Giants" Longtime Security Chief Handpicked by Parcells INDIANAPOLIS - He has been a constant presence on the Giants" sideline since the Bill Parcells days. At nearly every Giants game for more than 20 years, the television cameras find him, in the background but never far away. He is neither a player nor a coach, and yet he is almost always standing behind the head coach, waiting to serve. When the game ends, he jogs off the field at the side of his liege, pausing as a shoulder-to-shoulder witness to the ceremonial handshake with the opposing coach. You have seen him. The burly guy with the crew cut and Giants windbreaker. Who is that guy? He is Mike Murphy, a longtime cop from New Jersey. Officially, he is the Giants" chief of security, a part-time post. He acts as a kind of bodyguard to the head coach and players during games, does curfew bed checks on the road, coordinates the police presence when the Giants travel and gets splashed with a lot of victory Gatorade showers on TV. It is one of the many odd perks, or novelties, of the odd job Murphy has done since 1991. He exists to safeguard famous coaches and 300-pound players in a violent, hostile game watched by millions of fans nationwide. Or, as Giants fans, who recognize him wherever he goes, like to tell him: he has the best seat in the house. "When I'm down at the Jersey Shore, at my kids" Little League games and even when I pulled people over for a traffic violation, they look at me and say: "Hey, you're the guy from the Giants - the one behind the coach," " Murphy said last week, sitting in the Giants office complex. I guess you can't miss my big fat head in the picture frame. But people always say, "That is the coolest job in the world." And I agree. I am a big Giants fan and I can't believe I've done this for 22 years. Always in the middle of the action but somehow never a part of it, Murphy has seen a lot in his time protecting five Giants coaches. He has been pelted with snowballs at home and cups of beer on the road. Chicago fans, he said, for some reason throw hot dogs at the opposing coach. In Cleveland, where one rooting section is called the Dog Pound, they hurl dog biscuits, which, Murphy said, "hurt more than you would think." He has stopped streakers, imposters posing as photographers and fans who inexplicably wandered into the sideline area. "Bill Parcells told me before my first game that I wasn't a player and I wasn't a coach but I was important to both," Murphy said. "He said, "I want you to stay out of the way but I want you in the way if I need you." That's my job. In 1989, Murphy, then a police officer in Florham Park, N.J., was on vacation with some of his buddies near Sea Girt, N.J., where Parcells had a home. One day, Murphy, who is 6-foot-2 and 275 pounds, was walking down the ocean boardwalk. He passed Parcells sitting on a bench and the coach yelped: "You're a big guy. You play football? Murphy, a former high school nose guard, answered: "Yeah, coach, but not at your level." Murphy sat down with Parcells and had a conversation that lasted for more than an hour. They talked about police work, the Giants, food, movies, people and personalities. "It just went on and on, and finally he tells me he could use somebody for security sometime and might call me," Murphy said. Then a year went by and I never heard from him. Just before the Giants were going to San Francisco for the 1991 N.F.C. championship game, he calls and tells me to come to the West Coast with the team. "He said: "This is a serious job and you better treat it that way. And pack a bag for two weeks because we're going from San Francisco to the Super Bowl in Tampa the next week." " And two weeks later, Murphy got hit with his first Gatorade shower, standing next to Parcells in a now-famous photograph as Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks celebrated the Giants" second Super Bowl victory. It was Parcells" last game as Giants coach. Murphy has never left. His current coach, Tom Coughlin, is a former Parcells assistant who sees Murphy's duties much the way Parcells did. "Tom told me when he arrived, "I want you to be like a bear in the woods; I don't need to see you but everybody should know you are there," " Murphy said. A caption in a slide show with this article said incorrectly that the Giants won Super Bowl XXV in 1996. That game was in 1991.