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

by Mark Bowden

  When he emerged from the stall he ran into Tex Maule, a writer from Sports Illustrated, and told him, simply, “It’s the greatest thing that ever happened.” That’s how he felt.

  Out on the field, the visiting Baltimore fans were in a frenzy. News-Post writer John Steadman would describe the scene in his 1988 book about the game, The Greatest Football Game Ever Played:

  The noise factor from the applause may have broken the sound barrier. . . . The din . . . was charged with electricity and almost pleading personal involvement. The instant the overtime period ended, we climbed from the press box, game notes in hand, to make our way to the second deck of the stadium. . . . The field was being picked clean of grass. . . . They were tearing up the sod to take home as souvenirs. The goalposts had been dismantled and were being fought over . . . Don Bruchley, a radio/TV broadcaster from Baltimore . . . one not normally given to being caught up in the frenzy of the moment, was down there among the fans ripping apart the grass. . . . The Colts’ band, making jubilant music . . . went up and down the field, goal-line to goal-line.

  Steadman ran into Commissioner Bell, who was with his son and daughter and Art Rooney, the Steelers’ owner whose team had let Unitas get away. Bell pronounced it, “The greatest game I have ever seen! John, old boy, I never thought I would live to see sudden death.” Baltimore Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro, Jr., who had maneuvered to bring the Colts to his city and was pink-faced from the cold and the liquid cheer, was also making his way to the victorious locker room, as happy, Steadman wrote, “as a schoolboy.”

  In the New York locker room, the defeated Giants peeled off their gear in silence. Sweat-soaked player after sweat-soaked player saluted the performance of the Colts. “They deserve it,” said Dick Modzelewski. “They’re great and we have nothing to be ashamed of. That Unitas was just terrific with his passes. . . . We out-fought Baltimore, but they out-played us.” Howell politely defended his decision to punt in the fourth quarter over and over again. He would be defending it for the rest of his life. “I didn’t think it was a good gamble,” he explained. “Remember, we stopped them on the one-yard line in the third quarter by loading up the defense.” Then the next group of reporters would wander over, and ask the same question.

  Gifford wept. He told every reporter who asked that he thought he had made the first down in the fourth quarter. “The officials ruled otherwise, so what can you do?” Later, he claimed that the referee, Ron Gibbs, had come up to him after the game and admitted that they had blown the call.

  The gloom in their locker room stood in sharp contrast to the gleeful noise down the hall. Chuck Thompson, the slender, balding man who had become the voice of the Colts on WBAL-TV, Baltimore’s NBC outlet, cornered Rosenbloom, who had an enormous grin.

  “I just can’t say enough about these kids,” he said. “They are the greatest.”

  “We are the best in the world!” shouted rookie cornerback Johnny Sample, to no one in particular. “We are the best in the whole universe!”

  It went on like this for as long as it took the reporters to gather the quotes they needed to file their stories, and for the players to shower and dress. Donovan stayed in New York as the team boarded a bus for the airport. He would spend the night with his family just a few blocks away, the toast of a family dinner populated mainly by disappointed Giants fans. Raymond also stayed behind, stopping on his way out to introduce himself and shake the hand of Commissioner Bell, who had tears in his eyes. The receiver rode back to his aunt’s house in Philadelphia on the train with his parents, just another slender young man in glasses. He was back in Baltimore on Monday morning, knocking on Weeb’s door, as usual to borrow game film.

  Ameche stayed in New York. There was no more- fitting symbol of the NFL’s arrival in prime time television than the appearance he made that night—for $750—on The Ed Sullivan Show. Dressed in a smart suit, Ameche did little more than awkwardly smile, wave, and shake Sullivan’s hand. America’s favorite impresario showed a film clip of Ameche crossing the goal line with the winning touchdown. The Colts had made the big time.

  John had turned down the show. He said he wanted to “go home with the guys.” He would come back to Manhattan a few days later to accept the Corvette offered by SPORT magazine to the MVP of the game, the one prematurely awarded to Conerly. John posed seated behind the wheel, leaning out the window, grinning and waving. Perian Conerly later complained, jokingly, “Mrs. Unitas is driving my car!” Not likely. Married with three children, John traded it promptly for a family-sized vehicle.

  He went right back to his suburban life in Baltimore, not fully realizing how much his life was going to change. Overnight “Johnny” Unitas was a household word, not just the most famous football player in America, but a cultural phenomenon. As one of his biographers, Lou Sahadi would write,

  Every high school and college quarterback wanted to be like Johnny Unitas. The barbershops put down their combs and scissors and began using electric haircutters to sculpt crew cuts. High-top shoes were a must for every kid who dreamed about being like him. If there was a cult hero in professional football, it was Unitas.

  The team rode the bus to LaGuardia Airport and flew home immediately. They landed just after seven o’clock that evening, where an estimated thirty-thousand ecstatic Baltimoreans were waiting at Friendship Airport. The players’ bus was mobbed on the way out. Firecrackers exploded. Fans climbed on the roof of the bus and struggled to keep their balance as the crowd rocked it back and forth. Children had to be lifted to safety. Women screamed. The roof of the bus buckled and players started looking for a way out. Police reinforcements arrived and tried with little effect to suppress the havoc as the crowd clambered up on the roofs of patrol cars. Beer bottles flew. The celebration finally broke up on its own after the bus driver took on the crowd, rolling forward defiantly into the crush and defying the people to get out of his way. Survival instinct prevailed, the masses parted, and the busload of frightened world champions escaped.

  Carroll Rosenbloom saw to it that his team got the biggest payday of their lives for the championship. Each man got a check from the league for $4,718, which, good to his preseason promise, was matched by the owner. The victory fund was $90,000 and it was split down the roster evenly. The National Brewing Company, which sponsored the Colts’ game broadcasts, kicked in another $25,000, and a check for the same amount came from an anonymous benefactor, thought to be Rosenbloom’s Florida real estate friend Lou Chesler. Steadman wrote, “Winning was a bonanza for the Colts, unlike anything that had ever happened to a professional football team.”

  The Giants each got a check for $3,111.

  The day after the game, Jim Lee Howell invited the local press, whose strike had just ended, to review the game film with the team’s coaches. In the Daily News, Joe Trimble wrote, “It was almost as exciting as the game itself. Couldn’t change the 23-17 ending, though.”

  The film showed, according to Trimble, that Gifford had not made a first down on the critical fourth-quarter play.

  The third-down play shows Gifford reaching the forty-three-yard line, plus maybe a few inches. He didn’t reach the forty-four, which was necessary for the first down. Howell stopped the action and reran it a couple of times, almost in the hope that Giff might get that needed distance. But each time the play ended, Frank was in the same place.

  In the New York Times, columnist Arthur Daley wrote:

  If this . . . wasn’t the most exciting football game ever played, it will do until an even more implausible cliff-hanger is performed. This was one for the book, an unforgettable episode crammed to the gunwales with dramatics and heroics.

  Daley defended both of Howell’s decisions to punt in the fourth quarter and again in overtime: “It would have been sheer idiocy for him to have done other than what he did.”

  Daley saved his highest tribute for Raymond:

  The astonishing thing about Berry is that his eyesight is so poor he wears thick glasses offstage. He can’t even read
the letter ‘E,’ the biggest letter on the chart. Hence he wears contact lenses on the gridiron. They have made him the best pass catcher in the league. ‘Berry is so blind,’ remarked the whimsical Jack Mara . . ., ‘that the only thing he can see is a football.’

  “The Best Football Game Ever Played,” as it was soon dubbed by Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated, vastly increased the profile of pro football and fattened the league’s paycheck. The game’s attraction helped spur the creation of the rival American Football League in 1960, and by mid-decade the three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC were competing to broadcast games. By the midsixties, they were paying a combined total of almost $50 million to the two leagues for the rights, an amount which kept escalating. Today it is well into the billions. Franchises grew unimaginably rich. When Norman Braman bought the Philadelphia Eagles in 1982 for $65 million, he was thought by many to have overpaid. He sold the franchise twelve years later for $185 million. In 2006, Forbes magazine estimated the same team’s worth at more than a billion. Bidding for players went sky-high. The AFL gave quarterback Joe Namath a $200,000 bonus to sign with the New York Jets, and paid him $427,000—just five years after John Unitas was paid $17,500 to lead the Colts to the championship.

  The Colts and Giants met again for the championship the following year, and the results didn’t change. Baltimore won convincingly, 31-16. Howell was fired after that season, but stayed on as director of player personnel for the Giants until he retired in 1981. At home in Arkansas he was elected to the state legislature. He died in 1995. Bert Bell collapsed and died of a heart attack in 1959, watching an Eagles game at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, where he had played in college and fallen so in love with the game.

  Vince Lombardi left New York after the 1958 season to take over the Green Bay Packers, and made such a mark in that place that soon few people other than old Giants fans even remembered he had once coached in his hometown. His Packers would crush the Giants in the 1961 championship, 37-0, the first of five he would win in Green Bay, along with the first two Super Bowls. Tom Landry left New York after the 1959 loss to take over an expansion franchise, the Dallas Cowboys. It took him a few years to build a talented roster from scratch, but he had the Cowboys in the championship game in 1966, and then kept them in firm contention for the next twenty years, taking them to five Super Bowls, and winning two. The great Giants team assembled by Wellington Mara collapsed in 1964, after Huff was traded to Washington.

  Frank Gifford remained a star with the Giants until he retired that year, after being elected to seven Pro Bowls. He never made it as a Hollywood star, but he did become very famous as an ABC television sportscaster, working for twenty-seven years in the booth for that network’s Monday Night Football broadcast. His teammate, kicker Pat Summerall, left the field for the booth in 1962, and became the most famous of American football voices. He is still working as a broadcaster, and few people who hear him remember that he was once the best field-goal kicker in football.

  The great Baltimore Colts team stayed great for most of the sixties, and then unraveled, as they all must. The memory of Coltsaphrenia is still cherished by older Baltimoreans, but the city’s love affair with its team came to a cruel end. Rosen-bloom swapped franchises in 1972 with the owner of the Los Angeles Rams, the infamous Robert Irsay, who packed up the Colts’ uniforms and gear in moving vans on a snowy night in 1984 and shipped it all to Indianapolis. He stole more than a football franchise from the city. He took a piece of its soul. Rosenbloom had drowned swimming in the ocean near his home in Florida five years earlier.

  The Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore in 1996 and became the Ravens, but nobody who grew up in the city during the golden era of Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry, of Gino Marchetti and Artie Donovan, roots for it without mixed feelings.

  Of the great New York players, Charley Conerly, Jim Patton, Phil King, Kyle Rote, Emlen Tunnell, and Rosey Brown are all deceased, as are Howell, Lombardi, and Landry. Rosey Grier was traded to Los Angeles, having grown out of his desire to play only close to home. He became part of the “Fearsome Foursome,” along with Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, and Lamar Lundy, one of the most famous defensive fronts in the history of the game. He retired in 1967 to his Christian ministry, and was working as a bodyguard for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy when the senator was assassinated in Los Angeles a year later. Grier helped pry the gun out of the hand of Kennedy’s murderer. I met him in the offices of the Milken Foundation in Santa Monica in the summer of 2007. Grier is the foundation’s community director. He says that when Landry began experimenting with the four-three defense, he didn’t trust it:

  We ran a play and I went away from the system. I made a sensational play, I really did. So Tom Landry said to me, he said, “You made a great play, but if you didn’t make that play, Harland Svare would have made the very same play,” because it was coming right to him. So next time, we ran that same play, and I could have got the guy. I let him go, and Harland Svare tore him up, and I knew then that I could trust the defense.

  He says he still remembers the shock of being shipped out of New York.

  To be traded is a heartbreaker. Particularly when you feel that you devoted your time and your energy to the team. I mean, you put your own interests aside for the good of the team. If there was grumbling on the team, I went to the grumblers and said, “Don’t mess the team up.” I was always speaking out for the team. It’s a concept that I carry into my life, in my real life, that we’re all part of a team and we all have contributions to make, and so I have great love for these guys. In fact, I used to say we love one another . . . they say it all the time now. I mean, guys were funny back then about what they said concerning their relationship with men; and to me, it was just words of unity, words of saying we’re together, you know, like family.

  Sam Huff still feels the pain of his trade. It was one of the most bitter disappointments of his life, and even though he went on to a stellar career with the Washington Redskins, for whom he still does radio commentary, Huff gets hot describing what he sees as a betrayal.

  My last game with the New York Giants was in Chicago in the World Championship Game, which is now the Super Bowl, and we lost 14-10. And our offense turned the ball over to the Chicago Bears seven times, and they only scored fourteen points on two quarterback sneaks. And who gets traded? Me, Dick Modzelewski, Erich Barnes, and five guys off the defensive unit. . . . The old saying is you gotta trade a guy when he has a year or two left, to get a younger ballplayer. Oh, it was a great run, great players, and guys that are still friends today, great ownership. I mean, Wellington Mara and the Mara family were just great. When they started trading people away, dismantling the team, I go talk to Wellington Mara. I said, “What are you doing?” Because I work in New York, JP Stevens. So I go talk to him. I said, “I don’t understand, you know, what’s going on with this club? You’re getting rid of everybody, and you traded Rosey Grier last year . . . and now you got rid of Modzelewski.” He said, “Yeah, we did do that.” I was real happy playing with the Giants. That’s the only team I ever played for, only team I ever wanted to play for. I told Wellington, “I don’t want to be traded.” He said, “You don’t ever have to worry. You’re part of the family.” Good enough for me. I go back to work.

  A few days later I’m out in Cleveland, Ohio, making calls for JP Stevens. I’m at Modzelewski’s restaurant. He had a restaurant. And I get a call from my wife, “Sam, bad news for you.” I said, “What’s the bad news?” “Allie Sherman [the Giants’ head coach] just called me. You’ve been traded to the Washington Redskins.” I said, “He can’t trade me. Wellington Mara told me I’d never be traded. I was part of the family.” She said, “Allie said you ought to be happy because he got two ballplayers for you, Dick James and Andy Stynchula.” I said, “I ain’t happy; I ain’t happy.” I came home the next day, the next night. I lived in Flushing, New York. There was cars all around the neighborhood. Media parked everywhere. When they traded me, it went over the Wall Street ticker tap
e. I was traded; it stopped Wall Street. It was unbelievable what took place. I mean, I was really shook up about it.

  So the next day I go to work, Forty-first and Broadway at JP Stevens. I get a call from Wellington. He said, “I think we need to talk.” Wellington Mara, probably the most honest man I’ve ever known. I said, “Well, yeah, I think you have some explaining to do.” He said, “I’ll meet you at the New York Athletic Club. We’ll have lunch.”

  I meet him there. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He looked out over Central Park. He said, “What can I say?” I said, “What can you say? You goddamn lied to me. That’s what you can say. You told me I’d never be traded; I was part of the family.” He said, “I know, but you know that’s just part of the game.” I said, “Part of the game? Wellington, you’re a goddamn liar.”

  Huff has partly forgiven Wellington Mara, who died in 2005, but will never forgive Sherman.

  “He destroyed the whole team, and Wellington let him do it.”

  I visited Gino Marchetti in 2007 at his home in a gated development outside Philadelphia, where we sat in a small den filled with memorabilia from his playing days. He is still big, tall, strong, and active, although he moves a little slowly and gingerly. The shock of black hair that used to fall across his forehead is thin and gray now. He has raised his children and become a grandfather, helped steer a hugely successful hamburger franchise that was sold for millions, and has enjoyed years of active retirement. As he eases into his big chair he seems immediately overcome with mirth and pleasure summoning those old football characters and those times. I had not yet asked a question when the first cheerful anecdote spilled out.