AMERICA AT LARGE:What's in a name? Quite a lot it seems, when it comes to New York's NFL teams sharing a new stadium, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

THEY HAVE been rivals for the affection of New York football fans for half a century, even though the Giants haven’t actually played a football game in the Big Apple since 1975, the Jets since 1983. For much of that shared history the Jets have nurtured a not-entirely-undeserved inferiority complex, in that they have not only been treated as a step-child  by the New York media, but for the past 26 seasons played their home games in a New Jersey facility called Giants Stadium.

All of that was supposed to change this year with the grand opening of their new, jointly-owned digs, currently known as Meadowlands Stadium, and, given the fiscal climate, still may be on September 12th and 13th, when the teams will inaugurate the league season with home games.

The first controversy to emerge over the new stadium erupted over the past weekend, although it didn’t hit the sports pages until a couple of days later. While the Giants and Jets had traditionally alternated home games during the period of their shared tenancy, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had already agreed that in this Era of Good Feeling, both teams should play at home on the first weekend of the 2010 season, with the Giants christening the facility on Sunday afternoon and the Jets hosting the first Monday Night Football game the next evening.

Which team got which date would, on the surface, seem to most of us a matter of scant consequence, but to Jets owner Robert Wood Johnson IV it was a matter of principle too important to be determined by fiat. Since Woody, or his team, had ponied up half the cost of the €1.2 billion facility, his reasoning was that it merited at least a 50-50 chance to host the first home game. Woody proposed that a coin toss would be the fairest way to resolve the issue.

The next thing the Jets heard on the matter was a communique from the league office that said, in essence: “Fine. We took you up on your suggestion and flipped a coin. You lost.”

Next thing, the usually mild-mannered Johnson himself had flipped. By Monday, Woody was venting his rage to anyone who would listen – much to the delight of the

New York tabloids, which thrive on stories like this one, in which the Johnson Johnson heir all but accused the NFL commissioner of having rigged the coin toss.

“(There are) a few fundamental elements that are missing here,” pointed out Woody, “most notably,

the presence of the teams involved. That’s how it’s always done in this league, whether it’s determining the order of the draft, or deciding who’s going to kick off the game.

“We rejected a process in which neither team was present,” continued Johnson in his petition for a do-over. “The league departed from our time-honoured tradition and declined the opportunity to set the matter straight with a transparent process.”

Woody would seem to have a point there. You’d have to agree that if it were your money he was playing with, you might have wanted to be present for the coin toss, too.

Goodell’s explanation was that since the Giants so vigorously opposed the coin-toss idea that they refused to dignify it by sending a representative, he thought it fairer to conduct the ritual before members of his staff, with neither team invited to witness it.

Johnson is demanding a new coin toss, but there seems scant chance of that. Not only would Goodell essentially be confirming impropriety by conducting a replay, but the Giants, having twice secured the preferred Sunday date despite their opposition to the coin toss, would hardly countenance yet another one.

Giants Stadium, now being battered by the wrecking ball, was constructed for a then massive $82 million (though still less than 5 per cent of what it cost to build its replacement) in 1975 by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which had lured the team from Yankee Stadium with a sweetheart lease. The Jets continued to play their home games at Shea Stadium until the 1984 season.

Once it became apparent that Giants Stadium had outlived its usefulness, there were half-hearted attempts to lure both teams back to New York, but the age of publicly-financed sports facilities had clearly expired. When the Giants and Jets agreed to share the cost of the new stadium in New Jersey, it was with the understanding that they would be equal partners in every respect – including a proposal to jointly host a Super Bowl later this decade.

Both teams anticipated offsetting some of the cost through naming rights. A deal had actually been reached with Allianz, the German insurance company, which agreed to pay €18 million a year to hang its logo on the facility, but that was scuttled last year after revelations emerged detailing Allianz’s sordid history of coziness with the Nazis.

By then, the entire financial climate had been dramatically altered, with banks and financial institutions surviving only through the largesse of government handouts. The Obama administration seemed unlikely to countenance the frivolity of a company it had just spent tens of millions to bail out pledging a like amount to have its name attached to a football stadium.

Dallas owner Jerry Jones opened his own €87 million palace last season, and it played host to the Manny Pacquiao-Joshua Clottey megafight last Saturday night. It is called, simply, “Cowboys Stadium”, and will be for the foreseeable future. And when the naming rights to the home of the Miami Dolphins went up for bids last year, no money changed hands.

The Florida facility is now called Land Shark Stadium only because the Dolphins worked out a marketing arrangement with singer Jimmy Buffett, who is the major investor in Land Shark Lager.

By agreement, the home of the Giants and Jets will be the generic Meadowlands Stadium until (and if) a sponsorship agreement can be reached, and right now that looks like it could take aeons. In the meantime, just imagine how galling it must be to Woody Johnson that a website devoted to Personal Seat Licenses and season tickets for Giants’ games refers to the venue as “New Giants Stadium”.

In the midst of this battle royale over who gets to play first is the fact neither the Jets nor the Giants will be a participant in Meadowlands Stadium’s inaugural sporting event.

That would be a tripleheader involving six collegiate lacrosse teams, which is on the books for April 10th.