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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  Kemp, our future statesman, remembers the place vividly today-as well he should. One night Jack and his wife discovered first-hand just how diverse the tenants of a Bronx hotel could be. Joanne was pregnant with their first child when the two of them arrived at their new home-"and every now and then she'd get woozy," Jack told me from his office in the nation's capital, where, after several decades of public service, "The Honorable Jack Kemp" now heads Kemp Partners, a consulting firm. "So Joanne and I are in our new room-not a suite by any means. I think it had a kitchenette.

  "We're new to New York. We were excited. It's almost a second honeymoon.

  "So we come home one night after being out with you and the Summeralls and the Conerlys, at the start of the season, and they've painted our apartment to get us into it. I went downstairs to complain to the front desk that my wife was pregnant, and she couldn't sleep there with fumes. They gave us another room. The next morning we came down to go into our new apartment. First we went out to get the paper. The doors were heavy. I had groceries, the Times in my hands. I open the door, shove it with my foot.

  Joanne went in, and the door shut behind her. Suddenly I hear a shriek like you've never heard. She's screaming bloody murder. I'm fumbling with the key. I finally get the door open. The hotel had rented the room to a drunken sailor, who's now lying in the bed. He was asleep, buck naked. He'd been throwing up.

  "So how could I ever forget the Concourse? I spent a lot of time there. The only way I could go downtown with you guys was if I was a friend of Gifford's. Charlie did not speak one word to me the whole season."

  Don't feel bad, I told Jack-Charlie didn't talk much to anyone. Including me. And I was his roommate for a lot of years. Most of the time Charlie just sat on the bed, cracking his ankles so loudly you could hear it in the next room. I did the talking.

  Daily life wasn't all social at the Concourse Plaza-at least not for our all-business defensive coach, Tom Landry. Within five years of joining the Giants, the cerebral Landry had become a player-coach. In 1958, his room at the hotel was his film lab. "I learned more football in that one season in Tom's apartment than I'd learned all through high school and college," Sam once said.

  While Sam was studying film reels, Maxine and I were learning a lot about bridge, playing with the Conerlys, and the Rotes, the Heinrichs. Financial constraints limited our social options during the workweek, and as Sundays would approach, I'd want to steer clear of our favorite haunts downtown, to keep a clear head. Maxine and I had a two-bedroom apartment-room 909. We needed the space-by 1958, we had three children: Jeff, Victoria, and Kyle, the latter named for my teammate. Charlie and Perian had a nice apartment with a view, sort of; if you leaned way out the window you could see the Harlem River.

  If you were on one side of the hotel, you could see Yankee Stadium. If you lived on the other side, you looked out over the Bronx, and if you looked far enough, you could see a little bit of Manhattan. Punter Don Chandler's room was small, but he didn't care; to a Tulsa boy, panoramic views of Gotham didn't hold much appeal, and Don's room provided a view of the flags on top of the stadium, which told him, the morning of every game, what the winds would be like for his punts. Then again, as Don says now, you could never judge the winds coming in off the Harlem River, not once they started to swirl inside our huge home field.

  We didn't all live in the Concourse. The only two bachelors on the team-Cliff Livingston, our strongside linebacker, and Harland Svare, our other outside linebacker-lived in the Manhattan Hotel, downtown in Manhattan, across from Downey's bar and restaurant. They got a good rate. (All of us were always looking for rates back then-on anything and everything.)

  We all envied Harland and Cliff to some degree, but not completely. They'd come to practice after what had been a long, hard night on the town, and we'd look at their bloodshot eyes and eagerly ask them what they'd done the night before. They'd just look at each other and shake their heads. Cliff and Harland always talked about how much better off we were-we had home cooking, wives to go home to, security. But a lot of us fantasized about being in their shoes.

  Rosie Grier, our mammoth right defensive tackle, and Mel Triplett, our tough fullback, were roommates in an apartment over in Jersey: "We caught the bus, over and back," Grier says now, as if it were yesterday, from Los Angeles, where he's lived for years. "We couldn't afford a car." It wasn't that the black players weren't welcome at the Concourse Plaza; it was just that the fifties were simply a different time. Rosie and Mel felt more comfortable living across the river-and preferred the cheaper housing prices.

  But Rosie and Mel did draw the color line, and set a Giant precedent, at an exhibition game in Dallas in 1956. Down there, the hotels were separated by color, and one day Rosie and Mel made a statement for our team: "We were going to go to some hotel for a luncheon, and the black players on the club said they weren't going to go to the luncheon," Rosie told me. "We talked about it, and Mel and I decided we wouldn't go. A couple of the older black players were on the bus. (The Giant roster had four black players in 1958: Mel, Rosie Grier, Rosey Brown, and Emlen Tunnell.) Mel and I wouldn't get on. We figured, 'If we can't stay in the hotel with our teammates, then we're not going to the luncheon.'

  "So Wellington came out and said, 'You guys never said anything about this before.' We said, 'We shouldn't have to say anything about this.' Wellington said, 'I promise you we'll never again have to separate our team.' So we got on the bus, and we never stayed in separate hotels again."

  Some of the local guys preferred home cooking to dinners warmed up on a hot plate in a hotel. Andy Robustelli, our elder statesman on the defense, commuted every day from Stamford, Connecticut, the hometown he's never really left. When we traded stories over lunch at his Stamford restaurant not long ago, diners filed by to say hello to the man-not because he was once a great Giant, but because he was a Stamford guy, a man who never forgot his roots, and never wanted to.

  Jim Katcavage, our intense defensive end, commuted from Philadelphia every day-by train, if you can believe that. We called him "Choo Choo." He'd come racing in just before practice, checking his timetables to see what train he could catch to get home. As soon as practice was over, he'd give it a quick swipe in the shower, and then he was gone.

  My fellow halfback, Alex Webster, lived down in Jersey, in East Brunswick, that year. Alex had always been a Jersey guy anyway. He'd grown up in a factory town just across the Hudson River, in Kearny, a tough guy with a reputation for barroom brawling. He'd lost his dad when he was nine, and turned into something of a ren- egade. He'd been cut by the Redskins after his first training camp.

  After the Skins let him go, his friends encouraged him to give football one last shot. He'd gone to North Carolina State on a football scholarship, and the Montreal Alouettes' coach had been down at Wake Forest when Alex was in college, so Alex got himself a tryout in Montreal. He made the team, was named the league MVP in 1954, and the Giants welcomed him home in 1955.

  Webster tells me today, from his home in Florida, that he moved down to the Jersey Shore back then in order to stay away from the temptations of the big city. "I was glad I was commuting," he told me in that distinctive rasp, a voice worn down by years of heavy smoking. "The nightlife up there would have killed me. When I got home, Louise put the axe on me, and that was the end of it. So it was a lot easier coming home from practice every day than going back to a hotel room."

  But no matter how long the commute, whether it was a five-minute walk down the hill or a two-hour ride by the rails from Philly, every one of us enjoyed meeting up in that locker room every day. We liked our work, and we liked the people we worked for. We liked knowing we were playing for a first-class organization-no, a first-class family. We knew that, rain or shine, during practice we could look over to the sideline and see our beloved owner Wellington Mara's tall, familiar figure, dressed in sweats, that ever-present smile visible from beneath that distinctive little cap.

  Back then, the NFL was a league of fami
ly owners, and the Maras were the head of the family. When he bought the team in 1925 (for somewhere between the probably apocryphal sum of $500 and the likelier figure of $2,500) Wellington's dad, T. J. Mara, was thirty-eight, and a very well connected man in New York City. As a kid, T. J. had run bets down in his Irish neighborhood-legally-as early as the age of twelve. By the time he stumbled across the chance to pick up a franchise in the pro football business, thirty

  years later, he was a renowned boxing promoter and a highly respected legal bookmaker at the New York tracks, with booths on the infield at Belmont and Saratoga. If it wasn't exactly an honorable profession, bookmaking wasn't dishonorable, either; horse racing was still the sport of kings, and T. J.'s profession offered the perk of his being able to mingle with the likes of Vanderbilts and Astors and Belmonts.

  T. J. once said he'd never passed up a chance to promote anything-just for the challenge. I guess that explains why, on one August day in 1925, in the office of his sports-promoter friend Billy Gibson, he took a flier on a business about which he knew absolutely nothing. Joe Carr, the commissioner of the five-year-old National Football League, was trying to convince Gibson to invest in a New York franchise. Gibson declined, and not surprisingly: In the first ten years of the league, thirty-five franchises went belly-up. By 1925, the league had eighteen teams, most in small Midwestern towns and coaltowns-Modzelewski's towns. Unitas's towns.

  Carr understandably wanted a presence in the sports hub of the universe. T. J. Mara wrote the check. "The Giants," he would say many years later, "were founded on brute ignorance. The players provided the brute strength and I provided the ignorance." T. J. kept a fairly low profile around the team, but there was no questioning his devotion. Modzelewski remembers the old man making an unscheduled appearance before a home game, in our locker room: "He had two cops with him," Dick recalls. "He looked like he was looking for someone. Apparently there was some reporter who'd been saying negative stuff about the team, cutting us up. So Mr. Mara comes in, sees the reporter, and says, 'Take him out. If you can't say anything good about my team, get out.' We all cheered like hell: 'Ma-ra, Ma-ra!' "

  I never knew Tim well. But I know he was a gentleman; the first time I met him in his office downtown, he rose from his chair, in shirt and suspenders, and pulled on a jacket before he shook my hand. And all I needed to know about his generosity can be summed up by one night in 1953 after I'd played both offense and defense for the last five games of that terrible season. We'd just played our final game of the year-a loss to Detroit. I was sitting in the locker room, and seriously thinking of hanging it up then and there. Maxine and I had booked tickets on a night flight west. I wanted to get the hell back to California.

  I grabbed a quick shower. And when I got back to my locker, there was T. J.: tall, wearing a dark suit and tie and, as always, a hat; he always had a real presence about him. I didn't know him, other than that first meeting in his office. He came up to me and gave me a folded bunch of bills-not a wad of bills, merely a folded bunch of bills. "I just wanted to thank you for getting us through the year," he said.

  I thanked him. I didn't look at the money at first, just put it in my pocket. Later, I pulled it out: several hundred dollars. I said to myself, Can you believe this? That was a lot of money for someone who, two years earlier, had to borrow fifty cents in his senior year at USC one day to do the laundry.

  By 1958, though, it was Wellington's team, and had been for many years; T. J. had transferred the ownership of the Giants to Wellington and his brother Jack in 1930, when Wellington was fourteen. Jack handled the business end; Wellington ran the team that had been his life's obsession, from his days as a kid when he handed out free tickets to his elementary-school classmates, into his twenties, when he scouted for the team by reading the out-of-town dailies, to his mid-thirties-when, Giant-obsessed, he was still single. It's been written that Well briefly contemplated joining the priesthood, and while all of the Maras were very devout Catho- lics, it never would have worked: Wellington never missed a Giant practice, never missed a Giant game.

  In 1954, he married Ann Mumm, a young woman from the Upper East Side-a woman I now count as a dear friend. "The Giants were his whole life," Ann once said. "It was his faith, his family, and the Giants." They would remain married until his death in 2005.

  It was Wellington who scouted me at Yankee Stadium when I played against Army for USC in 1951, and it was Wellington who took care of me the rest of the way. I've always felt that I played my career for the greatest owner in the history of the game. And I wasn't surprised to hear that, to a man, my teammates share my sentiments. I've never had to ask them what they thought of the man; they volunteer the memories themselves. Modzelewski, who played for four different teams, never experienced the kind of unity in Washington, Pittsburgh, or Cleveland that he enjoyed as a Giant: "We all got along-no one was jealous of anyone-and the Maras were the ones who kept us together, made us feel that way."

  "I'll never forget first getting there," Webster told me. "I thought I might have a hard time with these guys-war veterans, guys from all over the country, me a Jersey guy. I never expected the love we ended up showing one another, from the top down. The way we talked to one another. The way we shared what was on our mind. All of us."

  "It was always like family," Perian remembers. "They were special times. Especially our group. And our owners contributed to that feeling. I think they thought the group was special. It was like a family: Once a Giant, always a Giant."

  That may sound like a cliché. But in 1958, it was true. It was a different time, a time when the bond between a football team and its owners, between a team and a city, felt almost neighborly. Today, I can't quite imagine reading, in a Giants game-day program, the words I found from a Giant program from those years: "Alicia Landry lost a charm bracelet, probably at the stadium, on Oct. 27, when the Redskins were here. The bracelet doesn't have intrinsic value. However, it means a lot to the Landrys. Its return will be greatly appreciated."

  Not that Wellington wasn't always looking out for the bottom line, especially when the team was struggling at the gate in the early fifties and we all worried that it was going to fold; some of the family's other interests, like the coal business, were struggling as mightily as the Giants. Wellington was the one who sat down with you at contract time, and my teammates tell me that Well could be a very tough bargainer at contract time. Of course, back then, every owner was a tough bargainer.

  "When I first signed in 1956," Don Chandler told me, "I said, 'What'll you give me?' Wellington offered $7,200, with a $500 bonus. I said, 'That's not much.' He said, 'That's all you're worth.' "

  (Modzelewski was making $10,000, which represented a big leap up from the first contract his brother, Ed, had signed in 1952 with the Steelers. Dick recalls, "I'll never forget the photograph he had of the day he'd signed: It's a shot of all of us, and the family dog, and he's holding the check-for $3,000".)

  In 1958, his third year, Sam Huff made $8,000-the equivalent of $56,000 today-after being named All-Pro in 1957. That's not a lot of dough, even if a steak downtown only cost four dollars. In 1960, when CBS miked Sam up for a documentary called "The Violent World of Sam Huff," he tells me now, he lied to Walter Cronkite about what he was making: "I told him I was making twelve. I was too embarrassed to tell him I was making nine."

  I was making $25,000 in 1958. But then, the Maras had always been gracious to me, ever since the first signing bonus they gave me in 1952. And when I look back at those miserable early years, I have to say I probably earned every penny of it. We were playing in the low-rent Polo Grounds, the bottom of the barrel, where drunken fans taunted players and their wives.

  At the Polo Grounds, across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium (really, it's one thing to have to play on a field designed for baseball-but a field designed for polo?), the field sloped downhill for drainage, but after a rain the water would collect into this huge pond that circled around the baseball infield. "I remember one gam
e where they couldn't even mark the ball," our bachelor linebacker Cliff Livingston told me from his home in Vegas, where he's still living the high life. "It would literally float away. Somebody almost drowned." That someone was me: On one play in the Polo Grounds, I was tackled and held underwater.

  But if the Maras could be tight with a contract, they never treated us as anything but friends. We were guests at their home.

  Our kids would play together. We didn't feel like employees; we felt like Giants.

  "The Maras would have us for Thanksgiving, Christmas parties," recalls Modzelewski-Mo, to me, now and always. "My son Mark was just a youngster, and he kept picking on our coach Jim Lee Howell's kid at one Christmas party. Jim Lee came to me and said. 'Mo, your son is picking on Pumpkin.' I told Mark, 'Leave Pumpkin the hell alone, or your old man will be playing back in Pittsburgh.' "

  For Dick, that would have been a return to Forbes Field, where, before we traded for him in '56, he had to dodge beer bottles as he walked into the tunnel after the Steelers' eighth loss in a row. Mo doesn't carry too many fond memories of his years with the Steelers. His coach in Pittsburgh was a guy named Walt Kiesling, apparently a semi-sadist who, Mo swears, used to fill the team's water buckets with oats to torture them after a bad practice. At least old Jim Lee Howell, our head coach in name only, was just ineffectual. "Coming from the Steelers, going to the Giants where they treated you so well, honest to God, I felt like I died and went to heaven," Mo says now. "To be in Yankee Stadium? Oh my God."

  Along with Katcavage, Modzelewski anchored the left side of our defensive line. Dick was the archetypal fifties tackle: wide as a tank, more or less immovable. He was known to sing the occasional Polish folk song for his teammates while they were gathered over duck soup at his mother's house when we were on the road in Pittsburgh. Like all of us, Dick was a small-town guy. He came from the cradle of pro football-western Pennsylvania, a coal town called Natrona, twenty-four miles outside of Pittsburgh-and he tackled like a coal kid . . . with leather shoulder pads. In Dick's time with the Giants, he had operations on both shoulders, maybe from years of tackling Jimmy Brown-the most powerful running back the game has ever known-and from having to practice against Jack Stroud, the toughest lineman I ever knew. One of Mo's legs is still black from that weird black salve that our trainer Johnny Johnson used to use as a cure-all for everything back then-including knees that locked up.