The Best Game Ever Read online

  John clearly knew what he was doing. In his huddle there was respectful silence. You didn’t presume to tell him what play to call, you planted a seed and waited for it to sprout. In the case of the winning pass in that Redskins game, it grew out of John’s observation that the cornerback was quicker than the Colts’ tight end Jim Mutscheller, so much quicker that he had grown cocky. He was covering him five yards too deep, figuring he could break back quickly enough to disrupt the play. John guessed that in his zeal to prevent a last-minute touchdown, the cornerback would be playing it safe, leaning deep longer than it was wise to lean deep. With just fifteen seconds left in the game, on a dark late afternoon in Baltimore, down 17-12, the quarterback didn’t bother with Weeb’s playbook. He gave his linemen their blocking assignments and then looked Mutscheller in the eye.

  “Go deep, Jim,” he said, “and then loop back.”

  It was improvisation. It was also the touchdown that saved all of their jobs, the one that opened the door to all that would follow.

  Giants coaches (from left to right) Tom Landry, Jimmy Lee Howell, and Vince Lombardi, 1956. (Courtesy of NY Daily News)

  Giants linebacker Sam Huff, 1958. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

  Giants bench (from left to right):

  Frank Youso, Kyle Rote, Frank Gifford, and Charlie Conerly. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

  Left to right: Giants secretary Wellington Mara, Yankees general manager George Weiss, NFL commissioner Bert Bell, and Giants owner Jack Mara. (Courtesy of NY Times)

  Vince Lombardi, 1958. (Courtesy of Sport magazine)

  Top right: Rosey Grier Bottom right: Jim Patton (Photos courtesy of Sport magazine)

  4

  Huff

  The Colts team that showed up in New York the day before that 1958 Championship game was, statistically speaking, the best in the league. “Johnny” Unitas had proved to be more than a great quarterback, he was a catalyst, that rare athlete who makes a whole team click. His fellow pros had voted him the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1957, and he could easily have been that again the following year if not for Cleveland’s Jim Brown, who had begun rewriting the NFL record books for running backs, rushing for seventeen touchdowns and more than 1,500 yards. John was still considered the best quarterback in the league. His career was just getting started, but already the Steelers’ oversight looked like not just a blunder, but the single biggest personnel error in NFL history.

  There was more to it than that, though, because if John had stayed in Pittsburgh he might never have developed the way he did in Baltimore. Paul Brown’s revolution had matured the game from its smash-mouth, leather-helmet, grind-it-out roots to a physical contest with a challenging intellectual side.

  Players like Raymond Berry, who studied film on their own and practiced obsessively, were still rare. Today such off-field work is essential, and digital technology has made it easier to do. Pro and college teams have layers of assistant coaches who wear their eyes out looking at video and tutoring position players, and just to be competitive in the NFL players have to work on their position year-round. But fifty years ago it was unlikely that John would have encountered a partner like Raymond. Their long film study sessions in the receiver’s living room, studying moving images projected on a white wall, added new layers of authority to the quarterback’s intuitive field judgment. The study was supplemented by hours of extra practice, with Raymond running route after route. A big part of John’s success was also Raymond’s. In 1957, their first full season playing together, he caught forty-seven passes for eight hundred yards and seven touchdowns, and was elected All-Pro.

  Success not only confirmed the value of Raymond’s approach, it deepened it. He carried a football with him everywhere, on and off the field, to accustom himself to holding it. When he wasn’t involved in a scrimmage during practice, he would pick a kid out of the crowd of spectators and ask him or her to roll him the ball on the ground so he could practice pouncing on fumbles.

  Raymond no longer just practiced catching the football, he broke down the various ways of doing so, depending on the position of his body, the location of the ball, and how he had to position his hands. He labeled each kind of catch. There were twelve kinds of short passes, most of which are self-explanatory—the High Look-In, High Back-to-Passer (looking at the throw first over the left shoulder, then the right), High Hook (turning and jumping for a ball thrown high), Low Ball, Scoop, Behind (the ball is thrown behind the direction of the receiver, who has to reach back for it), High and Behind, Back to Passer, One Hand, Toe Dance (keeping both feet in bounds at the edge of the field), Holler Ball (the receiver stands with his back to the thrower, who “hollers” when he throws, and the receiver has to pick up the ball in midflight), and Concentration (having a defender try to distract you while catching the ball). Raymond identified seven types of long passes—the Inside Shoulder, Outside Shoulder, Directly Overhead, Wrong Shoulder, End Line Toe Dance, Tightrope Toe Dance, and Harassment. He had John throw him three or four of every type every day, patterning the movements required to catch it, watching the ball all the way into his hands. To simplify the drills he strung netting from the goal posts to catch the balls he missed.

  Weeb sometimes worried that John would wear out his arm.

  “John, you’ve thrown enough,” he told the quarterback one day, after seeing him and Raymond at work again long after practice.

  “Coach, I just work here,” John said. “You better tell him,” pointing at the receiver.

  Weeb had such respect for Raymond’s methods and insights that he rarely questioned or instructed him. It was clear to the other players that Raymond enjoyed a special status, which is what John had meant by, “I just work here.” In one game, the head coach sent in a substitute with a suggested play. He usually left the play-calling to John, and had been known, on occasion, to send in general encouragement and even suggestions like, “Get a first down,” which would make the players in the huddle chuckle, but this time Weeb had a specific pass play in mind, a pass to Raymond. John called the play, and the flanker, who rarely spoke in the huddle, objected. It was rare indeed for a receiver to veto a play where the ball was to be thrown to him; they were universally inclined to beg for the ball. But Raymond said, “It’s not there, John.” So the quarterback called a different play, which failed. When he came off the field, Weeb was livid. He let loose a stream of obscenity, concluding with, “Why didn’t you run the play I sent in?”

  “Raymond said no,” John told him.

  “Oh,” said Weeb, immediately placated. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  During the season, Raymond would come to John on Tuesdays with his yellow legal pad full of notes. He would stop by Weeb’s office the day after the game to borrow film for the next opponent, and would spend hours on Monday studying the cornerback he would face next. Then he would tell John, “This is what I want to run on this guy this week.” That’s what they would work on in practice all week, nothing else. Weeb built a game plan, Raymond built a wide-receiver plan, and John digested both. Once he knew Raymond’s preferred routes, he and Weeb would work out blocking assignments and play action.

  Even as the flanker’s dogged, analytical style worked its influence on the team, his teammates continued to consider him odd. And Raymond was odd, but he was also the future of their sport. The days of the hard-drinking, hard-living bruiser who showed up on Sunday with a hangover were dwindling. No one quarreled with Raymond’s results. He got better every year. He caught fifty-six passes in 1958, which led the league. He was so careful and deliberate about the way he caught and handled the ball that he would fumble only once in his thirteen-year career, perhaps the most remarkable and telling of all his lifetime stats. His excellence raised John as much as the quarterback’s talent raised him. They were reciprocal.

  With an intimidating veteran defense and a remarkably balanced offense that could march upfield with either the run or the pass, Baltimore had coasted through that season, putting up more
points than any other team. They lost only one game on their way to clinching the western division championship. That one loss, however, had come at Yankee Stadium to the Giants, 24-21. It was also the only game that year that John didn’t play. He watched it on television from a hospital bed in Baltimore, nursing broken ribs and a collapsed lung, compliments of the Green Bay Packers, whose defense the week before had turned especially surly in the midst of a 56-0 rout. George Shaw, now the team’s back-up quarterback, played well in the Giants’ loss, but the game demonstrated, as if the Colts didn’t already know, how vital Unitas was to their ascendancy. The Giants had sat on their lead through the game’s closing minutes, taunting the Baltimore defense from the sidelines. Art Donovan grew so frustrated at the end that he started picking stones out of the turf and pelting the New York bench.

  If there was one team that could stop the Colts, it was this one. The Giants were an established power, a team beloved in New York but in the fine tradition of American sports, mostly hated in the rest of the country. They were the golden franchise, situated in the media capital of the world, and featured many of the league’s best known and best paid athletes. Its stars were written about in national sports magazines and signed lucrative advertising contracts. They had been champs in 1956, had stumbled the following year, but seemed poised for years of dominance.

  The Giants’ franchise was in many ways the opposite of Baltimore’s, which was one of the league’s newest and had a rich playboy owner whose gambling habits raised persistent if unproven rumors of tampering to meet point spreads. The Giants were one of the original NFL teams, founded by Tim Mara, a legal bookmaker, who eventually handed it over to his sons Jack and Wellington. The Maras were football aristocracy, and they ran the club like a family trust. Jack, the eldest, controlled the business side, while Wellington devoted his professional life to the game. A rock of respectability, Wellington, a slender man with a broad, muscular forehead and eyes that squinted out from two narrow slits, was a devout Catholic, the product of Loyola High School in Manhattan and the Jesuit Fordham University. Self-effacing, stoic, and unfailingly polite, he was one of the most beloved and respected figures in the league, someone who belonged by birth to the old guard, but by age to the new one. He had literally grown up with the team, carrying water to players on the field in their first games in 1925.

  The old owners, including Tim Mara, had been businessmen first and football men second. The division of labor between the two younger Maras, however, enabled Wellington to be a football man first. He knew the game, he knew talent, and he knew how to get and use it. He was always looking for ways to be useful. During the 1956 championship game, he had climbed up on the roof of Yankee Stadium with a Polaroid camera, and taken snapshots of the Chicago formations. He would put the pictures in a sock weighted with a few cleats, and toss it down to the Giants’ sideline, where the coaches used them for reference. He proved himself most useful, however, in acquiring and keeping talented football players. The dominant core of coaches and players he assembled in the 1950s was a professional triumph.

  More than most teams, New York’s had a split personality. The Maras had hired as head coach Jim Lee Howell, one of their former players. He was a blustery, towering ex-marine and defensive lineman who had the good sense to delegate most of the hands-on coaching to his two extraordinarily able young assistants, Tom Landry on defense and Vince Lombardi on offense. Nobody knew yet just how right he was to entrust his team to these two, but Howell seemed to have no doubt. He joked that his only job was to inflate the footballs and rake the stadium infield smooth before every game. He was an old-school football coach, someone whose long history in the game had imbued him with its manly culture. Football was about toughness and will, blood and guts and broken teeth, and with his background as a player and drill instructor in the marines, Howell had the leather-lunged qualifications to rally and goad, the traditional tools of the profession. Landry and Lombardi, on the other hand, were from the new, Paul Brown school of coaching. Like Weeb, they relished toughness and the controlled violence of the game, but they were also devotees of organization and careful preparation. Landry in particular was a film-study buff who approached coaching not as a job, but as a vocation. The year before Howell, Lombardi, and Landry took over, the Giants went three and nine. It took them just three seasons to reverse those numbers and win the NFL championship.

  A squat, dark, driven man with a bull neck and a gap between his two front teeth, the son of an Italian butcher, Lombardi had gotten the impression when the Maras first approached him in 1954 that they wanted him as head coach. So it was with some reluctance that he accepted the lesser role, which he did in part because, on a visit to Howell’s Arkansas pig farm, he was promised a free hand with the offense. The pugnacious Brooklynite had been working as an assistant coach at West Point, and before that had played football as an undersized offensive lineman at Fordham University. Wellington Mara had been the sports editor of the Fordham yearbook in those years, but the Giants’ owner said later that he had never met Lombardi. They became acquainted years later because of Mara’s interest in Lombardi’s legendary boss at the military academy, Red Blaik, who had once described his assistant admiringly as “a rough soul.” It was Blaik who recommended Lombardi to Mara as a coach who could keep pace with the changing pro game. Lombardi carried around a leather satchel that would become known as his “bible.” As his biographer David Maraniss would put it, “In Lombardi’s bible, the chapters charting the Browns were the book of revelation.”

  But Lombardi was not as enamored of the passing game as Brown. The core of this rough soul’s approach to offense was his experience as a lineman. He became famous for running a relatively small number of plays and not even troubling to disguise them that much. The key was not surprise, not the fancy derring-do of quarterbacks and running backs, but execution. Lombardi wanted his entire offense to work together with the precision of a dance company, or an engine (to choose a more appropriately gritty metaphor). The key to his system was not open-field running or a strong, accurate arm, but blocking.

  Lombardi looked for linemen who were more in his own mold, not just big and strong, but quick and agile and smart. His most famous play, the sweep, required the guard and tackle on one side of the line to literally pirouette off the line of scrimmage, performing a 180-degree turn at the snap of the ball before leading the running back on a sweep around the end, picking off potential tacklers on the run. The play demanded the precision of a dance number, lest the faster runner get ahead of his wall of protection. Lombardi loved blockers, but he recognized that the flanker position opened up a new range of strategic opportunity.

  In the running great Kyle Rote, the Giants had an athlete just like “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, the prototype, so Lombardi moved him out of the backfield and split him wide. The new offensive coach’s most significant adjustment, however, was to center his attack around Frank Gifford, the team’s first-round pick in 1952, who had not found a consistent role in his first seasons. His coaches shifted him back and forth from offense to defense, and Gifford had yet to really shine in the pros as he had in college. A strikingly handsome, well-spoken man, Gifford engaged the New York press in a Hamlet-like performance every off-season, wondering out loud whether he would return to play again for the Giants or stay out in California to pursue acting, his first love, and a potentially more lucrative career. He had landed small parts in five films. The prospect of success seemed stronger in football, but the potential pay in Hollywood was astronomical by comparison.

  Lombardi was determined to keep Gifford on the gridiron. He had coached West Point against USC when Gifford played there, and he remembered the young Californian’s talent. When they first met, he told the player, “You are my running back.” Under the new offensive coach, Gifford would become the best at that position in the team’s history.

  As important as Lombardi was to the success of the Giants, Mara’s more significant hire may have been Landry, who c
ontrolled the other half of the team. Fair-skinned, tall, serious, with thin lips and small eyes, the soft-spoken Texan was in manner and appearance the volatile Italian’s opposite. With Landry there were never histrionics. He did not bother to form close relationships with most of his players. He assumed motivation was something private and personal; all that interested him was performance. He would tell his men, “Here is what I want you to do. If you can do it, you will play. If you can’t, no hard feelings, I’ll find someone who can.” A B-17 pilot in the war, Landry had played college ball for the University of Texas, and after a stint with the AAFC, played in the Giants’ defensive backfield for four years. He didn’t just observe the transformation of the game, he experienced it. He had grown up with Howell’s hardscrabble brand of football, and had paid his dues. He liked to tell the story of the time the team’s trainer decided that his split lip needed a few stitches, so the old-school trainer pulled out his needle and without a thought of anesthesia started sewing, only to realize that he had forgotten the thread. Landry said he sat on the training table blinking back piercing pain with the needle stuck through his lower lip, while the trainer went off on a casual search for surgical thread. It was just how things were done. Football was always going to demand toughness, and Landry put a premium on it, but the unparalleled success of Brown’s Cleveland teams suggested that more than toughness was required.

  In the rough meritocracy of the gridiron, football strategy constantly and rapidly evolves. Any new idea that works gets repeated, noticed, and imitated until somebody figures out how to defeat it, often the following week. Survival demands constant adaptation. Losing kills careers. The hard truth of this natural selection breeds desperation. In his first game as a pro with the AAFC New York Yankees in 1949, Landry had been saddled with defending against the dominant Browns star receiver, the aptly named Mac Speedie, who ran past him, under him, and around him all afternoon, catching so many passes from Otto Graham that he set a league record for receiving yards in a single game, well over two hundred. Landry was humiliated. He realized that the only way to defeat the speed and accuracy of a pro combination like Graham-to-Speedie was to somehow know in advance where the receiver and the ball were going.