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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  Johnny wanted most of it on the first play: with all the time in the world, he lofted a long arcing pass to Mutscheller-but Tunnell and Patton had him blanketed, and Johnny, wisely, threw it too long. On second, Johnny surprised us by going to Dupre on a 12-yard circle route, but this time his pass was underthrown.

  Third and long. And while history keeps talking about Unitas to Berry, without Lenny Moore, this game would have been over. None of our defensive line was within yards of Johnny as he faded back. Moore broke toward Crow, stopped at the 25, and turned around to catch the ball. Johnny put it low, and Lenny reached down, cradled the ball, and fell to the 25-yard line as Crow scrambled to make the tackle. Too late. They had the first down by inches. And they were out of the shadow of their goalposts.

  They still had seventy-five yards to go. With time running out.

  At this point, I could just say, "Unitas to Berry, for twenty-five yards. Unitas to Berry, for fifteen yards. Unites to Berry, for twenty-two yards." And that would pretty much cover it. I heard the words then, and I hear them now. That we had to hear them then, echoing from the Stadium speakers, spoken in our home announcer's dulcet tones, somehow made it even more painful.

  The next few minutes-arguably the greatest few minutes any receiver has ever had in professional football-were the logical result of the hours, and hours, and hours of preparation Raymond Berry routinely put in: for any situation, in any game. The more I talked to his teammates, the more I became convinced that the key to Raymond Berry's amazing performance that day was that he never left anything to chance. There was no situation he hadn't envisioned in his head-no coverage, no turf condition, and no pass-because he'd prepared for it all beforehand, and practiced for it endlessly.

  "I have never seen a man so dedicated to his work," Ray Brown, the safety, told me. "In our practices at Memorial Stadium, Raymond had this net set up on the sideline, a big square frame with a net in it. John would throw to him, in front of this net. Then John would finally go into the locker room, but Raymond wouldn't be done. He'd ask me to stick around and throw to him.

  "So I'd throw balls to him, toward that net. And Raymond would come from the left. He'd come from the right. He'd jump.

  He'd get me to throw all the different patterns. He'd dive. He'd tumble. He'd practice every possible pass, preparing for any situation."

  They were on their 25, first down. From here on in, Johnny knew he wouldn't have time to call huddles after every play, so he told the offense to expect the calls at the line of scrimmage: one of the first no-huddle offenses. The Colts hadn't planned on it.

  I'll let Raymond set up that drive from here.

  "It took me years to figure this out," he told me. "Then I finally got it: The factor that no one could possibly account for was this nohuddle concept that happened quite by accident in that final drive in regulation. Your defense, at this very critical time, had to play against a no-huddle. I think it threw their rhythm off. That's why they weren't able to make adjustments. We had to go to a hurry-up type offense.

  John would call two, even three in the huddle, then we'd go to the line, and we'd go with a 'check-with-me' system. John would call the numbers, and it all happened very quickly. It was all pretty simple at that point, but, really, it had been simple for the whole game. That was Weeb. We hardly had but a handful of plays."

  On first down, Johnny followed his game plan: we were defending the outside, and he threw to Raymond inside.

  "It was a formation we used during that game a lot," Raymond remembers. "Lenny, split right, ran a ten-yard square-out to the right, Mutscheller ran a twelve-yard hook. I had come open late on the sideline. I was the third option. When he faded back, he was looking for Moore. Then he went to Jim. Then he finally went to me. In all the years we had it, I think that was the only time he ever went to me on that play."

  That Unitas had that much time tells you how little pass pressure he was getting from our wiped-out defensive line. By the time he got to Raymond, it seemed like about five seconds had already passed.

  Dupre, the halfback, was the key to this play. He circled out of the backfield to the left and turned it upfield. Carl tried to stay with Dupre, which left Harland, coming over from his linebacker position, man-to-man on Berry.

  Berry had beaten Harland. He took Johnny's pass, and then, with everyone figuring he'd step out of bounds, he cut right up the middle of the field, getting a block from Dupre on Huff. Raymond looked just like his old hero Elroy Hirsch back in that movie theater in Paris, Texas, as a half-dozen Giants tried to chase him down.

  First it was Livingston; Raymond juked him, and broke the tackle.

  Now Patton came in for the tackle; Raymond slowed, and Jimmy overran him. Finally, Crow and Emlen converged on Raymond at midfield.

  They'd gained 25 yards. The play had taken ten seconds. The Colts called their final timeout with a minute and five to go. During the timeout, Joe Boland's color commentator, Bill McCoglan, made the first mention of what none of us had thought about: the prospect of an overtime. I sure hadn't thought about it, anyway.

  "You're quite familiar with what a minute and five seconds means in the NFL, Joe. You can do plenty in that time. Right now I know what John Unitas and Weeb Ewbank would like to do: if not go all the way, they'd like to pick up another ten or twenty yards, and get in position for a field goal, and if that did happen, and they came through on the field goal, for the first time in the history of the NFL we would witness a sudden-death play-off."

  First and ten at midfield. And with no timeouts left, we knew Johnny had to keep passing, but somehow his play-fake to Dupre froze Harland, which left Karilivacz alone on Berry. Raymond ran a simple curl-in. Carl was still giving Raymond a deep cushion, and Johnny put it right where he had to: low and catchable. Carl missed the tackle. Livingston had to come across from the other side of the field to bring Berry down.

  Now they were on our 35, with the clock still running. They had time for one more play, and they needed yardage to give Myhra any chance at all to tie the game. By the time Johnny got the snap, the clock was down to forty seconds. Everyone knew what was coming, of course. I knew it. Sam knew it. Sixty-five thousand fans knew it. The ushers knew it. Sheppard knew it. Forty-five million people watching on TV knew it.

  Karilivacz knew it, too; he was ready this time. Berry broke from the line of scrimmage, ran 12 yards, and turned. Ray gathered the ball in and turned back outside. Carl came in late, and missed the tackle.

  By the time Harland brought Raymond down, he was on the 13.

  Three plays, 62 yards. Unitas to Berry, Unitas to Berry, Unitas to Berry.

  On the sideline, Myhra was getting nervous. The Colts had the kicking drill down to about twelve seconds for the field-goal team to get onto the field, line up, and kick it. Myhra turned to his holder, George Shaw, and told him to be careful not to slip if they had to go out there. Years later, Myhra remembered his actual words as "Don't fall on your derriere, or there won't be nothing."

  I'm guessing his words that day weren't quite so innocent.

  On the sideline, Milt Davis was smiling: "All the preparation I'd seen Johnny put in-now it was coming to fruition."

  Andy Nelson was just shaking his head at the drive that had put them here: "That was the best pitch-and-catch I'd ever seen."

  As the Colt kicking team ran onto the field, the clock was winding down to twenty seconds-but the scoreboard clock wasn't official; Gibbs had the official time. The Colt kicking team lined up, and got set, with the ball on the left hash mark. The big second hand on the scoreboard clock swept under ten seconds.

  The ball was on the 13. Myhra would kick the ball from the 20. Nutter snapped the ball.

  The clock showed seven seconds to go as Weeb Ewbank's second-least-favorite kicker took three steps, kept his head down, and kicked it.

  As our line went for the block, Mo put Artie right on his back.

  "I'm lying there on my ass," Artie remembers, "thinking, Oh, no. We didn't m
ake it."

  Gibbs threw his arms into the air: good.

  Summerall, standing at a perfect angle from our sideline, swears it went right.

  No one was as surprised as the man who had snapped the ball.

  "If he had to kick that field goal twenty more times he wouldn't have made it once," Nutter told me. "He was a terrible kicker."

  "What helped Steve on that kick," Ordell Braase says now, "is that after the first series of the game, he was playing linebacker, after Sanford went out. I think the best thing for us was that he didn't have time to think about anything during that game. He played the whole game, and he knew he had to play a hell of a game, and he did. So he didn't have to wait around on the sideline the whole game. Hell, his father owned all the land in North Dakota-what was there to worry about?"

  Buzz Nutter told me the exact same thing: that having Myhra pushed into action as a linebacker "was the luckiest thing that ever happened to us. Myhra didn't have all day to stand around."

  Myhra would agree, several years later: "If you had time to think about it," he said, "we probably would have blown it."

  In our sideline, no one said a thing. We just knew we'd have to go back to work.

  Rechichar kicked off into the end zone. We took possession on the 20, and Charlie ran a sneak. The game was over. At least, that's what a lot of people thought. Actually, most of us didn't know what to think. In my entire life of football-from the Bakersfield Drillers to the USC Trojans to the New York Giants-the game had been played in four quarters: win, lose, or tie.

  In the four decades that professional football had existed, no one had ever played an overtime game-not one that counted, anyway. There'd been an overtime for an exhibition game a few years earlier, but we hadn't been aware of it. The overtime rule had been instituted for this game by Bert Bell, the commissioner.

  Ordell Braase told me that Weeb had told the Colts during the week that overtime was a possibility. (There's another example of Ewbank's preparation being more thorough than our guy's.) But on our sideline, confusion reigned.

  "I was sitting next to Heinrich," Summerall told me. "I said, 'What do we do now?' No one knew how overtime went. Someone said, 'I think the captains toss a coin again.' But no one knew what was going on."

  Sam was ready to call it a day. He figured a tie wasn't so bad. "I just said, 'Great. At least we get half the money.' Then the official came over and said, 'Three minutes.' I said, 'What?' I wasn't quite sure what 'sudden death' meant."

  Most of us didn't understand the logistics of an overtime period. Who kicks off? How long is the break? If one team scores, does the other team get another possession? I do know this: none of us could have possibly envisioned that this new change in the rules was going to have a long-lasting impact on the game of football. All we knew was that we had to keep playing this game.

  "Yes," Joe Boland told his radio audience, "we've come to the end of regulation time, the end of the game, and we're going to see the first application in history of the sudden-death rule."

  CHAPTER 8 OVERTIME

  The next fourteen plays, the next thirteen minutes and twenty five seconds, did more than change the face of professional football. They altered the cultural landscape. They turned our sport into national prime-time entertainment. They changed the viewing habits of millions of people.

  They turned colleges into breeding grounds for football players. They turned professional football players into athletes who would earn more money in a single game than I'd earned in twelve years of hits to the head and hits to the heart. And they did it by marrying football to television, a medium that could fit its commercials neatly into the regular breaks of our game: timeouts, quarters, halftimes. With a sport TV could call its own, that medium could now turn to Madison Avenue and say, "We have hooked your customers. We can sell your product."

  And believe me, our overtime made the difference. The overtime allowed West Coast viewers, Midwest viewers, living room latecomers all over the country to turn on their sets and stumble upon a football game that should have been over. Overtime represented a whole new kind of ball game, for a nation founded on the idea of new frontiers. For the first time ever, we had a game where the first team to score a point would be declared world champion by knockout, if you will. One blow, and the title would be declared.

  After the commercial, millions of people were drawn to their television sets-except, ironically, in New York, where the game was blacked out. In jacket, tie, and overcoat, collar turned up against the chill now turning to a freezing cold, his right hand wrapped around his binoculars, his left resting on a clipboard, speaking into a microphone, Baltimore announcer Chuck Thompson stared into the NBC camera with all the grim seriousness and urgency of a guy issuing a civil-defense alert: "This is Chuck Thompson, speaking to you from Yankee Stadium, where the Baltimore Colts are playing in the first overtime period in the history of professional football." (Chuck seemed to have forgotten that he was addressing a nation, not just the city of Baltimore.)

  In the radio booth, Joe Boland could barely contain his excitement: "Never before in the history of the NFL or professional football has there been an extra period. A most historic moment in football history: a sudden-death play-off, with all the marbles on the line."

  It was history in the making-or so we'd just been told. For the Giants, it was just more football that had to be played. One more time to find some way to pump the adrenaline into bodies that had been thoroughly exhausted.

  I'm not offering excuses: the Colts had to do the same thing. But I think there was a definite difference between the feelings on the two benches. No: I know there was.

  Buzz Nutter told me he just couldn't wait to get out there.

  "Man, to me the feeling was unbelievable," he said. "Absolutely unbelievable. I was so pumped up, I could have played another whole game right then."

  The Colt kickoff team was about to take the field when Jack Call, the backup running back, turned to Leo Sanford, the linebacker who'd torn up a knee in the first quarter. Sanford had insisted on staying in for special teams. He was going to limp his way out there. Call turned to Sanford: "Man," he said, "I'd hate to lose this."

  Call remembers Sanford looking at him and saying, "Don't worry about a thing. We're going to win it. We're going to take it."

  "And I thought of all the times Johnny had done it before," Call told me. "I thought of the confidence we'd always had in John.

  And I thought, Hey, maybe he's right."

  No one had more confidence, of course, than Raymond. Berry felt that Johnny, given the chance, would no doubt have something up those sleeves that were always somehow too long for that strange-looking body. And if, somehow, we could find a way to shut Raymond down, Johnny would no doubt have something else in mind.

  "At that point," Raymond told me, "after we'd tied the game, our confidence level was off the board."

  On the Giants' side of the field? No rah-rahs from anyone. No extra incentive, it seemed, to dig deep and grind it out one more time. Just going back to work.

  The captains gathered at midfield. It was just after 4:30, Eastern Standard Time; exactly seven days after the shortest day of the year, it was completely dark inside the Stadium now. The lights lit the field like a night game. The white haze of our breath accentuated the drastic drop in the temperature.

  Johnny was alone at midfield; Gino had finally been taken from the field: "All of a sudden the police come up and say to the trainers, 'You better get him off-there'll be fans all over the field when this is over,' " Gino told me. "So they took me into the locker room. It drove me crazy down there. I could hear the crowd, but I had no idea what was going on."

  Our captains, Rote and Svoboda, stood swathed in our full-length dark blue capes, shelter against the cold. Johnny wasn't wearing a coat. Maybe the Colts weren't feeling the cold like we were.

  Johnny called the coin flip, and lost. The Colts would kick to the north end of the Stadium, the outfield. Gibbs brought
the captains together to give instructions no one had ever given before: "The first team to score, field goal or safety or touchdown, uh, will win the game now, and the game will be over," he said.

  We'd get the ball first. We had the whole things in our hands very briefly.

  This time Rechichar's kick was high, and short, and as Don Maynard watched it from the end zone, he figured he could take it in full stride. He had terrific speed. He could bust it right up the middle. As the ball began to fall from the dark sky, here came Don, like a sprinter bursting from the starters' block, looking up-into the lights. In front of him, our wedge was clearing out a serious lane. There were no Colts within fifteen yards of Don as he caught the ball on the 10-yard line, in full stride-and had it slip right through his hands.

  The four-man wall in front of him would last only a heartbeat.

  Maynard had to stop, rooting around on the ground to retrieve the ball. By the time he had it back in his hands, he was swarmed under at the 20.

  It was a rookie mistake. Don had never before looked for a kickoff in brilliant lights etched against a night sky, at least not in the pros. And not in Yankee Stadium in front of 64,185 fans-and 45 million other fans, from coast to coast.

  "Hey, at least I didn't give it to them" is what laid-back Don said recently when I tracked him down in El Paso. Of course, he can laugh. His own Hall of Fame career was just beginning. For a lot of us, the clock was winding down.

  In our last series of the season-on our last three-and-out of a long, lost year-we didn't play badly. We just didn't play crisply. We played tired.

  My 49 sweep on first down worked well enough-I picked up four yards. Hell, it was just as good as the fourth-quarter sweep for the first down they didn't give us. And it was a good call: Braase was now in for Marchetti at left defensive end, and we thought we could exploit that. At the snap, both guards pulled, and I headed right. But Braase beat two blocks and turned the play inside, and Joyce, coming over from the right side, made the tackle.