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

by Mark Bowden

  “Leave me alone, goddamnit!” Huff would growl.

  He had gone into the game knowing that Brown would carry the ball on probably half of Cleveland’s offensive plays. The middle linebacker had to watch the Browns’ center, Art Hunter, and the guards to either side of him, Jim Ray Smith and Chuck Noll. Behind the center was quarterback Milt Plum, and behind him, Brown. In one of the game’s first plays, Huff could tell a run was coming by the way Hunter positioned himself over the ball. He had his weight forward. Huff knew that the offensive line would take on each of the Giants’ four linemen—Robustelli, Dick Modzelewski, Grier, and Jim Katcavage—which would leave him free to hit the runner head-on. Except on this play Cleveland pulled a stunt. The linemen all blocked down to their right, ignoring Katcavage, the man at the end of the line, who was busy rushing into the backfield and too far from the hole to stop the play. This left Noll free to hit Huff. Brown had breezed through the opening and sprinted sixty-five yards for a touchdown.

  But Huff saw what they had done. Cleveland coach Paul Brown had clearly designed the play to thwart Landry’s new four-three system. What he hadn’t counted on was that a player might recognize the stunt and design a countermove on the spot. On the sideline Huff told Katcavage, “If you see the tackle blocking down, don’t charge in [as he had done on the touchdown play].” Instead, he told Katcavage to just drift down the line laterally, plugging the hole. The strategy effectively bottled up Jim Brown for the rest of the game.

  When they met again the next Sunday, a frozen afternoon, Huff played the game of his life. He would later explain that he and Landry and his teammates, playing the Browns for the third time that season, had simply figured them out. They knew exactly what Cleveland was going to do on every play. They shut out Paul Brown, and held his superstar to just eight yards on thirteen carries. They won 10-0.

  It was time to play the Colts.

  Alan Ameche tackled by Sam Huff (70) and Jim Patton (20). (Courtesy of Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated)

  Gino Marchetti (89, white) bats down the first attempted pass by Giants quarterback Don Heinrich (11). (Courtesy of Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated)

  Frank Gifford (16, blue) catches a lateral as Colts Gene ‘Big Daddy’ Lipscomb (76, white) makes chase. (Courtesy of Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated)

  Ameche crosses the line for a second-quarter touchdown. (Courtesy of Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated)

  6

  Fumble-itis

  The Colts flew to New York on Saturday morning, December 27, landed at LaGuardia Airport and boarded a bus that took them across the Triborough Bridge into the Bronx, and then uptown to 161st Street and the Concourse Plaza Hotel. Much to the amusement of his teammates, Raymond wore a blackout mask on the plane and bus to shut out the card games and foolery that always accompanied team travel. He carried an overnight bag and his personal scale, which he used to take daily measure of his weight. He had determined that 186 pounds was his ideal playing weight, and he monitored it scrupulously. Over the season he had dropped down to almost 175, so he was concerned, and had been trying to bulk up through relatively light practices in the previous two weeks. Weeb had put them through their usual steps the week before, easy workouts, some film study, walk-throughs at Memorial Stadium, but nothing strenuous. After six months of practice and twelve games there wasn’t must left to teach.

  The Concourse Plaza was a towering maroon-brick structure with a popular bar and restaurant on the ground floor. It sat at the southern end of a four-and-a-half-mile stretch of towering apartments, retail shops, groceries, and Art Deco office buildings on both sides of the wide Concourse Boulevard, which was marketed locally as “the Champs-Elysées of the Bronx.” Harry Truman campaigned there. It was a magnet for autograph-seekers, because not only did many of the city’s home-town heroes live there in season, the hotel also hosted visiting baseball and football teams. It was just a short walk from the hotel to Yankee Stadium, and as the Colts’ players strolled down for their afternoon workout that day, locals welcomed them in time-honored Gotham style.

  “You guys are gonna get killed!”

  “Yer gonna get the ball shoved up yer ass!”

  The Colts’ garrulous defensive tackle Artie Donovan had grown up in the Bronx and he enjoyed mixing it up with his old neighbors. He had a storied connection with New York sports. His grandfather, “Professor” Mike Donovan, had been the world middleweight boxing champion, and his father, Arthur Sr., was a famous boxing instructor at the New York Athletic Club and had officiated many fights in Madison Square Garden, including heavyweight champion Joe Louis’s bouts. The football-playing Donovan had attended Boston College after four years in the marines, and was now a beloved journeyman, a mainstay of the powerful Colts defense, and a big, lovable clown. His neighborhood was just a few blocks away, in Bedford Park, or as Catholics of that era would have said, in St. Angela’s parish. For him it was a holiday homecoming.

  A fireman shouted, “Hey, Donovan, I hope this team is better than the one you played for at St. Angela’s!”

  The lineman’s schoolboy team had lost most of its games. When he and his teammates walked back to the hotel later that afternoon, the same people who had heckled them invited them in for free sandwiches and beer.

  The team offered a big dinner spread of hamburgers and beer that night, but Donovan skipped it. He was used to his late-night binge before falling asleep, so instead of chowing down with his teammates he went over to his parents’ house. He came back in time to make the ten o’clock team curfew, carrying two pizzas, and sat up late with his roommate, Art Spinney, polishing them off and washing them down with beer before the television. They went to bed at eleven.

  Just before curfew, Gino Marchetti and Bill Pellington took a walk along the Concourse. As they stopped at a corner, a bus filled with raucous Baltimore fans pulled up to the stoplight.

  “Yeah, go Colts!” Marchetti shouted at them.

  Assuming two big men standing on a Bronx street corner were making fun of them, some of the fans on the bus hurled beer cans at them.

  “Yeah, you bums, we’ll get you tomorrow!” one shouted.

  Weeb liked to keep the team together on the road, so the night before a game it was his tradition to take breakfast orders from everyone. He wrote down the orders himself.

  “Anything you want,” he said. Many of the men wanted steak and eggs. Donovan, who was so nervous on the morning of games that he couldn’t eat anything heavy, ordered two bowls of consommé soup. Big Daddy Lipscomb ordered a root beer float. Breakfast wasn’t served until ten o’clock, because on Sunday morning the team’s Catholics, and there were many, including Unitas, Donovan, Sandusky, Mutscheller, and Marchetti, attended Mass at nearby St. Angela’s. Weeb wasn’t Catholic, but he went along. He had done so in a gesture of solidarity some years earlier, and the team had won, so he kept it as part of his game day routine, like wearing the same lucky brown suit. You looked for any edge you could find.

  Any edge. In the week before, the Colts had spied on the Giants’ practices from the roof of an apartment building outside the Yankee Stadium right centerfield wall. Bob Shaw, a former player who worked as an advance scout, attending the game of the team’s next opponent, had worried about getting caught and incurring the wrath of the NFL. Rosenbloom had promised him a job for life in one of his other companies if that happened. So Shaw just strolled into the chosen building’s lobby, took the elevator to the top, and then found a flight of stairs to the roof. He sat up there with binoculars, watching the Giants run through the assortment of plays they would employ against the Colts. He hadn’t seen anything new or radically different, which was welcome news to Weeb. Coaches lived in fear of teams inventing a new trick play, or suddenly unveiling a completely new approach. He couldn’t prove it, but Weeb was certain that the Giants had spied on his team, too.

  Mornings in the hotel on a game day were tedious. Nervous players watched the clock and wandered the halls and lobby. Walter Taylor, the Baltimore Eveni
ng Sun reporter, happened to be seated at a table in the coffee shop next to Huff, who lived in the hotel. Taylor tried a small joke, suggesting that there was still time for the linebacker to catch the morning train back to Morgantown.

  Huff was not amused.

  “I can always take the train for West Virginia,” he said, “I can’t always go out and win a world championship.”

  The Colts were showing their nerves, too, only a little more boisterously. John Steadman, a reporter for the Baltimore News-Post, observed the players reporting to a room on the sixth floor in groups of four to have their ankles and wrists taped. Donovan had showed up in his underwear and announced, “I’m going to get so rich today, here’s what I’m gonna do!” He put his thumb in a hole in his boxers and tore them off. Fatso twirled before them, naked from the waist down, and the room erupted in laughter.

  Lipscomb spent much of the morning singing loudly to himself. Lenny Moore and Jim Parker, the jazz enthusiasts, had chatted away about Moore’s new stereo player until it came time for Parker to be taped. He crossed the room and set his 272-pound bulk on the chair, only to have it give way. This prompted more gales of laughter. Buzz Nutter, the center, came in asking, jokingly, “Who won that play-off game last week, the Browns or the Giants?” He complained that in all Weeb’s efforts to prepare them, he had forgotten to tell them who they were playing.

  They took a bus for the short drive to the stadium at 12:30, just an hour and a half before game time. In the small visiting team locker room, seated on stools, Unitas, Spinney, and halfback Art DeCarlo gently tossed a football around. Off in his own world as usual, Ameche practiced some lines he had memorized from the Gettysburg Address. Rosenbloom walked around the room, stopping to chat with players one by one, wishing them well. His two sons, Danny and Steve, were at one end of the locker room helping the trainer chop ice. Steadman approached Don Shinnick, one of Baltimore’s linebackers, and asked him if he was ready.

  “Yes, I think we are,” he said. “You can feel it. This place is ready to explode.”

  Ever the showman, Donovan honored his own game-day ritual by vomiting loudly and theatrically in one of the bathroom stalls. His teammates were used to it. The sound echoed horribly through the locker room.

  To Raymond it sounded like a hippopotamus heaving a goat. He understood that the big lineman’s rowdy displays just masked his anxiety, but it annoyed him anyway. Different players had different ways of coping with tension. The receiver’s was to absorb himself in preparation.

  He was mightily prepared. He pored over and over the twenty-five pages of notes in his microscopic handwriting that he carried in a binder: insights he had gleaned from hours of solitary film study, plays that he wanted to try, reminders to himself about everything he needed to remember, from head fakes he had designed for specific routes to basics like remembering to watch the ball all the way into his hands. “WATCH YOUR FOOTING ON STARTS,” he had written in large block letters in the middle of one page. He had the careful planner’s habit of dividing each page into segments with perfectly straight lines. Under the heading “DURING RUNS,” he had written, “BASIC THREE,” which were:

  CK [check] FEET

  GET DOWNFIELD FAST

  BE BULLDOG ON YOUR BLOCK

  Below that, with stars penciled in alongside, referring to safety Jim Patton, who wore number twenty, and Karilivacz, who wore twenty-one, was written:

  * BE BEST COMPETITOR ON FIELD

  * KNOCK #20 & #21 ASS OFF

  *GO ST [straight] AT 21 TO SET UP 136 [a play]

  Under the heading “DURING SHORT YDG & GOAL LINE” he had written:

  * KNOW SNAP COUNT

  * DO YOUR JOB

  There were meticulously drawn plays on pages and pages divided into twelve neat squares, with arrows indicating every pattern he had ever run against the Giants and cornerback Carl Karilivacz, with tiny notes about outcomes. He knew at least some of this would remain in Karilivacz’s head, and he wanted his own thinking to be one level deeper—he wanted to anticipate the cornerback’s thought process. He had almost an entire page devoted to #84, Giants outside right linebacker, Harland Svare, one of Landry’s star pupils. Some of the notes were cryptic, others straightforward:

  When you squat to block 71 [tackle M.L. Brackett] he will grab you

  Will hold you on GL-6-1, short yardage, too, possibly

  He might play outside on OH from FR

  When standing up on special, get under him, step with out foot first, possible body block

  Will stay on your nose, then jump back when count starts

  Gets to outside fast!

  KNOCK HIS BUTT OFF EVERY CHANCE YOU GET

  Raymond often wondered whether such obsessive preparation really paid off in any concrete way. There were few games were he could point to a specific insight or trick that had made a big difference. It was just his way, part of an overall approach that worked for him. Long before the fans began to file in, Raymond was out on the field carefully inspecting the turf. He did it primarily to decide what kind of cleats to wear, but also to look for wet, loose, or frozen patches he might be able to exploit during the game. He had his regular cleats and his “mud” cleats, which had two extra-long spikes under the ball of each foot, on which he would pivot. If the turf was wet and soft, the mud cleats gave him advantage, but on a hard field the longer cleats hurt the soles of his feet and slowed him down. It was a tough call for this game because most of the field was dry, but there were a few wet spots. Raymond knew where to find them. There was a pattern to the way the grounds crew removed the tarp after a snowfall or rain. If they weren’t careful, the water tended to pool toward the center and then drain out the edges of the covering as they removed it, leaving wet spots on both sides of the field near the fifty-yard line. Sure enough, he found a big wet patch at midfield right in front of the Giants’ bench. He found another in the far southern corner of the field, which during the winter was almost always in shade. Raymond didn’t want to get caught at a critical moment in the game on one of these slippery spots, so he decided to wear his mud cleats. They would prove useful.

  Raymond’s parents were going to be at the game. It was rare for them to see him play any more, but Ray Berry’s high school season in Paris, Texas, was over so they had come east. Raymond had an aunt who lived in Philadelphia with her husband. The whole family was coming up on the train to see the big game.

  With them were thousands of Baltimore fans, so many that New York transit workers stood on the platforms at Penn Station shouting directions for how to get to the subway line that ran up to the Bronx.

  * * *

  Both teams took the field about a half hour before the game wearing their uniform pants but with no shoulder pads under their wool warm-up jackets, jogging back and forth and doing calisthenics as the first fans began to fill the seats. Teenage photographer Neil Leifer was at work wheeling in the disabled vets, setting them up behind the eastern end zone against what in baseball season was the left field wall.

  In the radio broadcast booth overhead, NBC announcer Joe Boland began introducing the game to millions of listeners all over the city and nation:

  —The weather conditions are almost ideal, surprisingly enough. We have sunny skies with a bit of a haze. The temperature is a pleasant forty-seven degrees. The wind very slight. The field surface is good, but in spots may be a bit loose because of the surprisingly mild weather, comparatively speaking, we’ve had in the last few days after the recent frigid spell. The frost is coming out of the ground in a few spots, and there are a few spots that are a bit moist. On the whole, I would say that the playing surface is as fine as you can possibly get in northern climes for a game this late in the year.

  As befits the title game in the fastest-growing league in the nation, two great teams will collide on this Yankee Stadium turf today. The New York Giants have had to fight two furious battles with the Cleveland Browns the last two Sundays to gain credentials to play today. . . . To give you a
n idea of the size of the mountain the Giants had to climb, they defeated the Browns three times this season, a performance that had never been accomplished over that talented group of Clevelanders. Baltimore, right on schedule on the other hand, for the five-year plan Coach Ewbank announced in 1954 when he took over, arrived at title status by winning the western conference race with a record of nine and three. The Colts got off to a fast start, winning six games before losing to these New York Giants, and then won three more to lock up the title with two weeks to go in the regular season. . . . So the heat was off them, while the Giants had to go into a pressure cooker for the last several weeks of the campaign to win. New York today shows the wear and tear of the eastern race, with a well-bruised team that has had to produce a pair of monumentally emotional efforts these last two Sundays. Baltimore is well-rested with everyone healthy and ready to go this afternoon.

  Boland introduced John Unitas as “The Cinderella Kid,” noting that he had now thrown a touchdown pass in twenty-five consecutive games, and pointed out that the Colts were a new team in their first-ever championship game. The Giants, he reminded, had been in the title game nine times, and had won it just two years ago. So while Baltimore fans were greatly outnumbered in the stands, they had arrived with a disproportionate share of enthusiasm.

  In the press box, the New York Herald Tribune’s Red Smith, was leveling his wry wit on the pregame festivities. He was one of the few New York sportswriters whose account, because of the strike, would be published around the country the next day.

  “From the start of the sunny afternoon,” Smith wrote, “the play ground had presented a spectacle rarely seen in this blasé town. Fog horns and sirens hooted and shrieked. Bands tootled and postured. Antlered ballet dancers in bright red union suits impersonated cottontail reindeer, a rare breed. Fillies of provocative design paraded wearing the letters COLTS across bosoms that pointedly contradicted the label.”