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Chapter One
The Beginnings
On December 28, 1958, the National Football League grew up. From Madison Avenue to small-town living rooms, fans began to pay attention to our weekly battles on their small-screen televisions. On that long Sunday afternoon, a nation began to recognize the unique appeal of a sport in which any one play could bring extraordinarily athletic feats or grimace-inducing collisions. Or both.
It wasn't complicated, our game, and this was a big part of its appeal. Professional football had speed and it had brutality. We didn't have a legion of reverential sportswriters covering the game, as the national pastime did. Covering the Giants were off-season baseball writers, guys who didn't understand the nuances of the offenses or the defenses—or even some of the rules. But you didn't need to know about nuances or rules when you saw a man carrying a football, looking for running room—and then watching our linebacker Sam Huff meet him head-on, pick him up, and slam him to the ground.
Sam, of course wasn't the only man on the field that day who began to capture a nation's imagination: Kyle Rote, Johnny Unitas, Big Daddy, Rosie Grier, Donovan, Marchetti, Conerly—these were guys who did things on a football field that the common fan could understand. Could feel. Could get excited about. The hypnotizing rainbow passes, the open-field sprints . . . these were exciting, but just as compelling was the violence: the hits, the man-to-man contact that echoed into the rafters—all interwoven with the highest level of individual athleticism any sport could offer.
And after that day, the advertisers and the television programmers could feel it, too: how, in a very real way, the men who brought beauty to brutality every week on a football field could be seen as a new breed of the old American frontier ideal of ruggedness, and individuality, and—above all—toughness and resilience. We were men who made a living on physical contact, who could endure pain of some sort—a blow to the face, a cleat crushing your hand, a limb being twisted in a way that nature never intended—on just about every play, and then rise to our feet and do it again. And again, and again.
Crowds began filling stadiums across the country, in cities whose stadiums had been half-empty in the years before. Television ratings began to climb. Athletes who'd once labored in a lunchpail league were now the stars of prime-time television shows and graced the covers of the weekly magazines.On December 28, 1958, everything changed.
But for the Giants, the final day of the old era began the way it always did, game day or practice day: by walking to work three blocks down the hill from our hotel home, in a working-class neighborhood in a working-class borough of a mighty city—a fitting starting point for a team that really was a band of brothers.
Star running backs, obscure linemen, punters and kickers, the oldest quarterback in the league, and a couple of brand-new rookies—we all lived in the Concourse Plaza Hotel, a twelve-story redbrick building planted atop a hill above Yankee Stadium, on a wide, ambitious avenue called the Grand Concourse, optimistically modeled on the Champs-Elysées in Paris.
We loved the hotel, we loved the neighborhood, we loved the time, and we loved our team.
In the late fifties, the Bronx was a pretty vibrant place—and the heart of a working-class football team was camped right in the middle of it, five months of the year. Most of us were making just about as much money playing professional football as the electricians, cops, and subway drivers who lived all around us. A lot of us were making less.
The rest of the year, we lived back home, working at our other jobs: as teachers, insurance salesmen, plumbers. Bert Bell, our colorful commissioner—a Philadelphia and Jersey Shore guy with no pretense—used to tell the new crop of rookies every summer: You are not going to make a living playing pro football, so don't quit the day job.
For me, the off-season before '58 had meant a brief movie-acting career that was winding down and a broadcast career that was just starting up. I'd always had my eye on the next thing I might do with my life. I'd always known—as any football player knows—that one blind-side hit on a planted leg, one searing jolt of pain as you feel the ligaments tear from your knee, could mean the instant end of a career.
But during the football season, we were residents of a proud borough, living in a giant, friendly boardinghouse, surrounded by our parks, our restaurants, our coffee shops, our subway stop—and our stadium. There was no disconnect between where we lived and where we played. We didn't have to fight traffic, or leave a suburban gated community, to drive to some stadium with an Internet company–sponsored name that would change as soon as the company declared bankruptcy. Our home and our workplace sat side by side. Our commute was by foot: down the hill a few blocks, past the shops and bars, under the rumbling el, through the glass doors.
I'd stop for a cup of coffee at a deli on my walk to the stadium, like any other guy on his way to work, and walk through the players' entrance and down the stairs to the locker room. After the game, I'd take a shortcut home: I'd walk back up through the dugout, across the scarred field, flanked by empty stands still smelling like beer and liquor and cigar smoke, then leave the stadium through a door tucked underneath the bleachers and go back up the hill to the hotel, maybe stopping to pick up a pack of cigarettes, a quart of milk.
The Glory Game
Excerpted from The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever by Frank Gifford, Peter Richmond
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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