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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  "Hell, Frank," Sam says now, "you wanted to vote shares to the kids sitting on the bench, for chrissake. You could afford to. You got so much of a bonus, we didn't have any left. I was making eight grand that year, man."

  Some of our argument that day was probably personal. No, not probably; it was personal. "Jesus Christ, did I hate you," he says now, laughing. "I didn't want to hate you-I wanted to be like you.

  We were jealous of you. You did everything. That's why we were all jealous of you. We really were. You made all the money. You're doing all this broadcasting and TV work. Number-one draft choice. Glamour boy."

  Maybe our fight was just a strange way to let off some steam.

  Whatever lay behind it, here I was, minutes before a championship game, ready to fight a teammate. Finally, somebody said, "Shut your mouth!"-it wasn't Sam; maybe Mo-and I got my ass out of there.

  And Jack got his share.

  So, less than an hour before our one o'clock start, as we piled out through the door for calisthenics and warm-ups, we weren't exactly a gung-ho, unified squad. I wasn't nervous. But on game day, the stakes were for real. Most of the time-five days a week the walk through that dark, damp tunnel, the sound of my cleats echoing off the concrete walls, then down to the dugout, then up into the burst of sunlight, meant a practice, a workout in front of a hollow stadium where you could hear the echoes of the kidding and the whistles and Lombardi's barks bounce around the vast old park.

  Not that practices were easy-Vince ran a serious practice, never afraid to keep us late after the defense had gone in. So did Landry. You'd hit hard, you'd be exhausted, and you never thought about being injured in practice.

  But on Sundays, the first thing you'd see was the crowd. The first thing you'd hear as you came out of the first-base dugout was the background noise of tens of thousands of voices, even more excited than you were, and the butterflies would begin. In a twelve game schedule, every game is huge. And every Sunday could also bring that career-ending hit. I'd try to put it all out of my mind, and I usually could.

  The usual pregame routine gave us a chance to get loose both physically and mentally: you'd do some stretching, run through a few plays, engage in some friendly chatter. I'd usually look up into the stands to spot a friend or two-maybe Toots.

  On this day, though, as I came out for the warm-ups, things were different. For one thing, the tension between the units was still there; none of the usual banter. I also noticed something else.

  This time, there was an added dimension to the feel of the crowd, an unfamiliar one: a lot of them were Colt fans. Wearing a lot of blue and white. By one estimate, there were fifteen thousand of them-by another, twenty thousand. Add the Colt band, with those bass drums that never seemed to shut up, and the Colt cheerleaders in their cowgirl outfits, and it was obvious that our opponents weren't going to be alone that afternoon. It seemed like half of Baltimore had come north, thanks to Rosenbloom's offer to pick up half the travel fare. The newspaper deliveryman strike that had muted the publicity in New York had left all those tickets available to Baltimore fans.

  Of course, their fans didn't concern me. But the Colts did.

  Baltimore had enjoyed a mini-vacation while we'd played our playoff game against the Browns; they'd had a week off. Ewbank had given the team three or four days to rest. They'd scrimmaged that previous Saturday, then gone through their normal routine the past week.

  For most of my teammates, stepping out onto the field, even that day, was still part of a routine. That's not to say they weren't feeling something special. On his ride up from Jersey, Alex hadn't said a single word to his wife. But I know I speak for Charlie and Andy and Kyle and the rest of the veterans when I say that I felt no overwhelming sensation of nerves.

  Of course, for some of the rookies-even the ones who wouldn't play more than a few minutes-that first moment endures. "Even as a rookie," Bob Mischak, our lineman, told me, "during the regular season sometimes you come out for the intros, and you sense the crowd and all, you know it's there, but you're kind of oblivious-you're getting prepared in your own head. But that day? The feeling was something spectacular. The crowd was already loud. Of course, I'm sure they were well lubricated."

  The guys in white were feeling their own emotions-except the even-tempered Berry: "At that point, I couldn't have told you who the president was," he told me. "I was just thinking about the game." And eying the turf. Raymond's folks were in the stands; Raymond's dad had coached him in Raymond's only other championship game, in high school in Paris, Texas.

  Ray Brown's dad and stepmother had driven up from Alabama to watch him play, which just fueled the thrill of the occasion for a man who, although he would clerk for a Supreme Court justice within a few years, counts our game as one of the true highlights of his life: "As I'm warming up, I'm thinking, 'Pinch me-I'm dream- ing. I'm on the field at Yankee Stadium, with all these guys who are future Hall of Famers, and I'm a rookie, and going to start?' It was just unbelievable."

  Like the Giants, there were a lot of southerners on that Colt squad, too, all of them a long way from high-school fields surrounded by cotton and bayous, and they were the ones who told me of a special sensation, inside each one of them, as they took the field. The day before, they'd been working out in a big, empty, storied cavern. Now, twenty-four hours later, they were on center stage in front of more fans than any had ever played for.

  "I tell ya-and remember, this comes from a guy from Louisiana, who didn't usually play before a whole lot of people," their linebacker, Leo Sanford, told me. "It's a feeling I've never had before and haven't had ever since. I recall running onto the field there in Yankee Stadium, and I guess if a guy is in athletics, that has to be the top thing he'll ever do: playing in Yankee Stadium in a championship game-with so much background, thinking of the number of great athletes who'd been there before . . . It was just an outstanding feeling."

  Even some of the stars, the guys who should have been jaded, remember being thrilled at the sight of the stadium as it filled up to the rafters. Marchetti had come a long, long way from Antioch, California, from the bench of the old Dallas Texans, to his status as, arguably, the best defensive player in the game-a perennial Pro Bowler, beloved in Baltimore. And as he glanced around the stadium, scanning the wings of the upper decks, and all the bunting, he took a moment to soak it all in. "Remember, I'd played on some bad teams," Gino says now. "I played on some teams where a first down was a victory. But getting primed up for a championship game in New York? I was in heaven."

  Andy Nelson, the safety from Alabama, was concentrating on his footing: "The field was in rough shape. Slick and frozen.

  Looked like if you got close to the sideline your feet would go out from under you. It had clearly been played on quite a bit." He was right about that. Our ragged home field had already taken the beating of a full season.

  Artie's dad was there, down from the Bronx neighborhood.

  He was a world-famous boxing referee who'd refereed a lot of Joe Louis's fights, and bouts Charlie and I had seen at the Garden or St. Nick's Arena-if someone could comp us some tickets. (Eight years before, when Artie's mother had leaned out from the second floor of their apartment building to shout that Artie had been drafted into the NFL, his dad had shouted up, "Those big guys will kill him!")

  Typically, though, Artie had a slightly different memory of stepping onto the field that day: "It stunk in the stadium. Maybe they'd put fertilizer on it, to keep it warm. It reminded me of an exhibition game against you guys in '54, in Louisville. It was a brand-new stadium, and the only thing they'd had before that game was a circus, with elephants and horses crapping all over the field.

  That day, when we were on defense, your offensive line would pick up a pile of horseshit and flip it at us. 'They're throwing horseshit at us!' "

  None of the Colts had as emotional a warm-up as Milt Davis.

  Back when Milt was a teenager in Los Angeles, he told me, his family put him in an orphanage. In 1958,
Milt hadn't seen his father in fifteen years. As he was warming up, testing that broken foot, he heard an usher call his name.

  "I remember it distinctly," Milt says now. "The sky was sun and broken clouds. I heard my name. I walked over to the usher.

  He told me my father was up there, on the third-base side, and I looked up about thirty rows, and there he was, waving. He was in the shade, way back up there. My daddy had never seen me play a game. He hadn't told me he was coming."

  Milt waved back. When the game was over, his father was nowhere to be found. Milt never saw him again.

  My own father was in the stands, too, sitting with Toots in his mezzanine box. My father had come down from Point Barrow, Alaska, earlier in the week, where he'd been drilling oil wells, to see me play professionally for the first time in his life. During the days, he'd watched the team practice, and listened in on our interviews.

  On a couple of nights, I'd taken my father down to Toots's, where my friend had taken him under his arm. It had been a great week for my dad-and a great week for me. Over those few days, we'd become closer than we'd ever been before.

  I'd never really known him because he was always away working. But I'd always been proud of of him, and that day, I hoped I could make him proud of me.

  Now came a sort of calm before the big storm, and I remember that, somehow, the scene was moving as if in slow motion.

  We went back into the locker room after warm-ups, and the atmosphere grew thick, serious. Jim Lee checked his watch and bellowed out in his Arkansas twang, "Twenty minutes now; let's be ready."

  These were the last few minutes. Some of us liked quiet and privacy. Alex sought out Kyle, as he did every week. "I was always trying to find Rote," Alex recalls, "because sometimes I'd feel like throwing up, and Rote would tell me a joke to get me over it."

  We said a prayer, of course. All the teams did. Father Dudley led the prayer-minus the robes and the cocktail condiments.

  Each time we prayed, I always remembered the time I went up to Father Dudley before a game and said, "Father, we're over here praying, and they're over there praying. How do you know who God favors?"

  "Frank, over the years," he said to me, "I have found that God seems to bless the team with the better personnel." Made sense to me.

  That didn't bode well for us. We had our share of future Hall of Famers, but man for man, you had to feel the Colts were a better team. And I wasn't alone. One man who probably knew us better than anyone agrees with me now.

  "Frank, I have to tell you," Bob Sheppard told me. "On that day, I thought the Colts were the better team."

  And as anyone who ever set foot in Yankee Stadium knows, that was voice of God speaking.

  Lombardi wandered by my locker, to talk quietly about a pass we had been working on, just a quiet reminder for both of us to go with it early; the Colt secondary was quick and aggressive, and even though they knew we loved play action, Carl Taseff would probably play the run. Meanwhile, Landry and Huff were quietly finalizing what they'd do on third and long-a situation that would come up a lot, with less-than-hoped-for results.

  As usual, Jim Lee didn't have anything to do with strategy.

  Even with the title on the line, it was business as usual, which meant that this day was more or less like the day when a New Jersey sportswriter asked Jim Lee about a certain play after a certain game, and Jim Lee responded, "Go talk to Vince, he runs all that stuff."

  The Colts went back into the visitors' locker room for their final preparations. Milt decided to go with two tennis shoes. Don Shinnick, the linebacker, led the prayer. Lenny Moore made sure he had his miniature Bible in his thigh pad: "I already had God's word with me," says Lenny. "I had that Bible in my right thigh pad for every year of the twelve years I played. It's in my wallet right now.

  That same Bible. I always carry it with me."

  But while the Giants were still trying to ease our pregame blowup, the Colts were listening to Weeb Ewbank, who pulled a rhetorical rabbit out of his hat and delivered a strange pep talk that was, I guess, psychologically brilliant. Little Weeb, brush-cut, frowning, stood up and faced the men who had dominated the league that year, on both offense and defense, and who'd clinched the division three-quarters of the way through the season-and told them about how they were all nothing but a bunch of castoffs.

  "I think about that pep talk a lot," Don Joyce says now. "You know, there were two Weebs. There was the meek and mild-mannered guy, but sometimes he was a tough guy. And that day, he had something derogatory to say about all of us.

  "Ameche: 'I didn't like you. I didn't want you. Go see if you can do it.'

  "Unitas: 'Pittsburgh didn't want you. We got you for a seventy-five-cent phone call. You've had some success here, but I don't know if it's temporary or not. We'll see.' Taseff: 'We tried to trade you; they didn't want you.' Lipscomb: 'The Rams were glad to get rid of you. We got you for a hundred bucks. You've been a problem here. See if you can straighten yourself out today.' To the kicker, Myhra: 'You've been awful. You've had an awful year. You've got to put those balls through the uprights.'

  "And I'll never forget what he said to me: 'Joyce, the Cards couldn't control you. They were glad you came here.'

  "It kind of silenced us. I remember this quiet descending. He'd really hit us where it hurt. Nobody said anything; they just listened.

  I think that had something to do with us winning that game, I really do. I don't think I remember any pregame speech before that."

  "To me he said, 'You were too small,' " Andy Nelson remembers. ' "No one wanted you. You weren't big enough to play this game, but we gave you a chance.'

  "He went right on down the line, made it sound like we were all a bunch of guys nobody wanted to have."

  "That was one of the better speeches he ever made," according to Gino. "He said to me, 'Marchetti, they said you weren't going to get any better, but you did. See if you can show up today.' To Ameche, he said, 'We had to draft you because the Bears didn't take you, because they didn't want you. But we took you, so get it done."

  Weeb even poked at himself: the Browns hadn't wanted him, and they'd let him get away to coach the Colts.

  For Berry, Weeb dragged up the usual stuff: that he wasn't fast, that one of his legs was shorter than the other (which, Raymond insists to me now, it wasn't; his bad back was chronically out of line, prompting him to put a lift in one shoe). But Raymond wasn't listening: "Me, I was a guy who wasn't paying attention to coaches talking before any game. My mind was in another world. I'd heard too many comments and speeches by then, and I was only motivated twice by speeches in my lifetime, and those had happeneda long time before: Bully Gilstrap at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas, and Rusty Russell at SMU. So maybe what Weeb said had a positive effect on a lot of them, but it wasn't my bag."

  To this day, I can't ever recall a coach saying anything that fired me up. But almost to a man, the Colts will tell you now that that talk may have made a huge difference. Whatever communal fire needed to be lit, the little man had lit it.

  Artie, of course, has his own version of that talk. Artie insists that he wasn't even in the locker room: "I never heard the speech. I was in the bathroom throwing up.

  "I swear to God. Our kicker, Bert Rechichar, was in there with me. Weeb wasn't going to let him play. Bert said, 'I'll get in that goddamned game.' Weeb didn't like him."

  As usual, Artie was half-right: Weeb didn't like Rechichar, but today Bert insists he was there, and that he recalls vividly what Weeb said at the very end: "He closed the whole thing out, after chewing everyone's ass, by saying, 'Remember this: If you want to do anything, you got to do it in New York.' Nothing else needed to be said."

  Up in the press box, the announcers and reporters were settling into their cramped, cold perches. "I was right about the fifty,"Dave Anderson, who would later win a Pulitzer for his column writing in the Times, told me. "I was doing sidebars for the Journal-American that season, but I wasn't writing that day, becaus
e of the strike. I just wanted to be at the game. Where else would you be?

  "To get to the press box, you had to walk up a ramp from a mezzanine box, and you'd walk down into it. I think it was enclosed in plastic that day. What I remember best about that press box was Wellington up on the roof during games, taking Polaroids of the other team's defense, and putting them in a sock weighted with something like a golf ball. We saw these things flying down. We didn't have the heart to tell him no one looked at them."

  In the radio booth, getting ready for their national telecast on the GE network, were Joe Boland-the voice of Notre Dame and, of all teams, the Chicago Cardinals-and his partner, Bill McColgan. Their call went coast to coast-sponsored, of course, by Marlboro.

  On another mike, Bob Wolff was getting ready to call the game for a broadcast syndicated by National Bohemian Beer. "That press box was cramped," Bob told me. "You couldn't walk back and forth. I had all my notes from the Baltimore papers, and they were obviously playing it up big: If a guy had the sniffles, would it turn into pneumonia? Baltimore was all over it."

  Sheppard prepared for his pregame introductions. He was in his third year with the Giants-his third of fifty. He'd come a long way, and quickly, from his first pro bono pro-football call a few years earlier at an exhibition game of the old Brooklyn Dodgers of the All-America Football Conference.

  On the wall of Bob's home in Long Island today hangs a framed print of the Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo's cartoon citing Gallo's five favorite moments in the Stadium: three Yankee moments-Larsen's perfect game in '56, the year we went to the Stadium; Maris's 61 in '61; and Reggie's three home runs in a World Series game in '77-and two Giant moments-Summerall's kick to beat Cleveland in the last regular-season game that year, and this game. But Bob can't hide his real priorities, even today. In his backyard grow four rosebushes, named for our front four that day: Andy, Rosie, Mo, and Kat. Like I said, the offense never got much respect.