Dead Celebrity Alert

October 26, 2005 — Wellington Mara, the patriarch of the National Football League, who served as a ball boy for the leather-helmeted 1925 Giants and later turned the team - founded by his father - into one of the marquee names in professional sports, died yesterday at his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 89.

The cause was cancer of the lymph nodes, the Giants said.

Mr. Mara had a front-row seat in the world of pro sports going back to the afternoon of Oct. 18, 1925, when the Giants played their first home game, losing to the Frankford Yellow Jackets. He witnessed the famed Sneakers Game, when the Giants outmaneuvered the Chicago Bears by wearing rubber-soled footgear in the 1934 championship game on a frozen Polo Grounds field.

After 31 seasons at the Polo Grounds, Mr. Mara took the Giants to Yankee Stadium in 1956, and they became the glamour franchise of the N.F.L., winning the league championship that season and playing in the title game five times in the next seven years. … Read full obituary

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