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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  Don saw malice and danger around every corner, lurking in the alleys and shadows of our big city. "See, my dad used to tell me, 'Always come home before dark,' " Don says now. "So when I got to New York, when I was on the streets, I learned to walk close to the parking meter-close to the curb, where I wasn't worried about outrunning anyone. I always walked down the curb."

  In his one season in a Giant uniform, mostly returning kicks, the only time Don set out to find Toots, he never arrived. The occasion wasn't an evening of hitting the spots after a game; Lombardi had summoned us for a meeting at Toots's place. "But I didn't know where it was," Don told me. "I went down on the subway. I couldn't find the place. 'What do you mean you couldn't find the place?' Lombardi asked me the next day. I told him what happened. See, after I came up from the subway station, I'd gone two blocks north and two south, and I didn't see the place. But I wasn't about to get too far away from that hole in the ground, so I'd know how to get back. When I didn't see the restaurant, I just went back to the subway and back up to the hotel."

  How could a New York Giant not know where Toots's was?

  Because he was the kind of Giant who never left the small town inside of him. The first time I called Don down in Texas, to talk about this game, we had to reschedule our conversation; the lunch special at KFC was calling his name.

  The Colts, of course, didn't do their drinking at places like Toots Shor's. Baltimore didn't have places like Toots's. And didn't want them. The Colts were a true neighborhood team, and they drank in the local watering holes. Some of the black players would visit bars like The Alhambra, down on Pennsylvania Avenue, but for most of the Colts, neighborhood bars near their stadium provided all the ambience-and beer-they needed. The players tell me that their favorite spot was a friendly hangout named Kusen's, near Memorial Stadium. I guess Ivan Kusen, a beloved Yugoslavian immigrant who also worked in Baltimore's shipyards, was the Colts' Toots, in a way.

  "Ivan didn't know anything about football, but he became a season ticket holder," Artie Donovan recalls. "He'd always say, 'You goddamned football players!' I'd take him home and drop him off at night after he closed. I'll never forget those rides-he'd have all the receipts and money on top of this patent leather bag; he'd put string beans and corn on top of the case to hide the money.

  "When my mother would come down from New York, I'd go down to Penn Station, and she'd have a box of Schrafft's for me, and the first stop was always Kusen's. My mother would have an old-fashioned."

  Artie must have done ample time at Kusen's; he became the executor of the old man's will.

  "Then there was Andy's, a little further up York Road," he told me. "There was no 21 club, like in New York, and all that stuff. We went to regular bars."

  No one went to Toots's the night before the championship game.

  Artie didn't even go back up to his old neighborhood in the Bronx on Saturday night. Instead, he brought the neighborhood down to him: "After practice Saturday, a guy from my neighborhood brought down some pizzas. Jerry's Casa Villa. I never ate the meal. I had the pizza on the TV all night, to keep it warm, so I could eat it for breakfast. We stayed up until one watching TV me and Art Spinney."

  Ray Brown, the Colts' safety from Mississippi, went to Charlie's hotel room that afternoon, and they watched the Gator Bowl together, before the Colts convened for their customary hamburger team dinner downstairs. Ray and Charlie had both grown up in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Like I said: At some level, we were all part of the same gang.

  Maxine and I played bridge with the Conerlys later that evening-the perfect image of your typical fifties couples. Charlie and I went over our impressions of the regular-season game we'd played against the Colts that year-a hell of a game, and one that the Colts weren't likely to have forgotten. We'd been struggling, and they'd been undefeated. I had no doubt they were looking for some special revenge after that game.

  Sunday, November 9, had dawned dark and cloudy, but by 10 a.m. the sun was out-"Mara weather," they used to call it, because of the legendarily uncanny tendency, through the years, of the clouds to part and the sun to burst out and bathe the Stadium field whenever game time rolled around. By noon the bleachers were full, and by kickoff the place was completely packed: 71,163 fans-5,000 more than the Yankees had drawn for the final home game of their World Series against the Milwaukee Braves a month earlier.

  This was our first really crucial game of the year. We were 4-2, one game behind the Browns in the East. An estimated ten thousand Colt fans had come up from Baltimore, carrying placards that read, simply and emphatically, "I'm a Colt." That day, Colt fans had to settle for a backup quarterback-George Shaw, their former starter. Unitas had hurt a couple of ribs. This would give us an advantage, we figured. We needed one.

  The Colts came into the Bronx that day with a 6-0 record, and they were not only undefeated, they'd been dominating. They'd scored 50 points in two games, including a 56-0 rout of Green Bay the week before. They were playing like a team possessed. Most of them felt as if they'd been the class of the league in 1957, but with a 7-3 record they'd embarked on a final two-game West Coast road trip and dropped both games, handing the Detroit Lions the Western Conference title.

  Shaw wasn't much of a downgrade; he was one of the first of the running quarterbacks in the NFL, and he had a pretty good arm. He also had Berry and Lenny Moore. It never mattered much who was throwing to Lenny Moore; he'd catch it. And when he wasn't catching, he was running. Moore was as good a back as there was in the league-versatile, fast, running wild in our secondary, beating every defensive back who ever tried to cover him. He did it all. I don't know if he ever threw the option pass. But I'll bet he could have if he had to.

  George Shaw had a great day. Charlie had a better one. Charlie knew how to rise to the occasion. I didn't have too bad a game either. I hit Bob Schnelker with a 13-yard option pass to set up our first touchdown-a play set up by something Vince had seen on film that week. I also ran for a touchdown, 13 yards, behind a block from Conerly, of all people.

  In that game, the Colts were driving for a fourth-quarter go- ahead score when Sam picked off a Shaw pass near the goal line. Summerall kicked the game-winning field goal a few minutes later, and we won it, 24-21. The locker room was a madhouse. We were pretty giddy after knocking off an undefeated team in front of the largest crowd the Giants had ever played for. "How about a moment of silence for good old Charlie?" Jack Mara said, mocking the naysayers, as Charlie stood nearby-with a cut nose and cleat marks on his left chin, maybe from his block on my TD run.

  Jim Lee Howell courted the press from his leather-upholstered swivel chair-not that Jim Lee had anything to do with the game. As usual, the day belonged to Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi. Landry's defense had foiled a key Colts trick play-a fake field goal. And Lombardi, no doubt trying to one-up Weeb Ewbank's strategy, called a trick play for us-Chandler ran for a first down from punt formation in the second quarter. "The odds against making first down from punt or field-goal formation," Vince told the press afterward, with obvious glee, "are ten to one."

  That day, Lombardi also explained his overall strategy to the writers-and looking back, I wish he hadn't. He explained to them that he'd wanted to run to the outside, to get away from the Colts' inside linemen. In hindsight, it's hard not to believe that the Colts didn't file that intelligence away, for use six weeks later.

  Until that game, I hadn't been aware of any feud between the two franchises; the Browns were our real rivals. But to hear the Colts tell it today, they had us in their sights-both during and after that game. Today, Artie still swears that following the Summerall field goal with three minutes left, he saw us smiling and laughing on our sideline. I kind of doubt it. But Artie swears he can still see me laughing.

  "You rat bastards," he says now. "You were standing on the field laughing at us."

  "No we weren't," I said.

  "Yeah you were. I threw a rock at you."

  "A rock?"

  "Well, it was cl
umps of dried field or something. Maybe it wasn't a rock. But you didn't even think we had a chance to get back in the game. Gino was next to me. I was so goddamned mad at you, standing over there laughing. You rat bastards."

  Bad blood was brewing elsewhere, too. Johnny Sample, the Colt cornerback, claimed that Perian, in a column, wrote that Charlie had said we'd "outgutted them." Perian doesn't remember anything like that. But Artie says our quotes fired the Colts up for our final meeting.

  "After that, during the rest of the season," Artie says, "we had all these clippings posted around the locker room, things the Giants had said about the Colts. Every day Weeb would go around the locker room: 'Look what they said about you!' "

  Six weeks had passed. But the Colts hadn't forgotten anything and as they came down the hill from the hotel on the morning of December 28, 1958, they were riding high. This time, they had Unitas. They were much healthier than we were. To a man they thought they had the better team, and they were right. "Honestly, I always felt we were going to win that game," their starting center, Buzz Nutter, a coal-town West Virginia man, told me. "We were a better offensive team than y'all were, and we were equal to you on defense, even though you got more publicity."

  In our apartment, we just played your average bridge game. Perian's column was the furthest thing from anyone's mind, and we tried to put football aside, and everyone retired early. Hardly the stuff of glory, or high drama, but definitely the stuff of everyday people living everyday lives: workingmen, about to put in another day-a day that has stayed with us the rest of our lives.

  CHAPTER 2 GAME DAY

  The temperature was cool-nothing like the previous two Sundays, when we had to beat Cleveland first in the snow, then in subfreezing temperatures in the play-off. Actually, it was one of the warmest days of the month. That December had been the coldest December in the city in thirty years, but as I walked down the hill to the stadium at 10 o'clock, it was in the low forties. A few hours later, as the sun set and dusk rolled in, all of that would change. I'd already started to think about game stuff-in particular, what sort of defense I'd be up against. On the runs, I was wondering if Big Daddy would bring his A game today or "just show up," as he sometimes did. If it was the A game, we'd want to forget the 47 power-our short-yardage bread-and-butter play off tackle: He could eat it alive. You never wanted to be tackled by Daddy. (To this day, I can remember the pain in my ankle from a game where Big Daddy grabbed me and wouldn't let go. I thought he was going to break it.)

  Pass coverage? I had to worry about their little gnat of a cornerback, Carl Taseff. I'd always wonder, How can Taseff cover me like that? Taseff got an enormous amount of mileage out of that funny little body. You'd make a good move, drive to the inside, break it out, he'd still be with you, and you'd be asking yourself, "What the hell is going on here?"

  The rest of the Colt secondary weren't flashy: Milt "Pops" Davis the vet, Andy Nelson the barbecue king from Alabama, Ray Brown the brain-Ray was already studying law in the mornings back in Baltimore, sowing the seeds for a postfootball career. Not a single big name among them. But they'd managed to intercept an incredible thirty-five passes that year. In twelve games. Do the math: that's three picks a game. (The following year? Forty.)

  So my work would be cut out for me when I lined up at flanker. But then, my work was going to be cut out anyway. The Colts had made headlines behind Unitas that year, but, as with us, it was their defense that had made them what they were-in their case, a power of the NFL. Our guys had shut out the Browns in the play-offs to get us here, but nearly as impressive was the Colts' defensive performance that had clinched their title a month before. In the second half, they'd shut out a 49er offense that featured Hugh McIlhenny and Y. A. Tittle-in no small part because of the play of the Colts' linebackers: Don Shinnick and Leo Sanford, real pros, and Bill Pellington, the madman.

  With Pellington, my strategy would be to just run to the other side of the field whenever possible. But like Big Daddy, Pellington was great at pursuit, and I had no doubt he'd end up piling on anyway at the end. Bill was deadly in a pileup-elbows, knees, insults all flying at the same time. Against Pellington, being tackled was just the start of it. In the pileup, anything could happen, from a jab to the ribs to an X-rated reference to your ancestry, your mother, you name it. Intimidation was what Pellington was after. But the way Pellington played just flat pissed me off.

  Then, the Colts probably felt the same way about Sam when he was piling on. "Sam was the only guy who should have had his number on the bottom of his shoes, he piled on top so many times," the Colts' Buzz Nutter told me before he died in the spring of 2008. "Sam knew where the camera was. He'd get on top of every pile so everyone would have to get out from under him. He had that number 70 pointed right where the camera could see it."

  The rest of the Giants arrived by their usual routes. Cliff Livingston and Harland Svare took the D train up from the Manhattan Hotel. Andy Robustelli drove down from Stamford. Alex and his wife hired a babysitter and drove up that morning from East Brunswick, up the turnpike. Rosie and Mel crossed the George Washington Bridge. So did Bob Mischak, our backup lineman-a Newark guy, living in Union that year, just across the bridge. "As I got ready to leave to go the ballpark," Bob remembers now, "all the people where I lived were already congratulating me. Everyone was anticipating a win. So was I."

  As Artie walked into the stadium, he heard a New York fireman shout, "I hope you're better than you were at Mount St. Michael's!"

  That's all we needed: more motivation for Fatso.

  One of the Colts went right to the locker room, dressed quickly, and then went straight to the field, before any other players and before any of the fans. Raymond Berry did not rank among the league's best because of great athletic talent-he had poor eyesight, a bad back, average speed. The man who'd dreamed of being Elroy Hirsch had honed his craft by leaving nothing to chance.He ran precise patterns. He was the last to leave the Colt practice field. And he checked out the conditions of each and every field he played on.

  Andy Nelson swears today that one time on the road, Ray walked off the width of a field before a game and discovered it was too narrow by a foot.

  So while the rest of his teammates were still back in the visitors' locker room, Raymond was out surveying every inch of the field that morning, looking for ruts, wet spots, frozen spots, bald spots-anything that might interfere with his almost-scientific approach to a football game.

  "I went from one end of the field to the other," Raymond told me, "because I wanted to know what kind of cleats I'd have to wear. I noticed a couple of things. The field was dry, except for a few frozen spots, two or three. Inside the five-yard line at each end it was pretty hard, and there was one spot near the Giant bench, and that was the worst.

  "I was trying to figure out whether to wear shoes that had normal-length cleats. I always carried extralong cleats for the ball of the foot on each shoe, because I did all the cutting on the balls of my feet, and when I saw these frozen spots, I thought I couldn't afford to take a chance-I'd go right on my butt if I wore normal cleats. So I wore long cleats on the ball of each foot that day. I didn't like to wear them, as a rule, but on that day, I did."

  As he stood alone in the vast emptiness of the stadium, Berry took in every detail-the piles of dirt-colored snow, shoveled up against the stands; wooden barriers that looked like cattle fences set up behind the end zone at the open end of the field, to keep the fans at bay. Ray was reassured by the attempt at added security; it had been just a few weeks since his own home crowd had rattled him down at Memorial Stadium. The Colts had just finished that remarkable comeback from a twenty-point deficit against the 49ers, clinching their first division title with a 35-27 win. But as soon as that game ended, Berry remembers, a mob stormed the field. "It was a crush," he told me. "It was absolutely crazy, and I can visualize the epicenter: all these people heading for the center of the field. The noise was deafening-you could not hear yourself scream. People started
falling. It was frightening. They lifted us up.

  I was above it all, and as I got lifted up, I was aware of people going down."

  Berry told me his radar picked up on something else that morning, too, as he looked to the clear sky and savored the mild temperatures: "I noticed that it wasn't that cold, and that there wasn't any wind, and I knew we'd gotten lucky for December 28 in New York. All of that played into what we needed to win that day, because Weeb had told John that we weren't going to be able to run on the Giant defense; we were going to have to pass. So no wind, no real cold, a pretty dry field-all of that favored us going in."

  Milt Davis, the Colts' veteran cornerback, had come out early, too, to test the turf. He saw that the baseball diamond was exposed, and that there were torn-up spots-and he grew worried. Milt had broken the fifth metatarsal of his right foot the week before against the Rams. After he saw the frozen spots, he figured he had to go with long cleats, too. He didn't like the idea; covering Kyle was as tough as covering Berry, and long cleats cut down on your mobility.

  "Kyle Rote had great quickness, in and out of cuts, and the ability to drop his weight down when he cut; he got great separation,"

  Milt remembers. "I think Kyle was the number one receiver I ever had to cover. So I'm asking myself, How can I do this with a broken foot?"

  The trouble was, wearing the cleats hurt Milt's foot. He could backpedal, he could cut, but he couldn't come forward. "I told Weeb I couldn't go," he says now. "He said, 'You have to.' "

  So Milt went out for warm-ups with one tennis shoe and one cleated shoe.

  Our spartan locker room had carpeting, and hot and cold running water, and that was about it. It smelled like socks and laundry, and it was our sanctuary. I liked the closeness. I liked our two club- house guys-Pete Sheehy and Pete Previte-who took care of everything; our pads and jerseys would be in our lockers, waiting for us. Mostly, I liked that each day, Charlie would be by my side, and your buddies would be in their lockers, before and after practice. With Charlie cracking his ankles. With Katcavage checking his timetables to see what train he could catch to get home.