The day the NFL got sudden life
THE GREATEST GAME
It was 50 years ago that the Baltimore Colts-New York Giants title game lifted the NFL's popularity to new heights.
In the murky gloaming of old Yankee Stadium exactly 50 years ago, on Dec. 28, 1958, Alan Ameche burrowed through a chasm over right tackle at the goal line to climax the "Greatest Game Ever Played," the historic moment captured in a photograph from the end zone that is famous in football lore.
My perspective from a press box seat in the mezzanine level of the stadium was different.
The "sudden death" victory of the Baltimore Colts over the New York Giants, 23-17, for the NFL championship propelled professional football past baseball as the national pastime. This was sitting in on history -- well, sports history -- before my eyes.
As a young sportswriter getting immersed in the pro football of the 1950s -- it lagged far behind baseball and even college football in public interest -- I had a special kinship with the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts. I was not a fan. The word "fan" derives from "fanatic," and I never felt that way about sports. I admired athletic achievement under pressure and was thrilled by the competition.
The star performer of the Giants was Frank Gifford, a versatile running back who came out of the oil field country near Bakersfield and married the campus beauty queen at USC. During the season, they (like many Giants) lived at the Concourse Plaza Hotel near Yankee Stadium, and Frank invited me to postgame parties in his apartment. Gifford received the Jim Thorpe Trophy (my creation) as the NFL's most valuable player in 1956.
The next year John Unitas, the young quarterback of the Baltimore Colts, came to New York to be awarded the MVP trophy. Just two seasons earlier, the crew-cut passer in the quaint high-top shoes was picked up from the semi-pro western Pennsylvania Bloomfield Rams, who paid him $6 a game. Unitas was the dominant player on the frozen turf of Yankee Stadium in that 1958 classic (and got a brand new Corvette for his MVP performance).
My first extensive travel with a pro football team was the two weeks annually I was invited to spend with the Colts on their season-ending West Coast trips. Heading to Southern California for the Rams game, the Colts moved into the staid Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, where a covey of little blue-haired old ladies who lived there clucked over the football behemoths and wanted to know where they had gone to school.
