The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever

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More About This Book

Overview

In 1958 Frank Gifford was the golden boy on the glamour team in the most celebrated city in the NFL. When his New York Giants played the Baltimore Colts for the league championship that year, it became the single most memorable contest in the history of professional football. Broadcast to an audience of millions, it was the first title game ever to go into sudden-death overtime. Its drama, excitement, and controversy riveted the nation and helped propel football to the forefront of the American sports landscape.

Now, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of "The Greatest Game Ever Played," New York Giants Hall of Famer and longtime television analyst Frank Gifford provides an inside-the-helmet account that will take its place in the annals of sports literature. Drawing on the poignant and humorous memories of every living player from the game—including fellow Hall of Famers Sam Huff, Andy Robustelli, Art Donovan, Lenny Moore, and Raymond Berry—as well as the author's own experiences and reflections, The Glory Game captures a magnificent moment in American sports history. It is the story of two very different cities and teams, filled with the joy, the disappointment, and the eternal pride of a day that will forever symbolize all that is great about sports.

Told with gripping immediacy, The Glory Game is an indelible portrait of the NFL's most transcendent hours—a winter version of The Boys of Summer, told by one of football's true legends.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Gifford, the 78-year-old former star for the New York Giants and later an icon on Monday Night Football, tells the story of this much-chronicled game between his Giants and Johnny Unitas's Baltimore Colts from both his perspective and through interviews with teammates and opponents. Gifford decided to write this book after David Halberstam, a friend of Gifford's who had planned to write a book about the game, was killed in a 2007 car accident. Gifford's is a candid, insightful and entertaining look at the camaraderie and culture of the first great stirrings of the NFL, when professional football was a second-class sport in comparison to baseball. He describes vividly an era where the Giants players worked second jobs in the off-season, spent many fall nights barhopping their way across midtown Manhattan and often partook of cigarettes and beer in their Yankee Stadium locker room. Despite the title, this is less a book about how that 1958 game changed the NFL (which was covered in Mark Bowden's summer release of The Best Game Ever) than it is an enjoyable telling of the men who played it. (Nov.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From The Critics

The 50th anniversary of the legendary 1958 NFL Championship game between the Giants and the Colts-when "sudden death" joined the pro football lexicon-and the startlingly fashioned victory of the Giants in the 2008 Super Bowl have unleashed a perfect storm of books. Already this year, Mark Bowden's The Best Game Ever and Lou Sahadi's One Sunday in December have scrutinized the fabled game of half a century ago. Thus, it's somewhat unexpected that Gifford's account is so revelatory, but he did, after all, play in it! For this project, Gifford interviewed the 37 living Giants and Colts to record their remembrances and combine them with his own first-person account of the action and the players and coaches involved. The result is a fresh, engrossing, anecdote-filled retelling of a familiar but unforgettable gridiron battle. Meanwhile, veteran sportswriter Cavanaugh's book covers not only that 1958 title game but the whole run of that remarkable Giants team that played in six championship games in eight years from 1956 to 1963. Cavanaugh covers that dynastic period year by year and provides a focused portrait of that team, informed by interviews with several players from the time. Both books are recommended for all public libraries; Gifford's will be of especial interest.
—John Maxymuk

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780061542558
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 11/4/2008
  • Pages: 304
  • Sales rank: 568,336
  • Product dimensions: 5.80 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 1.20 (d)

Meet the Author

A New York Giant for twelve seasons, Frank Gifford received the NFL's Most Valuable Player Award in 1956 and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977. He was a sports broadcaster for more than thirty years—including twenty-seven years in the booth for ABC's Monday Night Football. He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife, Kathie Lee Gifford, and their children.

Read an Excerpt

The Glory Game
How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever

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 individualathleticism 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
How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever. Copyright © by Frank Gifford. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 10, 2008

    A great book about a great game

    THE GLORY GAME brings back all the memories of a auper football game played fifty years ago that changed the direction of pro football. Every true football fan will love it.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted February 23, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    Great book by a great player

    Unique insights into the game. I saw the game and it will always be a highlight of my football memories. Being in the game gave Gifford an incredible insight not offered before. If you like football you will love this book

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted June 5, 2009

    A Glorious Celebration of the Game and Its Players

    What a wonderful tribute to his Giant teammates and the Colt players Frank has given us in this magnificent book. Not only does he capture the magic of that incredible game (which, as a young Baltimoroean, I watched with breathless excitement, and have always considered an unforgettable game), but he offers so many colorful, entertaining stories and such a rich cornucopia of information about the players, coaches and owners, stories which reflect his own abiding appreciation and love for his colleagues and mentors. This is a great book, and I commend it as an excellent, entertaining, and highly worthwhile read by an intelligent, insightful and modest human being. Tom Jackson, Raleigh, NC

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 16, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    Excellent Book for Sports Fans

    Recommend to all football sports fans!

    0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 5, 2008

    The Glory Game - Touchdown Gifford - Five Stars

    The Glory Game is a richly written, witty account of the championship game 50 years ago between the Giants and the Colts. As much as the game changed the course and future of football, it is an entertaining story of the players themselves. Gifford¿s reflective play by play brought the game alive. You almost felt the hard packed earth rise up with every tackle, the smell of cigar smoke in the stands, the intense rivalry and banter of the players and the confusion a tie created when the clock ran out. The conversational account made you want to hear more about the players, how they all had off season jobs to support their families so they could play the game they loved. 50 years ago football was considered second class to baseball but the guys who played the game were an eclectic fraternity who played hard, respected their owners and were part of the communities they played in. They drank at Toot¿s Shors, smoked cigarettes they endorsed, attended neighborhood birthday parties and in the case of the Giants, walked to home games. Gifford¿s account made me want to hear more about Charlie Conerly, the Marlboro Man, Big Daddy Lipscomb and his questionable death and Kyle Rote who had 10 children named after him because he was so beloved by so many. Had they given Gifford the few inches for a first down football history may have been rewritten. but then we would have lost the opportunity to read this most engaging story.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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