New York Giants fans know how much the late Wellington Mara loved his team. His father, Tim, founded the club in 1925 when Wellington was just nine years old. His first job with the Giants was a ball boy. Eventually, he would become the team’s iconic owner and a major force in the pantheon of the NFL power structure.
Mara’s Giants career was interrupted during World War II when he served as a naval officer aboard the USS Randolph in the South Pacific. Recently, one of Mara’s daughters discovered a trove of letters that Mara wrote during his time in the U.S. Navy from 1941-45.
Mara’s children, including his oldest, John, the Giants’ current CEO, had no prior knowledge of the letters outlining their father’s experience which included bouts of homesickness, loneliness and even a kamikaze attack on the ship. Mara never spoke of these things during his 89 years on this earth and the revelations of his ordeal are just now hitting home with his family.
“He talked a little about friends he had made, and some of the places he had been, but he never talked about any of the battles,” John Mara said, via NFL.com. “Reading this one letter, and the kamikaze plane hit their ship — it’s mind-boggling for me, because he never mentioned that. Just the constant fear of being in danger; think about that. Having to live like that every day. I would have loved to have had conversations with him about some of these things. I wish I had. That’s a big regret of mine, thinking I should have asked about it.”
“Ships get hit sometimes and people get hurt but the percentage is pretty small,” Wellington wrote in a letter from March 1945 to his parents, shortly after his ship was victimized by a deadly kamikaze plane. “Being on a carrier with this gang is something like playing quarterback for the Bears used to be. If anyone or anything ever does get through to take a shot at you, he is beaten, bruised and bloody.”
Many of Mara’s letters to his brother Jack contained concerns about the Giants and the NFL, which like many things in the world at that time, was struggling to survive.
As we know, it did — and he did — and the rest is history. When Mara learned the war was won and he was coming home, he equated the feeling to that of one he experienced with the Giants.
“The nearest thing I felt to this was when I heard the team came from behind to tie Philadelphia last year and when [halfback Bill] Paschal made that last minute run against Washington two years ago,” Mara wrote. “Home alive in ’45…Hoping this finds all OK and the team shaping up.”