By Michael Lovito
Are you a Giants fan looking for a glimmer of hope in a disappointing season?
Jordan Raanan has you covered
The longtime Giants beat writer will be discussing The Franchise: New York Giants: A Curated History of Big Blue, his retrospective of the team’s first hundred years, at the Morristown Festival of Books this weekend. The book places special emphasis on the Giants’ Super Bowl appearances in 1986, 1990, 2000, 2007, and 2011.
Spanning venues near the Vail Mansion lawn on Oct. 10-11, 2025, the festival will feature more than 40 authors and poets. Friday’s ticketed keynote talk by author Rick Atkinson takes place at 7:30 pm in the Mayo Performing Arts Center. Raanan can be heard Saturday at 11 a.m. in the parish hall of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church; admission is free.
A CENTURY’S WORTH OF STORIES
Raanan began covering the Giants for The Star-Ledger in 2013 before moving on to ESPN. Encapsulating a century of history in only a few hundred pages was a tall task, he admits. Yet that centennial also made some of his research possible. Last year’s litany of 100th anniversary events made it easy for Raanan to run into franchise legends such as Bill Parcells, Carl Banks and Ernie Accorsi, who shared their stories both in front of crowds and privately with Raanan.
The writer said he was particularly excited to revisit the team’s first two Super Bowl wins, which he experienced as a child.
“The ’86 and ’90 eras were fun for me, because I was a young kid at that point,” Raanan said. “I had versions of them in my head, but it was fun to go through those eras and talk to those guys about how the game was different and how they built everything up.”
Raanan said The Franchise covers many stories that die-hards already will be familiar with, like Tim Mara purchasing the team for a mere $500 in 1925. But the book is full of surprises for even the most passionate members of Big Blue Nation.
Perhaps the buzziest is quarterback Jeff Hostetler’s claim that he played Super Bowl XXV (and the rest of his career) with a torn ACL that still is unrepaired. (“I’m one of the very few that had enough other things going on structure-wise that I was able to continue to function,” Hostelter told Raanan).
Raanan’s personal favorite is the unorthodox way Eli Manning and Victor Cruz forged their connection en route to winning Super Bowl XLVII.
According to Raanan, Manning called Cruz, who had spent his rookie year on injured reserve, during the lockout-affected 2011 off-season asking if he wanted to work out. Cruz agreed and traveled to Hoboken, where Manning was living at the time. The wide receiver expected they would run plays at a high school field or indoor training facility – only for Manning to take him to a public park instead.
“As Victor Cruz put it, some guy and Eli Manning are throwing in the middle of a park in Hoboken,” Raanan said. “And all of these people are standing there, gawking at Eli Manning, and looking at [Cruz] like, ‘who’s this?’”
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE?
Other highlights for Raanan included his interview with Brandon Jacobs about the Giants’ testy Christmas Eve game against the Jets in 2011, where the running back almost came to blows with Rex Ryan, and a group interview with the offensive linemen who formed the core of the 2007 and 2011 championship teams.
“I had a Zoom call with all of them at the same time, which was a ton of fun, listening to them bust each other’s chops and tell all their inside jokes,” Raanan said. “A lot of them wouldn’t even be fit for the book or for air.”
Raanan said he had to cut some of the more interesting stories of the past decade – including Odell Beckham Jr.’s tumultuous tenure in the Meadowlands and a controversial boat trip by some players before a 2016 playoff loss in Green Bay – to keep the book focused on the team’s successes.
His hope is that, sooner rather than later, the Giants will win another championship so he can write an addendum to the book and fill in some of those gaps.
Until then, he’s satisfied the good stuff he left out is a testament to how good the stuff he left in is.
“Somebody in the last six months told me that, if you’re writing a story, and you have five or six details or tidbits or whatever that you don’t have room for, that just means you already have a really good story in the first place,” Raanan said.
MORE COVERAGE OF THE MORRISTOWN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS
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