Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Sports

Remembering two Giants who made the ultimate sacrifice

Years ago, there was a popular trivia question: Name the four 1963 MVPs who wore No. 32.

Answer: Sandy Koufax, Elston Howard, Jim Brown and Cookie Gilchrist, fullback for the AFL Bills — except it was half-myth. Gilchrits didn’t wear 32 and Brown didn’t win it that year.

Here’s another: Who was the last NFL Giant to wear No. 32?

Hint: You likely never heard of him.

But given the day, the time, the temperature and the way the wind has been blowing, perhaps we can change that.

He was Al Blozis, a 6-foot-6, 250-pound two-way tackle out of Georgetown, and before that Dickinson High School in Jersey City. Born in Garfield, N.J., he played two rising-star seasons for the Giants, 1942-43, then, on furlough from the Army, three games in 1944, including the championship game, lost, 14-7, to the Packers in the Polo Grounds.

Even with World War II raging, he’d been deemed “too big” for combat, too big for equipment and uniforms — sea ships and air ships didn’t have the headroom. But he insisted. Still, after breaking the Army’s hand-grenade-throwing record, inches short of 95 yards, he was assigned a desk job.

Members of the Giants and Al Blozis’ family at the Polo Grounds to unveil a plaque in his honor.AP

But Blozis finally was given the OK to join the fight.

There are conflicting stories from Jan. 21,1945, but it’s clear Blozis was in the Vosges Mountains of Eastern France, near the German border, when at least two of his men failed to return from a patrol. Blozis, alone and in the snow, went to find them. He didn’t return.

He was reported missing in action until April, when his death was confirmed. He, along with 10,488 American WW II military, is buried at the Lorraine American Cemetery near Saint-Avold, Moselle, France.

Blozis was 26.

Jack Lummus, a 6-3 offensive end — they didn’t call them tight ends or wide receivers back then — made it to 29, the number he wore with the Giants. A star athlete from Baylor, he played nine games for the Giants in 1941, his first and last pro football year.

After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Marines. At 25, older than most, and a college man, he was commissioned a first lieutenant.

Among the first to hit the black, volcanic sand of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, Lummus was killed there on March 8, nearly two weeks after the famous flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, and two weeks before Iwo was finally taken.

Though the need to take Iwo Jima was questioned for its cost — 26,000 U.S. casualties, 6,800 dead — U.S. fighter, bomber and scout air crews made the island’s two air strips a sortie base and a life-saving emergency stop.

US Naval ship Jack LummusAFP/Getty Images

Lummus’ initially was buried near his boyhood home in Ennis, Texas, and later moved to Texas State Cemetery in Austin. His tombstone reads: Jack Lummus, Medal of Honor, 1st Lt., USMC, World War II, Oct. 22, 1915, March 8, 1945.”

That’s right, a Giant earned the Medal of Honor. Commanding a rifle platoon, he’d already been wounded in the shoulder and twice been knocked flat by grenade concussions when he rose to lead three successful assaults on entrenched positions.

Pressing a fourth assault, a land mine blew off his legs. Mortally wounded, he continued to command his men.

A large Naval container ship is named in his honor.

Lummus’s commanding officer, a Major Antonelli, wrote to his mother:

“Jack suffered very little for he didn’t live long. I saw Jack soon after he was hit. With calmness, serenity and complacency, Jack said, ‘The New York Giants have lost a good man.’ We all lost a good man.”

Terrible tackling goes ignored on ‘great’ play

Expert analysts keep telling us to ignore what we see, believe what they say.

Last Sunday night on NBC, Miami running back Damien Williams scored a thoroughly modern touchdown.

Taking a short pass at the 10, he could’ve easily been tackled or shoved out of bounds at the 5 by two Oakland defenders, but both tried to shoulder-blast him into the next world. Williams bounced off both, then into the end zone.

Rather than address the conspicuous — the total absence of sensible, functional, fundamental tackling on this play and as part of an epidemic — Cris Collinsworth, even with the help of a replay, hollered, “That is a great play by Damien Williams!”

Do anything-for-money strategies ever consider diminishing returns?

While weeknight college football — now Tuesdays and Wednesdays as well as Thursdays — are played for TV money, most have the same thing in common: Lots and lots of empty seats.
North Carolina-Pittsburgh, this past Thursday night on ESPN, couldn’t hide row after row of bright yellow vacant seats.

Then there’s another visually disturbing NFL “Thursday Night Football,” the latest Seahawks-Cardinals — a close, low-scoring but slow-moving, 13-punts, 21-penalties slog.
And the second half began here at 10:21. Nah.

Recruits from all over

Here, there, everywhere, Division I colleges are losing money along with their missions and minds for what? To win ballgames.

The University of the Pacific, in Stockton, Calif., heavily recruits from across the Atlantic. Its current field hockey team includes eight women from South Africa, two from Belgium, one each from Spain and Holland. Whatever it takes!

Same with tennis. Current male recruits are from Zimbabwe, Egypt, Armenia, Spain, Brazil and England. (Two are from the United States.) Female recruits are from Holland, Israel, Romania, Ecuador and Spain.

Pacific last year exceeded its athletic budget by $4 million. Its men’s basketball program was sanctioned and fined by the NCAA for illegal recruiting, academic fraud and providing investigators with false information.

Tuition to the private college this year was raised 4 percent to $48,000 per student — not including housing and food. It’s crazy. But winning ballgames remains many colleges’ highest, most expensive and most shameless priority.


Craig Carton keeps insisting he’s innocent. Fine.

That would mean there were no victims of his ticket brokering, and no malfeasance in servicing an alleged $500,000 or more gambling debt — or, at the very least, he dealt up front and fairly with business customers and/or investors. That’s to be determined.

But how — given his radio schedule, side-gigs and personal appearances — did he find time to enter the marked-up ticket resales business, and why? And why, given his prominent public position and eagerness toward self-promotion, did he keep his honest involvement in an honest entertainment business quiet until he was arrested?


As for another WFAN All-Star, Mike Francesa, after his deluded declaration last week that post-WFAN he’ll continue to “release” his NFL picks because “they have value,” he went 1-2, including his career specialty: touting a big home favorite, this time Seattle giving seven to Washington, that lost the game, outright.