by Rudy Dicks
“Of course,” Rev. Messenger replied. “It would be a great thing if you could beat the Giants in their own backyard.”
“No, not that,” Dial said. “I want to win this game just for Mr. Rooney’s sake. I’d give all the money I’ll make if we win just for the satisfaction of bringing it in for Mr. Rooney. That’s what I think of him. Sure, we want this game, but I’ll bet that deep in our hearts, none of us want it as bad as he does.”61
The Steelers were in trouble as soon as they stepped on the field for warm-ups. The turf that had been in such good condition two days earlier had changed overnight. “Yankee Stadium was an ice pond,” Clendon Thomas recalled. “It had low spots that had, literally, ice spots in them. Little ponds of ice. It was just atrocious. You couldn’t stand up. … We didn’t have the right shoes. We had left our ‘ice shoes’ in Pittsburgh. It’s like some epoxy on tennis shoes that will let you run on it. It was like 18 degrees. It was somewhere between dry ground and a slick spot, and, of course, those guys are smart. They’ll take you down to a slick spot and turn, and down you go.”62
The Giants had experience playing in frigid conditions. They’d lost the title game to the Packers the year before at Yankee Stadium amid “fierce” winds and a frozen field that Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor said made it “impossible” to cut back on runs. In the heated press box that day, it was still cold enough to freeze the manual typewriters. Despite the unsure footing, Taylor was one among many players who wore regular football cleats.63
The Steelers had adjusted to winter conditions before, too. For a mid-December game in Chicago in 1959, Bobby Layne wore black high-top basketball shoes, and Tom Tracy wore sneakers, too, as did some Bears players. The year before, on the eve of the season finale at home against the Cardinals, coach Frank “Pop” Ivy paid a visit to Pitt Stadium where the caretaker of the field, Leo “Horse” Czarnecki, had his crew “attack ice and snow bumps with a sweeper, picks and a blowtorch” to thaw out icy spots on the field. Ivy despaired that the Cards would never be able to stop Layne on that field, and he was right. Layne threw for a team record 409 yards in a 38–21 Steeler victory.64
In the battle for the Eastern crown, some Giants stuck to football cleats. Tittle wore his high-tops; Huff, a pair of Riddells; and Erich Barnes, a pair of Spot-Bilt cleats. Others, like Shofner, King, and Jerry Hillebrand, wore white sneakers. Gifford wore low-cut black ones.
“It had gotten cold real quick, and the field was very rough and frozen in spots,” Dick Haley said. “I can still remember we had fires built on the sidelines to try to keep warm. We didn’t have the equipment we should have had. We wore regular football shoes. It was very difficult to maintain your footing and to make quick cuts.”65
The day after the game, Fran Fogarty, the Steelers’ business manager, said the team had bought sixty pairs of sneakers in August and routinely brought them to away games. “We kept them in a big box on the sidelines, and anyone could change who wanted to do so,” Fogarty said.66
“There could have been,” Russell said, “but they weren’t offered to us.”67
The temperature an hour before the 2:05 p.m. kickoff was 29 degrees, and there were 25 mph gusts of wind, creating a wicked wind chill.68
The Giants kicked off before a capacity crowd of 63,240. On the first play from scrimmage, Theron Sapp fumbled after being hit by end Andy Robustelli, and safety Jim Patton recovered for the Giants on the 25. Michaels was struggling with his kicking, but it didn’t affect his defensive play. He dumped Tittle for a 6-yard loss on first down, and after an incompletion on third down, Chandler kicked a 34-yard field goal. It was an ominous start, but “This didn’t bother us,” Parker said later.69
Gary Ballman finally broke loose again, taking the kickoff on his 14 and racing 57 yards to the Giant 29. John Henry Johnson gained 6 yards over right guard, but Brown threw incomplete to Ballman on third-and-4. Michaels lined up for a 30-yard field goal attempt, the scenario Brown had imagined the night before while talking with Cordileone. The kick veered wide right.
Hanging onto the ball was bound to be a problem in the icy conditions. On the second play from scrimmage after Michaels’s miss, Morrison fumbled and Clendon Thomas recovered at the 33. Katcavage broke through on first down to sack Brown and dislodge the ball, but Mike Sandusky fell on it for a 5-yard loss. After Sapp regained the 5 yards, Brown connected with Ballman, streaking toward the end zone. He had only Dick Lynch to beat, but the ball squirted out from inside Ballman’s right elbow near the goal line and was recovered by Barnes in the end zone and returned to the 34. Ballman was a step away from a touchdown, it appeared, but the score would have been disallowed because of a holding call on the Steelers.
Still, the Steelers had squandered another opportunity. A holding call would have taken them out of field goal territory, but even if they had to punt, a good kick could have pinned New York inside the 10.
Instead, Tittle went to work. King gained 12 yards on a draw, and Aaron Thomas caught a 16-yard pass to put the Giants at the Steeler 41. Earlier, cornerback Willie Daniel had broken up a short sideline pass to Shofner. Mindful of the scouting report that Daniel played that route tight, Tittle had Shofner make the same quick cut to suck Daniel in and then streak down the sideline. Shofner, getting good traction from his sneakers, made a Willie Mays–like over-the-shoulder catch for a 41-yard touchdown. Chandler, the so-called master of the home elements, saw his kick glance off the left upright, à la Michaels, giving New York a 9–0 lead 7:12 into the game.70
On second-and-3 from his 38, Johnson ran 14 yards up the middle to put the Steelers on the Giant 48. Brown fired deep for Dial, but Lynch intercepted at the 5-yard line and returned the ball to his own 44. So far, Ed Brown was doing a better job as a prophet than as an NFL passer.
Tittle fumbled on the next play—the fifth time a player mishandled a ball in the quarter—but center Greg Larson recovered for a 13-yard loss. Tittle mixed in runs with passes—25 yards to Shofner on third-and-24, 18 yards to Thomas, a screen to Morrison for 7. King ran up the middle for 3 yards to give the Giants first-and-goal at the 5. Now it was New York’s turn to waste a scoring opportunity. After the Giants were penalized 15 yards for pushing, Andy Russell picked off a pass at the 2-yard line as the first quarter wound down.
After the teams exchanged punts at the start of the second quarter, the Steelers reached midfield but had to punt again after Brown once more threw incomplete to Ballman on third down. Pittsburgh got a break when Eddie Dove fumbled Brown’s punt, and Art Anderson recovered for the Steelers at the Giant 24.
Sapp gained a yard, and Ballman caught an 8-yard pass, but on third-and-1 John Henry Johnson was stopped for no gain. All season, Parker had faced fourth-and-short decisions. After Dick Hoak was dropped for a four-yard loss from the Redskin 2 on fourth-and-goal back in October, the Steelers coach declared, “You can bet your life I’m not going to get down that close again and come away with nothing.”71 So, on fourth down with a berth in the NFL title at stake, Parker passed up a field goal try and went for the first down. “We only had about a foot or so to go,” Parker said later.72 Sapp got the call over left tackle, and he was stopped by Robustelli and John LoVetere. The Steelers came away with nothing.
Pittsburgh forced a punt and took over on its 38. Dial caught an 11-yard pass, and Johnson and Sapp ground out yardage to the Giant 37 before Brown threw two more incompletions Ballman’s way—sandwiched around a fumble by Johnson that Sandusky recovered. Patton had an interception but dropped the second throw. Michaels lined up for a 42-yard field goal attempt, but rookie quarterback Bill Nelsen, who had taken over as the holder a week earlier, fumbled the snap. New York took over on its 42.
“It looked to spectators that day as if the Steelers were thoroughly bewitched, for they either dropped the ball or gave it away again and again,” wrote Robert Smith.73
Tittle had a little over two minutes left in the half. He hit Shofner with a 44-yard pass down to the Pittsburgh 14, but the ace receiver
was injured on the play. Morrison gained 6 yards on a draw, and King picked up 5 to make it first-and-goal at the 3. The Press’s Pat Livingston described Morrison as “a lumbering 195-pound back who never before had been anything but a minor annoyance to the Steelers.”74 On this day, he was becoming a major pain.
Tittle faked a handoff to King and tossed a pass to an open Morrison in the end zone. The Giants had a 16–0 lead with just 1:13 left in the half, a margin that could have been cut if the Steelers hadn’t blown two shots at field goals and failed to capitalize on two other chances.
Brown got his team moving after Chandler’s kickoff. He hit Dial for 25 yards down to the Giant 37 and then, out of the shotgun, hooked up with Carpenter for 8 more. Sapp ran around right end for 9 yards to give the Steelers a first down at the 20 with forty seconds left.
A lot of war stories were passed down to young Steelers over the years. As a rookie in ’68, Rocky Bleier heard many of the tales, and Cope’s account, suggested that because of Brown’s abstinence from liquor the week leading up to the Giant game, “his system couldn’t take the shock,” in Bleier’s words. “By kickoff, his hands were shaking visibly and he was feeling slightly irritable.”75
“I think Brownie was a little nervous,” Cordileone said. “I guess the game weighed on his mind a lot. He wanted to win it so bad.”76
Despite having played eight years in Chicago, Brown, a native of California, hadn’t seemed to adjust to playing in wintry conditions. At a practice at Yankee Stadium, Cordileone and Myron Pottios were photographed laughing as they pranced over the snow on the sidelines. Days earlier, Brown was photographed at practice in Pittsburgh as he held a snowball in his palm, surrounded by grinning teammates Hoak, Sapp, and Johnson. Brown was not smiling; he looked rueful at best. He hadn’t been able to adjust to the elements. In its 1958 pro football preview, Sports Illustrated suggested that if the Bears could schedule games at the end of the season in California, where Brown played in high school and college, he might just lead the NFL in passing. “He has the arm and the eye but an inexplicable inability to coordinate the two when the weather turns cold,” the report read.77
Whether it was nerves, the weather, or the time away from Dante’s, Brown was having a rough go of it. From the 20, he tried three straight passes and misfired on all three. Twice he had receivers wide open for touchdowns but underthrew them, including a play on which Ballman had 5 yards on Lynch, the league leader in interceptions in both ’63 and ’61, at the goal line.
Brown had an arm powerful enough to counteract the wind and frigid conditions. “I’ll tell you what,” Cordileone said. “He threw a football, forget it. He’d throw it through your body.”78
Brady Keys agreed. “Nobody could ever catch his balls,” the defensive back said. “He threw the ball too hard. Only Buddy Dial could catch his balls.”79
But the throw to Ballman nose-dived weakly into the frozen turf. Michaels kicked a 27-yard field goal with seven seconds left before halftime to cut Pittsburgh’s deficit to 16–3.
The Steelers’ offensive line was providing great protection, but “this had to be the overdue off-day that Ed Brown had coming to him,” Robert Smith wrote. “He would throw to Gary [Ballman] and miss him by ten feet. Or he would ignore Gary running all alone and try to jam the ball through a trio of defenders.”80
The score should have been closer. The Steelers had squandered scoring chances and made mistakes, but they didn’t seem in awe of the two-time defending conference champs. “With wonderful protection for an inaccurate passer, a defensive line that savaged Y. A. Tittle, stout runners and receivers in the open, the Steelers seemed the clearly superior force in the first half,” Red Smith wrote.81
The second half began “with the Steelers still hoping Destiny would throw down the thread.”82 The Giants received the kickoff but were forced to punt, and Pittsburgh took over on its 33. On third-and-1 from the 42, the Giants bunched together and braced for Johnson to ram the line or soar above it. Instead, he burst through the right side for a 48-yard run before Lynch dragged him down at the 10. A holding penalty on Johnson set the Steelers back, but on third down from the 21, Ballman beat Patton in the right corner for a touchdown to bring the Steelers within 16–10 with 4:16 elapsed in the third period. Thanks to Chandler’s missed conversion, the Steelers could snatch the lead with one scoring drive.
The Giants had the ball; the Steelers had a defense that looked as if it was going to make a critical stand and give the offense good field position. Tittle had lost his most dangerous weapon, Shofner, who did not return to action in the second half. Sherman could feel the game shifting as abruptly as a gust of wind changed direction in Yankee Stadium. “I was most fearful in the third quarter,” the Giant coach said later. “The Steelers were beginning to gain momentum.”83
On first down from the Giant 21, Cordileone and Stautner hurried Tittle into an incompletion. King fought for 2 yards, leaving the Giants with third-and-8 at the 23. Stautner walked along the line, “slapping his teammates on the butt” as “wintry smoke poured out through the bars of his face mask.” Chandler would average 43.6 yards on his five punts that day, so, depending on the wind, a good return would leave the Steelers close to midfield, putting the Giants literally on a slippery slope.84
“The worst of it,” Sherman said, “was that they were driving toward the infield part of the gridiron where the underfooting was the worst and where pass coverage was tough. Then it happened.”85
“It” had happened before—three weeks earlier, in fact. On that day, Pittsburgh had the Bears bottled up deep in their own territory, facing third down, when Mike Ditka came up with his thunderous catch and run. On a mid-December day in the Bronx, a third-down play would turn out to be no less miraculous.
The play was simple enough. Gifford, flanked on the right side, would run a post pattern—sprint straight ahead and then cut diagonally across the field—with Glenn Glass, the second-year defensive back, covering him. Both were wearing sneakers.
“Frank Gifford was ‘a Sunday ballplayer,’” Tittle said four decades later. “He was a gamer. He didn’t look flashy with the long runs, but the big plays, the times you needed something big, you go to Frank Gifford and you’d probably get success. That’s what Frank was noted for: come through in the clutch.”86
Glass was another pickup of Parker’s. Parker’s assistant, Buster Ramsey, had been on the staff of the Buffalo Bills and, while there, he pushed to select Glass, who had played tailback in the single wing at Tennessee, in the 1962 AFL draft. But frustrated at being stuck on the sidelines after an injury, Glass wanted out of Buffalo, so the Steelers, with Ramsey having joined their staff, traded with the Bears for the rights to sign him. Glass played defense in college, but it hadn’t been much of a challenge for him, the way the college game focused on the running game in that era. “I was a safety man,” he said, “but you know what that means: You just stand around in the middle of the field.”87
The Steeler pass rush was pouring in on Tittle, but he managed “a clumsy sidearm toss.” As Gifford streaked across the middle, the throw looked like one of Brown’s passes: it would likely reach Gifford on a bounce. “I shouldn’t have even thrown the ball,” Tittle said.88
Russell, the left linebacker, had dropped back in pass coverage and, out of the corner of his eye, saw Gifford cutting across the field. Russell blamed himself for “a huge mistake,” but he was only following the conventional defensive wisdom: drop back, watch the quarterback’s eyes, and react to the ball. “Bullshit,” Russell said forty-seven years later. “You can’t do that, and I learned that the hard way in that game. Pro quarterbacks are too good, they’re too quick, and they throw the ball too fast.”89
Russell had made his third interception of the year that day, and he would get 15 more before he retired, but none of them by using that technique. “What I would do in the future,” he said, “I’d just go cover him. I’d be all over Frank Gifford. I wouldn’t even look at the quarterback.
Anybody in your zone, you cover man to man. If I’d have covered Frank Gifford, he would not have caught that pass. From that point forward, I didn’t play zone defense the way we were taught. I played it my way. And from that point forward nobody caught the ball in my zone—rarely.”90
Gifford, with a step on Glass, “lunged and shot out his right hand like he was picking up the morning paper.”91 The ball “hit into his hand nose-first and snuggled there like a baseball.”92
Dick Haley had a perfect view from his safety position. “I’ve seen that picture so many different places over the years,” he said. “I was playing over the top of that and the corner was underneath, and the ball was thrown low and Gifford reached down, one hand—he’s running full speed—and the ball stuck. The weather, the conditions, everything was terrible, and he had to do it with a ball that’s half frozen and a field that’s half frozen, with the wind blowing, and I said, ‘You can’t do that one out of ten times,’ and yet that was the one time. It could have been one in how many, I don’t know.”93
More like, as Tittle said, “The odds of Frank catching it were about a thousand to one.”94
“It was the biggest catch I ever made,” Gifford said. “All I was trying to do was bat the ball up in the air and it stuck in my hand.”95
Glass was close enough to Gifford that he had a handful of the flanker’s jersey in his right hand while Gifford was still trying to gain control of the ball and grasp it with both hands. Glass dragged Gifford down at the Steeler 47—close to where Pittsburgh could have taken possession on an incompletion and a good punt return—for a gain of 30 yards. Tittle went right back to Gifford, this time for 25 yards to the 22. On the next play, as Gifford ran his post pattern again, Tittle hit Morrison out of the backfield, and he outran linebacker Myron Pottios to the end zone to make it 23–10 with 6:11 seconds gone in the third period.
There were still nearly twenty-four minutes of football left, time for the Steelers to score two touchdowns and pull off another comeback, but the sudden twist of fortune felt like a knockout blow. “You could feel everybody on the bench lift up with a now-we-got-’em emotional surge,” said the scout Tunnell.96