When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  New York was crazy for these Giants, and Baltimore for its Colts. Was this the old rah-rah of college or something more in the spirit of the new and professional? Looking down from the press box, Red Smith, among the few New York writers facing a deadline, tapped out his impressions of the pregame stadium fanfare: “From the start of the sunny afternoon, the playground 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 that label.” Vincent stood in his usual place, down the far end of the sideline, admiring those same fillies. His dad was up near Jim Lee, play chart coded and ready. Marie was in the stands with Johnny Ryan and his wife, family friends who had given her and Susan a ride to the game. Susan had finally graduated from washroom towel duty and was seated by her mother. The Giants scored first on a Summerall field goal, but then Gifford fumbled twice in the second quarter. Ameche rode in from the two and Unitas hit Berry at the end of another long drive, and the Colts held a 14 to 3 lead by the half.

  Midway through the third quarter, the game looked nearly out of reach. Unitas had moved the Colts downfield again, first and goal inside the five, but this time the defense held, and when Livingston tackled Ameche on fourth down several yards short of the goal, the Giants offense at last awakened. One long, loopy play brought them back: Rote went deep, caught Conerly’s pass, raced toward the Colts goal, fumbled, and Webster, trailing amid a group of players, Colts and Giants alike, who seemed frozen for a second as they watched the ball bounce, finally picked up the loose ball and ran it all the way to the one—lucky improvisation, better than any trick play from Lombardi’s bible. Triplett scored from there, and the Giants were back. From the press box, Tex Maule watched with satisfaction as Conerly, his favorite old pro, led New York downfield again early in the fourth quarter, hitting Schnelker on two long passes, then finding Gifford in the flat at the Colts five, where he outmuscled an arm tackler and glided in for the go-ahead touchdown. Red Smith, looking around, noted that “blizzards of paper whirled through the darkening canyon of Yankee Stadium.”

  The score was 17 to 14 now, Giants ahead, clock running, defense holding, Lombardi’s offense fully engaged, getting the ball back, moving again. Two minutes, twenty-two seconds left. Third and a little more than three at the Giants forty-three. Sitting in his living room on Central Avenue, blood pressure rising, Harry’s listening to the endgame on WINS. Vincent is on the far end of the Giants bench, gazing up at the sea of noise, shreds of paper falling from the upper deck, hot dog wrappers swirling onto the field, his mother and sister in the stands, his father checking the play chart again next to Jim Lee. Colts think pass, their linebackers drop back, Conerly goes with Lombardi’s favorite, Gifford running for daylight, sweeping right, past the line of scrimmage and cutting upfield near the down marker. Gino Marchetti, the Colts’ terrifying pass-rushing end, is off balance when Gifford cuts, but leans back awkwardly and makes the tackle. On the Giants side, they think Frank’s got it, the first down that wins the game. But there is a distraction on the field. Big Daddy Lipscomb came to the play late and fell on his own man. Marchetti’s hurt, writhing. His parents, watching pro football on television for the first time like millions of others, see it in their living room. They never wanted Gino to play football, and now his ankle’s broken in the biggest game of his life and he’s carried off the field on a stretcher and laid out in the dressing room where he cannot even follow the rest of the game on the radio. The ref spots the ball, and Gifford looks on in disbelief—the man’s putting it back too far. I made that first down, Gifford would say, forever. But the official ruled otherwise, so what can you do? Inches short.

  Howell and Lombardi decided to punt, figuring they had a great punter in Don Chandler and an even better defense. “Later, the wisdom of this decision would be debated,” Red Smith wrote, “but it seemed wise then.” The Colts took over at their own fourteen and Smith described the meaning of the drive: “Two years ago, Baltimore’s Johnny Unitas was playing for six dollars a game on the Pittsburgh sandlots. Now he was throwing for the winners’ share of $372,310. With a minute and a half left, he passed to Spats Moore for a first down. One minute, five seconds remained when the Colts reached midfield.” The Giants front four knew Unitas was passing, but couldn’t reach him; Robustelli spent all day trying to get around big Jim Parker, with minimal success. All Unitas needed was three seconds, and he got it almost every time. He kept working his passes to Raymond Berry, the skinny Colts receiver with “weak eyes, one leg shorter than the other and peculiar tastes like a preference for laundering his own football pants,” as Smith described him. Borrowing a phrase that he had heard from another writer, his close friend W. C. Heinz, Smith called Berry an unprepossessing athlete who had but one incredible talent: he “catches passes … the way most of us catch the common cold.” Two Berry catches took the ball inside the twenty. The clock was down to seven seconds when big Steve Myhra lumbered out, head down, leg locked, and kicked a field goal.

  Tied at 17 at the end of regulation. The first tie ever in an NFL championship, and it was in New York, on national television, with America caught up in the twilight drama, and there was more. This was the first year of use for Rule 14, Article 1: “Under this system, the team scoring first during overtime play … shall be the winner of the game and the game is automatically ended upon any score.… When the regulation game ends in a tie, after a three-minute rest, a referee tosses a coin just as he does at the start of the game to determine which team is to receive. The visiting captain calls the toss.”

  Sudden death. Kyle Rote and Bill Svoboda met Unitas at midfield for the coin toss. Unitas, calling tails, lost the toss and the Giants received. Landry’s boys were relieved; three minutes was not sufficient rest for them. Their fatigue was not merely physical. Unitas had worn them down. But the offense could not hold the ball, and on fourth and one Howell and Lombardi chose to punt again, and there came Johnny U, trotting onto the field one more time in his odd slump-shouldered lope, at his own twenty. “The tremendous tension held the crowd in massing excitement,” wrote Maule. “But the Giants, the fine fervor of their rally gone, could not respond to this last challenge.” Sam Huff felt the pressure of an entire season as he stared across the line into the Colts backfield. As the middle linebacker, he was responsible for Ameche’s threat up the middle, wide slants by Moore or L. G. Dupre and short passes dumped into the center of the field. He did not know that Moore was being used only as a dangerous decoy now after suffering a brutal hit in the chest late in the first half. Huff found it almost impossible to outguess Unitas, and Ameche was such a running threat up the middle that he couldn’t commit too soon on the pass.

  Unitas sensed that he had the advantage, that the Giants were burdened with all the pressure. He made one calculated gamble after another, keeping New York off balance, leading his offensive unit with what Maule called “the cool sang-froid of a card-sharp.” On the key play of the drive, Little Mo charged through toward Unitas, finally eluding the pass-blocking wall that had stymied the front four so many times. But Unitas had suckered him in, deceived him, leaving a gaping hole on the left side, a free zone grown larger when Huff dropped off to cover Berry on what he expected to be a pass. And there was Ameche, galloping through the hole on the fullback trap. By the time Huff caught sight of him it was too late and The Horse had twenty-three yards. This happened on the far side of the field for young Vincent. All he saw was Ameche’s back, more paper falling and swirling, the whole stadium thumping, sideline fillies leaping, his dad yelling, and Tom Landry, the handsome stoic, showing nothing.

  When Ameche went down, finally, so did the broadcast. The exuberant crowd had knocked loose a power TV cable, and the sets went dark for the next two and a half minutes. During the blackout, the national television vie
wers in 10.8 million homes, the largest audience ever for an NFL game, missed a Unitas pass to Berry that took the ball down to the Giants eight, then a commercial, followed by a Dupre run stuffed for no gain. The sound and picture returned in time to catch Unitas arching the ball high over Livingston in the right flat, into the hands of tight end Jim Mutscheller, who was stopped at the one. No surprise what came next. “We all knew the next play was going to be a run, and that Ameche would be carrying, but it didn’t do much good,” Huff later recounted. Mutscheller blocked Livingston and Moore brushed Em Tunnell and no one even touched The Horse as he came through, and the Colts had won, 23 to 17. Thirteen plays of perfect offensive football, Lombardi watching helplessly from the sideline. Sudden death for his Giants. Gifford forlorn: two fumbles and the missed first down—he thought he had lost the game single-handedly, until Lombardi embraced him and said, “Frank, don’t feel bad. We wouldn’t have been here without you.”

  It was an uncommonly easy one-yard touchdown run, but one that immediately entered the realm of sports mythology. In that moment when Alan Ameche took the handoff from Unitas and churned across the goal line in the late December mist of Yankee Stadium, he ran pro football to a place in the American consciousness that it had never been before. The Colts’ early lead, the Giants’ comeback, Marchetti’s broken ankle, Giff’s bum-luck mark, the daring of Unitas, the hands of Berry, the speed and power of Lenny and The Horse, the cunning of Conerly and the grace of Gifford, the ferocity of Huff and Little Mo, the brilliance of Lombardi and Landry, the last-second field goal, the drive, the violence and sudden death, the rise of television, the cult of the professional—it all came together in what the headline over Tex Maule’s story called the best football game ever played.

  • •

  THE NEWSPAPER STRIKE ended the next morning, and in the first days of the final year of the fifties more of the old gave way to the new. Colonel Blaik retired at West Point after a final unbeaten season. Tim Mara, the old man of the Giants, died. Toots Shor sold his old three-story sports saloon on Manhattan’s West Side and began looking for a newer spot. And Vince Lombardi left the Giants, heading west to a place that he had once called god-forsaken, where at long last he could bust out of the category in which Sports Illustrated had placed him with its one-paragraph notice of his change of jobs. This might never have happened, a thousand flits of fate could have taken him somewhere else, yet his entire football life seemed to have readied him for this moment, when he could carry the mythology of the Four Horsemen and the Seven Blocks of Granite, the blood of the Izzos, the pragmatic discipline of the Jesuits, the faith of Saints, the order and clarity of Red Blaik, the no-substitute-for-victory philosophy of MacArthur, the professional cool of the Giants, the cult of the modern, with his leather satchel full of diagrams, his temper and fire and fearsome grin, his mauve and white Chevy and his struggling little family—take it all with him out to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he had his one best chance to become more than just a face in the crowd.

  11

  The Foreigner

  CHRISTMAS EVE 1958. Not yet half-past four in the afternoon, but already the drape of a long December night darkened the city: the old empty streets named for early American presidents, the widening yawn of the Fox River, the winter coal pile rising on the west bank, the northern firmament vaulted above the bay. Most of downtown had closed at noon, but lights flickered inside the two-story brick storefront office of the Green Bay Packers at the corner of Crooks and Washington. The staff was holding a party, a Yuletide football wake for the nicest guy who ever coached, Raymond “Scooter” McLean. Some of the men had ventured to a bar down the street and returned clinking bottles of gin and bourbon. One of the clerks brought in a phonograph and some big-band and polka records, and they cleared the furniture in the ticket office and had themselves a fine time dancing on the creaky soot-streaked floor. Verne Lewellen, the business manager, Tom Miller, the publicist, Art Daley, the Press-Gazette beat man, Ruth McKloskey and the other secretaries, all were there with Scooter and a few of his pals, brave and lonely souls in a town that had turned against them.

  McLean had resigned under pressure one week earlier, following a season-ending loss on the coast to the Los Angeles Rams. In his only year coaching the Packers, he had established a new standard of ineptitude, compiling the worst record in team history, 1-10-1, a mark that New York sportswriter Red Smith, who had grown up in Green Bay, later immortalized with the phrase: “The Packers underwhelmed ten opponents, overwhelmed one, and whelmed one.”

  Now Scooter was fleeing to Detroit, where he could be an anonymous assistant again under his old Chicago Bears roommate, George Wilson. Packers coaches seemed to be packing up with depressing regularity; still vivid in McKloskey’s memory was the sight one year earlier of her previous boss, the fired Lisle Blackbourn, trudging down the office stairs “with all his personal possessions, mumbling swear words all the way down.” Blackbourn had lasted four losing years, and Gene Ronzani four losing years before that, and between those two and McLean the Packers had lost seventy-two games during the 1950s while winning less than half that many. The team had become pro football’s provincial joke. College stars dreaded being drafted by the Packers. When veteran John Sandusky was traded from Cleveland to Green Bay during training camp in 1956, Bob Skoronski, the rookie tackle from Indiana University, greeted him with the words “John, welcome to the end of the earth.” Misbehaving players on the other eleven NFL teams were threatened with trades to “the salt mines of Siberia,” as Green Bay was known around the league. Commissioner Bert Bell was being pressured by big-city owners to fix the Packers or bounce them from the league. The long-running love affair between the people of Green Bay and its football team had also soured. The miracle that such a small town (population 62,888) could sustain a professional club was not enough; it had to win championships, as it had in the twenties, thirties and forties. Hang ’em high was now the prevailing attitude, best expressed by the effigy of Dominic Olejniczak (pronounced Oh-lah-KNEE-chick), president of the Packers board of directors, that swung from a lamppost outside the office a few nights before Scooter’s departure.

  Olejniczak had been president for only one year himself and was under scrutiny from all sides. He had arranged McLean’s forced resignation, but many fans were still not satisfied. Ole, as he was called around town, was short and bulky, a self-made man with a florid complexion, watery eyes and a soft gravelly voice. A onetime disciple of Bob La Follette and the Progressives, he had recently completed five terms as mayor, but public office was nothing compared to the stress he felt running the Packers. The unencumbered communal judgment went like this: if the Packers stank, Ole stank. Whether it was an earnest committee or a bloodthirsty cabal of conspirators depended on one’s perspective, but a group of men had been convening at the American Legion Sullivan-Wallen Post No. 11 for several months, secretly drafting plans for a massive reorganization of the Packers management. The legionnaires, with no real power to force the matter, nonetheless acted with a sense of entitlement, as did almost everyone in Green Bay when it came to the football team. The Packers were unique in professional sports as a publicly owned nonprofit corporation with 1,698 local shareholders, who had bought nondividend stock at $25 a share in 1949 when the team was on the brink of financial ruin. The largest share of stock was controlled by the legion post, to which all profits from the sale of the club would go in the improbable event that the team was put on the block. Around tables in the smoky legion hall, otherwise stoic men grumbled for Ole’s head.

  Although Olejniczak, like McLean, was a good-natured fellow, in that respect, he was not especially popular inside the Packers offices on the night of Scooter’s wake. The revelers took out the effigy of him that had been cut down from the lamppost and carried it around as a prop of ridicule for their Christmas Eve merriment. At one point a woman picked up the sheeted broomstick and danced a wild polka with it, shouting, “Now, Ole, you behave yourself!” Olejniczak was not th
e brightest figure in Green Bay; he was scorned by the social elite, who made him the butt of Polish jokes, embarrassed by his rough and bumbling ways, but he had the scrappy survival instincts of a real estate developer, and he knew one thing above all else about his future and that of the Packers. For either to survive, they could not afford another coach like Scooter McLean. Not even the players and sportswriters wanted another Scooter, and they genuinely liked the man. Some people claimed that McLean’s main problem was that he had been a Chicago Bear, as had Ronzani: how could a Bear coach the rival Packers? No more Bears! But McLean’s deeper failing was that he acted like one of the guys.

  Scooter chose to hang out with players, and sat down for poker games with them at training camp and on the road. He was carefree with the cards and his money, and usually lost. Owing money to players is not the best way for a coach to gain their respect. He thought Max McGee and Billy Howton were his gambling buddies, apparently unaware that they enjoyed playing with him because they “cleaned his clock all the time.” One night three of the Packers—Gary Knafelc, Tom Bettis and Johnny Symank—walked by McLean’s hotel room on their way to dinner on the eve of a road game in Washington and looked in on the scene, smoke curling toward the light above a card table, change jingling, bets going around, when the coach caught sight of them and told them to make sure they returned in time for bed check. They looked at each other in disbelief: “Imagine, Scooter telling us that!” Knafelc said later. “He was a great guy but he had no leadership qualities. He was not demanding. If you’ve been around ballplayers, you know they’ll take you to the hilt every time. They’ll drive you. They’ll get everything they can out of you. And we took Scooter in every way.”