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

by Mark Bowden

  White teammates were friendly and even supportive, but it depended on the circumstances. On the field, they were brothers. If a black player was taunted or hit with a cheap shot by an opposing player, the team’s white players would exact revenge, just as they did for each other—“Daddy, who we gotta kill?” asked defensive end Don Joyce in one game where Lipscomb got poked in the eye. That comaraderie sometimes was extended off the field. When Davis was refused admittance to a movie theater in Westminster in company with Alan Ameche during his first year with the team, the star white fullback complained to the theater manager, “Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave or are you some asshole?” He refused to enter the theater without Davis, who would never forget the gesture, and instead took the black player with him to his dorm room and introduced him to his collection of opera records. But there were limits to even Ameche’s colorblindness. The same Ameche, a few years later, would approach Parker, who had opened many holes for him on the offensive line, and apologetically ask him to leave his new restaurant in Reisterstown, where the offensive tackle had driven out to eat in a show of solidarity for his teammate. Ameche, ashamed and embarrassed, explained to his teammate that if a black man were seen eating in his establishment in that part of Baltimore it would kill his business.

  There was a kinship born of solidarity among the Colts’ black players. They kidded each other and played practical jokes. Lipscomb developed a cunning imitation of Parker, who was a ponderously thickset fellow with a massive brow. Big Daddy delighted in goading Parker to do silly things, and the offensive tackle had enough of a sense of humor about himself to oblige. He loved soda pop, and was challenged one day by Lipscomb to drink three at a time. He stuffed the tops of three open bottles in his mouth and drained them all at once, pouring soda down his throat and out the sides of his mouth. Lipscomb would collapse with gleeful giggles.

  The African American players gave each other nicknames. Parker was “Boulevard,” Moore’s “Spats” morphed into “Sput” in honor of the Russian satellite, which was too high and fast to be caught; Lyles was known as “LP Piles,” because of an unfortunate recurring gastrointestinal problem; Lipscomb was always just “Big Daddy.”

  Rosenbloom may have adhered to the policy limiting the number of black players on his team, but he was sympathetic and supportive of those he did sign. He obtained first-run movies and set up a private movie theater for his players so they wouldn’t have to deal with the racist cinema in Westminster. He personally lured Parker back to the team after the number-one pick quit training camp on his first day. When the enormous tackle showed up in Westminster, he found practice helmets, pads, socks, and sweats in a heap on the gymnasium floor. At Ohio State, the team had hired a tailor to custom make shoulder pads and a helmet for him because nothing in the normal size ranges fit. He had brought along the shoulder pads, but he couldn’t wear his Ohio State helmet for Colts practice. When he told Freddie Schubach, the equipment manager, he needed a special helmet, he was given a patronizing chuckle and a reminder that he may have been drafted, but he had not yet made the team.

  “You make the team and we’ll buy you one,” Schubach said. Meanwhile, Parker was invited to fish a helmet off the pile at the center of the gym like everyone else.

  He walked out to his car and drove back to Ohio.

  Three days later Rosenbloom called to ask what had happened. When Parker explained, the owner hired the same man who had made his college helmet to outfit him with several Colts ones.

  Weeb wanted to convert Parker into a pass blocker to guard John’s blind side, but pass blocking was something new to the offensive tackle. Ohio State was famous then for running the ball on almost every down. In his first scrimmage, Parker was matched against Marchetti, who was considered the best pass rusher in football. It was the kind of matchup—the top pick versus the star veteran—that drew a small crowd of players onto the practice field. On his first try, Parker stood too upright and Marchetti cut right underneath him, knocking him down for a clear path to the quarterback. Parker dusted himself off and endured the hoots of his new teammates. Advised now to stay lower, on the next play Parker crouched. The agile Marchetti simply hurdled him. Now Parker was embarrassed, and the crowd was taunting him. On the third try, he tried to strike a balance between being too high or too low, but was clearly thinking about it too much, because Marchetti just threw him aside. Parker got up stuttering, “Wwwwhat do I do now?”

  Donovan said, “If I was you, Jim, I’d just applaud.”

  Parker learned the ins and outs, and would become one of the best to ever play his position. But in the larger world he was still just a black man, albeit a big one. He and his black teammates endured such blatant racism in Westminster that Rosen-bloom offered to move the camp to someplace more enlightened—further north, maybe even Canada. The African Americans opted to stick it out where they were because it was close enough to Baltimore for them to go home several times a week.

  The owner didn’t just encourage his players to settle in Baltimore, in some cases he helped them with loans or even down payments on their homes. Most needed it. The highest-paid player was Ameche, whose $20,000 reflected his status as the first pick in the draft. Marchetti, a six-year veteran, was making $11,250. Buzz Nutter, the center, was making the least, just $6,500. Davis made $7,000, despite being named all-pro in the previous season. Moore was earning about $12,000. Raymond was particularly careful about his contracts, as he was about everything. He had contacted other pro receivers before signing his first one, and had asked for $10,000. Kellett agreed to pay him $8,500 and offered a bonus of $1,500, which Berry accepted. But when it came time to renew the contract, after the receiver had begun posting big numbers, he was startled to find Kellett ready to start negotiating from a base salary of $8,500, not $10,000. Raymond was one of the team’s stars at that point. John Unitas had started with a $7,000 salary and by the time he was the league’s MVP in 1957, he was making $12,500. His salary was up to $17,550 by 1958. Even the lowest of these paychecks was reasonably good pay, considering the American family’s average annual income that year was $5,087. The cost of a car was between $2,000 and $3,000, and a nice home in the suburbs could be had for $20,000.

  Despite their contract battles with the team’s tight-fisted management, the players adored the Colts’ fun-loving, free-spending owner. The Giants may have had more celebrity and glamour in their lives, and more chances to earn advertising and promotional dollars off the field, but the Colts had Rosenbloom. They called him “Rosey.” He looked after them like a rich uncle, and adored flamboyant gestures.

  At the beginning of every season he promised that he and his friends would start a special victory fund for the players, depositing $10,000 after every winning game. At the end of the season, the money was paid out evenly to the entire roster. Several days before Thanksgiving each year, he had gift baskets with turkeys, hams, fixings, and bottles of booze delivered to the locker room—there was always a rush on Raymond’s locker on those days, because he didn’t drink and would give away the bottles to whoever asked first. When L.G. Dupre complimented Rosenbloom on his suit one day, the owner, who was about the same size as the running back, had several delivered to the running back’s house. In addition to helping them buy houses, he cosigned loans for those trying to start businesses, and offered players chances to invest in real estate deals in Florida that he personally guaranteed—and that for many would prove quite lucrative.

  Just weeks before the championship game, when the Colts were in a San Francisco hotel readying for a game against the 49ers, Marchetti was cornered by Schubach, who told him, “Mr. Rosenbloom wants to see you.”

  Marchetti’s heart sank. What had he done? Were they trading him? Releasing him?

  He went up to the team owner’s suite, where Rosenbloom challenged him.

  “You dumb Okie, what are you gonna do with your life?”

  “What do you mean?” asked the defensive end.

&nb
sp; “I want to know what you’re gonna do with your life.”

  Marchetti was a happy man at thirty-one years old. He had survived two years as a grunt in Europe during the war, including the Battle of the Bulge. He felt lucky just to be alive. The Colts not only paid him to do what he enjoyed most, which was playing football, but more than he could make doing anything else. He lived in nearby Antioch, California, with his wife and three children in the off-season. He told Rosenbloom that he hadn’t given the future that much thought.

  “Listen,” said the team owner. “I want you to move to Baltimore. I want you to go into business and I’ll help you.”

  Rosenbloom talked to Mrs. Marchetti, who had driven from Antioch with the kids to watch Gino play that day. It wasn’t all altruism; the owner saw promising opportunities in the rising popularity of his players in Baltimore. His original idea was to help Marchetti invest in a bowling alley. Eventually, backed by the owner and some of his friends, Marchetti and Ameche would open a chain of fast-food restaurants in the Baltimore area modeled after the then-growing phenomenon of McDonald’s. The defensive end visited some of that booming chain’s outlets in the middle of the night, shining a flashlight through the windows to scrutinize the layout and the design. He and Ameche would make millions with a regional knockoff hamburger chain called Gino’s.

  There were chances like this for the industrious and lucky, but Baltimore’s players, on average, earned less than their New York counterparts. The prize money from the big game would more than equalize things. Each member of the winning team would receive $4,718.77, which Rosenbloom promised to match; altogether, this meant some of them could more than double their salary.

  “Coltsaphrenia” grew throughout the ’58 season as the team rolled over one opponent after the other. Baltimore lost two meaningless games on the West Coast at the end of the schedule, finishing with a record of nine and three, and arrived at the championship game healthy, rested, and ready. The Giants had an identical record, but their season had been a struggle from the first game to the last.

  Frank Gifford had opened the season with his usual public expressions of reluctance. He gave several interviews early in the year to local sportswriters suggesting that he might not be returning to play another year. He had taken some acting classes, had secured bit parts in two James Garner vehicles, Darby’s Rangers and Up Periscope, and had signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros.

  “I loved my pro football career, but the movies have a lot more longevity with any sort of luck and breaks,” Gifford told a UPI reporter in February. The best Jack Mara could come up with in response was to warn Gifford that he was contractually forbidden to take a role in a “football picture.” In a June profile of the “blithely audacious” halfback by Gay Talese, then a features writer at the New York Times, Gifford announced that he had decided on acting full-time. He was now twenty-seven years old, and had just returned to New York looking tan from a swimwear photo shoot in the Bahamas. In an interview at Toots Shor’s, Gifford said he was “through with football.” He had been engaged, he said, to play a recurring role in an upcoming TV series to be called Public Enemy.

  “I’m the hero,” he told Talese. “I catch ’em.”

  This came as news to Jack Mara, whom Talese reached on a golf course that day.

  “I saw Gifford this morning and at no time did he say that he was going to quit this year,” the team owner said. “The decision is still up in the air.”

  Gifford was backtracking before the day was out. He told Talese in a telephone interview from his hotel, “There is a remote chance I will play . . . but I don’t know whether Jim Howell (the Giants’ coach) will allow me to go to camp late. He’s running a ball club, not a TV station. He might frown on it, and I wouldn’t blame him.”

  Gifford may just have been playing the time-honored game of a veteran scheming to avoid some of training camp. He reported for work at the club’s distant training grounds in Salem one week late. Public Enemy never got beyond the pilot episode.

  The team dropped all five of its exhibition games that summer before opening against the Chicago Cardinals. They lost two of their starting offensive lineman to injuries in those games, but Mara alertly picked up Al Barry from Green Bay and Bob Mischak from Cleveland. Both lineman were just coming out of the service and had landed with teams that had a surplus of talent at their position. Mischak was from New Jersey and his wife had just given birth to twins, so he was delighted with the move. Barry had played with Gifford at USC, and was thrilled to be coming to a potential championship team. The Packers had lost nine of their twelve games in 1957, and would lose ten in 1958. Gifford picked up the new offensive guard and his wife, Phyllis, at the airport when they arrived in late September. Both Barry and Mischak were thrown right onto the field for the opener, which caused some predictable confusion.

  Lombardi used a system to number players and holes that was, in some respects, the opposite of what Barry had learned in Green Bay. Famous for pulling his guards, the coach sent in such a play early in the Cardinals game. It called for Barry, who weighed about 250 and was quick enough to play linebacker, to lead the running back. At the snap of the ball, Barry turned, pivoted, ran to his left, and was startled to find the field ahead completely open. For a fleeting moment he thought they had a touchdown for sure, until he heard a disheartened crack at the other side of the field. Gifford had run headlong into the Cardinals’ defense without a blocker. On the sidelines, Lombardi huddled with his players. “Let’s run this play over again,” he said, “but this time keep an eye on Barry.” They got something right, because Gifford went on to score three touchdowns on the way to a victory. The team’s bruising fullback, Alex Webster, bulled in from short yardage to score two more.

  They lost the following week, then won again, then lost again. Then they won three in a row, including victories over the eastern division—leading Browns and the victory over the Unitasless Colts. In that victory over the Colts, receiver Kyle Rote spent some time setting up Baltimore’s fleet cornerback Milt Davis, running a zigzag pass pattern where he cut toward the sidelines and then reversed direction, coming back across the middle of the field. After running it several times, the veteran receiver noticed that Davis was accustomed to it, following the outside zig halfheartedly, waiting for Rote to cut back inside. So as the Giants threatened in the third quarter, trailing 14-7, a quarter of the field away from the goal line, Rote saw his chance.

  “Okay, Charlie,” Rote told Conerly in the huddle. “I’ve got this guy all set up. Throw the ball in the corner of the end zone.”

  Rote’s catch over the off-balance Davis’s outstretched hands was cited by New York sportswriters as the game’s turning point. The Giants scored another touchdown in that quarter—a thirteen-yard end run by Gifford—but Baltimore tied the game in the fourth quarter. Summerall kicked a field goal with just under three minutes to play, giving New York the 24-21 lead that they held for the rest of the game, the one that had Donovan pelting them with stones.

  It was during halftime of that game, going over the problems the offense had faced in the first half, that Weeb asked, “Well, what do we do about Sam Huff?” The middle linebacker had been wreaking havoc along the Colts’ blocking front.

  There was a silence, and then the center, Buzz Nutter, suggested, “I think we should trade for him.”

  The win tied the Giants with the Browns for first place in their division. They lost the following week to Pittsburgh, but then went on a three-game winning streak that set up a final door-die game against the Browns on December fourteenth. A win would force a play-off game for the eastern division championship, a loss meant the Giants would go home. The Colts by now had wrapped up their division and were playing out meaningless games on the West Coast, resting their starting players for the championship game. New York played a thrilling game to save their season, before 63,192 fans in a snowstorm so heavy that Summerall never saw his amazing, forty-nine-yard winning field goal fall throu
gh the uprights. The kicker had hurt his leg the week before, and in warm-ups before the game was worried enough about it to tell his backup, Don Chandler, to be ready to take his place.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be able to kick,” he said.

  Beating Cleveland was about one thing: stopping its bruising fullback Jim Brown. With Huff assigned to dog Brown one on one, Cleveland had been held to just one touchdown and field goal, but with less than three minutes remaining, the Giants had managed only to hold their own. Summerall’s leg felt stronger as the game wore on, but he had missed twice already, including a thirty-one-yard field goal try just minutes before. Howell debated with himself before sending the kicker in to try from midfield. The coach would have liked to move his team in closer, but Conerly had just missed three passes in a row, including a long one that had slipped through Webster’s fingers at the goal line. It was fourth down. They might not get another chance.

  When Summerall showed up in the huddle, Conerly asked, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  It wasn’t encouraging. The snow was coming down so thick that the yard lines were all buried. Conerly took a knee and brushed the snow away from the spot on the field where he would hold the ball. Summerall reminded himself to keep his ankle locked. He felt like he had let it flop a little on the earlier misses. From that distance he was going to have to hit it hard.

  This time he remembered. The Giants won 13-10.

  The victory set up a one-game play-off for the following week. Holding the Browns to only ten points in that game had been quite an accomplishment, but Huff knew he could build on it. Jim Brown had been a nemesis for the linebacker ever since their college days, when West Virginia played Syracuse. The running back got under Huff’s skin, not just because he ran so hard it hurt when you hit him, but because he played nice. Huff worked himself into a fury to play football. He tried hard to hate his opponents for those rough sixty minutes. Brown would pop up after Huff knocked him down, pat him on the shoulder and tell him, “Nice tackle, Sam.”