Gifford: The Blue Knight Passes From the Scene

Sixty years are not that long ago in the life of a sport, really, but the amount of surviving film from that era in professional football is nothing like what it would become in even a decade later. And so, for a long time, whenever I tried to get a sense of what Frank Gifford meant to the New York Giants, for an era when I either hadn't been born yet or was too young to follow sports, I had to rely mostly on statistics and a few photos that froze him in action.

Then, more than a decade ago, in a Sports Illustrated cover story on memorable portraits from the magazine, I saw the one accompanying this post, taken by John G. Zimmerman in August 1959. It was so different from my indelible memories of Gifford from the early 1970s, when his yellow jacket matched those of his Monday Night Football colleagues Howard Cosell and Don Meredith.

No, in the photo you see now, Gifford was 29, at the height of his playing career, not just quietly confident but remarkably dashing. You half expected him to doff that cape and don armor instead. 

The Giants had plenty of stars in the dozen years of his career—Sam Huff, Andy Robustelli, Y.A. Tittle, Charlie Conerly, Roosevelt Grier, Alex Webster, Pat Summerall, and Kyle Rote—but really, only one Big Blue player was their Sir Lancelot, first among equals of the Knights of the Round Table, the one unafraid of any challenge.

That photo has been much on my mind since the news broke over the weekend of Gifford’s death at age 84. It would have bothered me if Gifford had died of a brain injury, a remnant of repeated concussions from his playing days, a pattern that has become all too familiar. Now, I am glad that nothing will interfere with my image of him as the most fearless and faithful Blue Knight.

Gifford became a football immortal as perhaps the key element during the longest stretch of sustained excellence in Giants’ history. Year after year, from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s, he led his teammates on an obsessive quest—the NFL championship—and they actually achieved it in 1956, due in no small part to Gifford’s MVP season and to the man who mined his potential: Vince Lombardi.

As head coach in Green Bay, Lombardi developed a kind of father-son relationship with the running back nicknamed “Golden Boy,” Paul Hornung. But the template for that relationship (minus, on the wild Hornung’s part, its prodigal-son overtones) was formed a few years before, in New York, with another back as versatile as he was charismatic: Gifford.

In his early 40s and a largely unknown quantity to the professional ranks when he came to the Giants as an assistant coach dealing with the offense, Lombardi made the critical decision to focus his half of the squad on Gifford, who had been used primarily as a defensive back the year before the coach’s arrival.

But, recognizing that Big Blue’s first-round draft choice in 1952 could also run, block, catch passes and throw from the option formation, Lombardi figured out how to capitalize on his multiple gifts. The team lost nine of 12 games just before Lombardi came but never had a losing season in his five years as assistant—and Gifford was named to the Pro Bowl each of those years. He would achieve that last honor eight times throughout his career, not just as a defensive back and halfback but as a wide receiver, the position he took up after being sidelined for a year by a ferocious hit from Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik.

Early on, Gifford came to embody hopes and ideals so intensely that he became a point of identification among Giant fans. That bonding was given its most memorable utterance by Frederick Exley, a fellow USC alum, in his fictionalized memoir, A Fan’s Notes:

Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, Gifford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his. It was something more than this: I cheered for him with such inordinate enthusiasm, my yearning became so involved with his desire to escape life’s bleak anonymity, that after a time he became my alter ego, that part of me which had its being in the competitive world of men; I came, as incredible as it seems to me now, to believe that I was, in some magical way, an actual instrument of his success.

His was “the face of our franchise for many years,” said current Giant co-owner John Mara upon hearing news of the death of the Hall of Famer. It was also a face that, in the Fifties and Sixties, helped him supplement his salary with commercial endorsements for the likes of Vitalis, men’s clothing, Florida orange juice, and other products…a face that could make What’s My Line panelist Arlene Francis gush…and a face that could turn Cosell green with envy.

“Humble Howard” might have scorned his broadcast booth partner for being in the vanguard of the “jockocracy” starting to make inroads into sportscasting. But Gifford had paid his dues even before appearing on camera for ABC, for he started his broadcast career at CBS Radio, where his voice, not his face, was his primary asset.

It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the polysyllabic sports pundit, groaning under the weight of his ridiculous toupee, was incensed at Gifford for being less follicularly challenged than he. So he struck back, churlishly, in his memoir, I Never Played the Game, deriding Gifford for never suffering the consequences of mistakes made on the air.

Some might feel that Gifford’s response, nearly a decade later, in his own autobiography, The Whole Ten Yards (Cosell “looked like Ichabod Crane and spoke with a nasal Brooklyn accent”) might have been testy. On the other hand, I regard the statement as remarkably pacifistic, given the mounting provocations and egotism that Gifford endured at his hands for more than a decade. It’s a sign of Gifford’s grace that he visited Cosell two weeks before the blustering broadcaster’s death.

None of this is to imply that Gifford was perfect. In the broadcast booth, he could mix up or forget names (even the Dallas Cowboys’ Tom Landry, whom he knew well as an assistant coach with the Giants). And, like Sir Lancelot, the Blue Knight had a roving eye that caused needless grief to those in his orbit. He was exposed, publicly and humiliatingly, by the tabloids for cheating on his wife, Kathie Lee Gifford, in the 1990s. As early as the 1970s, he may have carried on an affair with the wife of another famous man—Johnny Carson, according to the tell-all memoir of the talk-show host’s former lawyer, Henry Bushkin.

But, if Americans can forgive politicians for far more frequent and egregious unfaithfulness, then why not Gifford? His sins, in fact, look pretty mild compared with today’s athletes, a greedy, egotistic, philandering, substance-abusing, wife-beating bunch if there ever was one.

A last gaze at that photo, where Gifford returns our gaze. Come to think of it, that’s not a cape he’s wearing, but a mantle of destiny. Gifford looks ready for anything, even a role in one of the most astonishing dramas in the last century of sports, when football overtook baseball as the national athletic obsession.

Gifford would be there for the 1958 game regarded as the contest that put football on the national map—the “sudden death” championship between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts—as well as Monday Night Football, when the atmosphere—new stadiums with Astroturf, cheerleaders, the zingers tossed between Cosell and Meredith—often eclipsed what was happening on the field.

Thrown for a loss, Gifford might be, by a Bednarik tackle, a Cosell public insult, or a tabloid photo, but he never stayed thrown. Above all, the Blue Knight was resolute and enduring.

This Day in Sports History (Howard Cosell, Broadcast-Booth Mouth, Dies)

Apr. 23, 1995— Howard Cosell, perhaps the best known—and certainly most controversial—sportscaster of his time, died at age 77 of a heart embolism at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York City. Even as the strength in his body had faded in the last few years under the assault of multiple diseases, the memory of him had faded from a public that once tuned in to hear his outrageous utterances (or, as he put it, “telling it like it is”) on TV prizefights or with partners Frank Gifford and Don Meredith in the early years of “Monday Night Football.”

Cosell might have initially thought of himself as a sports journalist, but as he grew more famous, his fame extended far beyond those confines—a fact he abetted and reminded everyone about, on every conceivable occasion. 

In the early 1970s, Woody Allen spun comic gold from him in not in one but two films. In Bananas, Cosell made a cameo, giving a play-by-play narrative of the honeymoon night of Allen’s character, Fielding Mellish. In Sleeper, the humor was more pointed. A historian shows a tape of Cosell to Miles Monroe, Allen’s cryogenically frozen visitor from a century before: “At first we didn't know exactly what this was, but we've developed a theory. We feel that when citizens in your society were guilty of a crime against the state, they were forced to watch this.”

“Humble Howard,” they nicknamed him at the height of his fame, with irony as obvious as the toupee he wore on TV. He not only admitted to his egotism, he owned it. “Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff,” he once said. “I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.”

Sportscaster Jimmy Cannon put it far more hilariously and, of course, concisely: “If Howard Cosell were a sport, he’d be roller derby.”

In the mid-1970s, a relative of mine bought the live LP, Sinatra—The Main Event, in which Cosell introduced the Chairman of the Board. From a generation that worshipped The Beatles and Bob Dylan, I was aghast at the thought of purchasing anything by Ol’ Blue Eyes. But anything with Cosell constituted double grounds for temporary insanity.

“Not just Sinatra, but Cosell,” I asked my relative, staring at the LP. “What did you do?”

“It was a BIG mistake,” my relative allowed.

It’s hard to explain to anyone below the age of, say, 35, who came of age after Cosell receded from the limelight, what he had been like. I can say that when I was a kid, some of my friends took to mocking him. “THIS is How-ard CO-sell,” they would say, clutching an imaginary microphone, “speaking of sports.”

I might have thought better of Cosell if I thought he might be a bit bothered by the impromptu parodies of him by me and my friends. After all, it might be said that he got into sportscasting partly because of his advocacy for children.

Into his mid-30s, Cosell had been a sports attorney, with enough famous clients (including the young Willie Mays) to have become at least moderately successful. But at one point, while helping a client form a Little League with the novel idea of young ballplayers interviewing major leaguers, Cosell decided it would be even more fun—and, more important, lucrative—if he did so.

By 1956, Cosell was doing so well with sportscasting and commentary for ABC Radio that he was able to quit the legal profession.

The title of Cosell’s 1985 autobiography, I Never Played the Game, was a double-entendre. The meaning he wanted readers to get was that, unlike the “jockocracy” he endlessly railed against, he wasn’t a dimwitted cheerleader for a sport. But the other, literal meaning of the title was also true, albeit in ways he didn’t like to think about: He had never participated in the games he announced, as player or coach, and, therefore, brought no special insight into what to watch on the field or court, or in the ring.

The stands that Cosell took were less noble than he gave himself credit for. It wasn’t Cosell who was taking himself away from his livelihood in his prime, but Curt Flood when he battled baseball’s reserve clause all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And it wasn’t Cosell who lost the greatest honor in his sport by following the precepts of a dimly understood religion by refusing to go to war in Vietnam, but Muhammad Ali (the former Cassius Clay).

After leaving "Monday Night Football" in 1984, Cosell gradually scaled back his activity, retiring for good in 1994. By the time Robert Lipsyte got around to writing in The New York Times about a visit to him for his 75^th birthday, I had practically forgotten he was even still around.

Lipsyte’s piece, written two years before Cosell’s demise, shocked me—and, I suspect, a number of other readers—in its unsparing depiction of a man who—outside of the limelight he once courted, beset by cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, mild strokes, still absolutely bereft by the death of his beloved wife Emmy—seemed to be awaiting death impatiently:

“He does not get out of the apartment much. His daughters, Jill and Hillary, are concerned that physical activity, crowds, pressure of any kind could exacerbate his various ailments. The many medications he takes tend to leave him dopey and smiley. And with few real interests since his wife died three years ago -- he watches little TV and does not read much anymore -- the need to keep his eyes open diminishes.”

Quote of the Day (Howard Cosell, on Football)

"The importance that our society attaches to sport is incredible. After all, is football a game or a religion? The people of this country have allowed sports to get completely out of hand."—Howard Cosell

(So said the late ABC sportscaster and part of the “Monday Night Football” triumvirate, even as he raked in the cash that came with the game’s explosion in popularity. But for all his hypocrisy on the point, Cosell raised an important point. More and more Americans profess to having no religious affiliation, and don’t mind missing a service. At the same time, more and more people are glued to the set to watch 300-pound-plus mastodons grapple with each other. Guess it beats thinking about life, death, the meaning of it all, and what we owe each other, here and now.)