The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL

by Mark Bowden

  Unless he got better fast, he was going to lose the thing that he loved most. So as his teammates went home to enjoy the long, relaxing off-season, Raymond went to work. Using his father’s sixteen-millimeter film projector, he set about breaking down and studying the position of wide receiver like no one ever had. The Colts provided him with all the game film he wanted. He asked for games that featured the best receivers in the NFL; Harlan Hill, Max McGee, and others, and slowed down the projector to dissect their moves. He began to develop his own repertory, naming each juke and fake after the players he admired. He picked the brains of collegiate wide receivers. From Howard Schnellenberger, a star tight end at the University of Kentucky who would go on to a long career as a football coach, he learned the double fake.

  “See, Raymond, the first fake is always in the direction that you eventually intend to go,” he explained. He practiced the zigzag moves in pantomime at Wise Field. Then he began experimenting with triple fakes.

  He also got himself in terrific shape. At the time, the prevailing notions about diet and fitness were decidedly unscientific. Players played and lived hard. Most of them smoked—cigarette advertising powered the radio and TV broadcasts of their games. In deference to the general notion that cigarettes detracted from a strict training regimen, they would hide the cigarettes when they appeared in public, or when there were cameras around, but it was typical for players to calm themselves down before games by smoking, or reach for a cigarette at half-time.

  The big men kept weight on by drinking and stuffing themselves. Some were prodigious overeaters. Art Donovan, whose weight would sometimes approach three hundred pounds, was particularly fond of fatty meats—hot dogs and bologna were his favorites—washed down with Schlitz beer. He worked late as a liquor salesman after practice and was in the habit of gorging himself just before going to bed every night. On the road, he would sit at the edge of his hotel bed, hours after the team dinner, with a pile of bologna sandwiches or hot dogs or hamburgers, wrap a towel around his shoulders, and stuff himself, washing it down with beer, and then flop over backward on the bed and fall asleep, snoring clamorously. Don Joyce, a big defensive end who had been a boxing champion—his nickname on the team was “Champ”—rarely slept. He ingested uppers, pills he got from long-haul truckers, that he bragged enabled him to stay up all night drinking beer, and that turned him into a demon on the field. Joyce would stop eating and drinking completely every Wednesday night, and starve himself for the team’s weekly weigh-in on Friday—players were fined ten dollars per pound for being over- or underweight. Joyce would camp in a sauna and have trainers throw buckets of cold water on him every fifteen minutes. Come Friday, he always made his 275 pound limit. He would treat himself to a feast immediately afterward. All of this was tolerated, even encouraged. Exercise was regarded with suspicion. Football players in the off-season were discouraged from engaging in any activity that might develop the “wrong” muscles. Running, swimming, and lifting weights were discouraged. The teams recommended instead golf, tennis, and handball. Many also designed regimens of calisthenics, but rare was the player with the mental discipline to stick with such rigorous and intensely boring routines.

  Raymond was one of those rare ones, but he was also inclined to ignore conventional wisdom. He was neither a smoker nor a drinker, and he watched his weight carefully. Motivated by what he would later call “absolute terror,” he started lifting and running. He set about remaking himself.

  Football coaches always talked about being in “game shape.” Players, they said, could do calisthenics all they wanted, but the only thing that could get you in shape to play football was to play. That’s why Raymond got out his stopwatch and began simulating entire games by himself. He began in March. The first few times he tried it, he was exhausted by the end of the first half. So he would work out hard for a full week and then try again. Gradually, his stamina improved. By early summer, he could play an entire game without feeling winded. He knew his athletic ability might not measure up to the men he would be competing against in July and August at Westminster, that was something he could not control. But he could make sure he was in better shape than anyone else. And when the grueling two-a-day drills started, his obsessive training methods paid off. Given their lackadaisical off-season programs, most of his teammates paid a heavy price in July. Getting in shape was training camp’s primary purpose. It was a dreaded ordeal of heat, soreness, vomiting, and exhaustion. It was not unusual for the big men to pass out. By getting himself into playing shape before camp, Raymond was going against the grain in 1956, and it paid amazing dividends. The workouts were a breeze. He had never felt anything like it.

  “Raymond, your shirt’s not even wet,” one of his teammates remarked after a morning workout.

  Despite his new strength and stamina, Berry was suffering a crisis in confidence. His fear of getting cut, knowing that the slightest mistake might undo all of his hard work, ate away at him. When he dropped a pass thrown to him in the team’s first preseason game, he found himself hoping that the quarterback would not throw him the ball, which was like a death wish for a wide receiver. He fought the fear of failure. It spurred him to work even harder, and practice longer.

  One of the things that Raymond had absorbed watching all that film in the off-season, was that the great receivers weren’t successful just because they had slick moves, elusive speed, and sure hands. All of them had what appeared to be an almost mystical connection with a quarterback. Green Bay’s Max McGee, for instance, would run a route that delivered him to an open spot on the field at the same moment the ball arrived, which meant that his quarterback had thrown the ball before he was actually open. Quarterback and receiver had their timing down so precisely that they knew not just where McGee was going, but how long it took him to get there. But who was going to work with Raymond like that? Quarterbacks on pro teams tended to be highly paid prima donnas. They were aloof, and often had more of a relationship with the coaches than their teammates. They were, in effect, coaches on the field, because at that time they called all the offensive plays, which meant their decisions determined who would carry the ball or catch it most often. Ambitious running backs and receivers vied for the attention of the quarterback. So how was a struggling wide receiver, unlikely to even make the team, going to cultivate that kind of relationship with George Shaw, one of the hottest young stars in the game? How would Raymond get him to listen to his new insights into the passing game, and into the importance of synchronicity between quarterback and receiver?

  He couldn’t. But there was a new quarterback at training camp that year, a skinny, bow-legged, slightly stoop-shouldered young man with abnormally long limbs, enormous hands, a blond flattop, a big crooked-toothed smile, and an utterly unflappable manner who had about as much of a chance of making the team as Raymond. He was a tough kid from a working-class ghetto in Pittsburgh whom the Colts had picked up from a semi-pro sandlot league after he was cut by the Pittsburgh Steelers. In Shaw, Baltimore already had the most promising young quarterback in the league, but they were trying out a few arms for the role of backup. This kid had cost them little more than the bus fare from western Pennsylvania.

  His name was John, but pretty soon the sportswriters would insist on calling him Johnny.

  Johnny Unitas in his rookie season, 1956. (Courtesy of Frank Gitschier)

  Paul Brown, 1947. (Courtesy of AP)

  Lenny Moore (Courtesy of the Baltimore Colts)

  Top right: Art Donovan Bottom right: Gene Lipscomb (Courtesy of the Baltimore Colts)

  Johnny Unitas, 1958 NFL Championship game. (Courtesy of Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated)

  Johnny Unitas, 1958. (Diamond Images/Getty Images)

  3

  Johnny U

  Raymond got his first look at the new arm when he reported to training camp in the summer of 1956. The dorms and gymnasium at the Westminster complex were high on a hill overlooking the practice field. The rookies had already been in camp for severa
l days when the veterans began to arrive but Raymond hardly felt like a veteran. He had made the team the year before because Weeb Ewbank had been desperate for a flanker, and he’d felt overmatched in every game. Now, with the receivers Weeb had signed in the off-season, Raymond felt like he was just one bad practice or preseason game away from a ticket home. He stood on the hill and watched wistfully as the rookies went through the end of their afternoon practice, wondering if he had arrived at the last stop of his football career.

  “That’s the free-agent quarterback,” one of his teammates said, pointing to the tall, slightly stoop-shouldered passer. “Unitas.”

  John Unitas had grown up in a Pittsburgh neighborhood called Mount Washington, in a yellow house that afforded a sweeping view of the smoggy downtown that looked north across the Monongahela River. It was a Catholic, working-class district. John’s father had run a coal delivery business until he died of pneumonia at age thirty-eight, leaving his wife, Helen, with four children. At the time, John was five, the third oldest. Before he was a teenager he had followed his older brother Leonard into the family business, shoveling coal after school—three tons would pay him one dollar and fifty cents. It was hard labor, working in clouds of coal dust, and men didn’t live long doing it. John’s great uncle was afflicted with “miner’s disease,” or black lung.

  That hard way of life was the well-worn path for men in the Unitas family, and when John didn’t exhibit any special affinity for school, it seemed all the more inevitable. But even with class work and jobs after school, boys in John’s neighborhood found time to play, and here he excelled. Sturdy and smart and gifted with a degree of natural coordination that belied his gangly frame, he stood out in all of the games. He had an intuitive feel for strategy, for being one step ahead of his opponent. Football is the sport that grabbed him most. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he had discovered a book in the school library about the legendary Notre Dame coach, Knute Rockne. John checked it out again and again. When a substitute teacher passed the time one day by asking the children one by one what they wanted to be when they grew up, the boy with the buck teeth and tangle of blond hair told her, “I’m going to play professional football.”

  At the time, it was an unusual ambition. Baseball was the national pastime, the fates of the major league teams each season were followed as faithfully as the rebounding stock market or the march of Hitler’s armies in Europe. The big stars of the game were paid huge salaries and were national celebrities and a boy ambitious for riches and glory would have looked there. Football was still primarily a college game, and it would have been more likely for a Pittsburgh boy like John to aspire to playing for one of the Big Ten schools in his part of the country—Purdue or Indiana—or perhaps Rockne’s Notre Dame, the favorite team of every Catholic schoolboy in America. Pro football had none of the luster of the college games.

  The pro game had been around for most of the twentieth century, with towns and cities in the Midwest fielding teams that drew small crowds of devoted local fans. The players were strictly part-timers, working men picking up a quick weekend paycheck—usually less than one hundred dollars—for knocking each other silly. In 1920 the country’s most famous all-around athlete, Jim Thorpe, who was near the end of his remarkable career as an Olympic champion, professional baseball, football, and basketball player, presided over a meeting in Canton, Ohio, where fourteen teams agreed to unite under the umbrella of the American Professional Football Association, which two years later was renamed the National Football League. In the years before the war, dozens of teams were formed and folded. Those that survived did so because they were owned by singularly devoted football men, whose love for the game was coupled with an unshakable conviction that it would one day rival pro baseball for the hearts and wallets of American sports fans. Most would live to see their vision rewarded. This core club of owners consisted of Chicago’s George Halas (the Bears) and Charley Bidwill (the Cardinals), Pittsburgh’s Art Rooney (his Pirates became the Steelers in 1940), Green Bay’s Earl “Curly” Lambeau (the Packers), New York’s Tim Mara (the Giants), Washington’s George Preston Marshall (the Redskins), and Philadelphia’s Bert Bell (the Eagles).

  “The tight band of owners fought like brothers,” wrote Michael MacCambridge in his comprehensive history of pro football, America’s Game, “but persevered in the face of several rival start-ups, the indifference of the American public, the condemnation of many in college football, and the failures of several of their partners. Those who remained were cautious, inherently suspicious of change, and not eager to test their horizons.”

  Pro players were regarded as roughnecks and mercenaries. The idea of playing for hire was still considered ignoble; college athletes, amateurs who played for the glory of their alma mater, were the authentic football heroes. Thorpe himself, the most famous athlete associated with the pro game, had been stripped of his Olympic medals because he had compromised the purity of his amateur status by playing a few games as a schoolboy for a minor league baseball team. Pro football was the haunt of brawlers, boozers, and big-time gamblers. In 1946, when John was turning thirteen and about to enter St. Justin’s High School, news stories broke about an attempt to fix the NFL Championship game between the Giants and the Chicago Bears. Giants running back Merle Hapes and quarterback Frank Filchock, members of the losing team, were suspected of taking bribes to throw the game. They were both suspended indefinitely. The new All-America Football Conference was challenging the struggling NFL, but the only teams in either league that were profitable were the championship ones. A grade-school boy with his heart set on making a living by playing pro football was motivated by only one thing, love of the game.

  John would go on to play quarterback for St. Justin’s, one of the smaller Catholic high schools in Pittsburgh. He was already so bow-legged that his run looked more like a scuttle, but he was fast, and he could throw the ball further and more accurately than anyone the Pittsburgh scholastic leagues had ever seen. The football seemed small in his oversized right hand, which gave him a big advantage. Most grown men needed both hands to keep the ball from flying out of their grasp prematurely if they tried to fake a toss in one direction and then throw in another, but even as a teen John could perform what looked like a real pass, holding on to the ball with one hand, which really sold the fake. He would send linebackers and defensive backs diving in one direction, then neatly pivot and throw it the other way. It was a little thing, but in the heat of the action, it was nearly always effective. John’s knowledge of the game grew and grew. Like all the players in those years, he played both offense and defense, and when he called plays—and his high school coach had John calling all of the plays—he seemed to know exactly what his opponents were thinking. St. Justin’s was overmatched against the bigger schools, but at the end of his senior year in 1951 when the All-Catholic team was picked, John Unitas was its first-string quarterback.

  As John was maturing into a college prospect, winning a scholarship to the University of Louisville, America was going through a growth spurt of its own. Millions of American men had returned home from World War II and marched straight into a period of unprecedented prosperity. There were jobs aplenty, bigger salaries, and more leisure time, which meant the average working man had more money to spend and more time to spend it on fun. Television was becoming a fixture in American living rooms, and there were new living rooms under construction everywhere. Suburbs were sprouting up around every major city. Couples who had delayed marriage and children until after the war got to work, triggering a baby boom. That and the new affluence would prompt sweeping social change in the coming decade and beyond. One part of this new America would be an explosion in the attraction of spectator sports. Games had long been popular, but they were about to start generating wealth beyond even the most ambitious imagination, particularly in football. There was a unique confluence of trends. A vast market was forming for pro games just as the technology was being perfected to package and deliver them to ev
ery home. And at the same time the game itself was evolving. It was getting better.

  The tangle of big men grappling around a line of scrimmage had long held a brute appeal, but as the game’s experimentation with the forward pass and free substitution progressed, football was growing more aesthetically interesting and complex. With the invention of the flanker position, the quarterback no longer just called a signal indicating who would be given the ball and which direction he would run; he now worked from a broader palette of possibilities. There were routes assigned to receivers and holes assigned to running backs, and depending on whether the ball was thrown or handed off, the players could be either decoys, blockers, or ball handlers. Blocking patterns differed on pass plays and running plays, and within those shifts clever coaches designed stunts to confuse defenders. On the other side of the ball, teams had to decide whether to defend against the pass by dividing the secondary into zones, or assigning defenders to stay with the flankers and runners, man to man. Should the linebackers hang back to watch the play develop? Drop back to help guard against the pass? Charge into the backfield after the quarterback? The added layer of alternatives altered the timing of plays—some routes took longer to run than others. Should the quarterback take a three-step or five-step drop? Should the tailback retreat to help protect the thrower? Plunge into the line, pretending he had just been handed the ball? Slip off a block and swing out into the flat to become a third receiver himself? The game was growing bewilderingly complex, and awaited its first master tactician. His name was Paul Brown.