The Best Game Ever Read online

  He was self-made, in a peculiar sense, because by any social measure Bell was aggressively downwardly mobile. He had been born de Benneville (note the small “d”) Bell, son of a blue-blood Philadelphia Main Line family. His father was a former Pennsylvania attorney general and his brother was one of that state’s Supreme Court justices. Young de Benneville himself attended a private prep school and the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania (where his father was a trustee), but along this gilded path he had discovered the gridiron, embraced its blue-collar ethic, and never looked back. He became “Bert,” adopted a tough-guy, blue-collar manner, and somehow acquired an accent that was more Brooklyn than Brahmin, dropping his “g”s and abandoning learned syntax—as New York Times man Al Hirshberg put it, “He talks like a dock walloper.”

  Bell played football in college and, after several misspent postgraduate years squandering his family’s money—accumulating drinking and gambling debts totaling $50,000—he straightened out, married, gave up drink, and found a home in the professional game. The former gambler now kept a close eye on the oddsmakers, keen for the slightest hint of meddling with honest competition, and to fend off would-be fixers he hired former FBI agents to police every team. He weathered competition from an upstart rival league, the All-American Football Conference, and corralled it with a merger—the Baltimore franchise emerged from that maneuver. He instituted “free substitution” to improve the quality of play, and crafted draft rules that allowed the teams with the worst records to have first picks of the emerging college football stars each season. If a team owner complained about Bell’s frequent and often summary rulings, the commissioner was fond of invoking with stern finality, “Article 1, section 14, paragraph B.” He knew full well that nobody knew the league’s bylaws better than he did. The passage read, in part, “The commissioner is authorized to cancel a contract for any action detrimental to the welfare of the National Football League,” a relatively narrow prerogative, but rules are meant to be interpreted, and the commissioner of football interpreted them broadly and enthusiastically. He wielded “1-14-B” like a cudgel, and found that so long as the league prospered, nobody complained.

  He had no rooting interest in this Colts-Giants contest, except that it stay close. Despite Bell’s accomplishments, pro football still lived in the long shadow of baseball. No matter how good the games were, the NFL was still just a diversion during the long cold months of baseball’s annual hiatus. The Giants played in Yankee Stadium. The nation was attuned to the rhythms of the summer game, which dwarfed football in ticket receipts and national attention.

  Newspaper coverage of football was often relegated to the inside pages, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t even that—in mid-December, 1958, New York’s newspapers were shut down for more than two weeks by a strike. The lack of newsprint ballyhoo had contributed to poor ticket sales in the past week—there were alarming pockets of empty seats—but that wasn’t the only problem. It wasn’t the first time the championship game had failed to attract a full house, and Bell knew that if you couldn’t do it in New York it was not a healthy sign.

  Still, there was TV. This was the third time the NFL Championship game had been on national television, and each year the audience had grown. The number of Americans with sets was exploding, from a mere twelve thousand in 1946 to four million just four years later. When World War II ended, just a half of 1 percent of American homes had TV sets; by 1962, just four years after this game was played, 90 percent would. Television was working profound changes in American politics, marketing, journalism, and entertainment, and part of this concerned the way people watched sports. Pro football had begun to attract a larger and larger number of viewers on Sunday afternoons. An estimated 37 percent of those who turned on their sets in that time slot were watching the NFL. Television was perfect for action, particularly the suspense of live action. That’s how it had struck Orrin E. Dunlap Jr. of the New York Times after the first-ever televised game in 1939, a college matchup between Fordham University and Waynesburg College. Dunlap wrote, “With a camera on a dolly at the forty-yard line, the coach himself has nothing on the televiewer in the armchair at home. Both are on the sidelines. . . . Football by television invites audience participation . . . the contest is in the living room; the spectator is edged up close. His eye is right in the game.”

  He might have written eyes and ears, because televised football also added a helpful running commentary that explained the game to those who had never played. Baseball seemed made for radio, because it afforded the best broadcasters the opportunity to gift wrap the game in words, fill a slow-paced contest with description, anecdote, and analysis, and react to its flashes of action with colorful homespun expressions—“Well I’ll be a suck-egg mule!” would say that Mississippi poet of the diamond Red Barber. If radio and baseball went together perfectly, football seemed made for television. Its bunched and scripted action fit neatly in the frame of the set, while skillful cameramen and broadcasters helped viewers follow the ball as plays unfolded. Later would come stop-action and slow-motion replay.

  Today’s kickoff at two o’clock meant that the game’s finish might spill into early evening, into the promised land of prime time, the sweet spot of TV programming, when more ears and eyes were focused on the same thing than in the entire history of humankind. If the game were close, and exciting, it might creep into this national hearth, when the multitudes switched on their TVs for Sunday night viewing, the most valuable time slot of the week. If even a small portion of those who tuned in liked what they saw, Bell knew interest could soar. A blowout, one of those games that peaked early and then ground to a predictable finish, would have the opposite effect. It could be a disaster.

  But this game would be no disaster. It was about to ignite.

  There is a phenomenon known to every sport, but particularly to football, where the sustained high decibel roar of tens of thousands of fans, sheer condensed will, can assume a force like wind, can nudge (or at least appear to nudge) events on the field in the desired direction. This had already happened on the botched Ameche option play, and now it was about to happen again. The first two Giants plays from scrimmage gained eight yards, but the next try, on third down with two yards to go, would become one of the most famous fluke plays in football history, one of those remarkable combinations of skill and sheer luck that make the game so much fun to watch. It was not only going to answer Bert Bell’s prayers by upending the course of this game, it was going to change the history of pro football.

  In the full-throated din, Conerly took the snap and back-pedaled. The Colts’ relentless front four—Marchetti, Donovan, Big Daddy Lipscomb, and Don Joyce—rapidly collapsed the Giants’ pass protection, but just before he was hit, the quarterback lofted an off-balance prayer of a pass over the outstretched hands of the rushers, toward the middle of the field, where Giants flanker Kyle Rote was angling across from his position on the far left side. Rote was matched stride-for-stride with the Colts’ cerebral cornerback Milt Davis, who was playing on a right foot he had broken just two weeks earlier. It was so swollen that Davis was wearing tennis shoes, and so shot up with Novocain that it felt like a wooden peg. Rote had him by a numbed step.

  —Rote is open! He’s got it! Shakes loose one man, shakes loose another. . . .

  Lunging from behind, Davis, the first would-be tackler, slid off Rote, who turned upfield in full stride. The crowd screamed with excitement; there had not been many big plays in the game for New York, and Rote was running free. Angling across was the Colts’ bow-legged weak safety Carl Taseff, the second would-be tackler (this was happening in seconds), who dove at the ballcarrier. Rote neatly sidestepped, sending Taseff flying past empty-handed, but the dodge slowed him, and now two more Colts defenders closed in, cornerback Raymond Brown and strong safety Andy Nelson. It was Nelson who caught him, lunging, and before dragging him down from behind managed to slap the football free.

  The play wasn’t over.

  —The ball is l
oose! And it’s picked up by New York!

  Alex Webster, the big-chinned Giants fullback, had lined up at the start of the play as a wide receiver on the other side of the field from Rote, and like all disciplined players was trailing the play even though he was, for all intents, out of it. But when Nelson knocked the ball free, it tumbled forward, five yards, ten yards. Webster shouldered aside Brown and scooped it up in stride. He kept on running, nothing but an empty forty yards between him and a touchdown. But the Colts’ players were also disciplined. Taseff had jumped to his feet after forcing Rote’s dodge. The cornerback again gave chase. He was faster than Webster, but the fullback had a head start. It was a dramatic footrace, Taseff angling closer and closer, Webster sprinting for the corner of the field to buy an extra step or two. The crowd cheered frantically. At the final moment, just yards from the goal line, Taseff dove in desperation at the big fullback’s legs and sent him flying. Webster landed hard past the goal line but out of bounds. It looked like the top half of his body had stayed in bounds as it flew over the goal line, and amid the raucous celebration of Giants fans, Boland prematurely awarded the touchdown.

  —And I think on one of the world’s most amazing plays, New York has scored here. No, wait a minute. No, the ball is going to be put down on about the one-yard line! It’s ruled that he was tackled there. I thought he’d gone in for the score, but he had been hit and then crawled over. The ball is spotted on the one-yard line. . . . Eighty-six yards overall. Conerly to Rote, fumble to Webster, Webster to the one-yard line with a first and goal to go for New York.

  It didn’t matter. Two plays later the Giants scored, and the extra point by Summerall made the score Colts, 14, Giants, 10. Just minutes earlier it had looked like the Colts were going to pull away for good, and for Bell it would have been easy to imagine millions of TV sets being switched off, or millions of channels being changed, as the attention of the vast home audience drifted. But not now.

  Given the game’s inherent appeal and its neat fit with TV, pro football was bound to click at some point with the American public. This was the moment. Just like that, with one goofy eighty-six-yard play, the championship’s outcome was again uncertain. The commissioner of football could breathe easy.

  The real battle had just begun. As late afternoon eased into darkness and prime time, America was going to get not just a good football game, but the best anyone had ever seen.

  Colts wide receiver Raymond Berry, 1958. (Courtesy of Sport magazine)

  Baltimore head coach, Weeb Ewbank (far left), and his assistant Charley Winner (far right), 1962. (Courtesy of Ted Patterson)

  Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, 1958. (Courtesy of Sport magazine)

  From left to right: Weeb Ewbank, Johnny Unitas, George Shaw, Dec. 25, 1958. (Courtesy of AP)

  2

  Raymond

  The tall, skinny young man in glasses who moved next door to Al Brennan had some peculiar exercise habits. Every morning in the fall and winter, like clockwork, he would emerge from his house in Lutherville, Maryland, dressed in a gray sweat suit and carrying a cinderblock with a rope tied around it. He would stand at the top of the stairs that led from the sidewalk, set the cinderblock on a lower step, tie the other end of the rope around his thigh, and start lifting his leg and setting it back down. After a set number of repetitions, he would untie the block and fasten it to the other leg and do the same. Every morning, the same routine.

  Brennan had only this glimpse of his neighbor’s unique methods. If he had followed him through winter and into spring and then into the blazing hot summers of Paris, Texas, where he had grown up the son of the local football coach, he would have seen his young neighbor perform the same exercise on the steps of the empty grandstand at Wise Field, and then walk out to the center of the sun-baked gridiron, where he would set a piece of paper down on the grass, and for several hours race off carrying a football in one direction or the other, stop, return, catch his breath for a few moments, consult the paper, assume a set position, and then sprint off again. Sometimes he would angle off to the left for a short distance, and sometimes he would angle off to the right. Sometimes he would stop and turn back for a few steps, or perform a shuffle, what looked like a little dance step, in the middle of his sprints, and abruptly change direction. Sometimes he would run only ten yards and sometimes the length of the field before he came back. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to it, so it would have been hard for anyone to guess, but he was playing an entire football game at the flanker position in pantomime.

  He had chosen the film of a particular game, usually one that featured a lot of passing, observing each route run by the wide receiver, timing each play and interval between plays with a stopwatch, and then in tiny, meticulous handwriting, sketching the patterns and noting the sequences. Every play, whether the receiver was thrown the ball or not, every huddle, every time out, every stretch spent on the bench between offensive series. He noted the time spent in each phase, routes and recovery times, and consulting his hand-written script out on the grass, acted out the entire game, whistle to whistle. Out on the playing field of his hometown in the dead of summer there was no one to observe his obsessive devotion, no teammate, no neighbor, no coach. There was no one he was trying to impress. It was pure desire. No, not just desire. The young man in gray sweats and glasses was desperate.

  His name was Raymond Berry, and he was a football player unlike any his new coaches in Baltimore had ever seen. A lowly twentieth-round pick in the summer of 1955, he was not expected to be around for long when he reported to his first training camp in Westminster, Maryland. It was the job of Charley Winner, the Colts’ ends coach, to check him in.

  “Hey, Ray, welcome to training camp. We’re glad to have you.”

  “My name is Raymond,” he told Winner.

  And that was that. There would be a specific moment in the fourth quarter of the famous 1958 championship game on which the outcome would turn, but to fully appreciate it, you first need to appreciate Raymond. At a time when most players had full-time jobs off the field he was, at age twenty-two, a complete, full-time football player. He worked at it night and day. NFL and college teams had long employed film to break down the formations and tendencies of their opponents and to plan strategies, and they used it as a teaching tool for their players, but the players themselves generally viewed such classroom sessions as a chore, and a bore. Not Raymond. He bought himself a sixteen-millimeter projector and when his day of practice and mandated classroom work was done, when his teammates were out drinking beer, he would go home and study film on his own. His coaches used it to study formations and tendencies for whole teams; Raymond focused in on his position alone. He scrutinized the men who would be defending against him, cornerbacks mostly, but also linebackers and safeties. He sought out film of successful NFL receivers, and studied their routes and their moves, making page after page of notes in his tidy handwriting.

  He was different in other ways, too. While other young athletes spent their bonus money or paychecks on cars or booze or women, Raymond spent his on things like contact lenses, at that time an expensive novelty, or on a specially fitted tooth guard to cushion impacts that might cause concussion—a precaution many of the rough men in the game would have considered borderline unmanly. It didn’t stop there. No detail was too small to absorb Raymond. He found the canvas fabric of his practice football pants too heavy and binding, particularly when they grew damp with sweat. The team’s fancier game pants had a shiny white fabric on the front, and on the back were made of a lightweight material that stretched and breathed. Raymond wrote a letter to the company that manufactured the game pants and asked if they would make him some practice ones out of the stretchy material. They complied. To keep his special pants from getting lost in the team’s daily piles of laundry, Raymond would hand wash his own gear after practice, in the sink, and hang them up in his locker to dry.

  Imagine how professional football players viewed a new teammate who insisted on wear
ing custom-made practice pants, on doing his own laundry, and on being called by his full and formal first name. These were rough men, men with broken teeth and crooked noses. They regarded tolerance for pain and an appetite for violence as prerequisites for the game. Scars, broken molars, black eyes, scrapes, bruises, broken bones, these were badges of honor. Most were hard-drinking, fun-loving rowdies, many of them veterans of World War II and Korea. To these men, there was something antithetical about Raymond’s approach, his attention to uniform and protective gear, his excessive study and obsessive, eccentric preparation. Real men showed up hurt, or with a hangover, and they didn’t out think their opponent, they kicked his ass. Mouth guards and doing your own laundry? Raymond was also fussy. His locker was like a museum display case, with everything perfectly in place. He was jealous and protective of his things. One day teammate Art Donovan, a loud, comedic defensive lineman called “Fatso,” who epitomized the old school, borrowed Raymond’s hairbrush and, knowing his teammate’s ways, made a point of returning it to its proper place on his locker shelf. So he was surprised when the wide receiver confronted him.