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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  "I remember a game in the snow: someone stepped on my foot, I didn't pay any attention, and afterward I went in and my sock was full of blood. So the next week a story in the paper said I might be out with a bad toe. On the first play of the next game, I line up against Big Daddy. He says, 'Hey, Barry, how's your toe?' I say, 'Fine.' Then he says, 'Exactly which one is it?' "

  Daddy hadn't gone to college. The Rams found him playing for the marines at Camp Pendleton. "I asked him once where 'Northern College' was," announcer Bob Wolff told me. 'That's what he'd written on a questionnaire-No College.' "

  Off the field, though, Daddy's behavior belied his menacing on-field image. He was no tough guy. Inside that huge body lay a childlike, manic man whose glee was infectious. He called anyone he didn't know "Little Daddy," which was how he got his own nickname. Or "Sweet Pea." Daddy legendarily uttered his most-often-quoted words when someone once asked him how he made so many tackles: "I just reach out and grab an armful of players from the other team and peel them off until I find the one with the ball. I keep him." Too many times I was the one he kept.

  Daddy could be the bully, says Barry: "He spit on me one time. I don't remember why he did it. We got him back. I got the center to help. On the next play, we got him on the ground and beat the shit out of him." But Daddy was more bluster than actual toughness, teammate Ray Brown recalls: "One day, after a game somewhere, as we're leaving the stadium, I picked up a cricket. I held that cricket out to Big Daddy. I guess he didn't know about crickets, being from Detroit. It hopped out of my hand, toward Daddy, and he jumped like it was a snake or something. He went berserk.

  "He knew I was studying to be a lawyer," Brown says, "and after Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi, found in a river with a big cotton-gin fan on top of him, Daddy came up to me in the locker room, put his arm around me and pulled me in, and said, 'When Brown becomes a lawyer, I'm going to go down to Mississippi and he's going to keep me from being thrown in the river.' I said to him, 'They don't have any fans big enough to hold you down.' "

  On this, everyone who knew Daddy agrees: he was a wounded soul. Daddy was known to carry two things in his pockets: wads of cash, and photographs of his mother, lying murdered in the street in Detroit, after being stabbed nearly fifty times at a bus stop when Eugene was eleven years old.

  Teammates spoke of Daddy's dark side: crying jags, sudden depressions. "Daddy was a nice guy," Artie says. "A poor, unfortunate guy."

  On this day, he was just getting started.

  Now the Colts had the ball back, on our 20. Knowing Johnny- and keeping in mind Weeb's game plan to emphasize the pass, which we now know, but didn't then-one would have to figure he'd go for it all at once. Typically, Johnny did the opposite. He took them right in for the game's first touchdown-without ever going to the air. He ran it down our throats. It was line against line, and at this point, it was no contest. Our defense, "the finest in the league," wasn't used to being dominated. As a matter of fact, as I watched from the sideline, their dominating short drive was a little shocking.

  On the first play Moore got four yards before Sam caught him, lifted him by the waist as if he were hoisting a sack of potatoes, carried him a few yards-and then literally threw Lenny to the ground. Of course, there was no penalty.

  The play looked routine, but it probably wasn't. This was likely the play on which Moore got hurt. Lenny remembers only that he was hurt in the second quarter. My guess is that Sam's face-plant did it. "What many folks don't know-it didn't even hit the newspapers-in the second quarter, I pulled something in my chest, and man, if I did certain things, I couldn't move: there'd be a sharp pain all the way through," Lenny says now. "This was in thesecond quarter. I don't know what caused it. I told Weeb about it.

  He said, 'Don't say anything, just shut up and leave it like that.' So we kept it quiet."

  Two more runs put the Colts on our 10, first and goal. And then Unitas crossed us again: as we tightened our defensive line to stop the run, he faked to Ameche on a plunge, drawing Harland, our outside linebacker, toward the middle. But now here came Moore, crossing over from his right halfback position, heading left. Their left end, Jim Mutscheller, blocked in on Harland, who had moved inside to stop the run he figured was coming his way. With everyone caught inside, Moore had a wide-open field, except for Karilivacz, the cornerback, alone out in the flat. Carl had a clear bead on Lenny-who sprinted right past him.

  Jimmy Patton saved the touchdown by shoving Lenny out at the 1. On the next play they sent Ameche off left tackle. Parker just blew the injured Grier away, and Ameche scored easily.

  The Colts had their first points, and their first lead-7-3-not on Johnny's arm, but on his play-calling, and the play of his line. At this point, they were dominating us in every phase of the game.

  That Colt offensive line never earned a lot of attention. The only lineman whose name has gone down in history is huge Jim Parker's. But Sandusky and Spinney at the guards, Buzz Nutter at center, and George Preas at right tackle? They aren't exactly household names, but the Colts' margins of victory in 1958-by scores like 56-0, 40-14, and 34-7, and averaging more than 30 points a game-suggest that the line was doing something right. They also were giving Johnny a lot of protection, and opening holes for Ameche, Dupre, and, sometimes, Moore.

  To hear the Colt linemen talk about it now, the unsung key to this game was Buzz Nutter. Buzz was an unusually athletic center, with an uncanny ability to read the defense and call out blocking schemes at the line. But his teammates remember him best for his determination never to give up on any play, and always looking for someone else to block. "He was the star of that game," Artie told me, and you don't often hear a defensive guy saying that his center was the star of a game. "He was all over the field."

  Nutter came out of nowhere-from a Virginia Tech team that, by his own recollection, won fewer than ten games in his three years on the varsity. Buzz was stunned when the Redskins drafted him, and unsurprised when they cut him. He caught on the next year as a free agent with the Colts. "Christ, first day of camp I weighed 200 pounds," he told me. "Everybody said, 'Man, you must be an end.'

  I was faster than hell. I said, 'I play center.' 'Not in this league,' they said. Within three years I was up to 235. No weights-we didn't have weights. We just ate and ate and ate. And drank beer. By then Ewbank was on my ass about drinking too much beer."

  The talent of the Colt line told only part of the story of that short drive. By now, Grier's knee had become a liability. Art Spinney had just manhandled him. Which brings us to a second feud. It was bad enough that Rosie was lame. It was worse that Spinney had it in for him. "After the game we'd played in midseason, Spinney put out in the paper that Grier was the worst tackle he'd ever played against, in high school, college, or pro," Huff remembers. "The next time Spinney played him, Rosie picked that guy up and threw him backwards on his ass."

  So maybe Spinney had some extra motivation that day. But it was a one-sided matchup: without Grier at one hundred percent, we weren't the league's leading defense. Not even close. Would it have made a difference if Grier had been healthy? No doubt. But back then you didn't take yourself out unless you were near death, and for two reasons: With only thirty-five men on the roster, you didn't ask out of a game if you felt a twinge in your hamstring. You didn't even ask out if you'd been dinged so hard you didn't know what play had been called.

  Second, you didn't ask out because you might lose your job. It was sort of an honor thing, a matter of pride. You have to wonder if the outcome on this day might have been different if Rosie had admitted how badly he was hurt going into the game. Instead, he started. And the last time I talked to him about it, his voice was cracking at the memories of what happened that day. This game has stayed with him for a long, long time. And he's still kind of broken up about it-not that he let himself start; today, he still beats himself up about asking to come out of the game.

  "But I couldn't move," he told me, "and I thought I was hurting the team. Th
e game before, I was chasing the quarterback to the sideline, and somebody cut me from behind. It was the same knee I'd hurt in college. It was a mess. It felt a mess. I left the dressing room after that game with a cast on.

  "So I kind of beat myself up many, many days after that title game was over. Maybe I should have stayed out there and played that game, even if I couldn't move that well. In retrospect, I should have stayed in there. But no one told me not to come out.

  "See, I thought we were going to win that game. Later it just dawned on me so badly that we lost that game, and I felt that, had I been able to go just a little bit longer, maybe we'd have won. But if I stayed in, I didn't know how to get my leg ready to take the punishment. See, today you can put heat on your knee, get whatever you need to loosen it up. I didn't know all that stuff.

  "But I'm just so sorry. I didn't understand a lot of things I understand today. It was an incredible game, and there I am, just sitting. You can't do nothing. I could keep moving my knee, but it was not going to get better."

  Would we have been better off with Rosie admitting to Tom that he wouldn't be able to make it, so that Frank Youso would have had a little time to prepare, instead of being thrown into the fire? Just one of the many things about the game we'll never know. I do think I understand where Rosie is coming from. I'd have never gone to Vince the week before a game and told him we'd be better off without me, no matter how badly I was hurt. do know that when Rosie Grier was healthy, he was a star, even with his less-than-diligent practice habits. Who knows how great he would have been if he'd been a little more in shape?

  "If he'd have had, let's say, Katcavage's go-go heart, they would never have been able to handle him," Sam says now. "When we were in two-a-days at Fairfield, Rosie never worked very hard in practice. He worked at his guitar. He couldn't carry a tune, but his real love was still music. He had these loudspeakers, and in between practices, every afternoon, he'd be playing his guitar. We were all trying to nap. Someone stole the tubes out of his guitar so he couldn't amplify it. So one day at lunch, Rosie stood up at lunchtime and made a speech: 'All right, you guys. Someone stole the tubes out of my guitar. They better put them back, or I'll kick every one of your asses, one at a time.' He got his tubes back."

  I don't think Rosie would have kicked anyone's ass; in truth, he was just a kind, loving, gentle guy, and as good as he was, he could have been a real superstar if he'd had the inner toughness the great ones have.

  "We loved Rosie," Mo says now, "but we had to kick him around once in a while: 'Come on, Rosie, let's get going!' One time we played an exhibition game on a hot day in New Haven against the Colts, and me, I'm figuring, 'I can't take this anymore. I gotta go down.' So I dropped down on one play and grabbed my knee, like I'm hurt. I looked over and, so help me God, Rosie had the same damned idea on the same play. I said, 'Ro, get up.' Rosie said, 'But I was here first.'

  "But I ended up coaching defensive line for twenty-two years, and he was one of the best tackles I ever saw."

  "Yeah, we used to make fun of Rosie," Webster remembers.

  "He was supposed to come to camp in Winooski under 300, but when he came in, he just about broke the scale. We didn't have a scale that went over 300. They took him down to the meat factory, in downtown Burlington, and put him on the scale. He weighed 340 pounds.

  "We used to always try and get him to quit eating. One time, we thought we were doing really good, keeping him from eating too much at dinner. But we got held up a little after a long, late practice. We had a meeting. We used to all go out in Burlington, but we were running out of time and couldn't get down to our favorite bar. We ran across the street from the campus, where there was a deli. We bought a case of beer, went around to the back-and there's Rosie back there with a big submarine sandwich."

  Now we'd lost the lead. Rosie was hurting, and we were losing the battle on both the offensive and defensive lines. Unitas was getting too much time. All of it meant that the offense had to produce, and we had to get something happening, and quickly.

  Maybe Mel Triplett felt the pressure to break one on the ensuing kickoff. Or maybe Mel was just having a bad day. Incredibly, as he gathered in Rechichar's bouncing kick, he fumbled again. Fortunately, Rosey Brown was composed enough to not only recover the ball, but to pick it up and hand it back to Mel, who managed to hold on to this handoff, and plow his way out to the 33.

  We had good field position, and Charlie decided to open things up a little. On second down, finally enjoying some protection, he hit Kyle with a perfect 15-yard curl-in, between the corner, Milt Brown, playing on that broken foot, and the safety, Andy Nelson.

  As we huddled back up, I thought, Okay. Here we go, finally. I felt good for my friend, Kyle, and I felt good for the team. A Rote reception always seemed to give us a lift; for the Giants to have any chance on this day, we had to have Kyle Rote be a part of the offense, as he'd been for the last eight years. Playing on one good knee.

  The first time I remember hearing about Kyle Rote, I was at USC, and I was hitchhiking from L.A. up to Bakersfield, where my parents still had a house, even though they were living in Alaska. I was coming home to be with my sister for Thanksgiving.

  A guy picked me up, and together we listened to the broadcast of the SMU-Notre Dame national championship game on the car radio. As we drove over the mountain and down into the San Joaquin

  Valley, it seemed like every time the announcer said anything, it was about Kyle. I remember thinking, It must be great to be Kyle Rote.

  He ran for 115 yards and threw for 146 that day-and scored all three of SMU's touchdowns. Notre Dame had been a 27½-point favorite in that game; the Irish barely won, 27-20-and named Kyle an honorary member of their championship team. The next year, as a senior, he made the cover of Life magazine. The Giants took Kyle with the bonus pick in the 1951 draft. Back then, one team got a bonus pick ahead of the actual draft, and then-Giant coach Steve Owen was awarded the pick by pulling a ticket out of a hat. Kyle signed the contract at Toots's.

  But Kyle tore up his knee during training camp, in 1951, stepping in a gopher hole on a practice in Jonesboro, Arkansas. He must have had a terrible operation; someone must have botched it, and bigtime. It was the ugliest-looking knee I'd ever seen. In later years, after a few beers, we used to ask him to show it to us, if you can believe how sick that might be. Such was the gallows humor in our locker room.

  But in a strange way, that was our way of letting Kyle know how good we all knew he could have been. He pretty much limped through his first season; he played only five games. As a matter of fact, the Giants drafted me as insurance for Kyle. They figured I could fill in for him on offense, or, if he did play, I could play defense-which is exactly what happened.

  My first two years, whenever Kyle was hurting, they put me in on offense. Then, in 1954, under our new offensive coach, Lombardi moved Kyle permanently to wide receiver and me to left half-back. I finally had a home, and so did Kyle. Today I'll leave it to another great receiver to assess Kyle's football abilities.

  "As I've watched the NFL over the years," Raymond Berry told me, "I have a category in my mind for the elite receivers: Elroy Hirsch. Bobby Mitchell. Kyle Rote."

  Kyle was destined to make another more important catch in the third quarter, but this drive was doomed to stall. For the first time that day, on the next play, first and ten from our own 48 the Colts came on a blitz, sending Bill Pellington. Charlie had no chance, and Pellington wrapped him up at the 40. It was a clean hit; Pellington didn't have to pile on this time.

  Bill Pellington is a guy you seldom hear about when people are talking about the glory days of the Colts, because their front four was always so dominant. But to hear the Colts tell it, he was the single most intense player to ever wear a Colt uniform. Or, as Milt Davis put it so eloquently, "He'd play with snot and blood coming all out of his nose, mad at everybody, his eyes deep-set in their sockets. He was always stirring us up, stirring us up."

  He was a New Jersey nati
ve, a Navy vet who had done steelgirder work on New York bridges during the off-season. As the guy who called the signals in the defensive huddle-the defensive quarterback-Bill was one of the two real leaders on that unit, along with Marchetti. Gino led by example, and Pellington led by verbal intimidation. "He was intense in the huddle," Andy Nelson told me. "Someone catches a pass on you, he'd be in your face about it.

  I guess if you're winning, that's all right, but I didn't like it. I didn't particularly want anyone in my face after I'd given up a pass. Our huddle was a little rough at that time. It wasn't always pleasant."

  For the most part, though, the Colts put up with Pellington's abuse, because he backed it all up on the field, and led by example-even if the example was often borderline dirty. "He was as tough an individual as I've ever been around, tough mentally and tough physically," the Colts' linebacker Leo Sanford told me. "You didn't want to get too close to him. He had a knack for using his forearm like a clothesline. Teams tended to run their plays away from wherever Bill was."

  That went for me, too. Most guys were satisfied just to bring you down. Pellington wasn't satisfied unless he'd made you pay-and he had several ways of inflicting his peculiar brand of punishment, which more often than not involved throwing that forearm.

  "He wore a pad he'd tape around his arm," Ray Brown recalls.

  "After we won that championship, I'll never forget-we were playing the College All-Star Game, and there was a college kid coming into my coverage. He's a few yards away from me, I'm looking to pick him up-and all of a sudden Pellington's arm goes up, and it catches this kid right in the throat. The back of his head is the first thing to hit the ground. The doctors come out-I thought he was dying-and they did a tracheotomy right on the field. He'd swallowed his tongue. I thought Bill had killed the kid."

  The forearm wasn't the only weapon in Pellington's arsenal, but the clothesline technique was his trademark, and at least once, it came back to bite him. "I'll tell you how tough he was," says Ordell Braase, the Colts' backup defensive lineman.: "After one clothesline, he came out after the series was over rubbing his arm.