Kicking off a super Sunday
Jewish players reflect on Super Bowl
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PrintWith less than a minute to play in the biggest football game of his life, Jewish punter Josh Miller wanted a sandwich.
“I was hungry,” he said in an interview, recalling one of his many thoughts from Super Bowl XXXIX, when his New England Patriots edged the Philadelphia Eagles, 24-21.
Miller played an important role in the Patriots’ third NFL championship. With time running out, he booted the ball with enough backspin that it was downed at the Eagles’ four-yard line with 46 seconds left in the game. Before such a pressure-filled moment, Miller recalled the advice of head coach Bill Belichick, long regarded as one of the NFL’s top minds.
“He called me over and said, ‘Hey, man, just catch [the snap] and get rid of it,’” Miller said.
As his old club prepares to take on the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLVI on Sunday in Indianapolis, Miller recalled his big-game moments with New England and his pride in being able to achieve such heights as a Jewish athlete.
“It’s the greatest game you’ll ever play in, but it’s the worst game you’ll ever play in,” Miller said. “Nothing is fun about it. The pressure is unbelievable. When we won, and I hadn’t done anything [in the way of errors] that would be on Sports Center for the next 50 years, I was very happy.”
Miller enjoyed the ultimate thrill that only a select few athletes ever experience: being part of a Super Bowl-winning team. The list of Jewish players to win the big game is even smaller: including Miller, Pittsburgh Steelers tight end Randy “The Rabbi” Grossman (who won a Jewish-record four times from 1975 through 1978), San Francisco 49ers offensive lineman Harris Barton (1989, 1990, 1995), 49ers tight end John Frank (1985, 1989), Dallas Cowboys offensive lineman Alan “Shlomo” Veingrad (1993), Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Bobby Stein Bobby Stein (1970), and Los Angeles Raiders defensive end Lyle Alzado (1984).
Grossman grew up Conservative in the Philadelphia suburb of Haverford, earning his fitting nickname from defensive end Dwight White.
“He was the primary nicknamer back then,” said Grossman, who now works as a financial adviser for Wealth Management Strategies, in an interview. “Being Jewish, there weren’t a lot of people who would be nicknamed ‘The Rabbi.’ It caught on. What choice did I have? What else are you gonna to call a Jewish kid from Philadelphia?”
Veingrad, who now tours the country speaking about his personal transformation (he embraced the Chabad-Lubavitch movement), began observing Shabbat after his playing days. In an interview with JointMedia News last September on the topic of Shabbat-observant Jews in high-profile careers, Veingrad said he has given the prospect of being Orthodox in the NFL “a tremendous amount of thought.”
“I don’t think it would be a possible thing for me to say to the coaching staff or the ownership of the team that I am shomer Shabbes and therefore I can’t make the team meetings on Friday because I have to travel Friday and I can’t travel with the team on Saturday and keep Shabbes,” Veingrad said. “I think if I took that approach, I would no longer be in the National Football League.”
However, Veingrad said that if “you’re one of the greatest players to play in the game,” the team and ownership “would make certain exceptions for you, as you’re the franchise and you’re the guy, and if they wouldn’t, there’d be some other team to make those exceptions, and I think it’s black and white like that.”
In a 12-year NFL career also spent with the Steelers and Tennessee Titans, Miller made just the one trip.
Miller, 41, embarrassingly recalls an on-field meeting with Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton while stretching. As the two presidents walked by, Miller nervously said something unprintable that he now laughingly regrets, although it provided comedy for him during the game.
“I panicked,” Miller said. “The whole first half, I would talk to random guys on the sidelines and say, ‘Can you believe what I said to two presidents?’”
Miller has been a much better talker since. He anchors a drive-time sports talk show in Pittsburgh. Additionally, he often speaks to kids’ groups, and one of his favorite topics is embracing his Jewishness. He is even working on a book, “Who Let Jew In?,” that features interviews with other Jewish athletes.
While Miller’s sharp sense of humor will likely permeate the book, the message is simply to teach children to be proud of their heritage.
“I can’t tell you who to fall in love with, but I can tell you what you are,” said Miller, who was raised Conservative in East Brunswick. “Kids would like to hang their hats on somebody who’s the same. There are a lot more Jewish athletes out there, and I think that’s why this book is going to be good.”
Grossman went undrafted after a fine career at Temple University, but was viewed as “undersized” by NFL teams. He overcame long odds and eventually stuck with Pittsburgh. The Steelers won the Super Bowl in Grossman’s rookie season of 1974, and he caught a touchdown pass in his second trip.
Almost immediately, Grossman said he felt the pull of the city’s Jewish community.
“Every kid who is growing up may gravitate to a person for a different reason,” said Grossman, who still lives in the area. “If you have some sort of connection, it makes for a strong bond. Being a young Jewish man at that point in time — and Pittsburgh has an active Jewish community — it was nice for them to have somebody of their own. It’s far from a good comparison, but when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, the African-American community took to him.”
A 1999 inductee into the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, Grossman jokingly refers to himself as a “Manischewitz Jew.”
“It’s like being a ‘Chef Boyardee Italian,’” he said, with a laugh. “I grew up in a Conservative congregation, but would consider myself Reform. The rabbi at my bar mitzvah [wasn’t] sure I was going to get there, but said if they didn’t know where I was, they could look at back of the synagogue and find me playing football.”
JointMedia News Service
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Big game pits teams owned by big donors
When the New York Giants and New England Patriots take the field for Sunday’s Super Bowl, most of the country will focus on the athletes wearing the jerseys. However, from a Jewish perspective, the story behind these football franchises comes from those wearing suits in the owner’s box.
The Giants are co-owned by the Tisch family, with film and television producer Steve Tisch, son of Bob, as the team’s chairman and executive vice president. Bob’s brother, Larry, was the father of Jim — former president of the UJA Federation of New York and former board chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Jim’s wife, Merryl, chairs the board of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.
On the New England side, owner Robert Kraft’s wife Myra — who passed away last July — served as chair of the Boston-based Combined Jewish Philanthropies’ (CJP) board of directors and was twice co-chair of CJP’s annual fundraising campaign.
New Israelis plan their own Super Bowl fetes
In a country where “football” means soccer, you would think the Super Bowl would be a relic of the past for U.S. émigrés. However, for many of them the annual NFL championship game is cause for a party, complete with nachos and subs.
Steve Leibowitz, president of American Football in Israel, estimates that hundreds of fans will attend dozens of Super Bowl parties in Israel as the New England Patriots and New York Giants face each other on Feb. 5 — even though kickoff translates to 1:30 in the morning Israel time.
“In the old days, I used to organize Super Bowl parties at hotels because there was no way to watch at home,” said Leibowitz, a native New Yorker. “It’s kind of like wanting to celebrate Thanksgiving — it’s a part of the culture you grew up in, that you could take part in even if you were Jewish. It’s another reason for a party, but here it’s just at a very inconvenient hour. People arrange to come late to work or school the next day.”
Wrap sessions in the a.m.
For many, Super Bowl Sunday starts with a mitzvah lesson
It is hard to know which program will stir up the most emotion this Sunday — the Conservative movement’s World Wide Wrap, or the Giants and the Patriots going at it in the Super Bowl.
At Temple Emanu-El in Closter, youngsters will be singing original “Wrap songs” to celebrate the morning event, a global celebration of the mitzvah of t’fillin; while at the Fair Lawn Jewish Center/Congregation B’nai Israel (FLJC/CBI), the same men’s club that sponsors the Wrap early in the day will be hosting a Super Bowl party later on.
It is no coincidence that the two events fall on the same day.
Kosher caterers prepare for game day onslaught
In football, there are usually three B’s tailgaters keep in mind: Burgers, brats, and beer.
When it comes to Super Bowl Sunday, however, when parties move indoors, menus tend to change to less barbecue-intensive fare and foods fit more for large groups gathered around a television. And while many Super Bowl parties feature heaps of beef-laden cheesy nachos, hot wings with bleu cheese dressing, and pork, kosher football fans — and kosher caterers — have adapted.
“It’s an American holiday,” said Bobby Shorr, co-owner of Harold’s Kosher Market in Paramus. “It’s a big holiday. It’s a very big catering weekend for all kinds of delis. We look forward to it.”
