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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  Then, there came Rosey in front of me. He laid a block on the cornerback and steered the guy right into the safety: two for one Now there was nothing but daylight. I cut inside, and it was wide open.

  When you try and remember what it's like to make a run that long, you can't. It all happens too fast. In the stands, fans are wishing you'd speed it up, but down there, everything is happening in hyperspeed, all flashes and blurs. You hit the hole, you hear all this noise, and there's a violence about it. You hear bits of sounds-the grunts, the "oomphs," the swearing-and suddenly all you're seeing is flashes of this and flashes of that, glimpses of arms and legs, hands reaching for you, they almost get you, but they don't, and maybe you're wondering for a mini-fraction of a second why they didn't, and then another guy's suddenly there. . .

  . . . then, all of a sudden, wham! And you're down.

  I'd gone thirty yards before Pellington, the outside left linebacker on the other side, used his angle to close in on me. I slowed and damned near made Pellington miss, but he got me by the ankle. I dragged him a few more yards and went down after a 38-yard gain-just as Rosey passed me, looking for someone else to level.

  "The key to that play," says Maynard, who had a good view from the sideline, "is that you were running under control."

  And I was holding on to the ball, tucking it in. I should have kept doing it.

  Our first big play. Our first first down-twelve minutes into the game.

  I flipped the ball to the official and ran back to the huddle. Was I celebrating? Even inside? Not a chance. After the run, I just trotted back to the huddle. On the field, I never thought about what I did. I thought about what I almost did. After every play, whether it had worked or failed, I always came back to the huddle wondering what we could learn from it: What can I do off that play the next time? If we fake it, can Triplett slide out to the flat, run a screen off it? Or could Schnelker get open downfield? Could I throw a pass off it? Can we do it on the other side with Webster?

  The last thing you think about is yourself. We didn't have re-lays on JumboTron screens, of course, but I can tell you with a straight face that if we did, not a single member of our team would have stood around watching and congratulating himself. Besides, your own teammates would think, What an asshole. And the last thing you'd want to do is piss off a teammate. Your teammates are whom you're playing for. Not your coaches, not the fans. Your teammates.

  Now we were on the Colt 31. And Charlie thought it was time to open it up. On second down, he rolled right and saw Kyle on a crossing route, but led him a little too far, overthrowing him

  at the right sideline at about the 5-yard line. Carl Taseff was right with him, but Kyle had a step, even with that bad knee. You have to wonder now if Charlie wouldn't have led him perfectly if Charlie had been warmed up, and had been in the game from the start.

  On the next play, though, Charlie was on the money. Webster circled out of the backfield and cut back to the middle, behind the linebackers and in front of the safeties. Alex was deceptively fast He was big, and he could look like he was lumbering, but he had long strides and great balance, and he was a good receiver. It was an unusual call, but Kyle had already told Charlie he could clear out the coverage on that side, leaving Alex open in the middle.

  This would have been a game-changer. He was open. He was wide open-no one near him. Charlie led him perfectly. If he catches it, he has a chance to cut it up the middle and go all the way.

  If he doesn't slip. If his home turf doesn't betray him.

  The shadows were starting to cross the field as the sun disappeared behind the ornate façade of the upper deck, and as the temperature began to plummet, the traction on the field was changing "The turf down there was getting loose," Alex says now. "It wasn't muddy, but the grass and the sod were starting to go. He threw a great pass. I just slipped."

  If he catches it we're knocking on the door. As it is, we had to go for the field goal. Fortunately, our kicker was Pat Summerall, the hero of what was arguably the most dramatic play in New York Giant history.

  Two weeks earlier, we'd trailed the Browns by one game in the standings, going into the final game of the regular season. We had to win it, to force a play-off with the same Browns. With snow falling and the wind whipping through the Stadium, less than five minutes remained. We'd reached the Browns' 33, and sent out the field-goal unit for the kick that would give us a tie, and send us into a play-off game. Pat lined up for the field goal-and missed it.

  "I didn't even want to go back to the bench," Pat tells me now, in that so well known, distinctive Arkansas twang. But four or five guys came up on the bench to tell him to forget it: he would get another chance. He did-but not until we'd dodged a bullet on my own phantom fumble, a play that made headlines from New York to Cleveland. On third down, with the snow blowing around our ears, and the footing treacherous, Charlie, throwing from the Brown 42, hit me with a 7-yard pass. As I caught it, I turned upfield, and I ran into their linebacker, Galen Fiss. The ball popped out. Another Browns linebacker, big Walt Michaels, scooped up the ball and began to run the other way.

  But the head linesman, Charlie Berry, ruled it an incompletion-much to the dismay, outrage, and disbelief of Paul Brown.

  "There isn't a man in this room who doesn't think Frank Gifford fumbled that ball," Brown fumed afterward in the losers' locker room. I don't blame him.

  On fourth down, Pat came out, and the rest, as they say, is history. Chandler put the ball down somewhere around midfield in the snow, and Pat coolly and methodically kicked the longest field goal of his life. How long was it? Well, we'll never really know what the yard line was-too much snow blanketed the field.

  "It was over the fifty, from the still pictures I've seen," Pat says now. "Kyle always said it was fifty-three. I can still see Lombardi coming out and shouting at me, 'You sonofabitch-you know you can't make it from that distance!' "

  I asked Pat if the ball was in Canton, in the Hall of Fame, where it belonged.

  "No. Vinnie brought me the ball. I got all you guys to sign it.

  Then I left it in the house. The kids took it out on the front yard and all the signatures got rubbed off."

  Compared with Pat's snow kick the previous week, this one was routine: 36 yards, perfect weather conditions. Pat trotted on and coolly nailed the field goal. We had the lead, 3-0, with three minutes to go in the first quarter.

  It always feels good to draw first blood, and the momentum carried over to our special teams. Lenny Lyles, the Colts' rookie their top draft pick, and tremendously fast-took Chandler's kickoff out to the 21, where Cliff, busting up the Colts' wedge, just nailed him. Cliff was a madman on special teams. Many was the time the rest of us would literally stand on the sidelines on kicks, just to watch Cliff go flying in there to bust up the wedge.

  It felt as if we'd turned the tide-and, for the next few minutes, we had. In fact, we were set to seize the game right there and then, except for a couple of plays that never made the highlight reels-a couple of fleeting moments that have been buried beneath all the big plays that came later in this game.

  The first play was the interception Johnny should have thrown on third down of that series: Landry sent Karilivacz on a blitz, and Carl got in Johnny's face, forcing him to hurry the throw. The ball floated way behind Moore. Crow read the play perfectly, broke back and reached out for an easy interception. But before the ball got there, Moore tackled Lindon, throwing both arms around his waist.

  It was a smart play by Lenny-Crow would have probably taken it in for a touchdown-but it was also blatant pass interference.

  No whistle. If we get the call, they're penalized 15 yards, they're pinned on their 5, and we get the punt in great field position. Instead, they get to punt from their 29.

  Now, the second key play, long forgotten: Ray Brown got off a weak punt. If Lindon comes up to catch it, we have great field position. Funny how in retrospect it's the little things that no one notices that swing a game. This swing was h
uge. For a moment, it would turn the tide.

  ost coaches will tell you that the best barometer of how much a team wants to win is the play of its special teams. Bill Parcells always says that every football game is one-third offense, one third defense, and one-third special teams, and he's right. But for me, the play of the special teams tells you the most about a team's desire, because these are the guys who hurl their bodies into the kickoff wedge, or break up a punt return and take unbelievable shots, time after time. You don't read about them, but if you're going to win in the NFL, you better have a bunch of these no-name overachievers on your coverage teams.

  On this play, the Colts did. At least three Colts beat their blocks at the line, and they were swarming in on Lindon as the ball came down. Lindon, for right or wrong reasons, decided to let the ball bounce, then took it on the hop. And now, with Colts closing in from all three directions, he began to scamper around, looking for somewhere to run. He reversed his field, looked for daylight and was nailed at the 17 by one Sherman Plunkett. Right-that Sherman Plunkett. The same 300-pound Sherm who played for the Jets some years later, and was best known for the enormous stomach that hung over his belt like a bowling ball (he wasn't a bad blocker, either).

  On this day, he was the slim and quick version of Sherman Plunkett. With help from Ordell Braase, the Colts' backup defensive lineman, he tackled Lindon at our 17-yard line-23 yards behind where the punt landed.

  The quarter ended. Instead of having the ball at the 40, we had 83 yards to go.

  As we changed sides-nothing but a sixty-second pause for one commercial back in those days-and the offense took the field, I was thinking that, as badly as we'd played, it could have been worse.

  Unfortunately, we had a halfback who had a bad habit of carrying the football like a loaf of bread. More unfortunately, I have to live with him every day.

  CHAPTER 4 SECOND QUARTER

  To understand the first real turning point in this game-my first fumble-you have to fully understand the play. To fully understand the play, first you have to understand what was happening on the right side of the Colts' defensive line. And to understand the right side of their line, you have to know about Big Daddy, and you have to know about Don Joyce and The Feud with Rosey Brown.

  Let's start with the feud. Joyce was a big, athletic, scrappy defensive end from the rough streets of Steubenville, Ohio. Don had a history of what he describes now, with a proud laugh, as "roughneck" play. Don is best remembered by several of his teammates for having once devoured twenty-six pieces of fried chicken (with white gravy and potatoes) in a preseason eating contest-and then asking for artificial sweetener for his iced tea.

  Lipscomb, Donovan, and Marchetti (who quit after twenty two pieces) overshadowed him on that defensive line. But Don Joyce was one of a kind.

  Across the line, at left tackle, stood our own Hall of Fame tackle. Named to the Sporting News' All-Time NFL 100. Inducted into Canton. Rosey Brown was one of a kind too-just another kind. And somewhere along the line, Joyce tells me, they'd developed a certain dislike for one another. Me, I had never found Rosey to be anything but the ultimate gentleman; he was a class act on the field as well as off of it. In other words, it would take something special to provoke him.

  But then, Don had a way of getting under people's skin: "Yeah, I kind of had a lot of fights on the field," he admits now. In fact, it was Joyce's feistiness that had gotten him onto the Colt roster in the first place: Back when he was playing for the sorry Cardinals in a game against the Colts, on the kick return team, he blindsided a Colt named Joe Campanella, and knocked him under the Colt bench. Weeb grabbed Don and said, "Joyce, you're not going to last another week in this league."

  Weeb traded for him the next day. That little episode tells you a whole lot about both Weeb and his priorities. Today, Joyce isn't quite sure when the feud with Rosey started.

  He just knows it had some history. Joyce does remember the time his teammate Lenny Moore approached him with some news he'd heard from the Giant locker room. Moore had been talking with Rosie Grier (Moore and Grier were Penn State buddies) and Grier had told him that Rosey Brown had vowed to get Joyce-"and that if he had to, he'd carry a knife and cut my throat" is how Don remembers the particular wording of the message (this so-called message, which I don't believe). Don says that he and Brown "had a bit of a fistfight in the next game." Another time, Don says, the fight wasn't so little: "Rosey pulled my helmet off, and he started throwing bolo punches. I was dancing around, trying to throw jabs to his throat. The officials went into a huddle, decided to not break it up, let us go for several minutes (all of which none of us ever recalls actually happening).

  "Then, that year, in 1958, before our regular-season game against the Giants, someone put a clipping in my locker. Rosey'd said he was going to knock the shit out of me-in so many words.

  It was all about us being enemies. So I thought I'd get ready for him. A guy at Captain Joe's Crab House gave me his lacrosse pads for my arms. In warm-up, the day of that regular-season game, I'm hitting the sled, hitting goalposts. I got tape on my hands. The officials checked my tape. Then I put the left lacrosse pad on . . . and Rosey got his jaw broken in the first quarter. Big Daddy asked for the other pad."

  Actually, it was a fractured cheekbone, on a play in which Rosey was blocking for me. But it took more than a fractured cheekbone to keep Rosey down.

  Don told me that he and Rosey ended up good friends when they later scouted college all-star games for their respective professional teams and shared a few drinks. That's not the way I remember Rosey. As a player, Rosey didn't drink. And I have to question a lot of what Don has to say. I never saw Rosey get involved in any extracurricular activity that would have an impact on his two basic priorities: protecting Charlie, and knocking people on their butts so that I could get all the headlines. He was the best at that position I have ever seen, then and now-and a better friend.

  s for Daddy? When it comes to Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, everyone has a story to tell about him. He was truly unique, in a lot of ways. But it seems fitting to let Daddy's play on my fumble start the discussion.

  We had it first and ten on our 18. "Brown right, L-turn in," Charlie said, which meant, simply, an 8- to 10-yard turn-in to Kyle Rote, our split left end. I would flare toward the sidelines to pull the linebacker, or become the checkoff receiver if Kyle was covered.

  The prime receiver, of course, was Kyle, but if Kyle was covered, Charlie would pump-fake and flip it out to me.

  If he did, I'd be on my own, except for Rosey, who would pull out to his left and block for me. The trouble is, Rosey would first have to stand Joyce up at the line, then bounce outside and clear out the linebacker, or the safety, or whoever came into coverage.

  So for the play to work, a lot of things had to go right. None of them did.

  Well, one thing did: Charlie flipped the ball to me, and I caught it. After that, everything came apart. We just hadn't accounted for the speed and the pursuit of the Colt defensive line.

  I took the pass, and then tucked the ball into my left side, my outside hand, to protect it as I looked for room to the outside On the line, Rosey fired out and stood Joyce up, but he didn't stay with him long; Rosey immediately sprinted to the left to look for someone to hit, which was usually the cornerback. But Joyce had read the thing immediately. I hadn't counted on a defensive end's being that quick, and when I found myself in trouble on the outside, I turned it in. There was Joyce, coming at me full speed.

  I did a full 360-degree turn to try and avoid him. Unfortunately, I was stupidly waving the ball out there, looking for balance, and I had just started to break free of his hold. All of a sudden, here comes Big Daddy Lipscomb, face-to-face.

  To this day, I don't know how he did it. He'd been rushing Charlie, but turned his 6-foot-6-inch, 306-pound frame on a dime when he saw the pass. He was coming full speed from his right tackle spot, and he just completely enveloped me with those long arms, huge hands, and wide body.
The ball popped out. Then Daddy just fell on top of me. Their backup left tackle, Ray Krouse, a former Giant teammate, pursuing from the other side of the field, fell on the ball.

  They had it on our 20. And number 16 had given up a score-at least three points, and more than likely seven.

  It damn sure wasn't my finest moment. I hadn't taken care of the ball, and I'd looked like a stupid ballet dancer doing a pirouette out there, trying to spin my way free. On the other hand, if Daddy didn't make that astounding play, I had daylight. As the old saying goes, "If 'ifs' and 'buts' were candy and nuts, every day would be a party."

  That one play said it all about Big Daddy Lipscomb: for an enormous man-one of the league's few 300-pounders-he was great at lateral pursuit. And when he got there, his strength was surreal. Basically, he was as quick as a linebacker, and the size of a mountain. And he played like a linebacker, roaming from sideline to sideline. When you carried the ball against the Colts, you were always subconsciously thinking, Big Daddy: where is he?

  I never knew him personally, but it seems like everyone who played with or against him has a Daddy tale to tell, and the stories grew with each passing year, just like Big Daddy did.

  If you believe Artie, Daddy never wanted to rush the passer: "Daddy thought he was a black Tyrone Power," Artie said, laughing. "He didn't want to get hit in the face. One time we're playing the Rams, and Big Daddy pulls up lame because he doesn't want to play against Duane Putnam. I said to him, 'You better come in for the second half, because if we lose, I'm gonna shoot you.' Hell, I'm thirty-seven and I'm playing the whole game. Daddy stayed in."

  "When I was first with the Packers," our left guard, Al Barry, recalls, "I'd try to take him head-on, and he'd just kill me . . . I was 238, 240 . . . and 6-2, and he was 300, and 6-6. The only way to block him was to trick him. On pass plays, where you'd normally step back to set up, I'd rush at him. On running plays, I'd pretend it was a pass. That was the only way I could handle him.