But for my money, the greatest tribute my roommate ever got wasn't on the day he was showered with cottonseed. It was the night he was showered with love. The site, fittingly, was P.J. Clarke's. It was December 10, 1961, a Sunday night. The handwriting was on the wall for Charlie. He was on the bench; Y. A. Tittle was our starting quarterback. After years and years of telling Perian that he was going to hang it up, this time Charlie was finally going to make good on his promise.
I was on my one-year hiatus from the team after my concussion, and I'd been broadcasting a game that Sunday. I'd heard that Conerly had come off the bench to win the Giant game. He'd thrown three touchdown passes against Philadelphia, and the Giants had clinched a tie for the Eastern Division title. I couldn't wait to hook up with him.
I got to P.J.'s before Charlie did. Maybe he was celebrating up at the Concourse, or he'd been to a couple of other places. I was in the back room, and as usual on game night, it was jam-packed. All of a sudden, someone said, "Charlie's coming! Charlie's coming!" Charlie Conerly walked into that crowded room-and it was the loudest ovation he'd ever heard.
I'll never forget it. After all the criticism he'd taken in the bad years from fans and writers who didn't know how the game worked after being sacked seventeen times in one game in '52-here was this all-American from Mississippi, finally getting the ovation he'd deserved all along. He'd gone off to fight the Japanese-leaving most of his good years on the battlefields-then come to our town to work his butt off, without complaint. And now the whole of P.J. Clarke's-representing, I'd like to think, the whole town-was on its feet, as if it was finally giving him his due. As if it was trying, in one moment, to make up for all the quiet suffering he'd endured.
I'm sure he never, ever forgot that night. I know that I never will. It was a moment unlike any other: a great friend, a great player, a great saloon. The beginning of the end of a great time.
fter the 1959 season, Tom Landry was hired to be the head coach of the expansion Dallas Cowboys; no surprise there.
What was surprising was Jim Lee then telling Wellington that 1960 would be his last year, even though his contract went through 1961.
I can hardly blame him; without Vince and Tom flanking him on the sideline, no wonder Jim Lee wanted to go back to Arkansas. It was one of the few smart decisions he ever made.
But when Vince heard that Jim Lee was leaving early, he was devastated. He'd always wanted to coach our team, and if he'd known Jim Lee had designs on an early retirement, I'm sure he would have stayed. Vince, of course, turned things around immediately up in Wisconsin, but his heart was still with the Giants. After the 1960 season, Vince came to New York. I met him at Al Shack's when he was on his way to see Pete Rozelle. (Rozelle confirmed these conversations for me) to see if he could get out of his contract in Green Bay to coach the Giants. The guy who threw a wrench into it was Dominic Olejniczak, then president of the Packers. Olejniczak felt he had no choice but to hold Vince to the Green Bay contract. It would have set a terrible precedent.
Any question about whether Vince truly wanted to coach the Giants was answered during one of my conversations with Mo. "We played Green Bay in a preseason game one year," he remembers.
"Andy Robustelli and I were walking around downtown Green Bay, and a car pulls up. It's Lombardi. 'Get the hell in!' he says. He started talking about how he wished he was coaching the Giants, and he was in tears. 'I should have been there coaching you guys,' he said. He was crying in the car."
It does make you wonder, though: What would have happened if Olejniczak had let Vince come home? Would the NFL have kept growing so swiftly and dramatically if the Packers hadn't become the powerhouse Vince engineered? Would the public have become so quickly fascinated by our league?
The 1960 season is something I'd just as soon forget. And I probably did forget parts of it, because of what happened on November 20, 1960. It was one of the more memorable plays in NFL history, and one I still see more often than I'd like, every time another football season rolls around. I wish I could receive a royalty for every time I look at it. I was on the receiving end of a tackle from Eagle linebacker Chuck Bednarik. It wasn't the Eagle linebacker who hurt me. It was the hard, frozen Stadium dirt that did the damage.
We'd traded for the Colts' backup, George Shaw, and he was the one-not Charlie-who hit me on a slant, coming across the field on our own 30-yard line. I was wide open, and as I looked to cut upfield, I didn't see Bednarik coming full speed at me from the far side of the field. Bednarik, taking aim, actually turned his head away. There was no helmet-to-helmet collision. There was no clothesline; his arms weren't even raised. Bednarik's left shoulder pad hit my left shoulder pad. Period. Our helmets never even touched.
In a backward free-fall, with no time to cushion myself, my helmet slammed to the hard ground; that caused the concussion.
So if history wants to think that I was somehow leveled by the hardest hit ever thrown, let it.
On my visit to Bob Sheppard's home fifty years later, Bob told me he remembered the play pretty well too-as well he should have.
As soon as I'd been lifted off on the stretcher, one of the Maras-he can't remember if it was Well or Jack-immediately came up to the press box and asked him to make a very ominous announcement.
"They said, 'Bob, find out if there's a Catholic priest in the Stadium, and have him go down to the locker room.' So I got on the microphone and said, 'If there's a Catholic priest in the Stadium, will you go to the locker room.' Fifty people stood up. A hundred. [Well, it was the Giants, after all. We never lacked for fans of the Catholic faith.] I thought they were going to give you the last rites."
It turned out that a guard had suffered a heart attack and died.
Things got really interesting back in the trainers' room. The guard's body was covered up. Then they wheeled me in.
"I'm taking off my shoulder pads," Sam remembers, "and here come the trainers rolling a body on a gurney covered by a white sheet. Mo was undressing right next to me. 'Uh-oh,' I said to Mo.
'He's dead.' " (I'm not sure Sam would have been all that displeased, either.) Even Sheppard felt he had to show up, after making his announcement: "I thought, Well, I'll go in and look at Frank Gifford's remains."
I've never really had a chance to make my case about that play, and if I did, I might have taken Chuck off the banquet circuit. He needed the money. I've kidded him about it. He's even kind of a friend of mine. But his whole attitude just turned me off. No one did that back then. The shame is that Chuck is more remembered for making that play than for being the truly great player he was.
Many years later, I had been having trouble with my arms things tingling. I went into Dr. Russell Warren's Hospital for Special Surgery. Russell had actually tried to make the team, in 1962.
He was a good football player. Instead, he went on to found a great hospital. I had an MRI on my head and neck, and the technician asked me, "Were you ever in a car accident? Your neck looks like a typical car accident injury. A fracture of a couple of vertebrae" the Bednarik hit. That's how I know it wasn't even actually a head concussion, but probably a spinal concussion. Today, the back of my neck looks like a bad road map. Dr. Frank Camissa did a hell of a job-cleaned it all out-allowing the spinal cord to move back from the calcification that had taken place in the front of my neck.
I was fine after six weeks. Well, almost.
Contrary to popular thinking, the concussion wasn't the only factor in my temporary retirement. By then, my broadcasting career was taking off, and I was getting tired of everything but the games themselves: the practices, the travel, the time away from home. As always, I had a future to look toward, and a family to look after. But I was healthy enough to practice with the team as a visiting newsman that year, and I not only found that I still had the moves and speed, but I also found I missed the game.
In training camp of my comeback year of 1962, I was in for a rude awakening: Allie put me on the bench. I was a backup flanker, not the kingpin
I had always been. I was sitting on the bench during an exhibition game against the Eagles in Princeton, thinking, I'm not going to make it this time. The Giants had picked up Aaron Thomas, a big, fast receiver out of Oregon State, and now I began to think again about quitting for good. I was too proud to talk about it to anyone-I couldn't tell my wife or my teammates. So I sought the advice of one of the wiser sports philosophers of our time: I went to see Toots.
Toots used to say that bartenders were psychologists, and in this case, he was right. As I sat in his apartment that night at his bar, of course-I said, "I can't take this anymore. I don't think this guy wants me. I don't know what to do." It was well into the night. Toots was drinking at least his third brandy, and by now he felt like he could take my place on the Giants. He said to me, "You never quit on anything in your life. No one wants to be around a quitter."
By midnight, I was ready to whip the world. I stayed on the team, and I had a good season: 39 receptions, 7 touchdowns. In fact, I made the Pro Bowl again, in 1963, at my third position. So I couldn't have lost too many brain cells at Bednarik's hands. I probably lost a whole lot more at Toots's.
Sam stayed in a Giant uniform a few more years, then fell victim to Allie Sherman's bloodletting of the old roster. In the space of two years, Allie traded away-or chased away-the heart of our defense: first Cliff, then Rosie, then Mo, and finally Sam. Allie wanted to put his own stamp on the team-especially the defense, maybe because he'd always been an offensive coordinator.
On paper, Allie had some success: he took the Eastern Division title in '61, '62, and '63, but lost all three championship games-the first one big-time, 37-0, in Green Bay, to an angry and motivated Vince Lombardi. As the old song goes, breaking up was hard to do for that defense. "I'll never forget when Sam found out he'd been traded," Mo says now. "He was visiting me in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and we were at my place-Mo and Junior's Cocktail Lounge and Restaurant. We're sitting around, the phone rings. It's for Sam. He goes white in the face. 'I've been traded to the Redskins,' he says. A month later, I get a call at the restaurant, and it's the same thing: 'We just traded you to Cleveland.' After that, Sam used to say to players, 'Stay the hell out of Mo's restaurant, or you'll your ass traded.'
"The Giants are where my heart has always been," Mo says.
"I wish someone had this picture of a moment I'll never forget, a moment that says it all about the Giants: I'm playing with the Browns, against the Redskins, and Sam and I are walking off the field together, and both of us are looking up at the scoreboard to see how the Giants did that day. Not because we wanted them to lose.
Because we wanted them to win."
The day dawned cloudless and hot. I checked out the field personally: The north end was scuffed, worn down to the bald dirt in huge patches. It would be tough to cut in spots. As the captains met at midfield, the temperature was high enough to be a factor for the big guys; in fact, Artie would take himself out for just about every other series. The paramedics stood off to the side of the field in white scrubs, next to their gurney, and their ambulance, in case one of us collapsed, I guess. They must have known about how intense our rivalry had been.
The crowd was so eager to see us play that day, they ringed the field, pressing right up around the sideline-several hundred of them, at least, at game time. They were Giant fans, for the most part, but a smattering of Colt followers stood in the crowd too, eager for another chance to see Unitas throw to Berry. Some wore T-shirts. Some didn't wear shirts at all. Some had probably just wandered over from a day of sunbathing in Central Park to watch the curious show: a dozen men of various sizes and shapes, well into middle age, assembled for a reunion game of touch football, summer of 1978-twenty years after the glory game.
For the Giants: Kyle, looking young and spry. Pat-graying, but slim. Alex, still with red hair, which might have even been real.
Charlie looked every bit the gentleman farmer/cigarette model: white hair, deep tan, a few more wrinkles to his wrinkles, accentuating those classic features. Rosey Brown wore a porkpie hat. Mo had gained a little weight and lost some hair. Ray Wietecha still looked like the muscular, athletic center he'd always been. Sam wasn't there. "I didn't play two-hand touch," he says now.
I was still in playing shape, but my hair had morphed into a strange seventies-style flop. We were all decked in slick new Giant jerseys made out of some synthetic material-a brighter, almost unnatural blue, much lighter than the old ones had been.
Wearing the Colt whites-gleaming jerseys that never got dirty that day-were all of their stars. Johnny was limping a little on those bad knees, but the smile on his face, framed by a shock of hair falling across his forehead, gave no hint of the tougher days to come for him. Raymond, of course, was slim, and seemingly hadn't aged a day.
Gino had grayed some, and a small pot spilled out over the top of his shorts. Artie didn't have a pot; he'd just widened by about ten sizes, in all directions, his midsection tapering up to that smiling crew cut (he kind of looked like a grinning artillery shell). Lenny Moore had an Afro, but that was the only weight he'd put on; he was in game shape. Parker was a little wider, Ameche a little grayer, and Myhra, one of the best athletes on their team two decades earlier, had gained some weight himself.
The referee was former quarterback Sonny Jurgensen. Calling the plays for CBS was an old friend, announcer and ex-player Tom Brookshier. It was all in fun, a game played for charity, and it's a good thing it was; this time, they didn't need an overtime to beat us. And we still couldn't cover Berry.
The beginning of the game took on the feel of an eerie flashback. After Lenny returned the kick past midfield (it was a 70-yard field), it took Johnny two passes to get them into the end zone; on the touchdown, I fell down trying to cover Lenny (and gained even more respect for the job Lindon had done on Lenny back in '58).
After Myhra kicked off-and, not surprisingly, flubbed a worm burner that bounced twenty yards-Berry picked off a Conerly pass, and Johnny hit Raymond with a bomb for another touchdown. A few minutes later, Johnny hit Ameche with a bullet-I swear, he hadn't thrown a pass that hard twenty years earlier-then hit Moore with another bomb. Within five minutes, it was 21-0, Colts. The Colts looked as if they hadn't lost a thing. They even ran the 428-the pitchout to Ameche, who actually threw a completion.
Sure enough, in the second half, history repeated itself: just as in '58, we rallied. Charlie's elbow was hurting him, so I replaced him at quarterback, in time to throw two completely illegal touchdown passes. On the first, Kyle ran out of bounds, behind the crowd, then came back onto the field to catch my bomb. On the second one, I ran five yards past the line of scrimmage before I threw to Kyle for a score. ("Notice how they cheated on both touchdowns," Sonny observed.)
From there, though, it was downhill for the graying Giants.
During the '59 preseason, I'd gotten a brief tryout at quarterback, until Vince called off the short-lived experiment, and on this day in 1978, I proved the wisdom of that decision: with a few minutes left, I threw into coverage-and Unitas, of all people, picked me off. If I was a little pissed off that I'd thrown a pick-the competitive fires never burn out-I got real joy from watching Johnny on that play, because it really was a sight to see. His knees were obviously hurting, but he wanted to run it in for a score.
He made a few cuts, went to the outside, and turned it on as much as those legs would allow him to. In the end zone, he grinned, looked around-and emphatically spiked the ball. It was the widest smile I'd ever seen on his face.
When CBS Sports Spectacular aired the games later, accompanied by a cheesy disco sound track, Pat and Sonny's postgame interviews from that day were interspliced with clips of the '58 game. The first clip they showed? Not a Unitas pass, or Ameche's plunge.
It was a replay of my first fumble.
Pat and Sonny asked us all to remember the '58 game, and our failing memories provided a few more highlights. Pressed by Jurgensen about the controversial decision to pass to Mutscheller,
Artie replied, "The only thing controversial is the Giants. They still think they're better than we are."
Johnny revealed, astoundingly, that he hadn't known what had happened on Ameche's blown option pass on fourth down until they'd gotten together for our touch game: "He just told me last night," Johnny said, laughing. "He didn't hear the 400 number."
Kyle, laughing and smiling, was typically self-effacing when Pat asked him about his performance in the '58 game, and his speed (or lack of it) on the 86-yard bomb/fumble that temporarily turned the game around. "The guy that tackled me [Andy Nelson] had time to rush Charlie, turn around, and catch up with me," Kyle said with that almost-sad smile.
My favorite moment of the postgame interviews came when Pat interviewed Charlie, who had remained characteristically sparing with his words. Pat asked his old teammate a long question about how the game had become so legendary: Why did Charlie think that might have been? Was it perhaps the overtime that contributed to the legend? The question took about half a minute.
Charlie thought for a second, squinted, and said four words: "Ah'm sure it did."
Pat was left with a silent microphone. End of interview.
Afterward, at the Tavern on the Green, the Giants, for once, declared themselves the winners: we outdrank the Colts hands down, while we traded stories. Mo told Johnny, laughingly, that the draw to Ameche on the overtime drive-the one that had trapped Mo right out of the play-was "a stupid call." Johnny smiled at him and asked: "How many yards did I get?"
It was a hell of a day: a sunstruck, carefree afternoon of touch football with old friends who'd put on a few pounds, and put together a few good memories. We were still in our forties and fifties, all of us still feeling immortal. None of us thought about the significance of the occasion, that this would be the last time so many of the stars of that game would ever assemble as one. None of us yet knew how the legend of our '58 game would grow as we grew even older. None of yet knew that, as the NFL continued to grow, fans would seem to want to reach back to that December day for something that was, indefinably, disappearing.
The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever Page 23