The Connecticut Giants may look like a ragtag collection of players, but man, can they play football.

Story & Photos By Ken Widmann

August 2001

"It ain't about the money." You hear an athlete--usually some jewelry-swaddled free agent demanding a higher salary--spout that cliché and you give the television remote control a reflexive squeeze.

Here on the practice field it's different. The phrase comes out of the fast mouth of Rickey Vines, and it's more like an exasperated plea. Vines plays defensive line for the Connecticut Giants, a ragtag but exceptional semipro football squad based in Fairfield County, and he's trying to get a headcount for the upcoming team picnic. One teammate is concerned about a rumored $20 food and drink fee, so Vines reloads.

"Dog, all we need to know is--you coming?"

"Twenty dollars, right?" asks Dog.

"Naw, I said it ain't about the money, man. I just need to know if you're coming and who with, so we can plan it straight."

"I feel you," Dog nods. "I'll be there with the money."

"Just you? Cause if you're bringin' your girl, your wife, one a your mistresses and five a your homeboys we gotta know how many, or ain't nobody gonna eat."

"I got $20 in my car for you."

"It ain't about the money!"

And so it goes. Around here the love for the game flows, the money trickles. But it ain't about the money.

Semipro football is a purgatory with a big tent, the talent level spreading between the NFL and a spirited backyard game of Nerf. The Connecticut Giants are diverse in many categories: football ability, experience, education and race. Financial planners, construction workers, restaurant managers, an ordained minister, and more than one NASDAQ employee suit up for the team. Ages range from 20-something to 40-something. (Mindful that pro scouts avoid graybeards, some players are evasive about their ages. Thus any age claimed by a Giant must be viewed more as helpful suggestion than fact. As one confided: "A few of our guys are 29...again. This is their fourth or fifth year as 29-year- olds.")

The Giants are a close-knit bunch. Attests offensive lineman Mike Marino, "I was in the Marine Corps, where they talk about esprit de corps and camaraderie but it's not true. Everybody's out there stabbing each other in the back. This team is the exact opposite."

After taking some hard whacks in their formative years, the Giants' 2001 season was a magical one. The team finished with a perfect 10-0 record and outscored the competition by an eye-rubbing 399-69. According to John Shaban, a 37-year-old attorney who serves as both the team's starting right guard and self-titled Director of Legal Affairs, last year the United States Football Association ranked the Giants second best on the East Coast and fifth nationwide out of 500 teams.

That's saying something, although the local press didn't. The only mention of the Giants was a one-inch blurb in the Connecticut Post announcing the team's league championship victory last January. In contrast to all the hoopla surrounding Vince McMahon's XFL, the winningest, most genuine football team in the area can barely find a field to play on.

"We would have whupped any of those XFL teams at any time," declares Giants head coach Tim Andrews. "Would've killed them. They might have had more talented players, but they were horrible teams, horribly coached."

When he saw how the XFL rushed to assemble itself, Andrews says, "I told every single one of my guys not to play. The market for the game is there, but they should've celebrated the local angle: that guy's the postman, that guy was a local high school star, that guy owns this local business, et cetera. Made it more working class."

To a stranger happening by Stamford's West Beach Park on a random Wednesday evening, Craig Dobson's arm is the most obvious indication that this ragged collection of men can play. The arm itself doesn't look spectacular--long and lean, with a golf-ball-sized dollop of fluid sloshing beneath the elbow thanks to a hit in a preseason game last month. But football in hand, Dobson's arm is breathtaking, a bullwhip that can cut a diamond solitaire from 50 yards.

Practice is quite a show. Tight spirals carve through the summer heat, slamming into each receiver's chest with a crisp report. Fastballs navigate thickets of outstretched arms, only to bounce off the gloves of startled receivers. "I didn't think it would get here that fast!" one butterfingered target explains to a grimacing coach. Touch passes arc gently and then drop, stork-like, into nurturing hands. On the run from defenders, Dobson launches an ICBM that nearly lands on Shippan Avenue, a good 65 yards away.

A former quarterback for the University of New Haven, Dobson now manages three Subway franchises in Fairfield. Twice a week he and his teammates spend several hours slamming into each other in preparation for the upcoming season. Dobson's arm exposes the talents and flaws of his receivers. One of them, Elijah Sharmba, had a cup of coffee with the Denver Broncos a few years ago and now commutes from Maryland each weekend to play for the Connecticut Giants. Most of the players on the squad are not as skilled or dedicated as Sharmba, as the frequent dropped passes, sloppy coverages and sideline cell phone conversations attest. Many are clearly there just for the exercise or simply to be part of a team. Some had never played organized football before joining the Giants. All the players love the game, but a handful like Dobson and Sharmba have real damn-did-you-see-that-play kind of talent. They are hoping for a shot at the pros.

The practice field is pitted and uneven. What looks like a burial mound protrudes around the 30-yard line (it's hard to tell exactly where, because the field is not lined). When an offensive player is tripped by a divot, defensive coordinator Gary Snisky still doles out appropriate praise: "Good play, hole in the ground, good play!" he shouts at the turf.

Every once in a while one of Snisky's cleated behemoths clatters across the street into the nearby Duchess restaurant to use the bathroom. The NFL, or the Canadian Football League, or even Arena Football seems a long way away.

Other than their patriotic color scheme, the Connecticut Giants have no connection to the New York NFL franchise of the same name. As a business, these Giants are more of a charity, a not-for-profit organization that sponsors can write off their taxes.

Team sponsors are mostly mom-and-pop places like delis and pizza joints. In lieu of cash some companies barter. In exchange for game day advertising, for example, Connecticut Limousine provides the team buses, a real boon.

A local bottled water company was a Connecticut Giants sponsor for the past four years. Despite prominent feature on the team's website and in the game programs, last week the company told Andrews they "aren't getting enough bang for the buck" and were considering discontinuing their support. Instead of money, the company had been supplying bottles of water--eight cases a game.

"That's not an astronomical amount!" says Andrews. "It kind of annoys me, because you want to see companies that are making millions and millions of dollars try to do as much community stuff as possible." For their part, in the past few months the Giants have sponsored a blood drive, held a Punt, Pass and Kick competition for Bridgeport children and ran a free Pop Warner football camp.

Although some sponsors like Coca-Cola in particular, provide solid financial support, the team must look elsewhere to help strapped players. "Our players have to pay for their own stuff, and a lot of these guys don't have two nickels to rub together," says Andrews. Often the coaching staff quietly assists needy players with out-of-pocket emergency loans.

"Everything is very expensive to run on this level," says Andrews. "In most cases in semipro football, it's pretty much a shoestring budget." Andrews' wife Julie is the team's treasurer, overseeing yearly expenses that Andrews says range from $30,000 to $50,000 per year. Much of that is never recovered.

Fees for insurance, referees ($400 a game) and fields for games and practices quickly add up. Revenue is more difficult to accrue. Team members pay for their own equipment, uniforms and registration, often totaling hundreds of dollars. Players are required to sell 10 season tickets each, at $20 a pop. First aid equipment is often "borrowed" from somebody's workplace. During last Saturday's scrimmage two players shared the same mouthpiece.

Although many Giants players are alumni of Stamford High and West Hill High School, the city did not welcome them back with open arms. Municipal playing fields are cotrolled bythe Board of Education and according to the team, the Board of Ed hordes the grass like a drug cartel.

"They treated us like we were a plumbing company softball team, which I can see how that would happen at first," explains Shaban. "But then we were thrown into the vagaries of little political fiefdoms. You know the routine: 'This guy needs 50 bucks, and that guy needs a hundred bucks. And oh did you talk to so and so?' " So and so was invariably another wheel in need of expensive grease.

"The week before our first game," Andrews recalls, "I got a phone call from the Office of Cashiering and Permitting, saying, 'Whoop, we've got a problem. The custodians say they need more guys than what you're allocated for. You gotta come down here right now with $2,000, otherwise you can't play.' "

The custodians hired to set up the field never did so, leaving Andrews and his players to line the grid and wrap the goalposts just before kickoff, while their opponents stretched out and prepared for the game.

When the Giants made the playoffs, the Board of Ed asked for more money, according to Andrews. The Giants anted up, borrowing funds. Three days before the playoff game another phone call arrived from the city. "You can't use the field for the game," the official told Andrews. "It's too beat up."

The Giants had spent thousands of dollars and were without a field.

Andrews was stung. "So we had to play our home playoff game--that would have generated more revenue for us which would have gotten paid back to Stamford anyway--on the road in Westchester. We had to call all our fans, our sponsors, everybody else and tell them that our home playoff game was at Lincoln High School in Mount Vernon."

Nonetheless, the Giants won. A few weeks later the team played in the league championship game, this time at New Canaan High School's Dunning Field. Around 1,200 fans turned up to see the Giants throttle the Harlem Hurricanes 24-6.

The team was so dominant last year it is having trouble finding willing opponents. According to Andrews, a pre-season scrimmage against the Bronx Bengals was canceled at the behest of the Bengals' head coach, who announced that eight of his key players were occupied with a National Guard Reserve weekend. Andrews doesn't believe it. The Brooklyn Cardinals, a hastily scheduled replacement, backed out at the last minute. The Giants had to scrimmage themselves.

"Last year," says Andrews, "I saw two things I've never seen before in my entire coaching career, ever, and I've been coaching since 1979."

In Brooklyn against the Cardinals, the Giants won by a final score of 56-6 although "It could've been 156-0," says Andrews. By halftime, Andrews had emptied his bench but the home team had yet to score a point. At that point, he says, the referees approached him and said, "We gotta give the Cardinals a score to keep everyone calm. We have to live here, you don't." Sure enough, when the second half began the refs penalized the Giants defense right down the field until the Cardinals punched in a touchdown.

Andrews had to keep his players from revolting. "We've been on the other end of that kind of score, though, and it ain't fun."

The other incident occurred the night before the Giants' first playoff game. "My wife got a phone call from the head coach of opposing team," Andrews recalls. "He said 'Tell Tim to take it easy tomorrow.' Next day I'm walking across the field and the coach grabs my arm and asks, 'Did you get my message?' I said, 'Yeah, what was that all about?'

"He says, 'I mean it. You guys are gonna kill us, just take it easy on us.'

"I was scratching my head. We dominated them so much from the outset, our quarterback had so much time to throw the ball, like 15, 20, 25 seconds. At one point, Craig looked over at me on the sidelines and gave a 'what do you want me to do?' shrug in the middle of a play. Hysterical. Everybody was open. I said, 'Ah, just throw it!' Touchdown. Made the score 28-0."

Andrews and Leon Hunter founded the Giants juggernaut four years ago. Coaching friends, both had traversed the back roads of the football map, assisting at high schools, colleges and semipro teams along the East Coast. Connecticut soil is not known to be football-fertile; Fairfield County, in particular, hadn't supported a semipro team since the Stamford Golden Bears played the Bridgeport Jets nearly 30 years ago. In prep school-concentrated Fairfield County, trendier sports rule. The same thing holds true for much of Westchester. "We saw so much soccer stuff," says Andrews, "football was almost becoming a dying thing."

Although both men hold full-time careers--Andrews is a private investigator in Fairfield and Hunter a drug abuse counselor in Bridgeport--the urge to build a football community from scratch proved too enticing.

As Andrews recalls, "We wanted a vehicle to let graduates continue to play the game and also to keep a lot of young guys that couldn't go to college--whether for grades or financial reasons or things of that nature--competing so maybe they could get a chance to play professionally at a higher level. Even though the window of opportunity to make the NFL or even the Arena or Canadian Football League is minute, a semipro team allows players to have a dream."

Donovan Prawl is another Giant good enough to dream. A soft-spoken security guard at West Hill High School, at six feet tall and 350 pounds, Prawl is so big that when he contracted Lyme disease he lost 56 pounds in one month and didn't even notice. Despite his imposing appearance, Prawl is perhaps the friendliest player on the team, a reflective, self-described mamma's boy who gets along with everyone.

In 1993, Prawl spent three and a half months with the New York Jets before wrecking his knee. As Prawl tells it, "I was playing pickup basketball--which I should never have done--and I got my knee rolled on by the guy that was directly ahead of me on the depth chart. I know it was done on purpose. When I hit the ground he didn't even stop and say 'sorry' or anything, he just kept playing. Not too much you can do. The next day I took some Advil and went back out to football practice. We were playing in mud and I tried to split a double-team to impress the coaches when one guy slipped off and fell on my leg. That was it, I felt the pop. That finished off what the kid started the day before."

Prawl blacked out from the pain. After surgery, he woke up to a $38,000 liability payment from the Jets and a shattered professional football career. Prawl says his knee has never fully recovered.

Prawl sank into depression. "That was enough for me. I wasn't gonna play football anymore. I didn't even watch football for over a year. But I went to one of the [Connecticut Giants] practices and saw a lot of the guys I used to play with." Coach Andrews urged Prawl to return to the game with the team. Now Prawl is their best defensive player, notching 14 sacks last year.

Prawl wears jersey No. 95, which caused initial snickering amongst his teammates. Some thought the tight red, white and blue jersey stretched over the bulbous Prawl made him look like a New England Thruway sign.

"They got me so pissed off before the game," remembers Prawl, "on the opening kickoff the ballcarrier didn't see me coming. I hit him and his helmet went one way and he went the other. He was lying on the ground for a while. My teammates started saying that I cause more accidents than I-95, and the name just stuck."

"I-95" certainly causes pileups. In the first three games last year, opponents facing off against Prawl suffered a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder and a fractured collarbone. But Prawl's accidents are often self-damaging. He has so much surgical metal in his body that he has to travel with his medical records to bypass metal detectors. Much of the hardware stems from plain bad luck.

As Prawl explains, "Last year three days before I was going to a pro tryout camp, I had to chase a kid at school who had gotten into a fight and threatened that he was going to go back to his car. Because of [Columbine, etc.] we were very concerned. When I was running after him I forgot about the stairway and hyperextended the ACL in my right leg. I had to rehab the knee for weeks, and couldn't go to camp. Come to find out the kid didn't even have a car, he was just trying to run away."

In college Prawl broke a weight-bearing bone in his leg when he was kicked by a donkey.

Prawl was even accidently kicked in the face while watching a football game. "I was too close to the sideline," he says, when "a player jumped in the air to gain more yardage and got hit. As he spun around he caught me right in the face. Worst experience I ever had." That one required a plate, two screws and metal partial dentures. Despite absorbing more shrapnel than Vieques, the cat-quick Prawl battles each weekend for the Giants.

"I still love the game. My motives for playing were initially to get to another level. But it just seems like no matter how hard I try that people aren't looking. Around the time [Minnesota Vikings player] Korey Stringer died, I told Tim [Andrews] I didn't think I wanted to play anymore. Football had become boring. Than I thought about Tim. We've been together a long time. I thought about two of the kids I used to coach at West Hill. One was killed in Hartford, the other crashed his car and wound up killing himself. It opened up a whole lot of things. I felt selfish. You ought to do what you can now because nature showed me that tomorrow's a promise. I guess it's just getting up in age now, you start thinking about your own mortality. I'm 29. I still have the ability."

Like Prawl, quarterback Dobson is continually seeking to catch the eye of scouts, and is readying for another pro tryout next winter. But when asked if he plays more for the love of the game than to showcase his talent, Dobson pauses. "I guess a little bit of both. If this team turns out to be a stepping stone, it's good, I can deal with that. But if it doesn't, I'm content playing with the Giants because I love the game and I love my teammates and we have a good camaraderie."

Last month, the Giants did something they had not done in almost two years--lost a game. It was only a preseason matchup and didn't count in the standings, but some in the organization feel the team is complacent this year, grown fat from so many lopsided victories.

The Giants 2001 season begins at 1 p.m., Sept. 9 against the New York Titans at New Canaan High School's Dunning Field. Tickets are $10 at the gate, all kids 12 an under get in free. If you're bringing your girl, your wife, one of your mistresses and five of your homeboys, it doesn't matter, they only want to know if you're coming.

Because really, it ain't about the money.