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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  None of us were really feeling time closing in on us yet. Most of us were in the middle of a new professional prime in the late seventies. Charlie was farming and running seven shoe stores down in Clarksdale. At that point, he still held all of the Giants' passing records; Phil Simms was still in his third year-enduring the Giants Stadium boos. Seven years later, Simms would hear the cheers, for a phenomenal Super Bowl performance. But I don't think he ever got a standing O in P.J.'s.

  Charlie became the most famous of all of Jack Landry's Marlboro Men, doing print and television ads well into the seventies.

  "When the TV ads ran, we got residuals," Perian says now. "It was like finding money in the street. We'd go on location to Mexico, all over the place. They were looking for a lean, lank macho type, and Charlie fit the bill.

  "The cowboy ones were good, but my favorite is the one where Charlie is wearing black tie and tails, leaning back in his chair."

  I myself never saw him in that particular uniform. After he sold the shoe stores, he and Perian did a lot of traveling, and enjoyed a daily golf game. He died in 1996, at the age of seventy-four. He's enshrined in the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. But he never did make it to Canton. "Charlie is the best football player who is not in the Hall of Fame," Wellington once told the New York Times, and I wholeheartedly agree.

  Pat was doing play-by-play for CBS, and, three years later, would pair up with John Madden for twenty-two years of some of the finest play-by-play and color work the medium ever saw. Alex Webster had succeeded Allie as the Giant head coach for four years, with limited success, and was replaced. But his two successors, Bill Arnsparger and John McVay, had even less success at the job than Alex. Red wasn't bitter about it. "Why complain-no one's going to listen anyhow" is Alex's philosophy now. He was just happy to be along for the ride, and his generosity of heart has always been an inspiration to all of us.

  Andy took over as the Giants' director of operations for six years, and would stay until 1979. Now you can find him at a table in his restaurant in his hometown of Stamford, graying, but obviously content with a life well lived. Ro never wanted anyone to think of him as anything special, and still doesn't.

  As for myself, in the summer of '78 I was in the eighth year of the Monday-night triumvirate with Howard Cosell and Don Meredith. Don remains a close friend, and he's the godfather of my son Cody.

  Maynard didn't make it north for the touch game. But Don did all right for himself after Jim Lee and Allie cut him following the 1959 training camp to keep a twenty-seventh-round draft pick named Joe Biscaha. After the season, Don called Landry in Dallas, but no one returned the call. (You can't help wondering how the early Cowboys' fate would have been different if they'd returned the future Hall of Famer's telephone call, can you? They could have had Don Maynard-for seventy-five cents.)

  Don heard that there was going to be a new league in 1960, and that New York would get a franchise. One of the charter owners of that team was my old friend and longtime sports broadcaster Harry Wismer, who had once owned part of the Washington Redskins. Don had heard that Wismer had hired Sammy Baugh (the legendary Hall of Fame quarterback who had led the Redskins to two NFL titles during a sixteen-year career that spanned the thirties, forties, and fifties) to coach. Maynard made the call.

  "I played against Sammy's teams three times in college, so I called him up and said, 'I want to play for you,' " Don told me. "I was the first New York Titan ever signed. This time, I was loose as a goose. I knew I was going to be around, so I demanded a no-cut contract." They gave it to him. The team labored in front of empty crowds in the Polo Grounds for a couple of years, but Don stuck in there. He became Namath's favorite receiver on the New York Jets.

  He now wears a Super Bowl ring. And his bust is in Canton, Ohio. Al Barry played two more years, his last in the new AFL for the Los Angeles Chargers, in front of crowds "of about six thousand."

  He was blocking for a quarterback named Jack Kemp. In 1961, Al became an insurance broker and financial planner in California. When he sent out his first solicitations for clients, in 1961, Kyle wrote back, "Who's going to lead the way for Gifford?" Al has a son named for Kyle.

  Harland Svare had two head-coaching stints, with the Rams and Chargers. Now he's in the health-supplement business out in Colorado. Dick Modzelewski enjoyed a twenty-two-year stint coaching defense for five different NFL teams, before retiring in 1990. After enduring three back operations, and having various other joints rebuilt, Mo is retired, still fun-loving and happy, and living near his children in Ohio.

  Cliff Livingston, our handsome, high-living bachelor, did pretty well for himself. He landed a dozen television commercials, and had a brief but very lucrative run as a contestant for several weeks on the quiz show Name That Tune. "The money dwarfed my professional football salary," Cliff told me from Las Vegas, his new hometown. "But, hell, that wasn't hard to dwarf." One of the commercials featured Cliff as a Marlboro Man, one of many-but hardly the most famous: "The main guy was Charlie; the rest of us just smoked around him."

  Don Chandler was traded to the Packers in 1965-where he picked up two Super Bowl rings with Vince Lombardi. When he retired from football, he returned to Tulsa and went into the construction business, building apartment and office buildings. He's enjoying the good life in Tulsa: the last time I talked to him, he'd just shot an 88 on the golf course-and won eight dollars.

  M. L. Brackett played three years in the NFL, then made a wise choice. He quit the game that had ended up giving him twenty-two scars, for a safer world: steel mills. "I just didn't feel that pro football was a place for a married man, what with the nightlife on the road and the bars at home," he told me. He became the supervisor of a steel mill in Alabama.

  Frank Youso played two more years with the Giants and then asked Wellington to trade him to the Vikings; he missed his home town of International Falls, Minnesota, where he still lives, five blocks from the house he grew up in.

  When Mel Triplett died in 2002, the Mississippi Legislature issued a special proclamation commemorating his life, his football exploits, and the glory and honor he'd brought to the state of Mississippi. For the record, it noted that Mel left fifty grandchildren.

  Like the man said, Mel really liked women.

  We lost Emlen Tunnell way too early. "He always talked about dying young," Grier says now. He did, in 1975, of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three.

  The Concourse Plaza Hotel is now the Concourse Plaza Senior Center, a redbrick home for the elderly, surrounded by the offices of bail bondsmen. But it still has the red awning-a little tired, but it's still there.

  Rosie Grier has taken a remarkable journey down what he calls "Life's Highway," ever since, in one of Allie Sherman's worst trades, in July of 1963, we sent him to the Rams for a lineman named John LoVetere and a high draft choice. Rosie's arrival in Los Angeles was a key piece of the puzzle for what became one of the greatest defensive lines in football history: the "Fearsome Foursome"-Grier, Deacon Jones, Lamar Lundy, and Merlin Olsen.

  Rosie went on to do some television acting, became an ordained minister, and wrote a couple of books-including Rosie Grier's Needlepoint for Men. He even did a little movie acting, although I don't think The Thing with Two Heads will go down in cinematic history. (But then, my Darby's Rangers didn't, either.)

  But history will always remember Rosie for his heroism on June 5, 1968. He was a bodyguard for the Kennedys on Bobby's fateful campaign. Rosie was onstage with the candidate for his last speech, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and used his quickness and strength to disarm Sirhan Sirhan-a few seconds too late. The memory lives on, etched in Rosie's mind, because of the random sequence of events that changed a nation's history far more significantly than a football game ever could have.

  "That particular night," he told me, "I was told to stay with Ethel. She was six months pregnant. When we went on the stage, we had cordoned off a space to the right-hand side to get him off stage. He was supposed to come back to
me. Unbeknownst to me, an assistant maître d' came up at the last second and told him there was a quicker way to the back, to the kitchen. So he jumped off the stage. Now we're helping Ethel off, and everyone is out of position.

  "The shots rang out, and Ethel jumped, and I covered her. I heard the screaming. I came up, came around the back of a refrigerator, stepped over two people, grappling with him, gun waving I went for his legs. George Plimpton, the writer, goes for the gun hand, and now people are starting to attack Sirhan Sirhan. I have his legs locked, and George couldn't get the gun away from him.

  So I grabbed his hand and stuck my finger behind the trigger, so he couldn't snap it on the firing pin, and I put the gun in my pocket.

  Now I'm fighting those people off. I said, 'There's been enough violence.' "

  Years later, Rosie and Jackie Onassis became good friends: "I'd call her up and play her records I thought she should hear. Aretha, Ray Charles." He'd come a long way from that electric guitar in Winooski.

  These days, Rosie serves as a community service director for the Milken Family Foundation, getting out into the Los Angeles community, speaking to schoolkids. He's still making a difference.

  I saw him just the other day. Like all of us, he isn't moving quite as quickly: "It's the knees. I can get down, but I can't get up. I was at a school talking to some kids the other day, kneeling on the floor, and as I got to get up, my left knee said, 'Unh-unh.' Man, I fell over.

  People were trying to help me up and we were all laughing. I said we can laugh about that, because in life a lot of times you can fall down, and be embarrassed; the key is getting up. I got up."

  Jack Kemp didn't make the touch football game, because I think he might have had more pressing business at the time: he was in the middle of an eighteen-year term as a congressman, representing a district in upstate New York, after he'd led the Bills to consecutive AFL titles in the mid-sixties. "I had eleven concussions in thirteen years," he told me. "There was nothing left to do other than run for Congress."

  In 1988 Jack mounted a presidential bid, losing out to George Bush, who appointed him secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In 1996 Jack was the vice presidential nominee on the Dole-Kemp ticket. But whenever I talk to him now, it's always about football.

  "I revere my time in the NFL of the fifties," Jack told me.

  "It really was a golden age. I felt I was a part of one of the greatest enterprises ever undertaken. It's a great memory. It was a life that I wouldn't have traded for anything. Today I've got seventeen grandchildren, ten grandsons, and five of them play football, from Pop Warner to high school. In fact, I wrote a poem for my family: 'Family, faith, football, and freedom are the values of the Kemp family; nothing can beat 'em.' "

  The Colts had their own emissary to Capitol Hill: Ray Brown, the defensive back who was earning his law degree as a player, ended up clerking for the Supreme Court justice Tom Clark, who'd earlier been Harry Truman's attorney general. Ray is still practicing law down in Mississippi, litigating for the railroads. Milt Davis, the professor, finally got his PhD, after thirty-three years. When I finally tracked Milt down, he was farming in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

  Leo Sanford, the linebacker, bought a new house with the winners' share, and got into the class-ring and graduation-supply business. Jackie Simpson, the safety who fumbled that punt, played another year in Baltimore, then up in Montreal for a while, then opened up a bar, and eventually retired to Pensacola, Florida. Jackie still has his two rings: "Some people took a sterling silver dining set for the '59 win," he says. "I took the second ring. It was a good decision. I got a divorce, and she would have gotten the silver."

  Fuzzy Thurston, of course, moved on to Green Bay. Fuzzy told me he was a day late in reporting to his first Packer training camp. "Lombardi asked me, 'Who the hell are you?' 'I'm Fuzzy Thurston.'

  'You were due yesterday. Don't let it happen again.' "

  The rest of that story is history. Fuzzy earned enough championship rings with the Packers-five-to open up his own ring supply business.

  The Giants of 1958, by the way, each got a commemorative tie clip.

  Fast food was very, very good to Gino Marchetti and Alan Ameche. Four years after the touch game, they'd sell their restaurant business to Marriott. It's now known as Roy Rogers. "I wish I'd bought some of that stock," Andy Nelson says. But things worked

  out pretty well for Andy, too: drawing on his barbecuing heritage, learned at the knee of his dad in Alabama and nurtured in his years playing for Memphis State, Andy opened his own barbecue place outside of Baltimore, Andy Nelson's Barbecue. It's now a local legend, thanks to Andy's culinary motto: "Slow cooking, hickory wood, serve no pork before its time."

  Artie, having given up his hope of pounding the sidewalks as a Bronx cop, happily became a Baltimorean. He runs a country club in the suburbs of Baltimore, still receiving visitors and reporters in the kitchen. Artie has become nothing less than the comic Homer of that game, that team, that time. He would later write a book that was as hilarious on the page as Artie is in person.

  A few months after the touch game, Raymond Berry joined Landry's staff with the Cowboys, as a receiver coach. "I didn't care about coaching-I didn't want to get fired every three or four years-but Tom talked me into it," Ray told me from his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

  In 1984, Raymond got the head-coaching job at New Eng- land, and enjoyed tremendous success-with a little help, as Ernie Accorsi told me, from Unitas: "Berry called John when he got the job, and said, 'John, can you meet me at the Baltimore airport?'

  John drives to the airport. Berry's got a legal pad. He says, 'Tell me how you ran the two-minute drill in that game.' John says, 'You were there!' Ray says, "Yeah, but I wasn't paying attention to what you were doing.' "

  Raymond began paying attention. The Patriots played in the 1985 Super Bowl, losing out to Mike Ditka and Buddy Ryan's monstrous Bears, and our Monday Night Football team had some super games with Berry's Patriots.

  Lenny Moore has spent the last several decades giving back to the community that celebrated him on the football field; he works with Baltimore youth, for the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice.

  As time passed, the Colt watering holes moved on from Kusen's and Andy's; soon, Colts from every era were gathering at Johnny's place, the Golden Arm. "On Fridays, after the short practice,"

  Earl Morrall told me, "there was an unwritten rule: If we weren't home by five-thirty, the wives would come down and everyone would have dinner there. They knew where we were. The wives would all be there by six."

  Another local saloon drew the Colts as well: Bill Pellington's Iron Horse. And there's a story there. A haunting one. Like all small-town families, the Colts have suffered their share of setbacks and misfortunes, maybe more than anyone could have anticipated. But even in sadness, they have found a way to come together, as the epilogue of Pellington's life illustrates so well.

  Bill died of complications related to Alzheimer's. The disease began showing its effects in 1988.

  "My dad would talk about you all the time-he always had a lot of respect for you," his son, Mark Pellington, told me. When I reached him he'd just been looking at a photograph of his dad tackling me in the '58 game. But Mark's favorite photograph depicts his old man going face-to-face with a referee: "He's like a lion, up in the guy's face with his helmet off, laying every f-bomb in the world on the guy. I love that photo. It says to me, 'Don't be an asshole, but fight for what you believe in. Be strong.' "

  With his winner's share from our game, Bill Pellington built a cottage on the Jersey Shore. Back home, in Maryland, he opened the restaurant, in a shopping center in Lutherville-the archetypal ex-athlete's sports bar: steaks, chops, seafood. It was so dark when you walked in, Mark told me, it took your eyes a minute to adjust before it all came into focus: the painting of Pellington at the entrance, the photographs of the games, the red leather booths, the curved bar: "not the alcoholic's ultrastraight bar-the curved o
ne where you could talk to people," Mark said, and I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  Mark played football too, in high school, but he blew out a knee, and became a filmmaker instead. He's directed and produced feature films, television shows, and music videos with the likes of Springsteen and Pearl Jam. But his proudest filmmaking accomplishment garnered little publicity. He called the poignant documentary he made about his father's decline into Alzheimer's Father's Daze. The film was first screened at the Senator Theatre in Baltimore in 1993, at a benefit for Alzheimer's research. They

  were all there-Johnny, Gino, Parker, Mutscheller, Berry. The film's remarkable, heart-wrenching imagery makes it almost too difficult to watch, as it shifts from scenes of Pellington at his maniacal best on the field to sad scenes of Bill near the end, unable to speak, able only to intertwine his fingers with his son's and look out at him from the prison of his sickness.

  "My dad commanded respect," Mark told me. "When I hear all these crazy stories about him . . . I didn't really see that. I knew he was a tough sonofabitch. He was very stoic, a good sense of humor. Very tough, but he had a funny side. He was a good dad, When you really fucked up, he never laid into you-when you did something stupid, maybe, but when you really fucked up, he knew you felt bad. He led by example."

  On the night of the screening, Mark told me, there wasn't a dry eye in the house-until, following the credits, another film came on the screen-the highlights of the 1958 game. And when that film was over, the Colt band marched down the aisles, playing the Colt fight song. People jumped to their feet.

  "You know that community," Mark told me, "and you know how they lament each loss."

  The disease's onset, Mark has been told, likely resulted from several factors, including drinking-and the tackling. Mark has no doubt that the football played a part.

  Nothing shocked the Colts, though, like the death of Big Daddy, on May 10, 1963.