The Best Game Ever E-Book

Mark Bowden

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 388

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for the American NFL Championship game. Played in front of sixty-four thousand fans and millions of television viewers around the country, the game would be remembered as the greatest in football history. On the field and roaming the sidelines were seventeen future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry. An estimated forty-five million viewers - at that time the largest crowd to have ever watched a football game - tuned in to see what would become the first sudden-death contest in NFL history. It was a battle of the league's best offense - the Colts -versus its best defense - the Giants. And it was a contest between the blue-collar Baltimore team versus the glamour boys of the Giants squad. The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sport and is destined to become a classic.

Leseprobe

Also by Mark Bowden:

Doctor Dealer

Bringing the Heat

Black Hawk Down

Killing Pablo

Finders Keepers

Road Work

Guests of the Ayatollah

First published in the United States of America in 2008 by Grove Atlantic, Inc.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Mark Bowden 2008

The moral right of Mark Bowden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

The Ogden Nash poem, “The Introduction to ‘My Colts’”, copyright © 1968 by Ogden Nash. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84354 969 7 eISBN: 978 0 85789 911 8

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For David Halberstam

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Epilogue

THE BEST

Bert Bell, NFL commissioner 1946–1959. (Courtesy of The Sporting News/Zuma Press)

Giants third-quarter goal-line stand. (Courtesy of Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated)

New York assistant coach Tom Landry (with ball) and the Giants’ defense, Nov. 6, 1958. (Courtesy of AP)

Baltimore head coach, Weeb Ewbank, briefs his team on the day before the big game, Dec. 27, 1958. (Courtesy of AP)

1

Football Noir

It was freezing in Yankee Stadium. A balmy Sunday afternoon had faded into night, three days after Christmas, 1958. When the football game had started, nearly two hours earlier, the mildness of the day had surprised the players, particularly the New York Giants. They had played twice here in the preceding two weeks against the Cleveland Browns in bitter cold, first in a blizzard, and then in such a deep freeze that the field felt like marble. There were still wet patches here and there, but the turf was mostly dry and soft. Anticipating another frigid contest, the grounds crew had given the field a protective coating of brown mulch that contained manure, which warmed as it decomposed and gave off a pungent odor, flavoring the fabled sports arena with the aroma of a cow pasture. Every scramble kicked up clouds of fragrant dust.

But as the game moved into its third quarter and the sun dropped behind high stadium walls, winter was back. High above the grandstand, with its graceful white-picket-fence frieze, banks of arc lights lit the field brightly. The 64,185 paying customers (considerably fewer than a full house) peered out at the contest from frigid blackness. The Giants wore their dark blue helmets with the single red stripe and blue wool jerseys with white numbers, and the Baltimore Colts, with the familiar horseshoe emblem on their white helmets, were in badly soiled whites with blue numbers and trim. This was the colorful spectacle for those present, but for the far bigger part of its audience, the most celebrated game in football history would be remembered primarily in black and white.

Spooky black and white. An estimated forty-five million people, the largest crowd to ever witness a football game, saw spectral players battling in shades of white and gray against a stark black backdrop. National Football League rules had forbidden local television stations from broadcasting the championship game, but many determined New Yorkers, particularly those living north of the Empire State Building, happily discovered that they could pick up the signal only slightly impaired from over the southwest horizon, beaming from Channel 3 in Philadelphia. The country was transfixed. President Eisenhower had a clear signal on his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he was watching while playing bridge with friends, including William E. Robinson, the president of Coca-Cola. Brooks Robinson, the second-year third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, was watching at Fort Hood, Texas, where he was doing his off-season National Guard duty. Ernie Accorsi who would later become general manager of the Cleveland Browns, the team that had fallen twice in the two previous weeks to the Giants, was in a clubhouse on a golf course in Palm Beach, Florida, where he had decided to forego finishing his round in order to watch. Pete Rozelle, a public relations man for the Los Angeles Rams who had recently been promoted to general manager, watched from his team’s offices, a little sore that the Rams wouldn’t spring to fly him out to see the championship game live. Auto mechanic Ed Chaney, Jr. was watching from Henry Mack’s Pub, his favorite bar in Glen Burnie, Maryland, along with a few dozen other rabid Colts fans. Chaney had to work that evening, but had set aside this afternoon for the game. At the home of the famous doggerel poet and Colts fan Ogden Nash in suburban Baltimore, the entire Nash family was gathered in the living room. At a novitiate in Baltimore, burdened with a mean-spirited local ecclesiastical admonition against watching the game on TV, the obedient but clever Mother Superior draped a blanket over the set—there was no rule against listening.

Many of the viewers just beginning to tune in were not regular watchers of pro football, and they were seeing something starkly different than the traditional college games played on sunny autumn afternoons. This was more like mortal combat from some dark underworld. As in some medieval rite, the players on both sidelines were draped in long capes. A master cinematographer could not have lit the scene more dramatically.

In the shadow of the stands, men wore long wool overcoats and gloves. Many wrapped wool scarves over their heads, covering their ears, and scrunched fedoras on top of the scarves. They smoked cigarettes or cigars, and when they cheered or spoke their faces would momentarily cloud in smoke and steam. Beneath the red, white, and blue bunting draped from the second tier, the stands smelled of tobacco and beer and occasionally a whiff of whiskey or rum or the pungent stab of a struck match. Nineteen-year-old William Gildea, who would grow up to be a sportswriter for the Washington Post, was there with his father, sitting high over one of the end zones. They had been going to Colts games together since the first one the team had played in 1947, and had taken the train from Baltimore to New York the day before.

Behind the end zone on the eastern side of the stadium, out where the left-field bullpen was during baseball season, stood Neil Leifer with his Yashica Mat twin lens reflex camera. It was Neil’s sixteenth birthday, and he was spending it the way he had spent every Sunday afternoon that season. He had joined a camera club at the Henry Street Settlement House, to where the camera and film he carried had been donated. The club had taught him to shoot, develop, and print his own pictures, and he had discovered a potential market for them with the magazines and wire services around town. Neil knew their deadlines and he had shopped his work after every home game. So far he hadn’t had any luck, but this was a big game. He had to be on the field for the shots he wanted, but the club wasn’t handing out sideline passes to teenagers with borrowed cameras. Neil was tenacious, though. He had learned that before every game, busloads of disabled veterans arrived at the loading ramps outside Yankee Stadium’s outfield walls. There was no place for men in wheelchairs up in the stands, but the Giants allowed them to watch from their chairs against the outfield wall behind the end zone. They even provided blankets and hot coffee. When the buses started arriving from the various veterans hospitals in the hour before kickoff, there was always a need for able-bodied volunteers to push them into the stadium. Neil knew that the stadium guards and cops, in return for his help, would let him stick around. Sometimes they would even let him creep up the sidelines, although usually the accredited photographers would kick up a fuss and he would have to come back. The market for still shots from the game was small, and the pro shooters didn’t welcome competition, even from a sixteen-year-old on his birthday.

The surly culture of beery male boorishness that would come to typify football crowds had not yet taken hold, so there were many women in the stands. They, too, wrapped scarves around their heads and across their faces, and huddled under blankets. Joanne Kemp, the young wife of Giants back-up quarterback Jack Kemp, was there, pregnant with their first child, Jeff, who would grow up to be an NFL quarterback. Marcia Hersh was huddled under a blanket with her mother. She was sixteen, and had come up from Baltimore on the bus with a big group of Colts rooters who were now in the upper deck over the fifty-yard line. Her father, Abe, who owned a furniture store, was so excited that he screamed himself hoarse. Years later Marcia would remember his eyes glowing with excitement as he had rasped to her, “History is being made!”

It was hard not to sense it.

Consider the men on the field. Many were already famous; others were just starting their careers. Among the Giants were Roosevelt Brown, Rosey Grier, Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, Emlen Tunnell, Mel Triplett, and Andy Robustelli. Kicking for New York was Pat Summerall, who would become, as would Gifford, among the most famous TV faces and voices of pro football. Roaming that Giants sideline were future Hall-of-Fame receiver Don Maynard, and Jack Kemp, the eventual AFL quarterbacking star, future congressman, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and vice presidential candidate. For the Colts, there were Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, Jim Mutscheller, Lenny Moore, Alan Ameche, Art Donovan, Jim Parker, Ordell Braase, Bill Pellington, and Gino Marchetti. And the men on the sidelines were every bit as notable, with three who would become icons of the pro game. On the Giants’ side of the field, coaching the offense was Vince Lombardi, who was just a few years away from building his dynasty in Green Bay, and coaching the defense, Tom Landry, who would shape the Dallas Cowboys into another NFL power. Coaching the Colts was Weeb Ewbank, who in his career would steer two different professional franchises to championships. It was the greatest concentration of football talent ever assembled for a single game. On the field and roaming the sidelines, including Giants owners Wellington and Jack Mara, were seventeen future members of the NFL Hall of Fame.

In 1958, the great postwar boom was still in full stride, but some new and discordant notes had sounded. A year earlier the Soviet Union had orbited Sputnik, a technological stunt that disturbed the smug certitude of American power and demonstrated that the Russian foe could deliver its nukes anywhere on the globe. The vast Kansas night sky where President Eisenhower had grown up looked a little bit less friendly. There was talk of a “missile gap.” The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created that year.

The Ed Sullivan Show was the most popular hour of television. The tube was still full of cozy half-hour programs that depicted idyllic families enjoying the country’s new suburban lifestyle, programs like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver, but the strong cultural fabric of self-satisfied consumerism, traditionalism, and sentimentality was starting to unravel. Playboy magazine was a huge hit, Andy Warhol was working as an illustrator in Manhattan, and the country had watched with horror in its living rooms as racist mobs taunted nine black teenagers trying to integrate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Senator John F. Kennedy, who had already begun campaigning in earnest for the White House, was a frequent spectator at Giants games in Yankee Stadium. A guerrilla organization called the Viet Cong had begun to battle the anticommunist government of South Vietnam.

Just over the horizon was a decade of restless social, political, and cultural upheaval, but none of that was obvious yet. Americans had never been more affluent, and had never had more leisure. And pro football, which was about to catch hold, would just shoulder on through all this coming change, growing ever more popular and ever more rich. The audience and the league were on the cusp of an explosion that would quickly turn this era of pro football into a piece of a simpler past.

It would be this game that would provide the spark.

Early in the third quarter, the Giants had their backs to the wall, just as they had all season. They were an established NFL power in America’s greatest city, with a lineup of star athletes expected to dominate the league for years to come, but this year had been a gutty, bitter struggle. They had the best defense in the league statistically (the Colts were rated second), but an inconsistent offense. Baltimore’s offense was the league’s best. So New York could ill afford to fall far behind, and they were on the verge of doing just that, to a young team of castoffs from a small city that had never participated in a national championship in any sport. Baltimore was a blue collar train stop between Philadelphia and Washington, steel mills and dock works and a grimy inner harbor slick with oily urban slough. But the comparative wealth and glamour of New York City meant nothing on the gridiron, where the Giants had started the second half behind by eleven points, 14-3, and were now backed up to their own five-yard line.

They had purchased this toehold with a tenacious goal-line stand. The Colts had begun the second half by driving the length of the field with ease in just five plays. The cunning play calling and precision passes of Baltimore’s sensational quarterback, Johnny Unitas, who had been named the league’s most valuable player the preceding year, confused the Giants’ vaunted defense again and again, but with their backs to the goal line, facing the prospect of falling hopelessly behind, the defenders had a slight advantage. Unitas’s receivers had less room to maneuver. Lindon Crow, the Giants’ wily cornerback, no longer had to contend with his constant worry that Colts speedster Lenny Moore would turn upfield and leave him behind, and the other cornerback, Carl Karilivacz, knew the Colts’ shifty left end Raymond Berry would not have time for anything fancy. The battle was simplified; it was muscle on muscle. And with the New York crowd amping up its glee with each failed Colts attempt to push across the goal line, the Giants had held.

The Colts had decided to go for it on fourth down. A team that cannot push in from the one-yard line in four tries begins to feel overmatched. His linemen blowing and spent after the third effort, Unitas had elected trickery. He called an option pass around the right end for fullback Alan Ameche, who raced for the right corner of the goal line with Giants defenders in hot pursuit. The play called for one of Ameche’s three blockers, tight end Jim Mutscheller, to slip off his block and step into the end zone, at which point Ameche would surprise his pursuers by tossing a short touchdown pass. It had worked precisely as drawn up—Mutscheller was standing unattended in the end zone just five yards away—but in the din at that corner of the field, Ameche had misheard the call. The option pass, which Baltimore had not run at all that season, was called “648,” as opposed to “48,” the standard right sweep. Ameche assumed Mutscheller would hold his block on linebacker Cliff Livingston as he bulled his way in for the score. Instead, when the tight end let Livingston go, the delighted linebacker had a free shot at the running back. As Mutscheller stood watching in the end zone, waiting for the toss, Livingston dropped Ameche hard on the five-yard line.

It set up one of the most dramatic turning points in football history. How best to recapture the moment? The television broadcast of the game is lost to history. Most New Yorkers were following the old-fashioned way, on the radio. The tinny roar of the crowd, the cigarette and appliance commercials, the jingles and slogans—“Call for Phillip Morris!” and “There’s a lot to like in a Marlboro /Filter, flavor, flip-top box!”—the distant sound of a marching band, all of it framing a smooth river of play-by-play from NBC’s Joe Boland, the sounds were as familiar as a fire in the hearth and the smell of Sunday dinner. Boland had a perfect radio voice, warm, lightly southern, slightly nasal, and unfailingly upbeat, and he delivered a narration so mannered and professionally modulated that it was a kind of song:

—The New York Giants defense is great! They hold them off! Baltimore leading fourteen to three had a chance to get some icing on the cake as they marched steadily down to the New York one-and-a-half-foot line, and there the New York defense manifested itself! Bill, wasn’t that a dandy?

Boland’s broadcast partner was Cleveland Browns announcer Bill McColgan, who in his rush to comment revealed his unfamiliarity with the Colts. He confused the actual runner on the futile fourth-down play, Ameche, with the Colts’ other running back L.G. Dupre, and, ignorant of the play-call mix-up, lauded Livingston for making the play:

—It sure was, it looked for a moment as if Dupre was going to get around that right end but Livingston was wise to the call and he was in there and made a fine defense play to stop it. So now the Giants’ offense will have a first and ten on their own five.

The goal-line stand lifted the hearts and voices of the New York crowd, and it gave the Giants a reprieve. The crowd noise, which had prevented Ameche from hearing the play call, now surged again. New York’s canny veteran quarterback, the taciturn old marine Charlie Conerly, whose ruggedly handsome features would become famous as the Marlboro Man, trotted out, shedding his blue cape and wading into the chill. He had the whole field stretched out before him, and a Colts defense that had not shown much give.

Looking on from the owner’s box in the sheltered mezzanine with his son and daughter, no doubt praying for a Giants comeback, was Bert Bell, the league’s rotund, benevolent, and long-suffering dictator. Bell had been nursing the sport along for more than a decade, drawing up each season’s complicated schedule by hand on the dining room table of his house in the Philadelphia suburbs. He had persuaded the tight-knit club of cut-throat team owners to accept numerous compromises for their mutual benefit, and the reforms had paid off. Total attendance was the highest it had ever been in the league’s thirty-eight years, closing in on three million, and nearly all twelve of the league’s teams were in the black—only four had been making money when Bell had taken over the league in 1946. A big round man with a broad, fleshy face and a double chin, he was gruff, gravel voiced, earnest, and well-liked by owners, coaches, and players. He ran the league like one big college team, meeting with the players before every season and handing out his phone number, encouraging them to call him directly in Philadelphia if they had any problems. Many did so, and Bell took their complaints and suggestions seriously.

He was self-made, in a peculiar sense, because by any social measure Bell was aggressively downwardly mobile. He had been born de Benneville (note the small “d”) Bell, son of a blue-blood Philadelphia Main Line family. His father was a former Pennsylvania attorney general and his brother was one of that state’s Supreme Court justices. Young de Benneville himself attended a private prep school and the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania (where his father was a trustee), but along this gilded path he had discovered the gridiron, embraced its blue-collar ethic, and never looked back. He became “Bert,” adopted a tough-guy, blue-collar manner, and somehow acquired an accent that was more Brooklyn than Brahmin, dropping his “g”s and abandoning learned syntax—as New York Times man Al Hirshberg put it, “He talks like a dock walloper.”

Bell played football in college and, after several misspent postgraduate years squandering his family’s money—accumulating drinking and gambling debts totaling $50,000—he straightened out, married, gave up drink, and found a home in the professional game. The former gambler now kept a close eye on the oddsmakers, keen for the slightest hint of meddling with honest competition, and to fend off would-be fixers he hired former FBI agents to police every team. He weathered competition from an upstart rival league, the All-American Football Conference, and corralled it with a merger—the Baltimore franchise emerged from that maneuver. He instituted “free substitution” to improve the quality of play, and crafted draft rules that allowed the teams with the worst records to have first picks of the emerging college football stars each season. If a team owner complained about Bell’s frequent and often summary rulings, the commissioner was fond of invoking with stern finality, “Article 1, section 14, paragraph B.” He knew full well that nobody knew the league’s bylaws better than he did. The passage read, in part, “The commissioner is authorized to cancel a contract for any action detrimental to the welfare of the National Football League,” a relatively narrow prerogative, but rules are meant to be interpreted, and the commissioner of football interpreted them broadly and enthusiastically. He wielded “1-14-B” like a cudgel, and found that so long as the league prospered, nobody complained.

He had no rooting interest in this Colts-Giants contest, except that it stay close. Despite Bell’s accomplishments, pro football still lived in the long shadow of baseball. No matter how good the games were, the NFL was still just a diversion during the long cold months of baseball’s annual hiatus. The Giants played in Yankee Stadium. The nation was attuned to the rhythms of the summer game, which dwarfed football in ticket receipts and national attention.

Newspaper coverage of football was often relegated to the inside pages, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t even that—in mid-December, 1958, New York’s newspapers were shut down for more than two weeks by a strike. The lack of newsprint ballyhoo had contributed to poor ticket sales in the past week—there were alarming pockets of empty seats—but that wasn’t the only problem. It wasn’t the first time the championship game had failed to attract a full house, and Bell knew that if you couldn’t do it in New York it was not a healthy sign.

Still, there was TV. This was the ninth time the NFL Championship game had been on national television, and each year the audience had grown. The number of Americans with sets was exploding, from a mere twelve thousand in 1946 to four million just four years later. When World War II ended, just a half of 1 percent of American homes had TV sets; by 1962, just four years after this game was played, 90 percent would. Television was working profound changes in American politics, marketing, journalism, and entertainment, and part of this concerned the way people watched sports. Pro football had begun to attract a larger and larger number of viewers on Sunday afternoons. An estimated 37 percent of those who turned on their sets in that time slot were watching the NFL. Television was perfect for action, particularly the suspense of live action. That’s how it had struck Orrin E. Dunlap Jr. of the New York Times after the first-ever televised game in 1939, a college matchup between Fordham University and Waynesburg College. Dunlap wrote, “With a camera on a dolly at the forty-yard line, the coach himself has nothing on the televiewer in the armchair at home. Both are on the sidelines. . . . Football by television invites audience participation . . . the contest is in the living room; the spectator is edged up close. His eye is right in the game.”

He might have written eyes and ears, because televised football also added a helpful running commentary that explained the game to those who had never played. Baseball seemed made for radio, because it afforded the best broadcasters the opportunity to gift wrap the game in words, fill a slow-paced contest with description, anecdote, and analysis, and react to its flashes of action with colorful homespun expressions—“Well I’ll be a suck-egg mule!” would say that Mississippi poet of the diamond Red Barber. If radio and baseball went together perfectly, football seemed made for television. Its bunched and scripted action fit neatly in the frame of the set, while skillful cameramen and broadcasters helped viewers follow the ball as plays unfolded. Later would come stop-action and slow-motion replay.

Today’s kickoff at two o’clock meant that the game’s finish might spill into early evening, into the promised land of prime time, the sweet spot of TV programming, when more ears and eyes were focused on the same thing than in the entire history of humankind. If the game were close, and exciting, it might creep into this national hearth, when the multitudes switched on their TVs for Sunday night viewing, the most valuable time slot of the week. If even a small portion of those who tuned in liked what they saw, Bell knew interest could soar. A blowout, one of those games that peaked early and then ground to a predictable finish, would have the opposite effect. It could be a disaster.

But this game would be no disaster. It was about to ignite.

There is a phenomenon known to every sport, but particularly to football, where the sustained high decibel roar of tens of thousands of fans, sheer condensed will, can assume a force like wind, can nudge (or at least appear to nudge) events on the field in the desired direction. This had already happened on the botched Ameche option play, and now it was about to happen again. The first two Giants plays from scrimmage gained eight yards, but the next try, on third down with two yards to go, would become one of the most famous fluke plays in football history, one of those remarkable combinations of skill and sheer luck that make the game so much fun to watch. It was not only going to answer Bert Bell’s prayers by upending the course of this game, it was going to change the history of pro football.

In the full-throated din, Conerly took the snap and back-pedaled. The Colts’ relentless front four—Marchetti, Donovan, Big Daddy Lipscomb, and Don Joyce—rapidly collapsed the Giants’ pass protection, but just before he was hit, the quarterback lofted an off-balance prayer of a pass over the outstretched hands of the rushers, toward the middle of the field, where Giants flanker Kyle Rote was angling across from his position on the far left side. Rote was matched stride-for-stride with the Colts’ cerebral cornerback Milt Davis, who was playing on a right foot he had broken just two weeks earlier. It was so swollen that Davis was wearing tennis shoes, and so shot up with Novocain that it felt like a wooden peg. Rote had him by a numbed step.

—Rote is open! He’s got it! Shakes loose one man, shakes loose another. . . .

Lunging from behind, Davis, the first would-be tackler, slid off Rote, who turned upfield in full stride. The crowd screamed with excitement; there had not been many big plays in the game for New York, and Rote was running free. Angling across was the Colts’ bow-legged weak safety Carl Taseff, the second would-be tackler (this was happening in seconds), who dove at the ballcarrier. Rote neatly sidestepped, sending Taseff flying past empty-handed, but the dodge slowed him, and now two more Colts defenders closed in, cornerback Raymond Brown and strong safety Andy Nelson. It was Nelson who caught him, lunging, and before dragging him down from behind managed to slap the football free.

The play wasn’t over.

—The ball is loose! And it’s picked up by New York!

Alex Webster, the big-chinned Giants halfback, had lined up at the start of the play as a flanker on the other side of the field from Rote, and like all disciplined players was trailing the play even though he was, for all intents, out of it. But when Nelson knocked the ball free, it tumbled forward, five yards, ten yards. Webster shouldered aside Brown and scooped it up in stride. He kept on running, nothing but an empty forty yards between him and a touchdown. But the Colts’ players were also disciplined. Taseff had jumped to his feet after forcing Rote’s dodge. The cornerback again gave chase. He was faster than Webster, but the halfback had a head start. It was a dramatic footrace, Taseff angling closer and closer, Webster sprinting for the corner of the field to buy an extra step or two. The crowd cheered frantically. At the final moment, just yards from the goal line, Taseff dove in desperation at the big halfback’s legs and sent him flying. Webster landed hard past the goal line but out of bounds. It looked like the top half of his body had stayed in bounds as it flew over the goal line, and amid the raucous celebration of Giants fans, Boland prematurely awarded the touchdown.

—And I think on one of the world’s most amazing plays, New York has scored here. No, wait a minute. No, the ball is going to be put down on about the one-yard line! It’s ruled that he was tackled there. I thought he’d gone in for the score, but he had been hit and then crawled over. The ball is spotted on the one-yard line. . . . Eighty-six yards overall. Conerly to Rote, fumble to Webster, Webster to the one-yard line with a first and goal to go for New York.

It didn’t matter. Two plays later the Giants scored, and the extra point by Summerall made the score Colts, 14, Giants, 10. Just minutes earlier it had looked like the Colts were going to pull away for good, and for Bell it would have been easy to imagine millions of TV sets being switched off, or millions of channels being changed, as the attention of the vast home audience drifted. But not now.

Given the game’s inherent appeal and its neat fit with TV, pro football was bound to click at some point with the American public. This was the moment. Just like that, with one goofy eighty-six-yard play, the championship’s outcome was again uncertain. The commissioner of football could breathe easy.

The real battle had just begun. As late afternoon eased into darkness and prime time, America was going to get not just a good football game, but the best anyone had ever seen.

Colts wide receiver Raymond Berry, 1958. (Courtesy of Sport magazine)

Baltimore head coach, Weeb Ewbank (far left), and his assistant Charley Winner (far right), 1962. (Courtesy of Ted Patterson)

Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, 1958. (Courtesy of Sport magazine)

From left to right: Weeb Ewbank, Johnny Unitas, George Shaw, Dec. 25, 1958. 20 (Courtesy of AP)

2

Raymond

The tall, skinny young man in glasses who moved next door to Al Brennan had some peculiar exercise habits. Every morning in the fall and winter, like clockwork, he would emerge from his house in Lutherville, Maryland, dressed in a gray sweat suit and carrying a cinderblock with a rope tied around it. He would stand at the top of the stairs that led from the sidewalk, set the cinderblock on a lower step, tie the other end of the rope around his thigh, and start lifting his leg and setting it back down. After a set number of repetitions, he would untie the block and fasten it to the other leg and do the same. Every morning, the same routine.

Brennan had only this glimpse of his neighbor’s unique methods. If he had followed him through winter and into spring and then into the blazing hot summers of Paris, Texas, where he had grown up the son of the local football coach, he would have seen his young neighbor perform the same exercise on the steps of the empty grandstand at Wise Field, and then walk out to the center of the sun-baked gridiron, where he would set a piece of paper down on the grass, and for several hours race off carrying a football in one direction or the other, stop, return, catch his breath for a few moments, consult the paper, assume a set position, and then sprint off again. Sometimes he would angle off to the left for a short distance, and sometimes he would angle off to the right. Sometimes he would stop and turn back for a few steps, or perform a shuffle, what looked like a little dance step, in the middle of his sprints, and abruptly change direction. Sometimes he would run only ten yards and sometimes the length of the field before he came back. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to it, so it would have been hard for anyone to guess, but he was playing an entire football game at the end position in pantomime.

He had chosen the film of a particular game, usually one that featured a lot of passing, observing each route run by the receiver, timing each play and interval between plays with a stopwatch, and then in tiny, meticulous handwriting, sketching the patterns and noting the sequences. Every play, whether the receiver was thrown the ball or not, every huddle, every time out, every stretch spent on the bench between offensive series. He noted the time spent in each phase, routes and recovery times, and consulting his hand-written script out on the grass, acted out the entire game, whistle to whistle. Out on the playing field of his hometown in the dead of summer there was no one to observe his obsessive devotion, no teammate, no neighbor, no coach. There was no one he was trying to impress. It was pure desire. No, not just desire. The young man in gray sweats and glasses was desperate.

His name was Raymond Berry, and he was a football player unlike any his new coaches in Baltimore had ever seen. A lowly twentieth-round pick in the summer of 1955, he was not expected to be around for long when he reported to his first training camp in Westminster, Maryland. It was the job of Charley Winner, the Colts’ ends coach, to check him in.

“Hey, Ray, welcome to training camp. We’re glad to have you.”

“My name is Raymond,” he told Winner.

And that was that. There would be a specific moment in the fourth quarter of the famous 1958 championship game on which the outcome would turn, but to fully appreciate it, you first need to appreciate Raymond. At a time when most players had full-time jobs off the field he was, at age twenty-two, a complete, full-time football player. He worked at it night and day. NFL and college teams had long employed film to break down the formations and tendencies of their opponents and to plan strategies, and they used it as a teaching tool for their players, but the players themselves generally viewed such classroom sessions as a chore, and a bore. Not Raymond. He bought himself a sixteen-millimeter projector and when his day of practice and mandated classroom work was done, when his teammates were out drinking beer, he would go home and study film on his own. His coaches used it to study formations and tendencies for whole teams; Raymond focused in on his position alone. He scrutinized the men who would be defending against him, cornerbacks mostly, but also linebackers and safeties. He sought out film of successful NFL receivers, and studied their routes and their moves, making page after page of notes in his tidy handwriting.

He was different in other ways, too. While other young athletes spent their bonus money or paychecks on cars or booze or women, Raymond spent his on things like contact lenses, at that time an expensive novelty, or on a specially fitted tooth guard to cushion impacts that might cause concussion—a precaution many of the rough men in the game would have considered borderline unmanly. It didn’t stop there. No detail was too small to absorb Raymond. He found the canvas fabric of his practice football pants too heavy and binding, particularly when they grew damp with sweat. The team’s fancier game pants had a shiny white fabric on the front, and on the back were made of a lightweight material that stretched and breathed. Raymond wrote a letter to the company that manufactured the game pants and asked if they would make him some practice ones out of the stretchy material. They complied. To keep his special pants from getting lost in the team’s daily piles of laundry, Raymond would hand wash his own gear after practice, in the sink, and hang them up in his locker to dry.

Imagine how professional football players viewed a new teammate who insisted on wearing custom-made practice pants, on doing his own laundry, and on being called by his full and formal first name. These were rough men, men with broken teeth and crooked noses. They regarded tolerance for pain and an appetite for violence as prerequisites for the game. Scars, broken molars, black eyes, scrapes, bruises, broken bones, these were badges of honor. Most were hard-drinking, fun-loving rowdies, many of them veterans of World War II and Korea. To these men, there was something antithetical about Raymond’s approach, his attention to uniform and protective gear, his excessive study and obsessive, eccentric preparation. Real men showed up hurt, or with a hangover, and they didn’t outthink their opponent, they kicked his ass. Mouth guards and doing your own laundry? Raymond was also fussy. His locker was like a museum display case, with everything perfectly in place. He was jealous and protective of his things. One day teammate Art Donovan, a loud, comedic defensive lineman called “Fatso,” who epitomized the old school, borrowed Raymond’s hairbrush and, knowing his teammate’s ways, made a point of returning it to its proper place on his locker shelf. So he was surprised when the receiver confronted him.

“Why did you use my brush?” Raymond asked, accusingly.

Donovan didn’t even try to lie.

“How did you know?” he answered.

“When you put it back, it wasn’t lined up on the shelf the way I had it.”

Impressed wasn’t the right word for how that made Donovan feel about Raymond. He was impressed, sure, but the feeling also leaned slightly in the direction of appalled. Maybe the right word is wonder. You give a guy like that a little more room.

Raymond had been drafted before pro football teams had extensive scouting organizations, and before there were film libraries on college prospects. He was taken in the winter of 1954 as a “futures” pick, which was a throwaway category, down in the lower echelons of the draft where teams grabbed players in a what-the-hell frame of mind. He still had another year of eligibility for college ball. An entire college season went by, and still no one from the Colts’ organization had bothered to travel to Southern Methodist University to scout their new possession. They never laid eyes on him before he showed up at training camp. Even Raymond was unsure how he came to be chosen. But when his name had popped up in the draft, it had changed his life. He had never even started a game at SMU, and because he already had enough credits to graduate, he had pretty much decided to quit football and go back home and look for a real job. Then his college teammates, in recognition of his inspirational work habits more than his accomplishments on the field, unexpectedly voted him cocaptain. These two things, the draft and the vote, had so honored and inspired him that he decided to stick around for that final season. Maybe it was possible for a man like him to have a future in the game.

The story of Raymond Berry is more than the story of an overlooked, talent-deprived young athlete who by dint of sheer effort, will, and dedication, turns himself into a star. There are players who fit that description on every team. It is a cliché. Raymond’s story goes beyond that. His personality and his obsessions changed not only his own life, but those of his teammates and the Colts’ organization, and ultimately the history of pro football.

He had always been an extraordinarily organized and self-possessed young man, tall and lean, with narrow, wide-set eyes, wavy brown hair worn longer on the top than the sides, and a thin smile that unfolded at a slight angle that made you wonder what else he meant by it. He looked more like a grocery store clerk than a football player. He was quiet, but not shy. His dad was known to one and all back in Paris as “Ray,” which is why young Raymond insisted on the full pronunciation of his name. He was his own man. He was poised, as though he had pondered everything a little harder than anyone else. This made him generally impervious to what other people thought or preferred, and made him, among other things, uncoachable—or, more accurately, in no need of coaching. More than any player Winner would ever meet, Raymond was his own coach. The way you handled him was to leave him alone. He could be present and also not present, lost in his own thoughts, which ran along very disciplined lines. Off the field, he carried slips of paper in his shirt pocket on which he made lists of reminders and observations.

Football was a game played for the most part with speed, brute strength, and natural athleticism. Star running backs simply knew how to elude tacklers; great receivers and pass rushers relied on speed, strength, and instinct to shed defenders and blockers. Great players were typically at a loss when sportswriters wanted to know exactly how they accomplished something remarkable on the field. They would give this look: How pathetic to even ask. The very idea that something as fluid and beautiful and natural as an athletic move in the heat of a game could be explained! It was meant to be admired. Athletic ability was uncomplicated; it just was. It was the opposite of thought. Indeed, there were those who held that thinking itself was the enemy, it slowed you down, it muddied the ideal of a pure act. In the split second of opportunity, if you had to decide, you were dead.

Not Raymond. He was the opposite of this kind of player. His teammates considered him a nut. Sportswriters found that he could talk your ear off not just about why and how and when he had made a particular move, but about how, why, where, and when he had dreamed it up and planned it. He had sketched it out at some point, broken it down into its component parts and named them, rehearsed it a thousand times in his head and then a thousand more times on the field, and held it in reserve to employ at precisely the right moment. To a degree considered hilarious and sometimes tiresome, Raymond was entirely cerebral in his approach to the game, or, more precisely, to his position, because he knew he was suited for only one job at the pro level. He was deconstructing and reinventing the position of wide receiver.

The idea of splitting a player out to one side to concentrate exclusively on running pass routes was relatively new. It had only been nine years since Los Angeles Rams coach Clark Shaughnessy, one of the game’s greatest innovators, had created the position by placing Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch seven yards wide of the line of scrimmage. Hirsch had become famous running the ball for the universities of Wisconsin and Michigan, and his nickname heralded both his speed and the surprising moves he made in the open field, but by the time Shaughnessy got him he had injured his leg and lost a step. In part to spare Hirsch the bruising contact at the center of the field, his new pro coach split him wide of the scrum. He was free from that position to sprint unmolested into the other team’s backfield, a dangerous target for Rams quarterbacks Bob Waterfield and the rookie Norm Van Brocklin. Shaughnessy split another receiver wide on the other end of the line and he, along with the tight end, opened up a passing attack unlike any the league had ever seen—the Rams breezed through their regular season that year before losing the championship game to the superb defense of the Philadelphia Eagles, who were aided by a cold rainstorm that dampened the air show.

Football had long been afraid of the forward pass. It was unveiled in 1906 by St. Louis University and it led their team to an undefeated season. It was considered so powerful a weapon that an assortment of rules were put in place to limit it. The quarterback was allowed to throw only from a spot five yards directly behind where the ball was snapped, and his throw had to travel at least five yards to either side of that position. This was to prevent quick passes up the middle, which were thought unstoppable. The rule briefly turned the gridiron into a checkerboard—lines were drawn not just from side to side every five yards, but from end to end, so that referees could more easily determine if a thrown ball met the five-yard rule. Incomplete passes were turnovers, and an uncaught ball thrown across the goal line was a touchback. As a result, teams used the weapon sparingly.