"I went into a toilet stall and shut the door. I don't have any memory of why I did, but there I was. I was just sort of overwhelmed. I sat down, in my uniform. I was not a religious person, I was not a person given to giving God any thought, but I was so aware . . . it was like I was enveloped in this awareness of God. In my little twenty-five-year-old mind, I knew there was some connection between God and what had happened on that field. I couldn't put it together, but it was just overwhelming, it was a very strong awareness. I had never had any experience like that; it was very unique and unusual.
"After that, the next thing I remember is standing out on the street by our bus after the game and seeing Bert Bell with tears in his eyes. I remember thinking, What was that about? As the years passed, I guess I realized what it was about-that Bert Bell knew what had just happened to football." (Up in the press box, Bert Bell had told Baltimore writer John Steadman, "I never thought I'd see a day like today.")
Our locker room was quiet, of course. Guys peeled off bloody tape, headed for the showers. The longest season we'd ever played-the longest season ever played in the NFL-was over. It had been an emotional roller coaster, and now it left an unbelievably empty feeling. You'd done the best you could-we all had and it hadn't been good enough. There was nothing more to be said. It was time to move on.
I was sitting in my locker stall, obviously feeling terrible about the loss. My father came in, with Toots, and I just felt so sad that my dad had come so far to see us lose, and to see my two fumbles, which had probably cost us the game.
But then something happened that I'll never forget. Vince came over, and I stood up, and he put his arm around me. He said, "Frank, don't feel bad, because we never would have been here without you." And that helped me get through one of the lowest points of my career.
The writers moved around the room, gathering the few quotes they could get. It was Emlen who probably summed it up best, when he spoke of Unitas's magic: "Everything we expected him to do, and what you absolutely believed he would do, he didn't do. He did exactly the opposite. Those of us who have been around knew we had been beaten by a better man."
M. L. Brackett, our backup lineman who'd seen duty only on special teams, was feeling as down as the rest of us, and recently told me that all he could think about right then was getting back home to Alabama. "I was just sitting there," M. L. was saying. "I'd taken most of my uniform off. I was looking at the floor, thinking what could have been. I'd been a Bear when we lost the title game in '56, to the Giants, and now I had another chance, and we'd lost again.
"So Chris Schenkel, our announcer, came in, and he was smiling. We'd become friends over the course of the season. He came up and shook my hand. Now, I knew he had something to do with United Airlines, because he would always make sure our baggage was okay, so right then I said, 'Hey, Chris, do me a favor: Give me direct clearance between Yankee Stadium and Alabama-I'm going home.'
"And Schenkel said to me, 'I want you to do something. One thing. I want you to remember this game. Because this is going to go down as the greatest game ever played.'
"I'd never thought of it. It never crossed my mind. But after that, I never forgot what he said: 'Don't let it get out of your mind: This is the greatest football game ever played. It's going to go down in history.' "
The Colts' plane was given clearance to Friendship Airport in Baltimore, where, several hours later, thirty thousand fans greeted their heroes. The plan had been to put the team on a flatbed truck, but with the huge crowd milling on the tarmac, the plane taxied to a hangar, and they put the players on two buses. "The plane couldn't even get near the airport," said Marchetti, who'd endured the plane ride, despite the broken bone.
The plane taxied to the other side of the runway, behind an elementary school, where the players got off and loaded the buses.
As soon as they began to move, says Marchetti, "the next thing you know, the fans are jumping all over them."
"They were rocking the bus," Nelson remembers. "People stomping on top, beating on the windows. I thought they were gonna turn it over. The cops came and said they were going to arrest them, but Johnny and [GM] Don Kellett got out and talked them out of it."
Johnny's cool had won out again. In fact, Nelson remembers, his friend showed no emotion whatsoever, from the locker room to the plane ride to the final ride on the bus back to Memorial Stadium, where the players had left their cars.
Nelson and Unitas lived near each other, and they'd ridden over to Memorial Stadium in Andy's car on Saturday. Now Andy would give him a lift home.
"He didn't say a thing on the ride home," Andy told me.
"Well, three words: 'See you tomorrow.' We had some celebration scheduled at The Belvedere. But that was it. Just three words: 'See you tomorrow.' "
Years later, Johnny's widow, Sandy, told me about the time one of their children asked Johnny, " 'Dad, what did you do when [that game] was over?' He said, 'I got the hell out of there.' He'd done his job, and that was it."
Artie, of course, went back to the neighborhood in the Bronx, to spend the night with his folks in the apartment on 202nd Street, where he could finally lift a celebratory beer. The next morning, Artie says, he was standing outside Goldberg's Candy Store when the proprietor came out and asked, "Hi, Artie. What, out of work again?"
Maxine and I took my dad down to Toots's that night, with Charlie and Perian. My favorite saloon was quieter than usual, but it wasn't like a wake or anything. In fact, we said little, or nothing, about the game. What was to be said? We knew the season was over, and that we'd all be going our separate ways-some of us within a few hours, some in a few days. Life would go on.
Toots and my dad did their best to make me feel better about fumbling the ball. And Toots helped loosen up Dad a little. Dad was more of a beer drinker; he wasn't used to Toots's style of drinking brandy. Before the night was over, they stopped feeling sorry for me, and started feeling sorry for themselves, almost sobbing. As bad as I felt about the game I had helped lose, that night I felt a warm, wonderful glow over being with my dad. Because of his work, or lack of it, in the oil fields of California, Texas, and Alaska, we hadn't shared much together while I was growing up. I can only recall one game he saw me play at USC or, for that matter, at Bakersfield High or Bakersfield Junior College.
As I shared that evening with him and Toots, and my other teammates, somehow, the love and respect I felt for this hardworking "oil field man" eased the pain of what had happened a few hours earlier.
CHAPTER 9 AFTERMATH
On the morning of December 29, 1958, the residents of the Bronx went back to work, walking streets emptied of crowds, opening the delis and bars, climbing the stairs to the subway plat- form next to the Stadium for the trip downtown to a typical Monday-morning workday. Normalcy had returned to New York: the newspaper deliverymen called off their strike that day, although it was one day too late for anyone in the city to read a next-day account of the game.
Outside of the city, though, readers got the news in the out of-town editions. The accounts of our game left a couple of impressions: first, that it had been a hell of a football game, and second, that it had been played by athletes who still belonged to some other subclass of species. To read Arthur Daley in the Times, we were still one notch above wrestlers: "It was a wildly exciting and utterly mad affair. The final touch of insanity came when these massive meatballs couldn't settle supremacy after sixty minutes of bitterly bruising battling. They had to go into overtime. This sudden-death period was the first ever required in formal football warfare."
Adding to the outdated image of neolithic warriors laboring in leather pads and helmets were the words of an un-bylined Times writer, who, in his story on Unitas, referred to Johnny as "that rarity in pro football-a player with all his teeth." On the other hand, Daley, an old friend of the Maras, did conclude his piece with the simple, celebratory cry, "This was a football game. Wow!"
The tide had begun to turn. Obviously, we weren't aware o
f it. "No one knew the actual value of what had just taken place," Rosie Grier says now. "We didn't know we'd just seen the beginning of the future of the game. All I knew is that we'd lost some extra income."
A few weeks later, Sports Illustrated called our contest "The Best Football Game Ever." But the real momentum wouldn't really start gathering until the mass media caught up within the next few years to something that we, as players, had already started to feel: that, as Jack Kemp put it to me not long ago, "baseball may have been the national pastime, but football was the national passion."
That game began to convince sports editors to start assigning writers to football teams, instead of using off-season baseball and boxing scribes to moonlight at our training camps. Once we had actual beat writers, and extensive TV coverage, the true exposure began. But the real tipping point was the cover of Time the following fall. It featured a portrait of Sam. When the national general-interest magazines decided to announce that professional football was now a part of the cultural landscape, we knew we'd arrived.
Not that it mattered much to us. Salaries didn't explode; they still crawled upward, by a thousand or so a season. The Time cover illustration was significant in another way, though: It showed Sam's face, in an artist's portrait, unhidden by helmet and faceguard. Without his armor on. The artist's portrayal of Sam depicted not a football player, but a person. In a way, that cover announced that we'd come out from hiding: We were real people, real athletes. Not toothless meatballs.
The other media shoe fell in October of 1960, when the CBS newsmagazine show The Twentieth Century miked Sam up live for a segment entitled "The Violent World of Sam Huff." The CBS cameras followed Sam as he went through his daily routine at our training camp, tracking his every move during the days and nights of August in Vermont. Narrating the segment in a somber, serious voice, in keeping with the public impression of us as warriors, a bespectacled Walter Cronkite sounded as if he were narrating the preparations for a battle whose stakes were nothing less than the fate of the free world. (Walter could have used a better writer: speaking of a rookie's difficulty in gaining acceptance from the veterans, he intoned, "To break into this tight little aristocracy, a rookie needs the hide of a battleship, the sheer guts of a wounded water buffalo, and enormous talent.")
The size of the television viewership, of course, made the most obvious case of all that pro football could be lucrative for the networks. "I think our game was the day when television finally woke up," Ordell Braase says now. "I think after that, they said, 'This is pretty damned good. All we have to do is back up a trailer loaded with equipment to the stadiums.' "
I can only guess as to why the national media, when it introduced our game to the public at large, decided to feature the angle of our defense. Sam swears he had nothing to do with all the fuss, despite the suspicion of several of the players I talked to that Sam had a publicist, or that he purposely piled on late on his tackles so that "the late-to-get-up number 70" would be the number that the cameras always focused on.
Maybe it had something to do with the Cold War, and a political climate in which our national defense was in the daily news. Both the Time piece and the CBS show paid detailed attention to the strategies of our defense, each accenting all of the hours the players spent in classrooms, as if the media had made a world-shaking discovery: that these knuckle-draggers actually had brains.
In the days following our game, the guys made their way back home, to Alabama and Mississippi, to Texas and Oklahoma, to Minnesota and Pennsylvania-most of them as quickly as possible, to get back to their off-season jobs. The three thousand and change we'd picked up as losers wasn't bad, but it wasn't enough for anyone to retire on. Maynard resumed his plumbing. Grier hit the road with a cavalcade of singers, emceeing a show that featured The Coasters, with Rosie insisting on doing a little singing himself at each show. Vince started a job doing public relations for a local bank-for a couple of weeks.
Charlie and Perian put the kitchenware back in storage at the Concourse Plaza Hotel and headed back to Clarksdale. He probably threatened to quit, but as always, he'd be back, at least for a few more years. Maxine and the kids went back to California while I stayed in town to do my radio show, subbing for Phil Rizzuto on CBS until Phil headed south for spring training and I could head back to California. Soon after that, the Yankees would move back into our stadium, and Mantle would move back into my locker. Or Sam's. I made yet another visit to Toots's later that week, and accepted congratulations and condolences from my pal. It was one of my final visits to my old friend's saloon. Eighth months after the '58 game, Toots sold his business, and soon after, a wrecking ball brought down the greatest room on the island. He would open another version of Toots Shor's a few years later, but it never rivaled the old one. It was big, and fancy. It still had a circular bar, but that was about it. It wasn't a saloon. And a few years later, he lost that one. Toots's time had passed.
Much later on, I ran a dinner to try and save Toots and his restaurant when he was deeply in debt to the government. Everyone turned out. Talk about a star-studded dais: Jackie Gleason. Rocky Graziano. Mantle and Ford. Willie Mays and Bob Mathias. Wellington and Bowie Kuhn. Arnold Palmer and Bob Hope. It was a great evening-and the IRS enjoyed it so much, they attached the money from the dinner. We couldn't save Toots's place, and we couldn't save Toots. He didn't get much out of that night but a whole lot of love. He deserved it.
A few days after the game, I got a letter, dated December 28, the night of the game, sent to Giant management, from the Office of the Vice President. Not of the league. Of the country.
"Dear Frank," it read. "I have just turned off the television after seeing the fabulous play-off game. While I am not supposed to take sides in such a contest, I must admit that I was pulling for the Giants . . . I know you must be disappointed as to the result. But certainly you can be proud of the superb performance you gave. In any event, it was a great season for the Giants, for foot- ball, and for you personally. My wife, Pat (USC '37), joins me in sending our best wishes for the new year.
Sincerely,
Richard Nixon."
It's no surprise that Nixon had been watching. We'd met six years earlier, when I'd looked over at the sideline before a game in Washington, and seen him waving-and waving, and waving.
Finally, I realized it was me he was waving at, and I walked over. "Frank?" he said, in that unmistakable voice, "I'm Richard Nixon." I assured him I knew who he was. We became casual friends and we would see each other often when he was out of office and living in New York. To me, he was just a nice guy who loved the game. I could never get over how it always seemed as if Dick Nixon really did think that a pro football player was somehow more important than a politician.
But looking back, it's tempting to see that letter-and all of his subsequent letters to me, through the years-as a signal of what Raymond Berry called "the birth" of the NFL. Richard Nixon and football became synonymous. Monday Night Football debuted in 1970, the second year of Nixon's presidency. Nixon always seemed to identify with the ups and down of the life of a pro football player.
Soon, the same could be said of the nation.
The years immediately following our game were tumultuous ones for the Giants players and its coaching staff. We'd play in four more title games in the next five years, but the team would undergo tremendous change. We were still winners, but the golden age had begun to fade for me already-specifically, in the first week of January 1959, when Vince took a call from the Green Bay Packers. Head coach Jim Lee figured to be going nowhere, so Vince took the job.
Allie Sherman, another Brooklyn kid, came in to coach the offense. Allie and Tom took us to the title game the next year, and again we played the Colts. This time they cleaned our clocks, by a score of 31-16, down in Memorial Stadium. Few football fans seem to remember that game outside of Baltimore, which is fine with me. We didn't score a touchdown until the final minutes, and Unitas, once again, picked us apart.
The m
ost memorable day for me in 1959 in Yankee Stadium had nothing to do with a football game. They say that every dog has his day, right? Well, the old goat got his, literally-Charlie Conerly Day: Sunday, November 29, 1959. Before a game against the Redskins, in a ceremony on the field, Charlie and Perian were showered with a cornucopia of gifts: a trip to Europe; a vacation in Dauphin Island, Alabama; a portable television; a sewing machine; a knitting machine; a tape recorder; a transistor radio; an aluminum fishing boat; golf clubs; a set of encyclopedias; and, of course, the cottonseed and ton of fertilizer. They also gave Charlie a Corvette. Somehow, a Corvette still didn't seem to fit the man.
For Perian, the car took a little of the edge off being deprived of the one she hoped to get back in December of 1958. But the new Vette didn't last too long. "You know what happened?" she told me, laughing. "Three months later I went down to Jackson to see my mother, and Charlie lent it to a teenager who cracked it all to pieces."
In all, the package was worth $25,000-$5,000 more than his salary.
But it wasn't the loot that mattered. In some small way, the affection made up for all of the abuse Charlie had had to endure. "He was really excited," she told me. "Of course, he never could understand why anybody would do anything like that in the first place. Would even bother with something like that."
Charlie played for two more seasons after that, managing to boost his salary in the process: When Wellington asked him to come back for the 1961 season, Perian told me, Charlie asked Well how much money Jimmy Brown was making, and asked for one dollar more. Perian says he got his $30,001. A few years later, he started doing the Marlboro Man commercials.
The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever Page 22