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

by Frank Gifford; Peter Richmond

  The day of the game, Sheppard was wearing the special stadium boots his wife, Mary, had given him.

  "The old football press box hung down from the mezzanine, above third base, and it was all steel," he recalls. "That press box was a horrible place. I'd come home one night earlier that season, and my feet were frozen. So my wife Mary bought me some stadium boots. It was cold that day-clear, but cold."

  Then, finally-and for many of us, the highlight of so many Sundays-the world-famous introductions. If you couldn't get excited by the sound of Bob Sheppard introducing you in Yankee Stadium, you had to be dead. Sometimes, in the dugout, we'd imitate his call of our names before he did the actual calling. But not that day.

  "When you came out of that dugout," Sam says now, "and Bob said, in that deep, drawn-out baritone, 'Ladies and gentlemen, number 70, Sam Huff,' you'd run out onto that goddamned field, and you were ready to play. That was inspiration."

  That sentiment is still shared by any athlete lucky enough to hear Bob announce his name. Before the Yankees-Padres World Series of 1998, when the great hitter Tony Gwynn was asked what he was looking forward to, his answer was "I'm waiting to hear Bob Sheppard say my name."

  The Colts took the field first, all in white-with the Colt band flanking them in a gauntlet as the team ran out of the visitors'

  dugout, the bandleader thrusting his baton rhythmically into the air.

  Finally, and fittingly, Bob introduced our defense.

  "What I remember most at the start of the game," Bob says now, "was the crowd. The Stadium was full. They were standing behind the seats; they were standing on boxes, filling the bleachers."

  Andy Nelson remembers the sound of the crowd, just before kickoff: "It was like a buzz, like you're inside a beehive."

  It wasn't a sellout. We'd sold 22,500 tickets in the twenty-four hours after our play-off win, but there were 5,000 empty seats, apparently. Somewhere. I couldn't see them.

  The two coaches made for an interesting study in contrasts as they met with referee Ron Gibbs to go over the ground rules: for the Colts, the squat Ewbank, like a well-dressed bulldog, in a fedora and a light-colored coat, looking ready for a football game, clutching a couple of pieces of paper. I found out later that one of those sheets held his thoughts on what it would take to beat us.

  Two sentences said it all: "One of our keys to winning this week will be predicated on how well we pass-protect, pass the ball, and how well we catch it. Run good patterns-study your opponent make him wrong."

  How accurate it was. And how simple.

  Representing our side? Tall Jim Lee, in a white shirt, a thin, dark tie, long black topcoat, and black fedora. He looked a little like an undertaker who had his pants pulled up too high. He was also clutching some paper. I doubt it was a game plan-the game plan was locked in the heads of our two real coaches, Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry. Maybe it was a program.

  Then the captains met with Gibbs at midfield-Marchetti for the Colts, Kyle and Svoboda for us. The lights were already on, making for a strange effect-daylight in the sky, but lights bouncing off the helmets, like in a night game.

  We won the toss. Kyle chose to receive the ball.

  In the radio booth, Boland set the stage: "They've got a lovely day for it. It's a great tribute to pro football that seventy thousand fans will show today, with the city barren of the normal means of communication and newspapers. Radio and TV have done a great job . . . It seems that New York is one big village today."

  The game was broadcast nationally on NBC. Chris Schenkel, our announcer, and Chuck Thompson, the Colt announcer, shared the booth.

  The size of the audience? By the end of the game, 45 million people were watching us, in 11 million households: a larger audience, by far, than any of the top-rated shows on television that year, and infinitely larger than any audience for a pro football game, ever since the first championship game was televised nationally in 1951.

  The Wayne High School band and the Colt band serenaded us with a noncelebrity version of the national anthem-heavy on the bass drums.

  Bert Rechichar put the ball on the tee. Maynard and Phil King, our number one draft pick from Vanderbilt, waited at the goal line.

  At one o'clock, Eastern Standard Time, Ron Gibbs blew his whistle. Bert Rechichar took five steps, booted the ball, and put it in the back of the end zone.

  Maynard took a knee, and we were finally under way.

  As I trotted onto the field, my instincts took over. I just felt ready.

  CHAPTER 3 FIRST QUARTER

  One of the commentators in an NFL documentary about the 1958 championship game likened those first few minutes to a title fight between heavyweights feeling each other out in the early rounds. I'd liken us to a couple of lightweights who looked as if they'd never been in a ring. Yes, we made history that day: we played the worst first quarter in the annals of championship football, before or since. It was ragged, it was chaotic, and it was downright ugly. The major metropolitan area could feel fortunate that those first fifteen minutes were blacked out. The only difference between the offensive play in the first few series of this game and an August preseason game in Louisville or Portland was the location. At the start, the most legendary stadium in the land was treated to some of the most forgettable football every played.

  The climate didn't have anything to do with it, and we couldn't blame the mistakes on the hype-there weren't any newspapers being delivered in New York, and, outside of Baltimore, this game, like all NFL championship games before it, had garnered little national attention. (The New Yorker didn't list it under the week's sports events, but then, we probably didn't have a lot of fans who read the The New Yorker.)

  It wasn't nerves, either. The Colts were playing in a championship game for the first time in the team's short history, but they were a confident team full of veterans, and they'd rolled through the NFL's Western Division. Besides: I don't think Johnny Unitas ever experienced a nervous moment in his life.

  As for our guys, we had no reason to be nervous. Two years earlier, when we might have had reason to be rattled, we'd broken out of the gate in our first title game in eighteen years-and our first title game in Yankee Stadium-and rolled to a 47-7 victory over the Chicago Bears. Our key players had been here before. But we stumbled all over the place at the start of this one, and much of the reason, to my way of thinking, was that we had the wrong guy at quarterback. We began the first series of the game of our lives with our second-string quarterback. You read that right: our starting quarterback was Don Heinrich. Now don't get me wrong: I loved Don Heinrich, as a friend. We welcomed him into our inner circle. He was a drinking buddy. He even played quarterback pretty well, setting all kinds of records at the University of Washington before coming to the Giants in 1954. But Don Heinrich was no Charlie Conerly.

  So on the first series, instead of leaning in to hear the Mississippi drawl of my old big-eared buddy, it was Heinrich calling-to my surprise-three passing plays. We had worked, of course, on the pass during the week, with the idea of getting away from our traditional run-heavy tendencies. The strategy sure didn't fool Marchetti.

  Not for nothing did a rival coach once call him the single greatest player in the NFL. On the first play, a flare pass to Alex out on the right side, Marchetti blew past Frank Youso's block, blew past Mel Triplett's attempted pickup, and batted down Heinrich's pass as if he were swatting a fly. On second down, we called a screen to Alex, and it looked like a great call-until Marchetti got into Don's face.

  Heinrich had to float a balloon over Marchetti's upstretched arms, and Alex was held to seven yards.

  As a chant of "G-I-A-N-T-S" reverberated throughout the stands, the Colts called an unexpected timeout; my guess is they were confused that we'd come out throwing. On third and three, I was hoping to get the call on a sweep, but Don, with orders from Lombardi, stayed with the pass, a square-out to Kyle: hurried, high, and incomplete.

  The punting team came on, and we slumped off the field.
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  We'd set the tone on our first series, and it was in a distinctly minor key. No, you can't lay our three-and-out all at Don's feet. But teams just play better for a man they believe in. The opening series did nothing to boost our confidence.

  A lot of theories have been floated about key moments of strategy in this game. But I have yet to hear anyone point out the obvious: that the Giants, as we had all season, began the game with the wrong quarterback.

  I found the whole Heinrich-Conerly system, which called for Don to start a game while Charlie watched from the bench so that he and Vince could get a look at our opponent's defensive schemes, to be just downright weird. To start with, the sidelines are the worst seat in the house. You can't see anything from the sidelines. And if Charlie was on the sidelines, he was like anyone on the sidelines: struggling to get a view of what was happening. This strange system had never been used before on a good football team, as far as I knew, and it's never been used since. But we'd been starting Don all season. In fact, we'd been starting Don for three years. A story in a game program against the Steelers that year gave the front-office version of this peculiar arrangement: "Don reached star status as a quarterback in 1955 after a year of apprenticeship. He and Charlie Conerly now give the Giants a one-two punch that keeps the attack moving in high gear. Don's particular genius is as a field general

  who has the knack of spotting and exploiting enemy flaws. For this reason he generally starts."

  Well, for one thing, Don never reached star status, and certainly not in 1955, when we won all of six games and his completion percentage was under 50 percent, with two TD passes. Hell, I threw two TD passes that year, from the option (they were two of my only three completions). In our championship year of '56, Don started all twelve games-with a completion percentage of 40 percent. Charlie replaced him in every game, as well as the play-off game against Cleveland.

  Yes, Don had brains-he would later coach for four teams but if he was so adept at spotting and exploiting enemy flaws, how come we had to replace him in every game, as early as the first quarter? While I always heard that the two-quarterback idea was Vince's, this thing had Jim Lee Howell's fingerprints all over it; in some games, the pattern had no rhyme or reason. Sometimes Don would play a quarter, sometimes longer. For example, in our third game of the season, they'd started Heinrich, brought in Charlie, who threw an interception, then yanked Charlie for Heinrich again, then brought Charlie back in again in the third quarter and he threw another interception. That's just crazy. It didn't look like a coherent plan; it looked like we were making it up as we went along, and that wasn't Vince Lombardi-style coaching. During the week, Charlie would practice primarily with the first string. We'd do an hour of practice with the offense, and Don would come in for maybe the last twenty minutes of it. And yet he would start.

  And Charlie would then get most of the playing time.

  "Charlie couldn't understand it," Perian told me when I asked her if she had a clue as to why our coaches started Heinrich, and whether he ever talked about it. "Do you suppose it was in Don's contract that he got to play a little?" The arrangement still ticks her off after all these years, because, in all the records of all those great games, Don is listed as the Giants' starting quarterback. "But Roach just went with the flow. He didn't complain; he always did what they wanted him to. But it seemed silly to me at the time, and it seems sillier now."

  I don't think the Maras ever put incentives into a contract. I never asked Vince about the quarterback system. We were good friends, but back then, no one questioned a coach's strategy, even Jim Lee Howell's. One has to think that this was all Jim Lee. Had it been Lombardi, why didn't Vince start Lamar McHan and Zeke Bratkowski when he got to Green Bay, and let Bart Starr watch the first quarter from the sidelines?

  The Colts took over at the 30-and came out determined to one-up us in ineptitude. If we'd tried to cross them up by passing, Weeb tried to trick us: he had his guys come out in the weirdest formation we'd ever seen, with the entire Colt offensive line, except for one lineman, lined up to the left of their center, Buzz Nutter.

  Nutter later confirmed to me that Weeb had called a trick play, hoping to run Lenny Moore wide to the left, from his right half back position, behind a wave of blockers, hoping to break Lenny on a long run. I guess it would look good on a blackboard. On the field, everything that could have gone wrong for them did. It didn't fool our defense. We just thought it was dumb.

  "You were in your defensive huddle," Buzz told me, "and we thought we'd catch you by surprise. The trouble is, the damned official wouldn't get off the ball. By the time we got him off the ball, you guys got it together."

  But after watching the tapes dozens of times, I've figured out what actually happened: the Colts had ten men on the field-a screwup, pure and simple. By the time Lenny took the handoff, with L. G. Dupre and Alan Ameche blocking for him, the whole right side of our defense had played it perfectly. Lenny kept going outside, looking for room, and our corner on that side, Carl Karilivacz, came in to nail Moore for a 2-yard loss. Too bad they didn't stick with that formation all day; eleven against ten usually wins.

  Looking back, it's also too bad they didn't let Weeb keep sending in the plays.

  Things grew uglier. After an Ameche trap for six, Johnny faded back on third down, facing a heavy rush; Landry had Cliff and Harland blitzing from their outside linebacker positions. Unitas stepped up into the pocket, tucked the ball in, and began to run.

  Johnny was always extraordinarily good at reading the rush. From a fan's point of view, you can't see the pressure as we see it. Actually, the good ones don't see it; they feel the pressure, and hear it-the sounds of pad on pad, cleats coming closer, tearing up the turf.

  But the next thing Johnny felt was Livingston laying him out.

  Johnny coughed up the ball. Our tough little safety, Jimmy Patton, recovered.

  Now we had the ball back on the Colts' 37-a huge break, and a great time for us to make a statement. On second down and eight,

  Heinrich called for a draw to Triplett, and it might have worked if Heinrich hadn't bobbled the snap from Ray Wietecha. Don was cool enough to pick the ball up on this play, but then made his second mistake, something Charlie never would have done: he tried to salvage the play by handing off to Mel, who had no clue what Don was trying to do.

  And now, here in the middle of a botched handoff, Artie swooped in, to wrap up both of them and force another fumble the second fumble on the same play. Gino fell on it. Colt ball.

  The whole play looked like a seventh-grade fire drill. Artie may have looked like the overweight captain of a bowling league, but he was quick beyond belief. Beneath those layers of flesh was a really good athlete, schooled as a kid on the handball courts of the Bronx.

  Mel couldn't be faulted for the fumble. He had a very quick first step, and once Mel got going, he didn't make too many turns.

  The only way Mel knew how to run was straight forward, and on his first carry of the day, I don't blame him for being eager, because in our last game, the play-off against the Browns, Mel had gotten kicked out of the game for getting into a polite swinging match with a guy named Don Colo.

  That's kind of the way Mel lived his life: straightforward, no questions asked.

  Mel Triplett is not a name you hear a lot anymore-no surprise, considering he played with Webster, Charlie, Rote, and me.

  But Mel was our second-leading rusher that season, two yards short of my 468 yards, and he'd been the offensive star of our '56 championship game.

  "Mel? Mel was down-to-earth, laughing and grinning and having a baby every year," our backup lineman M. L. Brackett told me, from his home in Alabama. (For the record, Mel had twelve kids.)

  Grier sizes up his roommate more succinctly, with that distinctive Rosie laugh: "Mel Triplett was a trip."

  Born in Indianola, Mississippi, Mel was so prodigious a talent that as an Ohio high-school running back he received more than twenty scholarship offers for college. He
chose to stay close to home, and went to the University of Toledo. We'd picked him up three years before-the first black running back for the Giants. We called him "Choo-Choo," too, because he always made this funny sound when he was running-sort of puffing, like a train. Come to think of it, that made sense. He ran as if he were on a track, banging into anyone-the opposition, his teammates-who got in his way. (Huff once described Mel's 17-yard TD run in the '56 game thusly: "With his head down he went straight over an official and into the end zone.") When Mel was in the backfield, the rest of us were always very alert.

  Mel was very emotional about his play, very focused. "He used to say, 'If you need three yards, give me the ball, get out of the way, and don't get run over,'" Grier recalls. Rosie knew Mel better than anyone else. They were roommates. Rosie did his best to keep tabs on Mel, not always successfully; one night Mel disappeared, and came back to their room, real late-and talking about things that Rosie had never heard Mel talk about. Radical talk about relations between the races-"hate talk," as Rosie recalls it. Before too long, Grier realized that someone had taken Mel to a Black Muslim meeting and tried to convert him. By the next day, Rosie had unconverted his roommate.

  I'll say one thing for Mel: he was his own man. Triplett cared as little about the coaches as he did about running over his teammates. I'll never forget the film session after a game where Triplett had missed a block. Lombardi, as he loved to do when you made a mistake, kept running the tape back and forth, back and forth, ragging on Mel.

  Suddenly, a quiet voice emerged from the back of the room.

  It was Mel's.

  "Run that again," he said, "and I'll cut you."

  Vince, without a murmur, moved on to the next play.

  We tended to give Mel his space.

  Now, in this sloppy seesaw early-game duel, the Colts again had great field position. And again, the immortal Mr. Unitas gave it right back again. No wonder no one remembers the first quarter of this game. I'm surprised the NFL hasn't deleted it from the records. Anyone who played that day has.