 4th quarter.

But the sneakers did the trick. Ed Danowski threw a touchdown pass to Ike Frankian, making it 13-10 Chicago. The Bears could do nothing on their next drive. The Giants got the ball back, and Strong had enough footing to break away for a 42-yard touchdown run.

Strong scored another touchdown, this time from 11 yards out, as the Bears kept slipping, unable to keep up with the surer-footed Giants. Nagurski later said, "We immediately said something was wrong because they suddenly had good footing and we didn't... They just out-smarted us."

Danowski capped the game with a 9-yard quarterback keeper. The Giants won, 30-13, and their 27 points remain a record for the 4th quarter in an NFL championship game. (The New England Patriots scored 19 points in the 4th quarter of Super Bowl LI.) It became known as "The Sneaker Game." (It's never been called "The Sneaker Bowl.")

Beattie Feathers, a rookie running back out of the University of Tennessee, had become the 1st player to rush for over 1,000 yards in an NFL season. However, he was injured with 2 games remaining in the regular season. It probably wouldn't have mattered if he had been available to the Bears: He would have had to have helped them make up 3 touchdowns.

The Giants won another NFL Championship Game in 1938, but lost it in 1935, 1939, 1941, 1944 and 1946. In 1956, the Giants' 1st season playing their home games at the old Yankee Stadium, they again hosted the Bears in an NFL Championship Game. Again, the field was frozen solid. This time, with the legend of 1934 in mind, they had sneakers ready from the start, and it was no contest: The Giants won, 47-7.

Burned by it twice, Bears owner/coach and NFL co-founder George Halas talked the other owners into outlawing the sneaker tactic. The Giants would play on frozen fields in the NFL Championship Games of 1958 (at Yankee Stadium), 1961 (at Lambeau Field in Green Bay), 1962 (at Yankee Stadium again) and 1963 (at Wrigley Field in Chicago), and lost them all. 

Packer coach and general manager Vince Lombardi had been a Giants assistant in 1958, and had coached against them in 1961 and 1962. He knew that the cold weather of Green Bay made for a home-field advantage at Lambeau Field, but he didn't want a frozen field. So he had heating coils installed under the field, and it became known as "Lombardi's Electric Blanket." But on the morning of the 1967 NFL Championship Game, it was so cold, the machine keeping the coils heated broke, and the field froze. The game became known as the Ice Bowl, but the Packers won, anyway.

Since then, all natural-grass fields in the NFL have had similar heating systems. And, by the time the Giants made the Playoffs again, in 1981, many of the NFL's fields, including their own at Giants Stadium, were artificial. So while there have been many cold games in the NFL since, including a few at the Meadowlands, there has never been a frozen field since Lambeau became "the Frozen Tundra."