This Day in Football History (Death of Tim Mara, A Giant Among Owners)

Feb. 16, 1959—Tim Mara, a bookmaker who parlayed a $500 investment into multigenerational family ownership of the pro New York Giants football team, died in his native New York at age 71.

Himself a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame (posthumously elected in the Class of 1963), “Big Tim” (a reference to his 6-ft., solid 205-pound frame) was the father of another Canton inductee, son Wellington. He was a cornerstone of the National Football League, as his payment for the Giants franchise gave the fledgling league a showcase in the nation’s largest city.

Over the years, Mara and the league had to endure several stiff challenges, including bearing the brunt of the fight against rival AFL in 1926; helping to keep the team and league together at all during the Great Depression (when he transferred ownership to sons Jack, 22, and Wellington, 14) and WWII (when some teams, with players off fighting, could not continue in their current form); and enduring another upstart league, the AAFC, from 1946 to 1949.

But Mara built Giants into a perennial powerhouse with three NFL championships and eight divisional titles, And only a few months before his death, the NFL’s first “sudden death” playoff game—between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts—became known as “the greatest game ever played,” finally establishing the league’s popularity.

In a number of ways, Mara’s story resembles that of fellow NFL owner and good friend Art Rooney. Both were devout Irish-Catholics who earned the wherewithal to buy their teams through their bookmaking; both created great franchises (in Rooney’s case, the Pittsburgh Steelers) that have won multiple championships; and both passed on their stake in the teams to their descendants, now in the third generation of ownership.

 

For all the money that Mara amassed by the end of his life, his beginnings were distinctly humble. Growing up in Greenwich Village, he quit school when his policeman father died in order to help his mother and brother survive, according to his friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Arthur Daley.

Mara began running bets when he was a 12-year-old newsboy, since his route—along Broadway, from Wanamakers to Union Square—was filled with bookmaking joints. Fortunately for him, many customers were lower- and middle-echelon Tammany Hall figures who, as they rose, remembered him fondly, including Governor Alfred E. Smith (who incorrectly predicted that pro football would never compete with college football) and Jimmy Walker, the dapper “Night Mayor” in the Roaring Twenties.

Before long, Mara began booking bets himself, becoming a “wagering commissioner” when this was still legal, up to the ‘30s. Never gambling himself, he eventually branched out, with side ventures in bookbinding, coal, liquor, scotch, and boxing promotions.

Success with his NFL venture was hardly assured for a long time. Mara experienced stiff financial losses until Red Grange’s debut in the Polo Grounds for the Chicago Bears on Dec. 6,1925, turned the tide, converting a $40,000 deficit into an $18,000 gain.

By this time, Mara’s childhood associates had drawn him into Tammany Hall’s “Tiger Room” at 23rd Street and Fourth Avenue, where they could relax and help each other out. His loyalty (a trait that evidently still runs in the family) led him to help out these associates, even when it brought unwanted attention.

One was Walker, who in 1930, when the Great Depression was taking hold, got Mara to promote a game benefiting the city’s unemployed. The contest; against the Knute Rockne-led Notre Dame, ended up netting $116,000. (Mara was such a good friend of the mayor’s that, at the latter’s funeral in 1946, he led the entire Giant team en masse into St. Patrick’s Cathedral only moments before the service was to begin, according to Donald I. Miller’s Supreme City.)

While Mara remained friends with Walker to the end, he was not so lucky with Smith. Their falling out stemmed from the 1928 Presidential race. Late in the campaign, the governor’s campaign manager, John J. Raskob, sought to keep his Presidential campaign through loans meant to evade campaign-finance laws. Friends such as Mara were assured they would not be responsible for the loan, but after the election that proved not to be the case. In 1934, he and another member of the Tammany group, Patrick Kenny, became involved in litigation for recovery of the loan.

Overwhelmingly, however, in other areas of his life, Mara managed to avoid such difficulties, in part because of his winning personality. This excerpt from a 1937 profile of him in Turf and Sport Digest conveys quite well the impact of can-do optimism:

“Atop that high stool he is the very picture of beaming good humor. His big, rosy, happy face is topped by a crop of wavy reddish hair. Contrasting with the nervous secretive taciturnity of most of the clubhouse bookmakers Mara’s joyful mien and robust voice, calling out hearty greetings and poking weak fun at all comers, is refreshing. You like the fellow. He looks as though he’d give you a break.”