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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  (Our other cure-all was the Scotch that our team physician Doc Sweeny would carry in that little black bag. You'd be sitting on a plane ride home-aching, bruised, hurting-and you'd tell Doc about it. He'd pull out a bottle of Scotch: "Here, have a nip."

  He believed there was no injury or illness that a good shot of Scotch couldn't cure. It didn't help your knee, but it sure made the flight back home more bearable.)

  It wasn't every owner who treated his team like family, of course.

  Hearing about the exploits of some of our '58 refugees from the dark side of the NFL, the always-woeful Chicago Cardinals, made me appreciate the Maras even more. To hear Summerall tell it, he was lucky to get out of aging (even then) Comiskey Park alive. Today, as I go to Giant games on the road-a guest in a luxury box in some huge, gleaming stadium with amenities we never dreamed of, watching players who dress in spacious, carpeted locker rooms it's almost surreal to think of what an NFL player in a second-rate organization had to go through back then.

  In Chicago, of course, the Bears were the big show, the team of the fabled George Halas-a guy who, legend has it, would visit the saloons on Rush Street on a Saturday night, watch a bar fight, and sign the winner up to play on his line the next day. The Cards, playing in crumbling Comiskey, with its empty bleachers and flaking paint, were simply a joke, top to bottom. In Summerall's five seasons before joining us in '58, the Cards played sixty games and won seventeen.

  "I think I would have quit if I hadn't been traded to the Giants in '58," Summerall says now. "It was a totally low-class operation.

  The equipment was bad. The trainers were bad. The field was awful. The locker room facilities were terrible; we were lucky to have a nail to hang our clothes on. Traveling was bad. They'd say, 'Get to the airport any way you can.' It was just a cheap outfit, in every way. Even medically. I remember one time, we only had two offensive tackles, and a guy pulled a hamstring during a game and we didn't have anybody to replace him. So they gave him a Novocain shot through his pants, on the field.

  "This'll give you an idea of what it was like on the Cardinals: Every Thursday, they passed out the cards so we could make bets on the game that Sunday. One time our fullback Johnny Olszewski and I played a parlay card together. Someone scored a TD that put us over the spread. He said, 'You sonofabitch! We won't win our bet on the parlay card!'

  "Then, to have it be the Giants they traded me to? Things were a little different over there. For one thing, the guys were all reasonably intelligent. The thing that struck me about going from the Cardinals to the Giants was that on the Giants we had some really smart guys. We didn't have a lot more physical ability than the Cardinals, but the guys we had were bright. We had guys who could think about things, come up with solutions on the field, in the huddle. It wasn't just a collection of athletes. Our guys were smarter."

  He's right. At least if we were betting, we'd have been smart enough to bet on our own team.

  But history has proved Pat out: On the Yankee Stadium field that day, we didn't just have six future Hall of Fame players. The number of guys who went on to serve as coaches must rival any NFL's team's alumni: two head coaches (Webster and Svare) as well as a number of assistants, including Modzelewski, our tough safety Emlen Tunnell, and our big, cerebral tight end, Bob Schnelker-a substitute teacher at that time, with a fondness for mathematics.

  Not to mention a future general manager, Robustelli.

  At first glance, our opponents that day in 1958 seemed to have little in common with the Giants. The team had been in existence half a decade, hailing from an old, low-profile port town, with no championship pedigree. But we actually had a great deal in common. The Colt roster featured its own future head coach in Ray Berry, who would take the New England Patriots to a Super Bowl. Their owner, Carroll Rosenbloom, treated them as well as any man they'd ever worked for.

  And their roster featured a few survivors from an even sorrier team than the Cardinals. At least the Chicago Cardinals knew what city their franchise belonged to.

  The core of these Colts-among them, Gino Marchetti and Artie Donovan-had come from a team most recently known as the Dallas Texans, a team that played the first four games of its only season in the Cotton Bowl in 1952 before its owners declared bankruptcy. (Before that, the franchise played in Boston and New York.) The NFL league relocated the team in midseason to Hershey, Pennsylvania, of all places, to finish out the season. They won one of twelve games, playing those last eight on the road, including a Sunday afternoon in the Akron Rubber Bowl. (Their one victory that year was against, of all teams, Halas's Bears. George started second-stringers for that one.)

  "In Dallas," Gino Marchetti tells me now, "we were so bad the vets would hide on the bench 'cause they didn't want to go in. This is how bad we were: One day someone said, 'Who can play tight end?' I said, 'I can!' I said to the quarterback, 'Hey, Hank, hit me for six.' He threw a Hail Mary, and I caught it. I was so happy until I heard the announcer say, 'Rams 42, Dallas 6.'

  "Jimmy Phelan was our coach. He'd fought in World War One.

  Nice guy, but he never read a scouting report, hardly looked at film.

  You know how we made his last cut? He walks right into the locker room and points at various guys and says, 'You, out. You, out. You, out.' That's how Don Klosterman got cut. Don says, 'You can't do that to me.' Phelan said, 'Shit I can't. I just did.' "

  No wonder the Dallas/Hershey guys lost eleven of twelve that year-especially if a legendary account of one of their practices is any indication. As the story goes, the week before a "Texan" game against the Eagles, the Philadelphia head coach, Jim Trimble, told John Huzvar, his fullback, "Don't come to practice Tuesday. Spy on the Texans." Huzvar sat in the parking lot in Hershey with his hat down over his eyes, trying to glean some covert intelligence. The next day Trimble asked him, "What'd you see?" Huzvar reported, "They were playing volleyball over the crossbar."

  Artie confirms the volleyball story, and, as always with Artie, he insisted on sharing a few more memories of those strange days playing for a team without a home-like the one of an exhibition game against the Eagles in Hershey. "All the fans got so drunk in the stands," Artie told me, "the guards had to turn the water hoses on them.

  "So anyway, Art Spinney-he was the starting guard in our game; his nickname was Pusbag-we told Pusbag to go get us some beer after the game. So he goes over to this bar, but the only thing he could find to carry the beer in was this sack that had horse manure in it. We didn't care. We just brushed the manure off the bottles."

  In the meantime, while the Texans were bouncing around the country, the city of Baltimore had lost its own NFL franchise in 1950, the original Colts-named for the Preakness-or, depending on whom you believe, because "Colts" was short enough to fit into a newspaper headline on deadline. Those Colts folded after one year, but the fan base had proved unusually solid. So Bell turned to Rosenbloom, a personable, ruggedly handsome businessman who knew nothing about owning a professional football team, but was more than anxious to learn. Bell had coached Rosenbloom in the backfield at the Ivy-League University of Pennsylvania.

  For his first roster, Bert gave Carroll some of the Texans. And the NFL's gypsies had finally found a home (until 1984, anyway, when they moved to Indianapolis).

  Until Bell talked him into taking over the team, Rosenbloom had no experience in any front offices other than his family's businesses. He'd made his money manufacturing uniforms during the Second World War, running the Marlboro Shirt Company in Baltimore, downtown on Lombard Street. "He wasn't real excited about taking over the team-not at the start, anyway," his son Steve told me. "Owners back then, they had to be a little crazy, or civic minded, or both, because no one was making money."

  Rosenbloom paid $200,000 for the franchise in 1953, and put another $800,000 into getting it off the ground, in the renovated municipal redbrick horseshoe of Memorial Stadium, a few miles up the hill from downtown Baltimore, planted in the heart of a proud, working-class neighborhood.
Rosenbloom expected to lose the whole thing. He wasn't alone. "This is Carroll Rosenbloom," a local radio personality told the crowd at a banquet introducing the new team to its city, "and it's lucky he's in the shirt business, because he's liable to lose it."

  Bell appointed Rosenbloom's first head coach himself: Keith Molesworth, a man with virtually no professional coaching experience. Carroll wanted to fire him at the first training camp. He'd have to wait a year. Rosenbloom was also less than impressed with the players his buddy Bert had bestowed on him.

  "It was a sorry bunch," Rosenbloom said years later, in Mickey Herskowitz's The Golden Age of Pro Football. "No discipline. No pride. Very few good players . . . All I asked of them was to let the other team know they'd been in a game. If you do that, I said, I'll look after you financially." Rosenbloom made good on his word. He figured that the most logical way to motivate his band of wanderers was through their wallets. He put in an incentive system, which was, of course, completely against league rules. He'd offer a certain amount of money for an interception, for example. "The other owners regarded me as a communist."

  (Actually, Carroll wasn't the first owner to offer off-the-record bonuses. Before my time, T. J. Mara had been known to dangle cash-on-delivery for on-field exploits. As the story went-probably apocryphal, but not unbelievable by any means-some years before, he'd told an unidentified Giant defensive back before a game against the Browns that if he intercepted two Otto Graham passes, it would mean a new suit. The guy picked off one pass. Tim gave him a pair of pants. The next Sunday, goes the tale, he picked off another-and, the following Monday, got the jacket.)

  It wasn't just extra cash that turned the Colts around. According to his players and friends, Carroll Rosenbloom had a way of pumping up the lowliest of underachievers. Today, an old friend of Rosenbloom's, who requested anonymity, speaks of the man's eloquent gifts of persuasion: "He just had this ability to motivate people," his friend told me. "He'd say, 'I want you to jump over the Empire State Building.' You'd say, 'No way can I do that.' But he'd say it often enough that, all of a sudden, you thought you could. He'd get people to do unbelievable things."

  Rosenbloom, ever the entrepreneur, was equally concerned about advancing our game's overall image. He figured that the key to marketing what had been a second-rate league was to play up its connection with the college game everyone loved so much. In- stead of reinforcing the public perception of the league as being a less dignified version of the college game-and its players as old out-of-shape guys who played on the Sabbath, in half-empty stadiums in cities, instead of on autumn Saturdays with brass bands and standing-room-only crowds-why not promote the NFL as the land of glory gods, playing in a Valhalla to which the college stars people had loved had graduated?

  Rosenbloom wanted his players to comport themselves as gentlemen. And in turn, he would treat them as such. To a man his players not only appreciated his generosity, but sensed that he regarded them as equals, and that he truly cared for the city of Baltimore.

  "Carroll was a people person-he genuinely liked people," Raymond Berry says now. "And he definitely recognized that the fans were the most important part of the NFL. Without the fans, there'd be no league. He reached out. He hired a GM, Don Kellett, who was a great PR man, and they immediately set about making the players available to the fans, through the Colt Corrals."

  The Colts already lived in and around the neighborhoods of Baltimore, and the Corral took them even deeper into those neighborhoods: they'd attend oyster roasts, dinner parties, cook-outs. "Fans would call and ask if so and so could come to the house, have dinner, sit down with the family," Andy Nelson, one of the Colts' starting safeties in 1958, told me from his barbecue place north of Baltimore. "You'd go to a kid's birthday party and have some cake, just because they asked you. We weren't looking for money or anything-it was just people trying to be nice to us, and we appreciated it. It's just being friendly. It's being homey.

  It's being down-to-earth. That's what we cared about. Not winning a world championship."

  "We were the fans' friends," Artie says now, and Berry agrees: "It really was a unique relationship that was built between the team and the city."

  Rosenbloom was known as a fair and generous negotiator at contract time. His son swears he once shoved a contract across the table to Gino Marchetti and told him to fill in the number.

  Rosenbloom's contract-negotiating philosophy was understandable: Happy employees made for a solid corporation. But Rosenbloom took it a step further. He made it a point to do whatever he could to guarantee the financial futures of his players. As a motivational tool, it was probably brilliant. Few of them were savvy with money, and fewer still had any great ambitions.

  Despite being universally regarded as one of the best players to ever play the game, Marchetti, another small-town guy from Northern California, was content to go home when it was all over, helping to run the family service station and tending bar-until Carroll stepped in and began to look after his star's future: "Oh, yeah. He took care of my life," Gino told me. "This one time, I'll never forget, we were playing the 49ers in San Francisco. So after the game Carroll calls me into his room. I come in, and he says, 'I'm kind of worried.' So I sit down, and we talk, and he says, just like this, 'Hey, you dumb Okie, what the hell are you going to do with your life?' " (I'm not sure why Carroll called him an Okie.

  Maybe they didn't teach geography in the Ivies.)

  "Well, I was happy to just be going home bartending in Antioch, California. He says, 'I want you to move to Baltimore. I'll help you in business. The people in Baltimore like you, and that's where you should be.' Then, after the game, he went up to my wife, told her the same thing. We stayed in Baltimore. And for years after that, if anything came up, and I needed something or wanted something, I'd call him, and no problem."

  "At one point," the Colts' cornerback Milt Davis told me from his farm in Oregon, "Carroll Rosenbloom asked us all to invest in a mutual fund, the Dreyfus Fund, and all of us invested." For the veteran Davis, investing a paycheck represented a remarkable milestone for a kid who was born of black-Indian blood on an Oklahoma reservation, before his family traveled west in a Model A in the thirties, when Milt was three years old. In south-central Los Angeles, Milt's dad dug ditches in front of the school Milt attended. The boy fought off street gangs to get food from a local commissary. And now he was playing for a man who was guiding his investments. "Our money doubled in something like six years. Rosenbloom really did care. We had some leadership from the top."

  If, as Mo says, the Maras made the Giants into an organization where "the whole team just molded together," then Rosenbloom clearly had the same effect on his own team. To hear the Colts tell it, the 1958 team was as tight a group of guys as you could imagine. "We didn't have cliques," says Artie, and the preponderance of nicknames on that team says a lot about the close relationship the players shared. Carl Taseff, the bandy-legged cornerback, was "Gaucho." Artie Donovan was "Fatso." Eugene Lipscomb was, of course, "Big Daddy." Lenny Moore was "Spats" but Unitas called him "Sput" for Sputnik, the Russian satellite, because of his speed.

  Steve Myhra, their erratic kicker, was "Mumbles." The running back Alan Ameche, of course, was famously "The Horse." Milt was "Pops." And the mammoth All-Pro offensive tackle Jim Parker was "Boulevard"-"because his butt was as wide as one," Davis told me. "In that championship game, I remember Unitas in the huddle, saying, 'Boulevard, this is critical-a 32 trap, right over your ass.' "

  The two most revered men on the team, Gino Marchetti and Johnny Unitas, didn't have nicknames. They were always Gino and John.

  "I never saw so much love between a group as I saw back then," Big Daddy Lipscomb's wife said, years later. "They wanted to play for each other."

  That's a sentiment I can fully understand.

  The Colts and Baltimore enjoyed a distinctly different relationship with their city than the Giants did with theirs. In New York, the highest-profile stars are easily lost amid the glitter.
But Baltimore is a small town at heart, and from the day these new Colts arrived in 1953, the town wholeheartedly took them in.

  To hear the Colts talk today about playing at Memorial Stadium being introduced as they ran up an angled plywood ramp laid over the concrete steps in the Oriole dugout-is to experience the bond that only a small town of a city can share with its sports heroes.

  Berry insists that Memorial Stadium was the first field where the roar of the crowd was so intense that opposing teams couldn't hear their quarterback's signals. (That sure wasn't the case in the Polo Grounds. We used to play in front of eight thousand people.)

  Today, Ernie Accorsi likens the bond between the Colts and Baltimore to the relationship between Brooklyn fans and their Dodgers. Ernie was raised in Hershey, Pennsylvania, joined the Colt front office in the seventies, and went on to serve the Giants as a general manager, so he's obviously given all of this some thought. "In both cases, the team was the city's identity. In both places, you'd hear them talk in the neighborhood about their team-Brooklyn, overshadowed by Manhattan, Baltimore always overshadowed by Philadelphia."

  The night before a home game, the Colts would generally stay at the Hotel Belvedere in Baltimore-the jewel of that city, built at the turn of the century. The Belvedere had its own storied history:

  Woodrow Wilson was staying in The Belvedere when he was nominated for the presidency; it hosted a half-dozen other presidents, from Taft to Kennedy. But in the late fifties, the Belvedere's most storied guests were named Marchetti, Unitas, and Donovan.