The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  But during the football season, we were residents of a proud borough, living in a giant, friendly boardinghouse, surrounded by our parks, our restaurants, our coffee shops, our subway stop- and our stadium. There was no disconnect between where we lived and where we played. We didn't have to fight traffic, or leave a suburban gated community, to drive to some stadium with an Internet company-sponsored name that would change as soon as the company declared bankruptcy. Our home and our workplace sat side by side. Our commute was by foot: down the hill a few blocks, past the shops and bars, under the rumbling el, through the glass doors.

  I'd stop for a cup of coffee at a deli on my walk to the stadium, like any other guy on his way to work, and walk through the players' entrance and down the stairs to the locker room. After the game, I'd take a shortcut home: I'd walk back up through the dugout, across the scarred field, flanked by empty stands still smelling like beer and liquor and cigar smoke, then leave the stadium through a door tucked underneath the bleachers and go back up the hill to the hotel, maybe stopping to pick up a pack of cigarettes, a quart of milk.

  Perhaps a fan would stop me and say hello, more often not.

  None of us played football for the fame, and none of us had much; celebrity hadn't really yet attached itself to professional football back then. The Giants were beginning to grab attention, but the individual players were still pretty faceless. Hell, half the time our friends back home didn't even know what we did in the fall. During my first few seasons, when I'd go back home to Bakersfield, California, after the season, people would ask me where I'd been all those months.

  Until 1956, games weren't even locally televised. In Charlie Conerly's first few years, in the early fifties, when he'd disappear from Clarksdale, Mississippi, for months on end, his wife's friends would wonder whether Charlie had left her, or maybe gone back into the military. In the early years, Perian Conerly, Charlie's widow, remembers now, the public equated us with professional wrestlers. What kind of guy would graduate from college, then find work playing in a sport that paid less than working as a master plumber?

  There were some perks to being a Giant in the Bronx, of course. If you were our starting left guard, Al Barry, for instance, you could enjoy your own squad of neighborhood bodyguards on your walk to the stadium. But Al's bodyguards weren't like the bodyguards who surround today's players; Al had his own private escort of dead-end kids.

  "This one local boy got about three or four other kids, about ten or twelve years old, and they formed the 'Al Barry Guards Club,' " Al told me when I reached him at his home in Georgia.

  "I don't know why, but at some point this group of kids started walking down to the stadium with me. Then they'd sneak into the games. They used to send me postcards at the hotel, stuff like, 'Saw you play in Cleveland. Signed, the Al Barry Guards Club.' "

  History remembers the bold-faced names from the 1958 championship. But most of the men who played in that game, in that glory game, in those glory years-the men who made up the small, blue-collar fraternity of the National Football League weren't bold-faced guys. They weren't prime-time stars. They were men of their time: war veterans, Depression small-town kids who took on work in the NFL as a second job. They were the down-to earth Al Barry, the always-laughing rookie lineman Frank Youso, the tough coal-town tackle Dick Modzelewski: men who had unexpectedly discovered in college that they possessed a talent for a game that they loved, and who'd been lucky enough to find someone who would pay them to keep playing it-as long as they could find gainful employment during the off-season.

  Al's story was pretty typical for the mid-fifties NFL player.

  Al's dad lost his furniture business in Los Angeles during the Depression. Al's dad died when Al was a kid, and his mother moved the family to an apartment in Beverly Hills to get her children a good education, and it paid off. Al got a scholarship to my alma mater, USC, graduated two years behind me in 1954, then played ball for the Air Force-on a team that featured several all-American football players. The Packers drafted Al in the thirtieth round. (If the NFL still had a thirty-round draft, it would take ESPN a month to televise it.) When the Giants traded for Al from the Packers in 1958, he was living in Wisconsin farm country on a two-lane road on the outskirts of Green Bay. Cows grazed across the highway.

  When Al and his wife moved into the Concourse Plaza, he was happy as hell to be living in a big hotel, to instantly become part of the family.

  It wasn't fancy by New York City standards, but the Concourse Plaza had some class. When the place opened in 1923, Governor Al Smith spoke at the dedication. The Concourse Plaza would "enable the social life of the borough to assemble amid luxurious surroundings, in keeping with its prestige as the sixth greatest city in the country," wrote a local paper called Bronx in Tabloid. New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency at the Concourse Plaza. Its ballroom ceiling soared twenty-eight feet high.

  Our rookie kick returner that year, Don Maynard, merited only modest lodgings at the hotel-"a couch made into a bed, a bathroom, and the kitchen on the other wall," as Don remembers it now-but still found the place a little overwhelming. "When I got to the city," he told me from El Paso, the town he's never really left, "the first building I saw was the Concourse Plaza Hotel. That hotel had more bricks than some of the towns I lived in."

  Today, Don swears he didn't even know where New York was when we drafted him out of Texas Western in the old Border Conference: "I had to look it up in National Geographic." Knowing Don, a Texan tall-tale-teller to the core, he may be slightly exaggerating this account. I do know that in 1958 Don would often ask himself why he was spending most of his time sitting on a bench in a huge New York stadium when he could be making more money as a master plumber back in El Paso.

  When I think about the men on that field that day, some of them remembered as being among the best football players who ever played the game, I picture guys whose talent was all the more remarkable considering how humble their roots had been-and how few of them ever expected to find work in our equally humble league. They hadn't been groomed every step of the way to be in the NFL. They were hoping to get shoes on their feet-in Sam Huff 's case, literally. The man around whom our defensive coordinator Tom Landry had designed an entire defense grew up in a West Virginia mining town-literally barefoot. Like myself, Sam had been embarrassed at times, growing up, by how humble his home was: no plumbing, a four-room mining house.

  Jack Stroud, our sinewy, tough offensive lineman, was a Depression kid from Fresno, California, who worked the docks in San Francisco as a teenager to help his single mom with the finances.

  Our captain Kyle Rote's dad worked WPA jobs during the Depression in San Antonio.

  Charlie Conerly's dad, down in Clarksdale, Mississippi, was a deputy sheriff who ran the town jail for a while. Harland Svare, our swift and scrappy weakside linebacker, was a farm kid from Washington State. Colt quarterback Johnny Unitas's dad drove a coal truck in Pittsburgh, and died when Johnny was five; his mother washed office-building floors at night. Andy Robustelli grew up in a tough neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut, the son of a barber, playing football in the streets-not that he thought he'd end up in the pros. None of us really did.

  Well, check that: one of us did. Maybe that's why Raymond Berry, the wide receiver, was destined to dominate this game. He'd been preparing for it in his mind-and no one prepared for a foot- ball game like Raymond Berry-for a long, long time.

  "I don't think any of us knew in those days that we might end up playing in the pros," Raymond told me. "Games weren't nationally televised. But I'd thought about it-in a movie theater in Paris, Texas. I'll never forget the movie. It was a movie about [Elroy] Crazy Legs Hirsch. It was released after the Rams won the championship. I'm sitting in a movie theater, spring of 1952. I've never seen televised pro football or college. Elroy came into my brain, and I was thinking, Man, I'd like to catch passes like that guy."

  We, I lived in thirty-seven different towns when
I was growing up, according to my mom's Bible, where she recorded each and every move, as my dad followed the work. We lived in apartments. We lived in the back of the car. We lived in a small house next to the railroad tracks in the San Joaquin Valley, where

  I'd watch the big freights, pushing an endless line of boxcars, start their climb over the Tehachapi Range, on their way to Los Angeles, letting out their long, wailing whistle that traveled through the clear air for miles.

  My dad was a roughneck, to begin with. Later on, he was a driller, and then finally a tool pusher. As a teenager, I'd worked in the oil fields too. I'd known what it was like to feel proud of earning a little money, and putting a nickel into the basket at church at Christmas for the families who didn't have much of their own, families who were struggling-and then, a few days later, finding one of those baskets at our own front door.

  When I got to high school, I settled down. I went to Bakersfield High, about a hundred miles north and inland of Los Angeles. My junior year, my mother got sick, and I stayed in Bakersfield with her.

  My brother had dropped out of high school to work in the oil fields with my dad, so I was the man of the house. I did the shopping and the cooking, taking care of my mom. I enjoyed the responsibility.

  In high school, I majored in wood shop. I wasn't embarrassed by it. Everyone in my family had always worked. But no one in my family had finished high school, and I wanted to graduate. It wasn't as if I was trying to get out of poverty. It was a noble, proud thing to work in the oil fields. To be a driller was to be something-certainly in my family, anyway: glamorous, macho work, using machinery that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  But I wanted to play football at a major college, so after I graduated, I attended Bakersfield Junior College to get my grades up, then transferred to USC, where I got my first taste of a very different kind of world. My classmates were the sons and daughters of lawyers and other white-collar professionals. My girlfriend, a doctor's daughter, was the Rose Bowl Queen, the Homecoming Queen, and a Phi Beta Kappa art major. I'd pledged a fraternity, but I had to drop out; I couldn't afford the dues.

  Maxine and I married in January of my senior year, in 1952, and she was soon pregnant with our first child. On the day I was drafted into the NFL, I wasn't huddled around a TV or waiting by the phone. No one thought much about the draft back then;

  I wasn't even sure I'd be drafted. I was skiing with Maxine up on Mount Baldy. I was more comfortable on the mountain than down in the valley; I knew the guys up there. I loved to backpack up there. I enjoyed the wilderness.

  Maxine and I were driving through San Bernardino, and sud- denly, on the radio, I hear, "And the New York Giants took USC's Frank Gifford in the first round." What the hell? New York? Are you out of your mind? I wasn't even thinking about it. But Maxine liked the idea. She was excited by the idea of living in New York. We decided to give it a shot.

  Maybe it was my itinerant upbringing that made those early hotel years in New York so enjoyable. First we lived in the Commander, in Long Beach; we couldn't afford the city at that point.

  Then the Whitehall, on 100th and Broadway, and then the Excelsior, with a few other Giants, across from the Museum of Natural History, just down the street from Central Park.

  Sam Huff lived at the Excelsior too: "Our kids loved the park,"

  Sam told me recently, as we traded stories in his office in Middleburg, Virginia, down in the horse country where the old coal miner's kid has found a beautiful life. Plaques and photographs adorn the walls, tokens of the considerable fame that has come his way through the years. But Sam, like me, seems to reserve his fondest memories for the beginnings of our journey.

  "To me," Sam said, "the whole damn city was a playground.

  We didn't have anything like that in West Virginia."

  Or Wink, Texas, or Kermit, Texas, or Hobbs, New Mexico, the towns where, as a little kid, I'd stand down at the end of the field on a Friday night and watch the football team head for the locker room after a game. God almighty, those high-school guys were huge, with these big pads, these helmets catching the lights.

  They were special.

  And now, we were them: living in big-city hotels, but wideeyed as hell just the same.

  We moved to the Concourse Plaza for the 1958 season, joining a dozen other Giants and their families in the big hotel with the maroon awning, across the street from the huge, gilded Bronx County Courthouse. To us, the Concourse Plaza was like a big dormitory.

  We'd hang out in each other's rooms, play cards at night. We'd do our own laundry, wash our own jerseys-and the white uniform pants they'd make us pay for out of our own pockets. We'd have cocktail parties after games, crowding into our cramped quarters, thrilled when someone famous would show up-David Niven, who would win the Oscar as Best Actor for the '58 film Separate Tables; Gordon McRae; Ernest Hemingway. When the football and baseball seasons overlapped, we might get some Yankees up to our rooms: Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford. "We'd have a packed house at those parties," Dick Modzelewski remembered, the coal-town man now living in Ohio. But I didn't need reminding: New York celebrities, wanting to hang at our place? It was something I could never get over.It's something I still can't get over.

  "The Concourse Plaza was called 'the business and social center of the Bronx,' " Perian Conerly recalls now, in her distinctive, classy, Mississippi lilt. It was definitely the latter for us-just not the kind of society the hotel was talking about in its brochures.

  Perian Conerly was our resident true socialite, historian, and literary light-a beautiful, blond Mississippi deb back then. Perian's book Backseat Quarterback, published in 1963, provides as lively and hilarious an account as you'll ever read about pro football in those early years. In the fifties, she was writing a social-notes column for the Jackson, Mississippi, paper, sprinkled with her own wry and gentle way of seeing the world-"a little fluffy column," in her own words.

  Later, her "New York Newsletter"-dispatches from a quarterback's wife-earned a little blurb in Sports Illustrated and Newsweek, and the next thing she knew, the column was syndicated.

  To this day, Perian is one of the most sophisticated and worldly women I have ever met-but it does her no disrespect to say that she enjoyed her role as the queen mother of our redbrick, dim corridored den. Perian loved the Concourse Plaza, and the place loved having her. Each December, the hotel staff would pack up her kitchenware and save it for the next season-if there was a next season. Every year, Charlie said that this season was his last. And every year, he'd come back for more.

  "At one point," Perian told me, "there were twelve couples and twenty-seven kids in the place. Of course, we wives all knew each other. I was always looking out to see if we had any new wives, so I could make them welcome. Roach would always forget to tell me about a new player who might have a wife, so we had to try and seek them out on our own and make them feel welcome." (Roach was Charlie's nickname. "He wasn't sure why," Perian says. "He thought maybe it was because he used to catch roaches back in Mississippi, as a kid, and sell them to fishermen.")

  Perian would try and squeeze us for the latest gossip for her column, but Charlie and I never gave her anything good to use, so she had to get her literary fodder from Don Heinrich, our other quarterback. Don was her husband's rival on the field, but football didn't factor into our home life; in the hotel, all the wives were sisters. It was Perian who told Don Heinrich's wife, Barbara, that the hotel provided another special service for Giant families, above and beyond storing the knives and forks for the winter: If cash was a little short, the front desk would provide an advance on her husband's paycheck. When Don's wife asked him about the service, she discovered that he had already been getting advances on his paycheck without telling her, and that was the end of Don's extra cash.

  "We were just living the regular lives of wives," Perian says now, and there's no mistaking the delight in her tone at the memory. "When y'all would practice, we'd go over to the courthouse, across the Co
ncourse, looking for trials. They were mostly divorce cases. Occasionally we'd get a juicy murder. And since we were just a couple of blocks from the subway, you could get downtown in fifteen minutes. Sometimes during practice, the wives would head downtown. We went to a lot of matinees. Standing room was a dollar and a half. I saw South Pacific before almost anybody."

  Perian, Maxine, the other spouses living in our dorm-they weren't rich wives. They were housewives. They talked about their kids, they changed diapers together. The dads did, too.

  Our kids never strayed far from the football field, or the park.

  We couldn't afford a regular diet of Manhattan nightlife. Actually, some of my teammates couldn't afford any Manhattan nightlife. So we mostly stuck close to home. The parks, the stadium, these were our front yards-taking the families to Macombs Dam Park after practice, throwing the ball around, while the wives were pushing buggies.

  "We all brought our children to Yankee Stadium," Sam recalled. "They all ran around and played with each other. John Mara, Wellington's little boy, used to show up wearing this little bow tie. Modzelewski's kids and my kids always wanted to take down little John. I'd tell them, 'Hit anyone else, but don't hit the owner's kid.' "

  The rooms at the Concourse Plaza were nothing special; you were lucky if you even had a bedroom. Some of my team- mates had to live on foldouts until the Yankees finished their season. "When Jack Kemp, the rookie quarterback, came to the team that year, he couldn't get a room that had a kitchen," kicker Pat Summerall remembers now, in that southern-tinged baritone. "I remember going to dinner with my wife, Kathy, to Jack and Joanne's room one night. We washed the dinner dishes in the bathtub, on our knees."