STAMFORD – Bob Robustelli figures there were three great things about growing up the son of a New York Giant.
The first was that football training camp was at Fairfield University, a short ride from his family’s home in Stamford. For three weeks each summer, Bob Robustelli and his big brother, Rick, along with other sons of Giants, did laundry and cleaned the training room, carried water and equipment to the practice field, and served as ball boys during practice drills.
It was the late 1950s and early ‘60s, a time of growing excitement over professional football. Hundreds of fans would travel to Fairfield to watch the Giants train, walking with the players from the gym to the field, getting autographs as they went.
The second great thing happened on certain Saturdays during the season. When the Giants played at home, Saturday was the final practice before Sunday’s game, and practices were at the Giants’ then-home field, Yankee Stadium.
During Saturday Giants practices, the ball boys played football. On a field at Yankee Stadium they squared off against each other – sons of defensive players vs. sons of offensive players.
“It was competitive,” Bob Robustelli said.
He remembers an incident in which the son of the Giants’ star halfback, Frank Gifford, was knocked out briefly during a Saturday game. The following day, Frank Gifford was knocked unconscious by Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik in a tackle so vicious that it lives in National Football League history.
The third great thing was Sunday home games. The Robustelli family, devout Catholics, would go to 8 a.m. Mass at St. Cecilia’s in Stamford then pile into their Pontiac station wagon and drive to Yankee Stadium.
Bob Robustelli remembers freezing-cold December games when, just before halftime, he and his brother would run to get a cup of hot chocolate. They would drink it sitting in the huge bay windows of the old Yankee Stadium, spending the 20-minute halftime getting warm before returning to the field to watch the rest of the game.
100 years, one of top 10
Robustelli’s memories now are in a book released a few weeks ago, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the New York Giants, one of the NFL’s oldest and most storied franchises.
As part of the celebration, the Giants formed a committee of sports writers, notable fans, and NFL and Pro Football Hall of Fame executives to rank the team’s top 100 players over the century.
First on their list of Giants greats is Lawrence Taylor. No. 2 is Roosevelt Brown, followed by Mel Hein, Frank Gifford, Michael Strahan, Emlen Tunnell, Harry Carson, Eli Manning, and Sam Huff.
No. 10 is Bob Robustelli’s late father, defensive end Andy Robustelli, a Hall of Famer, member of the Giants’ Ring of Honor, Stamford legend, and pope-like figure to players.
Bob Robustelli’s book, “The Pope of the NFL,” is titled after a nickname Giants players gave his father because he was three or four years older than they were, rooted and wiser. Andy Robustelli spent his early-adult years aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer in World War II, delaying the start of his student days at tiny Arnold College in Milford, where an NFL scout spotted him.
Bob Robustelli said the smaller part of his book is about football. The rest is about the family who loved Andy Robustelli, a man of faith, a devoted husband, a father of nine, an innovative businessman, a team leader, a Giant.
“It sounds corny, but it was written out of love,” said Bob Robustelli, the second-born. “It’s about how my father lived by the rules, tried to do the right thing, and helped people out whenever he could.”
Andy Robustelli died in 2011 when he was 85, exactly two months after the death of his wife of 63 years, Jeanne Dora Robustelli. They had been Stamford High School sweethearts.
“All those years, he never left the house without kissing her goodbye,” Bob Robustelli said.
81, the pass rusher
The football field was a different story. There, Andy Robustelli, No. 81, was a fast, fearsome tackler with the smarts to read plays quickly and the strength to sack quarterbacks relentlessly.
According to his Pro Football Hall of Fame entry, Andy Robustelli was “one of the finest defensive ends in pro football history.” He played five years with the Los Angeles Rams then nine years with the Giants, where he is “credited with molding together the 1956 team that won the NFL championship” – the title game until the Super Bowl started in 1967.
“A natural leader as well as an outstanding player,” Andy Robustelli “was clearly one of the finest pass rushers the game has seen,” the entry reads. Robustelli played in nine championship games, two with the Rams and seven with the Giants. He was named All-Pro seven times. In 1962 the Maxwell Club selected him as the NFL’s most outstanding player, a distinction that, until then, was given to offensive players.
He helped form a Giants defense so dominant that fans took notice. They began chanting “DEE-fense!” at Yankee Stadium in 1956, Andy Robustelli’s first year with the team.
“They were the first defensive unit to ever have a fan base,” Bob Robustelli said. “It was something special. The design of the defense, the overall concept, had never been seen in the NFL.”
It was the brainchild of Giants Defensive Coordinator Tom Landry, who would go on to join the Dallas Cowboys and become one of the winningest head coaches in the NFL. Called the 4-3 defense, it set up interlocking movements between players, one dependent on the other.
“It was a total team concept, based on precision. It revolutionized defense,” Bob Robustelli said. “Tom Landry invented it, then he and my father refined it. They talked about it constantly. My father became kind of like a coach on the field.”
Before the 4-3 defense, the Giants would announce only the offensive team to start Sunday games at Yankee Stadium. Afterward, “they started introducing the defense,” Bob Robustelli said.
It happened just in time for television, which was only beginning to broadcast professional football games.
Rubber soles save the day
The 1956 championship game, Giants vs. Chicago Bears, one of the first to be nationally aired, was an exciting contest that “told the sports world that pro football had arrived,” Bob Robustelli wrote.
The weather was so cold that December day that beverages froze at the concession stands, and “the hot dogs turned cold as soon as they hit the buns,” he wrote.
Andy Robustelli sacked the Bears quarterback three times for the Giants, but his biggest contribution that day may have been what he brought from his business world.
Sneakers.
Robustelli had a sporting goods store in Stamford, and before the game the Giants’ head coach asked whether he had enough sneakers on hand for the team if needed. The day of the game Robustelli stopped at his store, picked up 90 pairs of U.S. Keds, a popular brand of the time, and drove them to Yankee Stadium.
During the game the Bears slipped around the frozen field in their cleats, while the Giants caught traction in their Keds. The Giants defeated the Bears, 47-7.
The day after the win, “the game that put pro football on the map,” Bob Robustelli wrote, “a championship in the nation’s media capital in the dawn of the television age,” his father was at work in his Stamford sporting goods store.
‘We were lucky’
His father learned about hard work from growing up on Stamford’s West Side, then a neighborhood of Italian immigrants. He had a head for business, and launched enterprises as a boy, Bob Robustelli said.
Besides the sporting goods store, Andy Robustelli founded successful businesses including Robustelli World Travel, Robustelli Corporate Services, and National Professional Athletes, a company that engaged star players to market products to corporations. He also served as Director of Operations for the Giants for four years.
But it all wraps up in one conclusion, Bob Robustelli said.
Besides the three great things about being the son of a Giant, there were some terrific ordinary things.
They include having a father who made all his kids’ school lunches in the morning before he left for work, and later invited all the grandkids over for breakfast every Saturday so he could griddle them golden-brown pancakes.
“How else would you want to grow up?” Bob Robustelli asked. “We were lucky to be where we were.”