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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  The only remarkable thing about our locker room was its unbelievable aura of history. When we first came over from the Polo Grounds, in 1956, one of the locker room attendants had given me

  Mickey Mantle's locker. Well, that's the way I remember it; Sam, of course, remembers it completely differently. Today, Sam still insists he had Mantle's locker. (That figures. To this day, the offense and the defense seem destined to disagree.)

  I'd been acquainted with Mantle's talent for a while now, even before his pro days. Back at USC, once in spring practice, on our football field, adjacent to the baseball field, I remember that a baseball came banging into our huddle, and I distinctly recall walking around the bleachers thinking, Who the hell hit that ball? No one could have hit that. Someone said, "Some kid from Oklahoma named Mantle." It had carried over the fence and the track. That had to be the longest ball ever hit at USC. Now, five years later, I was dressing in his locker. Or Sam was. (Or Mantle was dressing in ours.)

  We all had Yankee lockers, and considering how great the baseball team was-and how much of a second-class citizen our league seemed to be in the nation of professional sports-it's not surprising that we all remember whose pinstriped locker we occupied. "I had Berra's," Mo says now. "He kept complaining his hooks were getting bent from my equipment." Summerall remembers his locker well: it belonged to "Bullet" Bob Turley, who had won the Cy Young that year-"but as I remember," Pat says, "you still had to wash your own jock."

  To be sharing the lockers of a team that routinely won world championships was a thrill, in a lot of ways-but it wasn't as if we were starstruck. From 1949 to 1956, New York baseball teams had won every major-league championship, but now things were shifting. After all, we'd won a title in '56. I'd been the league MVP that year. Before the '58 season, two of New York's baseball teams, the Giants and the Dodgers, had carpetbagged their way out west, leaving a wound that still hasn't healed. The football Giants weren't going anywhere, and everyone knew it; the Mara roots were way too deeply interwoven with the fabric of the city.

  And to be completely honest, we didn't have a hell of a lot of respect for baseball players anyway. Just about every player in the NFL went to college, which wasn't always the case in baseball. We might not have learned a lot, but at least we were exposed to higher learning.

  Was I awed to be in the same stadium as the Yankees? Honestly, no. All I knew each season was that we were going to be able to get into Yankee Stadium full-time when these guys got through playing, and the quicker they did, the better off we'd be, the sooner we'd be able to call the place our own.

  Nothing personal. I'm sure they couldn't have cared less, either.

  We did have a little extra equipment that modern dressing rooms don't carry: cigarettes and beer. The cigarettes were cartons of Marlboros, thanks to one of our biggest fans: Jack Landry, the Marlboro brands guy at Philip Morris. He'd sit on our bench during the games, and over the next few years, he'd give a lot of Giants off-season work: Huff, Lindon Crow, Chandler, Cliff Livingston, and Mo went on the road, marketing the brand. In front of the camera. Charlie would become almost as famous as a Marlboro Man as he was as a quarterback. He had the perfect face for it, kind of expressionless-a frontier guy squinting into the sun. ("The cowboy represented an antithesis-a man whose environment was simplistic and relatively pressure-free," Jack once said. "He was his own man in a world he owned." No wonder Charlie became one of the most famous Marlboro Men. Living in his own world was just fine with Charlie.)

  Me, I endorsed Luckies. I had a lot of endorsements in those years, from contact lenses to orange juice to sweaters. Why not? I needed the money. But when the Surgeon General's Report came out, I stopped the cigarette ads. It's the only ad campaign I ever felt guilty about.

  But back then, our whole backfield smoked. Kyle was a heavy smoker. And Webster. Alex would smoke on the bench, during games. You'd see the smoke curling out from under the hood of his cape. Heinrich, too; we were a very nervous backfield.

  We had two kinds of beer in our locker room that year. Ballantine, our sponsor, gave us each a case per week. Maynard didn't drink, so he gave his case to Webster. It was probably because of the beer, Don figures, that Red helped the rookie out, sitting next to him and explaining defenses during film sessions.

  We had Rheingold that season, too. Al Barry's sister had married into the family that owned Rheingold Beer-"We got a case from Rheingold to go with our Ballantine," Al recalls.

  The Colts? They never had beer. Artie remembers drinking Nehi Orange. Buzz Nutter remembers Coke-"except when we were in Dallas, when you had to have Dr Pepper."

  The Colts tell me that they felt the same affection for their place, down in Memorial Stadium. To a lot of guys who'd seen much sorrier locker rooms, it was a revelation. "We had a guy whom everybody paid ten bucks a week," Jackie Simpson, their backup defensive back, told me. "Your locker was spick-and-span.

  Your T-shirt was folded, your socks were there, your shoes cleaned up. When I got traded to the Steelers? They brought a big box out-all the jocks and socks were in a box. You tried to grab ones that didn't have holes in them."

  As a rule, our pregame locker room scene before the warm-ups was pretty much the same week to week. Most of the time we were quiet: "We just got suited up when the time came, and went out to play" is how Alex described it. Nothing special usually, and I didn't expect anything different that day. We'd been there before. You could count on a little intensity from the handful of guys standing by the locker room door waiting impatiently for word from Coach Jim Lee "High Pockets" Howell to hit the field. You didn't want to get near Cliff Livingston, not when he had his game face on-his eyes all dilated, mouth set grimly. Katcavage would be standing by the door, champing at the bit to get out there.

  The eyes of Bill Svoboda, our veteran linebacker-one of our honorary captains that day, playing in his last game after a nine-year career-would grow as big as saucers.

  "He was one tough guy," Sam says now, and coming from Sam, that's no small compliment. "He'd hit so many people, he didn't have a bone in his nose anymore. Bill was a wildman. One time, in the off-season, he couldn't get his lawn mower started. So he just picked it up and threw it into the bayou. Then he calmed down, realized what he'd done, and bought another one. He probably chucked that one, too."

  My own usual pregame ritual involved no superstitions, no special routine. For one thing, I'd been doing it all since high school: pull on the equipment, lace up the shoes, grab the helmet, and go. It's second nature. I never relied on rituals to get me ready for a game. I always felt that if you have to rely on superstition, you're in trouble.

  That day, as always, Johnny Johnson taped my ankles. I kept the tape to a minimum, because I didn't like it, but it was mandatory. I pulled on my shoulder pads, which were plastic, not the leather pads of old-although, down the hallway that day, the Colts' Don Joyce's were leather: after going against tackle Rosey Brown in the regular-season game, his pads had torn, and he'd taken them to a Baltimore shoemaker to have them sewn back together. Then the blue jersey, and the white pants.

  There was one other unspoken element that added to the silence: we were tired. If I said I was pumped up and crazy that day, I'd be lying. We'd just played the toughest season we'd ever played.

  For the last month, every game was a must-win: we'd had to win five straight games just to be here. That takes it out of you physically, and it takes it out of you emotionally. And speaking of physically, a lot of us were hurting. Grier had been on crutches that week after getting hit from behind on his knee in the last game. Huff had a cracked rib. Our backup guard, Buzz Guy, had chipped an ankle bone. Jack Stroud was hurting all over, after a particularly tough season for him: "I tore up my knee three times," he told an interviewer years later. "Each time, I'd get it taped up and go back and play and tear it up again. So for that game I had a bad knee, plus I had been kicked in the ribs in Detroit so that it was still tough to breathe."

  Kyle always had two bad
knees: "We'd tape both of them each week," Johnny Johnson recalled, just before his retirement at the age of ninety. "Kyle's knees were both pretty bad. So we'd tape both, solidly, and he was able to run pretty well."

  My own knee was as good as I could expect, after getting hurt in the fourth game of the season, on October 19; after I'd caught a Heinrich pass, a Cardinal cornerback named Charlie Jackson hit me below the knee, just as I'd planted the foot to cut, and I heard something pop: stretched ligaments, which prompted a brief hospital stay. Obviously, there was no question I'd play-or that anyone else would, either.

  "It was a different kind of guy who played the game then," Johnny Johnson tells me now. "We'd just try and do whatever we could to put you guys back together. We would tape up guys with a sprain or strain, do whatever we could to put them together well enough so you could go out and at least make an effort.

  "In those days, there were no MRIs or scopes or anything, so you'd tape and improvise. We'd put a patch on the back of the knee, wrap it up tight, and you guys would just go out and do the best you could. Unless the ligament couldn't handle it, you'd go to the end of the year before you'd do anything about it."

  With thirty-five guys on the roster, the idea was to patch the players up as quickly as possible and get them back on the field-limping or otherwise. Believe it or not, our roster was so thin that day that we didn't have a backup defensive lineman-and that would come to haunt us, in a big, big way.

  In fact, we were so banged up that earlier in the week we'd practiced down at the Armory, indoors, because the weather was so cold that the coaches didn't want us out there at the Stadium, where the cold, windy conditions could help worsen the injuries.

  On other days we'd have taped up and headed out to the field an hour before the game. On the morning of the championship game, though, we veered from custom. We had a meeting to vote on championship shares. And this team meeting was one for the ages. It was also about the worst way you'd ever want to start one of the biggest days of your life. It was players-only, and it wasn't laid-back. It's hard to believe now, but we spent our last minutes together, before a championship game in our home stadium, having a heated shouting match that almost came to blows. And I would have been on the receiving end.

  When I saw Ray Berry last year at a Colt dinner, he couldn't believe it when I told him about our meeting just before the game.

  While the Colts were pumping themselves up a hundred feet away down the hallway, Sam and I were fighting about whether first-year quarterback Jack Kemp should get a full share. The shares in question? According to the Associated Press, it was $4,718.77 for each winner and $3,111.33 for each loser. Sam's own book, written twenty years ago, says the winners got $4,674.44 and we each got $3,083.27. Seems like peanuts, right? Hardly worth fighting about?

  Wrong on both counts. A few grand was a huge amount in 1958.

  It could mean taking the summer off from work. It could mean the down payment on a house (and it did, for a lot of the men in that game). So giving a full share to a player meant everyone else's share would be diluted by more than a hundred bucks. And that was still big money. Twenty-five steaks at Toots's, for instance. A thousand subway rides. It was a sum worth fighting about, as far as I was concerned-and I was the most vocal guy in the debate, in favor of getting Jack a full share.

  But this argument wasn't all about principle. Our shouting match had an underlying theme. The animosity that was always simmering just below the surface between the offense and the defense was coming to a head.

  As any Giant fan knows too well, the team has never been an offensive firepower, never made its name by running up the score or even scoring many points. In our case, it was no different. On defense we had an all-star middle linebacker who stood behind a tremendous front four. On offense, we couldn't even figure out who our starting quarterback was-Heinrich or Conerly. We'd scored the third-lowest total points in the league that season, averaged less than 20 points a game, and won our games by an average of 5 points.

  We had no speed to speak of. Kyle was playing, basically, on one knee. Our fastest guy, Maynard, only returned kicks, because in our offense, a halfback had to be able to block, and Don was a skinny speed guy, period (with great hands, as the world would discover in a few years, across town in Shea Stadium, where he played with a quarterback named Joe Namath). Alex was tough, but he wasn't fast. Our other starting end, the workmanlike Schnelker, had great hands, and was faster than everyone thought he was, but he couldn't leave a defensive back in his wake, the way Lenny Moore could. I was the fastest back, and Rosey Brown, our tackle, was probably faster. But then, Rosey was the best athlete on the team.

  All of which accounted, in part, for Sam's blatant disregard for anything and everything our unit had ever accomplished.

  The tension between the two units obviously was magnified by the certainty that our real head coaches-Lombardi and Landry-didn't really like each other. I honestly don't think those two spoke more than three words to each other a day. Their coolness toward each other stemmed from many factors: They helmed different units, and they had a much higher profile-at least with the players, if not the media-because of the void in the head coach's office. It was like having two head coaches, and how could that ever pave the way for pleasantries? Jim Lee, the old Arkansas native, may have sat in an upholstered head coach's chair in his tiny office off the locker room, but it was an empty chair as far as we were concerned. By Howell's own account, in fact, one of his few roles was to mediate between the two assistants: "One day one of them would come in and tell me he hadn't been given enough time, and the next day the other would," Jim Lee once said. " . . . They were fussing all the time."

  Then, add the factor of their two completely different personalities-the stoic, mechanical, unsmiling Landry and the volatile, grinning, exuberant Lombardi. "You could hear Vince laughing from five blocks away," Wellington once said. "You couldn't hear Landry from the next chair."

  Their rift filtered all the way down to their units. "We were always separate anyway," Sam says now, when we can laugh about it-and we do, today. "We were always divided into two groups, and that's the way we got along. We had different dressing rooms at Fairfield, when we practiced up there. At the Stadium, we had to take the training room for our [the defense's] meetings. That's where we met-in the training room. But hell, we didn't need much room anyway. We had twelve guys who could play defense.

  Seriously. Maybe thirteen was the most we ever had. Anyway, offense was always what Wellington favored."

  He was right, at least when it came to our first-round draft picks. Every first-round draft pick the Giants had between 1940 and 1959 was either a running back or a quarterback. And the numbers on our team were skewed. Our roster was almost two-thirds offensive players, which meant that in that endless six-game exhibition season substitutes and soon-to-be-cut rookies could play offense during blistering, meaningless warm-up games. Meanwhile, the defense had to play most of the time, in every game.

  "Plus, you had Lombardi," Sam says. Another good point.

  Not that Landry wasn't respected by Wellington; he'd been a player coach in the early fifties, the ultimate vote of respect. But Wellington and Lombardi had gone to college together, at the Giants' favorite university-Fordham. By some accounts, Well and Vince weren't close at Fordham, but it's hard to believe that bond wasn't important when Wellington later hired Vince away from Army.

  "Our team was always divided into two groups," Sam says now, "and that's the way we got along. We were two units, and we were different. But on game day we were one."

  But on that game day, before the game, we were definitely two.

  Like all the confrontations we had in those years in the "friendly" rivalry between the offense and the defense, the confrontation was probably going to be between me and Sam. We were the high profiles on each unit. We weren't the captains, or the leaders-that would have been Charlie on offense and Robustelli on defense. And Charlie and Andy would have soo
ner broken out into a Broadway duet than have an argument in public, or an argument of any kind.

  No, this was between me and Sam. This one got personal, and it got ugly.

  Jack Kemp had been the seventeenth-round draft pick of the Lions in 1953. They traded him to the Steelers-"for two Cokes, a chin strap, and an old Frank Gifford helmet," Jack says now. The Steelers cut him after the last preseason game in '58, and the Giants picked him up. He was making $100 a month, until, in an early practice, he threw a rollout pass about eighty yards-twenty yards over Maynard's head. And he happened to do it right in front of Jim Lee. "Howell said, 'Gee,' just like that," Jack remembers. (That does sound like Jim Lee.) "We did some more passing, then Lombardi came up and said, 'You got a hell of an arm, kid. We're going to sign you. How much you making?' 'I'm making a hundred.' 'How much do you need?' I say, 'Like, a thousand.' They gave me four-fifty."

  Jack had been active for a few of our games that year, and that was enough for me. He was in on all the practices. He was a neighbor at the Concourse Plaza. He had been part of what got us here, and I thought he should be paid accordingly. Sam's point was also a simple one-and based upon his pure and open dislike of anything connected to the offensive team. The defense had turned in huge performances in our final three games. The old story about Sam coming off the field in games and saying to me, "Would you assholes go out and hold them for a while this time?"-it wasn't a joke. He said it. He was only half kidding, and it stung because it was at least half-true.

  And here I am in the locker room, a few minutes before a championship game, defending a full share for another offensive guy-who wasn't even active that day. Hell, everyone in football knew the defense was our strength. (After our play-off game against the Browns, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Red Smith had called our defense "those slightly cannibalistic characters who were simply devouring the Browns: the yeomen of the guard" who "came to glory." No one ever wrote about the offense that way.)