Tweet of the Day (Phil Simms, on Eli Manning)

“#EliManning can stand tall and proud and will for the rest of his life for all he has been to @Giants —Fans will never forget him #GiantsPride.”—Former New York Giant quarterback and current sportscaster Phil Simms, on his old team’s horrendous, humiliating, deeply shameful decision to bench two-time Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning, tweet of Nov. 28, 2017

(The accompanying photo of Eli Manning, showing the quarterback in a pre-game warm-up, was created Oct. 11, 2009, by Marianne O'Leary.)

Quote of the Day (Red Smith, on Bobby Thomson’s ‘Shot Heard Round the World’)

“Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”— Red Smith, "Miracle of Coogan's Bluff," New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 4, 1951

Giant announcer Russ Hodges’ breathless announcement—“The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant!”—might be what most people recall about Bobby Thomson’s walk-off homerun that defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers in the rivals’ best-of-three playoff series 65 years ago today. But to my way of thinking, Smith’s column captured the “inexpressibly fantastic” nature of the moment better, all the way down to the image of the dejected reliever who threw the fatal pitch: “Ralph Branca turned and started for the clubhouse. The number on his uniform looked huge. Thirteen.”

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.

Gisele Jinx?

I’m not sure of the provenance of the image attached to this post, but it sure conveys a Churchillian sense of triumph—a premature feeling that might have turned into rancid disappointment and anger inside the very famous young woman flashing this sign.

For the faithful in New England, the New York Giants’ come-from-behind win in the Super Bowl must have felt like (with apologies to Yogi Berra) Deja Blue All Over Again.

But the outburst by losing quarterback Tom Brady’s celebrity wife, Gisele Bundchen, rubbed salt in the wound. Fox Sports’ Bill Reiter went so far as to suggest that it might spell the end of “The Patriots’ Way.” That, for those of us previously unfamiliar with the term, is the code of omerta imposed by coach Bill Belichick that had succeeded, for much of the past decade, in keeping within the family the inevitable tensions occurring when testosterone-turbocharged young men, striving past every ache and pain and Monday-Morning-Quarterbacking session by fans, fall short in the quest for perfection on any given Sunday.

And wouldn’t you know it, no sooner had Mrs. Brady unleashed The Rant Heard Round the World against a taunting male Giant fan, when the Pats’ Ron Gronkowski—he of the most-talked-about bad ankle in New England since Curt Schilling’s much-hyped bloody sock—was videotaped at an aftergame party, moving as if his throbbing body part had miraculously recovered.

The Patriots' Yoko Ono?
It was a massive breach of the latter-day athletic Spartan code: instead of coming home with his shield (or helmet, in this case) or on it, the record-setting tight end was ready to dance on his, surely making a few fans wonder if he could have moved just as fast to catch Brady’s last-second Hail Mary heave into the end zone. It was a Patriot re-enactment of The Fall: first the sin, then the end of the innocence, all following a woman leading a man astray.

The whole sequence had many Patriot fans speculating if it all might have been part of a “Gisele Jinx.” Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy succinctly summarized the developing consensus: “The notion of Gisele Bundchen as Yoko Ono will gather steam now that Brady’s wife has inserted herself into his professional business.”

What a fascinating turn of events—particularly for a woman who has, from all appearances, led a charmed life as the Uber-Supermodel.

The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women
A friend related, not so long ago, that he had developed a small, unexpected, but fascinating subset of his very busy legal practice: representing models. The practice of discovering and marketing beautiful young women, it appears, can be singularly ugly, with some agents ready to take gross financial advantage of these naïve youngsters.

My friend is far too modest to draw the inevitable conclusion, but there is obviously, in this environment, a burning need for an honest, competent, all-around good guy such as himself to act as legal eagle. (I can’t imagine that my friend, if he had junior male attorneys at his firm, would have a terribly difficult time convincing them to perform for such clients work that would normally be considered the worst kind of drudgery.)

I gather that my friend’s practice includes at least a couple of young women who prance down the catwalk, but I don’t know if any of them have yet ascended to the rarefied level of The Supermodel: the Christies, Cindys, Naomis, Elles, Tyras, and Heidis of the world, the ones who can say: “Go ahead, hate me because I’m beautiful! I’m crying all the way to the bank!” Such women have long convinced me that the term “pouting supermodel” is redundant.

Now comes Gisele. Perhaps her profane outburst that her hubby couldn’t be expected to throw and catch at the same time was simply, as Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay contends, a matter of a loving wife standing up for her man in an understandable, if inappropriate, way.

But who could doubt that this was a blow to the Patriots’ esprit de corps, an incident so grievous that it made the appearance of a previously unknown “New Belichick” (one given to smiling, if you can believe it) as evanescent as “The New Newt” in the GOP primaries.

Another one of my friends (and he knows who he is!) has sometimes expressed delight that Brady’s wife has a twin out there, presumably unattached. But outbursts such as Ms. Bundchen’s post-Super Bowl rant make one question the desirability of possessing such eye candy, for reasons going beyond what Jack Nicholson memorably told Michelle Pfeiffer in Wolf : “The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you're not very interesting.“

I’m not talking simply about the fact that, even after she stops walking down the runway and consumes her first Twinkie in two decades, there’s a good chance that Gisele will be netting more money than Tom. (On one side: income from apparel lines, diet/exercise books, reality shows in which she could deliver tough love to aspiring Pouty Supermodels; on his side, a pension which will be lucky to exceed his mounting medical expenses. Do the math.)

I don’t even have just in mind the elemental fight every morning for Mirror Time. From Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe to David Justice and Halle Berry, the longevity of unions between professional athletes and their glamorous spouses does not seem terribly long.

The Difficult Mixture of Football and Supermodels
There is also the issue of why a supermodel would even want to follow closely a game such as football. Football involving tackling is not, after all, unlike soccer, volleyball, softball (a cousin of baseball), or basketball, an activity in which a female is likely to participate at a young age. If you’re a supermodel with a loved one in the game, watching him chased (and, sometimes, upended) by 300-pound mastodons at unbelievable speeds is likely to seem like a Sunday horror show. As for all that complicated play-calling—well, what could be interesting about that?

Even after hours of hanging out with, say, Hannah Storm or Erin Andrews—both of whom might be able to translate the game into fairly understandable terms—professional football is simply not likely to be fully understood or liked by Gisele.

And that lack of understanding might go to the heart of why she missed some fairly elementary things, such as:

* If her husband’s receivers were so bad, then how come they caught a Super Bowl record 16 consecutive passes of his at one point?
* Why had her husband put the Patriots in such a vulnerable position with his safety on the Pats' first possession, as well as with his subpar fourth quarter (6 of 15, 64 yards, an interception)?

* She couldn’t have had Wes Welker in mind with her tirade, could she? Because if so, her husband was at least halfway at fault by throwing so poorly on the play.

* Instead of taking umbrage against the Giants heckler who claimed that Eli Manning owned her husband, why couldn’t she point out, with perfect reason, that her husband faced the Giants’ defense, not its offense—then ask, with equally perfect reason, how her heckler might have fared if he had Justin Tuck chasing him all day?

* Instead of questioning her own team’s wide receivers, she might inquired about the wisdom of Belichick’s plan in guarding against the Giants’ wide receivers—specifically, whether the odds of Mario Manningham staying in-bounds on a crucial play would begin to work in the latter’s favor.

Instead, Brady’s Mrs. has made matters unnecessarily awkward for herself and her husband. No matter how much the two of them might offer abashed apologies, from now on, there’s going to be quite a contingent of Patriot wives who, instead of helping Gisele flip the burgers at the next summer Brady barbeque, would much rather flip her the bird.

No, the sense that Gisele is Yoko, or Delilah depriving her husband of his powers at critical moments, can’t be entirely sustained. There are equally, perhaps even more, plausible explanations for why the Patriots dynasty has, as the Giants’ Brandon Jacobs stated with relish, been “decapitated.”

First, perhaps this is all divine punishment for Spygate—a use of videotaping against an opponent so egregious that the NFL imposed a heavy fine.The Patriots have not only not won a Super Bowl since then, but lost in the most agonizing fashion: first, when they were minutes away from concluding a perfect season, and second, when they were on the brink of avenging themselves for that earlier loss. Somehow, the term “genius,” once tossed around regularly about Belichick, sticks a bit more in the throat these days.

The Curse of Bridget Moynahan?
Second, might this be less Gisele’s Jinx than the Curse of Bridget Moynahan? The star of Blue Bloods, Sex and the City and Coyote Ugly has declined to criticize her ex-boyfriend, even after a) he dumped her, taking up with Gisele shortly afterward, and b) he left her pregnant, and even, for a short time before the birth of his first child, seemed distinctly unhappy about impending fatherhood.
But Moynahan's ex-beau, more than anyone, should know better than to read a public silence as ready acceptance of reality. After all, Brady, as someone of Irish descent, should understand that Moynahan can summon all sorts of forces beyond the ken of mortal man. She can pray to the saint for whom she is named, for instance, asking her to take her ex-boyfriend down a peg.

Or she can look in a far less benign direction. Something in the ancient Irish way of life lends itself to impenetrable mists, or calls on the supernatural. (With their groundbreaking tales of vampires, Sheridan LeFanu and Bram Stoker didn’t write from a vacuum, you know.)

If I were the Patriots, I would deeply worry about this curse of a woman scorned. Consider Kate Hudson, who last went out with Alex Rodriguez during the 2009 World Series, and split with him shortly afterward, supposedly over his incurable narcissism. The Yankees not only haven’t come close to winning since, but Kate's Curse seems to be a metastizing force. (How else to explain Brian Cashman's current case of lunacy?)

As he considers what Gisele Hath Wrought, Brady has experienced firsthand the meaning of these lyrics from Peter Allen’s “Don’t Wish Too Hard”:

“How I wished for you and now you’re here
Now I wish that I could disappear and go away.”

Quote of the Day (Joe Namath, on Victory and Other Things)

“If you’re not gonna go all the way, man, I mean, why go at all?”—Joe Namath, 1973 Brut TV commercial

Jets legend Joe Namath was famous for scoring on and off the field. His prognostication skills, however—at least, as demonstrated by picking the New England Patriots to win yesterday’s Super Bowl—leave something to be desired.

Eli Manning, from all appearances, is not into the colorful off-the-field life that Broadway Joe led. I don’t think he even has his own nickname.

But he’s gone “all the way” to the Lombardi Trophy, twice earning MVP nods in the biggest game of the year. He and long-maligned Coach Tom Coughlin are now genuinely in any discussion of the elite of their profession—and, in time, should receive full consideration for admission into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

New England fans—not to mention Vegas oddsmakers—should have heeded the message we Giant fans have been trying to send them these past two weeks: “Eli’s coming…Hide your heart….No, you’ll never get away from the burnin’ a-heartache…”

Photo of the Day: From Heroes to Zeroes

I just had to snap pictures of two action figures, representing the New York Giants and the New York Jets, this morning as I passed the Tonic Sports Bar in Times Square on my way to work. They simply seemed so symbolic of their teams’ maddening seasons.

There’s the sense of premature jubilation in the raised fingers, followed by the crushing realization that they had failed to show up against teams they should have beaten handily. There’s the shameless appeal to the hometown crowd.

And it ends, of course, with those 00s. No, they’re not the jerseys of the great Hall of Fame center Jim Otto. Nor, as the makers of these statues of Big Blue and Gang Green probably believed, are they diplomatic ways of not associating a team with a single player. Instead, the numbers have become emblematic of the teams’ slide toward absolute oblivion.

Funny, isn’t it, that, for all their differences in temperament and coaching philosophy, Tom Coughlin and Rex Ryan now stand with their teams at the same ugly pass.


Tonic features karaoke. Perhaps, before their next game, Giant and Jets fans can sing a Tom Petty song. You know the lyric: “Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes…”

This Day in Football History (Lombardi Wins 1st Game for Packers)

September 27, 1959—With a hard-fought 9-6 victory against the archrival Chicago Bears, the Green Bay Packers signaled more than that they were shedding their losing ways and rededicating themselves to winning.

The win at home, on Lambeau Field, also demonstrated that they were responding to new head coach Vince Lombardi, who had begun to forge his leadership style—as heavy on teaching as on discipline and motivation—20 years before, in a small parochial high school in northern New Jersey.

Jack Pearson had a fascinating post a few weeks ago in 50 Plus News Magazine about the game—the seasons of hopelessness preceding it, what transpired during the victory, and how sportswriters viewed it. (None, needless to say, predicted the coming dynasty.) He tells the story much better than I ever could, so read the above link.

Lombardi came to the Packers by way of the New York Giants, where he and Tom Landry had served as assistant coaches--the greatest assistant staff I can think of in league history. 

Recently I began dipping into one of great sports books of all time, Instant Replay, Packer guard Jerry Kramer’s diary of the last championship season under the coach who had pushed, prodded, cursed, and cheered him into becoming a star. It, along with David Maraniss’ later biography of the coach, When Pride Still Mattered, shows that there was far more to Lombardi than just brutalizing players, that knowing how to make them understand assignments as well as how to inspire each one individually figured much more prominently in his unequaled success. 

Focus again on a couple of verbs in that last sentence: “understand” and “inspire.” They’re central to the mission of teaching, aren’t they? It turns out that Lombardi came by his unique method while a teacher-coach at my alma mater, St. Cecilia’s High School in Englewood, N.J. 

Maraniss’ book makes clear that Lombardi’s middle linebacker at Green Bay, Hall of Famer Ray Nitschke, was something of a reclamation project, a man whose brute strength could easily have been misused as an adult in tough neighborhoods if he hadn’t found an outlet for his aggression. The same thing happened at St. Cecilia, where Lombardi earnestly believed that sports could provide focus and instill character—and where, he felt, he could steer players into more productive pursuits. 

I was reminded of Lombardi’s inaugural season at Green Bay—and of the part education played in it—through Phil Barber’s marvelous article “Lombardi Rules,” in the Fall 2009 issue of American Heritage Magazine. That march to glory started in the summer with plays he diagrammed on blackboards (yes, classic teaching instruments), which the players were then expected to copy out themselves. 

Simplicity was the key to the whole thing. A play could fall apart if someone didn’t understand what he was supposed to do—which happened a lot with the 1-11 1958 Packers, when impossibly complicated play calls at the line of scrimmage, often barked by a quarterback making his voice heard over a roaring crowd, represented a recipe for disaster. 

In contrast, Lombardi’s plays featured an easy-to-remember numbering system: “43 Double Pinch,” for instance, meant that the 4 back would plunge through the 3 hole. 

Lombardi had learned another lesson from St. Cecilia’s, where, for $1,700 a year, he taught physics, Latin and chemistry, besides coaching football, basketball and baseball: don’t move on until even the dimmest bulb in the group understands what you’ve just said. It worked wonders. 

Barber quotes Packer center Bill Curry on what Lombardi “did best”: “What a great teacher does is make you want to please him or her. I’ll never forget what he taught me. That was his greatest gift.” 

Oh, one last holdover from his days as a teacher: grades. One of the most amusing entries in Kramer’s diary occurred early in Packer training camp, when Lombardi lashed out at the players: 

“Usually, we get graded for our blocking, and Vince reads the grades out loud at a meeting. Today he said he was so embarrassed by our blocking grades that he couldn’t even read them out loud. Instead, he wrote them down on little slips of paper and folded up the slips, put our names on them and handed them out.” 

Vince’s kid brother Joe could have told Kramer all about how the coach felt about poor grades. At St. Cecilia’s, Vince had gotten positively emotional about Joe’s—so much so, in fact, that it became one of the enduring legends of the school. 

Maraniss narrates the story in his biography, and maybe there are a few people out there who think it’s too outlandish to have happened. But a friend of mine who attended Saints at the time was present, reeled off the names of several people who were principals in the ensuing sequence of events, and insisted it occurred as Maraniss narrated. 

Lombardi was making a presentation at Blue and Gold Day, an academic-athletic-extracurricular awards ceremony just before the close of the school year that was still a tradition when I graduated in the late 1970s. The coach acknowledged the names of achievers, then referred to his brother Joe, a student in the school at the time. To the astonishment of those assembled, he pulled out a paper and began to read aloud Joe’s marks. 

The mediocre ones came first. It didn’t get any better after that. With each declining grade, Lombardi’s voice grew more vehement and his face more red. When he read the last subpar mark, he flung the paper down and chased his brother out of the hall. 

My friend told me that it took several burly football friends of his to block Vince’s path and enable Joe to make a safe exit—otherwise, he might have ended up pummeled, black and blue, or maybe even worse, if the chase hadn't been halted. 

Chase—a word associated with speed and constant movement, much like the famed “Lombardi Sweep” that the Pack immortalized in the Sixties. I like the quote that Pearson found in the Sporting News in which quarterback Bart Starr related the coach’s first remarks to the team in 1959: 

“Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because in the process we will catch excellence.” A pause for dramatic effect, then this conclusion: “I am not remotely interested in being just good.” 

That first season didn’t reach excellence, but it came close—a 7-5 mark. The next year, the Pack made the playoffs before losing to the Philadelphia Eagles. From then on, the Lombardi-led Packers never lost another postseason game. 

If you’re a sports fan, you know the rest of Lombardi’s record. You surely also know about the admiration, love and fear with which he was regarded by his players. What you might not know is the price he exacted from himself. 

The friend who attended Saints in the 1940s during the Lombardi era noted that the ashtray in the coach's office was continually full, with the air reeking of cigarette smoke. Smoking seemed the only way Lombardi knew to relieve the incessant pressure he placed as much on himself as on his players.

Inevitably, it took its toll. Lombardi’s death of stomach cancer at only age 57 in 1970 robbed the game of its greatest coach, and 20th-century American culture of one of its most complicated, driven, fascinating individuals. I've written endlessly every day for nearly two years about individuals from history, but Lombardi would easily make the short list of people I would most liked to have met.

This Day in Sports History (Colts Beat Giants in “Greatest Game”)

December 28, 1958—With the former head football coach of my high school, Vince Lombardi, serving as offensive coordinator, the New York Giants lost the first “sudden-death” overtime game in the history of the National Football League to the Baltimore Costs, 23-17.

A number of people have called this “the greatest game ever played.” Giants running back Frank Gifford, who fumbled twice in the game, remembers it as sloppily played, pointing to seven turnovers altogether on that blustery winter day. Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid, who broke down a “coaches’ film” of the game this past spring for Atlantic Monthly writer Mark Bowden, would probably agree. So, I bet, would the notoriously perfectionist Lombardi.

Nevertheless, there’s no doubting the attention given this NFL championship game, especially when you consider the following:

* Approximately 45 million people watched the broadcast of the game, ratifying the NFL as a major TV draw 19 years after NBC became the first network to televise a contest.
* Among the people in attendance was Vice-President Richard Nixon.
* The Giants may have had the most talented assistant coaching staff in the history of the game—Lombardi as offensive coordinator and Tom Landry directing the defense.
* Besides Lombardi and Landry, 14 other people associated with the game would enter the Pro Football Hall of Fame, including Colts coach Week Ewbank and Giants owner Wellington Mara.

I am a longtime Giants fan and, as a graduate of St. Cecilia, a Lombardi aficionado. But I have to admit that one of the most inspiring stories of this game was the crucial partnership of Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry. The pair—nothing at all like the mastodons that now roam the gridiron—would never have even stepped foot on a football field if their naysayers could have helped it.

That they could have succeeded at all was due to a blue-collar work ethic, tireless craft and undaunted grit. Two years before “the greatest game,” Unitas had been picked up off the slag heap, so to speak, by the Colts, who had found him playing in a semipro sandlot league after he’d been cut by the Steelers.

Even before that, when he was a college hopeful, Notre Dame had ignored him, never believing he could bulk up. In a way, they were right—Unitas finished up his NFL career with the San Diego Chargers, a team that, exactly a decade before, had introduced steroids into the game, and the proud old quarterback was distinctly out of place in that overgrown lockerroom. In his prime, it didn’t matter—no field general could move his forces at will and attack the enemy at the exact point where it hurt when everything depended on it like Unitas.

Likewise, those paid to know about those things discounted Berry as lacking speed. They overlooked his big hands and an obsession with detail that made the wide receiver what writer Mark Bowden, in an excerpt from his book The Best Game Ever in Sports Illustrated, called “the prototype of the modern football player.” Not only did he study 25 pages of game notes in preparation for the confrontation with the Giants, but before the fans trooped into the stadium that day he minutely inspected the turf, examining which spots he could exploit—preparation that aided him in his playoff-record 12 catches that afternoon.

Two last points and I’m out of here:

* Lombardi was halfway through his post-St. Cecilia High School life—and at a career crossroads—during the game. He badly wanted the head coaching job of the Giants, but the Mara family made too much of a fetish out of personal loyalty. They didn’t want to push out the door current head coach Jim Lee Howell, even though he cheerfully admitted his penchant for delegating to Lombardi and Landry with the one-liner, “I just blow up the footballs and keep order." In short order, Lombardi and Landry left for head coaching posts with the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, where they forged the records that put them in the Football Hall of Fame—and even Howell had decided to hang it up after the 1960 season.

* Colts running back Alan “The Horse” Ameche, whose one-yard plunge into the endzone decided the contest, was the subject of one of the funniest scenes in the great 1982 Barry Levinson comedy Diner. You might remember the scene when a sports-fanatic groom decides that his prospective bride needs to pass a trivia test before the ceremony. “Alan Ameche” was the answer she had on the tip of her tongue when her fiance’s friend blurted it out. The capper of the scene: The groom emerging to tell his buddies that the wedding was off! As Paul Reiser’s character Modell sums it up: “We all know most marriages depend on a firm grasp of football trivia.”