It Takes a Giant to Practice Yoga in the NFL

June 5 -- The New York Giants--the football players--have taken up yoga. So have other athletes of various sports, and it's easy to ask what took them so long.

The practice of yoga, a school of Hindu philosophy, dates back at least 2,000 years. Until late in the 20th century, however, a practitioner in the United States was usually regarded as a skinny contortionist who somehow stretches his feet up behind his head while wearing only a rumpled white sheet around his waist. He then blows on a squeaky recorder before an audience of one, a slithering snake.

Beginning about 1975 yoga began to be a celebrity activity in America and the first prominent athlete to admit to being a yogi was the basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, nee Lew Alcindor.

Today 15 million Americans are into yoga, twice as many as 15 years ago according to a recent cover story in Time magazine. One is Sandra Day O'Connor, the 71-year-old Supreme Court justice and a member of a Tuesday morning class held in the justices' basketball court--"the highest court in the land."

The Giants added yoga to their pre-season conditioning program because of two of their players, Greg Comella and Amani Toomer. They had found yoga on their own, joining a class held in New York's lower Manhattan and found it to be so beneficial that they convinced the head coach, Jim Fassel, and the strength coach, John Dunn, to add yoga to the six-week spring conditioning program.

Two women, Sarah Margolis and Marilyn Barnett, were hired to infuse stretching and flexibility into a program otherwise focused on lifting weights. It is beginning to dawn on the football fraternity that building brute strength in a brutal sport isn't the only predilection.