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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  For the most part, the Colts lived in homes and apartments in neighborhoods all over their friendly city. They immediately became part of the town's fabric-and thanks to that game, they still are. I was amazed to find out how many of them stayed in town, or returned to live in the area.

  "We always considered New York the place where the big money was," Gino says now. "But Baltimore, to me, well, it just seemed like a genuine place. It was the people in Baltimore who really made it so friendly. And being a Colt, I guess there was a certain mystique."

  The night before we faced off against the Colts to fight for the 1958 championship, we weren't the only football players staying in the Concourse Plaza. The Colts were sharing our dorm.

  They'd gotten into town on Saturday afternoon and walked down to the Stadium for practice.

  Talk about a different time: Can you imagine the two Super Bowl teams staying in the same old brick hotel these days, the night before the game? In the week before last year's Super Bowl, the Giants took over an entire resort, south of Phoenix. The Patriots populated another whole resort, east of the city. Each luxurious lodging place was replete with Jacuzzis and golf courses.

  Back then, the Colts and Giants were just another seventy guys staying in a dorm-a dorm that Artie Donovan happened to know well. For Artie, checking into the Concourse Plaza on Saturday afternoon was like going back in time. Artie tells me now that he'd spent more than a few nights bending a few rules down on the Grand Concourse: "When I was a kid, we used to steal beer off the tables during dances in that ballroom. The couples would get up to dance, and there were these pitchers of beer on the tables.

  We'd hang out outside the ballroom, then go in and steal the pitchers. The maître d' was a guy named Jerry. He was from my neighborhood, so whatever we wanted, we got. All the big-shot lawyers would be hanging at the bar."

  Artie had returned to his favorite borough-only this time, he was the enemy. And a couple of men outside a cafeteria near Jerome Avenue let him know it.

  "These guys are standing there with their baby carriages with children in them," he told me from the suburban Baltimore country club he's managed for decades, "and these guys are yelling at me,

  'You're gonna get killed tomorrow.'

  ' "Yeah, right,' " I said. ' "We're gonna stick it up their rear ends.' "

  (Through the years, Artie has become, in many ways, the face and voice of the old Baltimore Colts, but Artie himself did everything he could to stay in his hometown. Even after he became a Colt, he was always looking for work in New York. He considered the police force. At one point, he wanted to be a teacher. After reviewing his application to get some teacher's credits, Columbia advised him to stick with professional football.)

  Back then there was nothing unusual about staying in the same hotel as your adversary. Because the guys in the other uniform weren't your enemy. There wasn't any showboating, one-upping.

  The whole league was made up of just a little over four hundred guys, and a whole lot of them became friends. We didn't think of one another as opponents so much as members of a special fraternity. Through the years, we'd all crossed paths: played together in Senior Bowl games, in Shrine games, in Pro Bowl games. We'd played each other during the endless six-game exhibition season, in small cities, where we'd hang at the hotel bars together. We'd even brawl together; Marchetti once remembered teaming up with Alex Webster-his archfoe in our championship game-in a barroom melee against a couple of guys who clearly didn't know who they were messing with.

  "I really don't think we looked at the players on the other teams with any animosity," Andy Robustelli says now, sitting at a table in his restaurant in Stamford. "Back then, there wasn't a hate signal anywhere, or anything that caused you to get rough with opponents. You wouldn't talk about who was better than who. You just said, 'I'll do what I can do, and hope I can do it to the best of my ability.' No one said you were playing on a better team because you were a better player. You played as a team. We emulated the Colts. It was like that back then. We had a capacity to reach out to other teams and say, 'You're a good team. We want to be like you.' " Weeb Ewbank, the Colts' coach that day, may have captured this feeling we had for each other better than anyone, in an interview years later: "The thing I miss about the fifties is that people seemed to have more respect for each other-even if they disliked you. There was more of a purpose, less selfishness. People talked about doing their share. Whatever happened to that?"

  We were all bound by being members of a small, special club: athletes in a league that was still playing its games in relative obscurity, fighting for a decent paycheck, playing in half-empty stadiums. In the fifties, the World Series was a huge event; the NFL championship game was anything but.

  No story about the 1958 Giants would be complete without a brief visit to the streets of the team's other neighborhood. By day, we were residents of the Bronx. But by night, on occasion-on many an occasion-we had another neighborhood we called our own: downtown, where bars were still saloons, and the streets were festooned with the neon nightclub signs that lit mid-town Manhattan, beckoning us all-athletes, admen, businessmen, journalists-to the sanctuary of several well-lighted places. That world, for the most part, has disappeared now, of course-not just the bars and restaurants, but the feel of a city in its prime. Today's players are the poorer, I think, for playing in a city that has lost that feeling, but even if all of our old haunts were still around, I think something would still be missing: the camaraderie of a bunch of teammates working their way east across that most hallowed section of midtown-the streets that had been crowded with speakeasies during Prohibition.

  Whole books have been written about the area that centered on 52nd Street-"The Street." For the Giants, all of midtown Manhattan was our street. Anyone who lived through our glory days knows that we didn't just play them in a sacred stadium. We lived them on our nighttime tours, bathed in a glow that was very different from the lights of Yankee Stadium.

  Drinking was simply a part of society back then, and it was definitely part of the professional football player's routine. Of course, we were hardly alone. Television advertised hard liquor. Any gathering-from a Park Avenue cocktail party to a gathering at a bar under the el-involved some sort of lubrication. "That was just a generation that drank" is the way that Nina Rote, the widow of my friend Kyle Rote, remembers it now. "Drinking was normal.

  When people would come to our apartment, the first thing you'd say was 'Would you like a drink?' It was the polite thing to say. That was the generation when it was okay to drink. And you were expected to hold your liquor."

  We were encouraged to loosen up; one of the many cocktail invitations we got during the '58 season, from some friends downtown, read, "Let's Get Plastered." We would do our best not to, but back then, it would have been strange to not drink at a party.

  Liquor was definitely part of our society. Our announcer, Bob Sheppard, told me he had a weekly routine of stopping for a few drinks at a little place in Queens on his way back to Long Island after the games. Doc Sweeny had that bottle. Even our team chaplain bent a few elbows downtown with the rest of us-and frequently. Father Dudley, in fact, could mix a mean Manhattan. I should know. Earlier in the '58 season, I had to spend a few days in the hospital after I'd messed up some of my knee ligaments in our fourth game, against the Cardinals. I'd had a rough first month, medically speaking: A couple of hits to the head had briefly sidelined me in our first two games. Now, on Sunday afternoons, Father Dudley struck a reassuring figure on our sideline, in his black suit and his white collar. When he visited me in the hospital that week, though, he wore a slightly different uniform; Father Dudley was a Franciscan monk, and when he came to my hospital room, he was in full Franciscan garb, from the robe, with its deep folds, right down to the sandals.

  He showed up in my room and said to the nurse, in that slow, deep, authoritative voice that I'll never forget, "Will you leave us alone, please?" She agreed, probably figuring he was going to lead me thr
ough some special mass-a prayer to the saint of torn knees, perhaps. Father Dudley had a different ceremony in mind. He reached into one of the folds of his robe-and brought out the bourbon. Then he reached into another fold-and pulled out the sweet vermouth. Then, the cherries. Then, somehow, from somewhere, he pulled out a couple of glasses. And some ice. And we had our Manhattans. Chilled and straight up. Just the way he liked them.

  In a very real way-in a very liquid way-our evening prowls across midtown Manhattan were just as historic as our games uptown: more than simply a tour of popular watering holes, but a tour of some shrines that echoed with the vibrancy that had made the city such an amazing place in the previous decades, with the growth of the theater, of the sports teams, of Madison Avenue.

  Our uptown and downtown neighborhoods shared something in common for me, too: in both places, I was becoming a (small) part of New York history myself. At Yankee Stadium, we were playing in a stadium that really did put New York on the sports map.

  It might have been called "The House That Ruth Built," but it was a place that Conerly, Rote, and Huff-after our 47-7 championship win over the Bears two years earlier-were beginning to claim for their own, too. And downtown, where the soul of the great city truly resided, we were walking in another set of historical footsteps: The Street, where jazz was born and speakeasies once ruled.

  Our path didn't touch on the haunts of the real royalty of midtown Manhattan. We didn't hobnob at the Stork Club, or drink on the roof at the St. Regis. The high-end hotels weren't for us, nor could we have afforded them. We haunted saloons. Our half dozen regular stops were peopled by New Yorkers of all stripes not the New Yorkers who lived in the penthouses, but the folks who brought the town to life, including its less-than-legitimate entrepreneurs. In a way, we were kind of silent heroes to the people who ran the colorful side of New York.

  And believe me, some of them were pretty colorful. Back then, the city wasn't littered with "clubs"-it really was still a town of saloons, and the guys who loved to have us come into their places were saloonkeepers at heart. They recognized us, and they welcomed us as part of the community. We weren't superstars looking for a VIP room, just football players who liked to drink, and talk, under a cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke, gathered around a circular bar, chatting with friends and strangers alike, nighttime New Yorkers who felt like and treated each other as neighbors.

  We enjoyed hitting our regular places, but we didn't frequent any of them to be recognized, or celebrated. Most of the time, no one knew who we were. In 1958 we were starting to claim someof the Yankees' high-profile turf around town, but the erratic attendance at our home games made it abundantly clear that we were far from superstars. Except for our regular-season game against the Colts in November that year, we didn't sell out any of our games.

  When we beat the Eagles in the ninth game of the season, on a cold day at the Stadium-a must-win game-we drew exactly 35,458. (Unfortunately, they weren't treated to much of a game, either: Four of the first five plays featured fumbles. The next day, in the Mirror-one of the nine dailies that were on strike when we played the championship game-one of the biggest headlines read, "Frigid Weather Couldn't Stop High-Stepping Gals." A story about the Bergenfield [New Jersey] High School band's bare-legged female members offered far more intrigue than interviews with the participants in a lackluster football game.)

  But the saloonkeepers in our downtown neighborhood knew us well; more often than not, we chose our destinations based on which proprietors might be willing to take care of some of the check-or all of the check. It seems almost bizarre now to think that the players on a New York team would have to watch their budget. But somehow that sense of perspective made life better.

  Somehow, it made more sense. On our team, there were no superstars, and no superstar salaries. We didn't have to deal with becoming rich overnight and not knowing how to handle all the pressures of sudden wealth-because there was no sudden wealth. We were all in the same boat, and it wasn't a yacht. We appreciated the city in a way that the modern players probably don't. Today, they all seem to live in Jersey, apart from one another. Do they take advantage of New York the way we did? Do they get to appreciate the things about New York that we knew were special-the parks, the museums, the galleries, the theater? Do they know what it's like to be part of the fabric of a place that can be so huge and so much like a village at the same time? I don't think so.

  So on the good nights, after the good games, we headed downtown to our second home-"by subway on the way down," Summerall recalls, "and taxi on the way back, when we were a little more relaxed."

  The big nights out, of course, would follow a home game-bigger if we'd won. That year, we broke out of the gate slowly, losing two of the first four games, but we won our last five. The temperatures and snow of the frigid early winter had the city in buoyant spirits.

  This was the postgame routine: We'd make our way back to our various apartments at the hotel-or cramped rooms. Depending on the number of guests we'd invited to our cocktail party, and the need for ice bags on bruised and battered bodies-as well as the need for drinks-we'd spend a couple of hours getting ready to hit the town.

  We'd get organized, get our coats and ties on. Me, I kind of liked that guys wore coats and ties, and women wore dresses and furs back then. It was harder to get Charlie dressed up. Charlie couldn't have cared less, of course. In fact, I don't think he actually owned a coat. This was not a man who had much use for ceremony. (The next season, the team gave Charlie a day in his honor, and showered him and Perian with gifts. One of them was a season's worth of cottonseed and a ton of fertilizer.)

  Nor could I blame Charlie for being less than enthusiastic about hitting the town on some of those Sundays; in our loss to the Cardinals at home that season, the crowd was all over him. ("His parting shots were such duds," Gene Ward wrote about his passes in the Daily News, "that the stadium virtually rocked with derisive boos at his futile fourth-quarter flinging.") But we'd clean him up, drag him out-and he'd be the toast of the town.

  After a few cocktails at the Concourse Plaza, we'd walk the three blocks down 161st Street and up the stairs to the elevated subway, wait on the wooden-planked platform with its view of the empty field beneath us as the December wind whipped our overcoats, and head for downtown. The subway was our 1958 limo, the D train our stretch car.

  I'd gotten my first taste of the city in 1951, when I played at the Stadium with USC against Army-the first time the Trojans had played in New York. If USC was where I got my first hint of privilege, of a world above and beyond my own, my first glimpse of the real New York, as a USC player, was astounding. The university did it up right for us. We stayed at the Waldorf, that grand palace gilded in gold paint, planted on Park Avenue. The night before the game, we saw Guys and Dolls on Broadway, back in a time when the theater crowd dressed to the nines. I remember thinking, "Man this is unbelievable." I had no idea that, a year later, I'd be calling New York my second home.

  But in1958, the city's offerings were even more unbelievable.

  On the long nights, we'd hit every spot, and make a night of it.

  Our first stop would be at Downey's, for a quick one, on West 45th Street and Eighth Avenue, where the price was always "right"-if there was even a check at all. Downey's was a theater crowd. We could meet and mix with some Broadway cast member, or crew member, or a stage director, or lighting guy: real theater people. Now that was big-time. That season, Maxine and I caught a couple of Broadway shows, including West Side Story. Even back then, tickets for two to a Broadway show could run you pretty high, so the tickets we got usually came in exchange for tickets to a Giant game-or, sometimes, were just plain free.

  Another favorite spot was, Mike Manuche's. I can still remember the phone number at Manuche's, Judson 2 5483, and the red interlocking M 's on the pink matchbooks. Manuche's was next door to the longest-running jazz joint on the Street, the Hickory House. But the Giants preferred the nonmusical ambience of Mike's saloon.
Mike was a big, handsome, affable former Air Force pilot whose own Giants roots were deep: he had tried out for the Giants once. I'm glad he didn't make the team. We wouldn't have been able to enjoy his saloon, where, after any game, Mike would relive the game for you-or anyone who would listen-right by his circular bar, where people could drink, talk, and smile. Funny how the circular bars have disappeared. Now everyone just seems to sit and stare at the bottles behind the bartender as they check their cell phones or caress their BlackBerries.

  Vince Lombardi loved Mike's. But the real star in Manuche's was Mike's wife, Martha Wright, a pretty reddish-haired singer and actress with sparkling eyes. Martha had set the record for consecutive Broadway performances when she played Nellie Forbush in South Pacific for more than one thousand performances in a row. The city's high rollers could catch Martha's act at the Waldorf and the St. Regis. We'd see her at Mike's, when she wasn't on a stage somewhere. Between them, Mike and Martha had a pretty wide reach into the city's more interesting folks.

  For really interesting folks, though, there was Eddie Condon's, the jazz club on 55th between First and Second Avenues, home to a lot of great musicians. The funny thing is that the people at Eddie Condon's bar hated the music; we could never hear each other, and a lot of the time the clientele were people who definitely had something interesting to say. You'd run across Roy Cohn, or the mayor, or a hooker, or a gambler, or someone who might have been a member of the mob. Condon's was the one place that, a few years later, Pete Rozelle would insist I stay away from. I usually abided by my friend Pete's requests. I ignored that one.

  Eddie Condon's was presided over by a classic New York host and gatekeeper-Peter Pesci. Peter was an Italian guy who had these great, expressive hands, which he was always clapping or rubbing together. And he always wore red socks. He never struck me as the kind of guy who should have been working in a jazz joint.