The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL

by Mark Bowden

  In the words of MacCambridge, Brown was a man who had spent his adult life “viewing football not as a sport but a field of study, worthy of the fine and close attention of academic inquiry.” As a high school coach, he led his team to eighty victories and only eight defeats. He took over the top coaching job at Ohio State shortly before the war, and when his talent all disappeared into the service, Brown followed it, doing his bit at Naval Station Great Lakes outside Chicago, where he turned the base’s football team into a terror. When he was named head coach of the newly formed AAFC Cleveland club at war’s end, he came with such a big reputation that the city’s fans voted to name the team after him. The Cleveland Browns would dominate pro football for a decade, more than any team before or since.

  Brown did it not just with masterful strategy, but with a ruthlessly efficient system of assessing and acquiring talent, and a level of organization and discipline entirely new to the game. It was not enough for prospective players to be talented athletes, they had to pass Brown’s intelligence and psychological tests. Other teams had two assistant coaches; Brown had six. And they no longer held seasonal jobs; they worked long hours year-round. He stunned his players by regimenting every aspect of their lives. They were given playbooks with descriptions and diagrams of every play, and after studying them in classrooms, were forced to spend hours at night copying them out by hand in their own notebooks, which were collected and graded.

  “Some players learned by hearing it,” explained Charley Winner, who worked as a scout for Cleveland during those years and later helped implement Brown’s system in Baltimore. “Other players learn by watching you draw it up on a blackboard. Others players learn by seeing it, so we show them the film. Others learn by walking through it on the practice field. Others learn by drawing it out themselves by hand. We covered all the learning methods, so when we were through, by God, they knew it.”

  Before Brown, football practice was loose. By the time players reached the pros, they were thought to have mastered the game and the coach’s job was to keep them in shape and help devise a plan of attack against opposing teams. Theories of physical training were eccentric, and varied widely from team to team. Most operated on the principle that the only way to rightly prepare to play football was to play football, so scrimmages were the rule. You warmed up, scrimmaged, and then fooled around until it was time to go home. In the days before a game, concerned about keeping players rested and healthy, coaches rarely demanded much. Winner remembered scouting a practice session of the hapless Dallas Texans, a short-lived expansion franchise that would later move to Baltimore and become the Colts, and reporting to his Cleveland bosses that the team did nothing more than play “volleyball” with a football, using the goal post as a net. For Brown, classroom study and practice sessions were where you won football games, every bit as much as on the gridiron. He ran tightly scripted practices, breaking down the game plan and focusing players on the specific tasks they would be expected to perform in the game. Coaches orchestrated with whistles and stopwatches, moving the players briskly from one assigned exercise to the next. There was relatively little scrimmaging. Other teams scouted their opponents, and Brown did that, too, but he also scouted himself. He assigned his assistant Blanton Collier to prepare a detailed analysis of his own team, watching film and breaking down every play and player from the previous season. Brown termed the process his “flaw-finder.” Such study and regimentation was for him an organic part of “playing” football. You did your homework, you made your plans, and you made certain each player knew exactly what was expected of him on every play. It all came together when the ref blew the whistle Sunday afternoon.

  Led by Otto Graham, the prototype of the modern quarterback, and fullback Marion Motley, Cleveland effectively ascended to a new level of the game. They lost only twice in their first season, on their way to winning the AAFC championship, and they lost only once more in the next two years, claiming the trophy twice more. Absorbed into the NFL in 1950, the Browns were regarded as the best team from a lesser league until they rolled right through the more established competition, too, losing only twice on the way to a fourth straight championship. Other NFL teams stopped sneering at that point and started imitating, but Cleveland made it to the championship game in each of the next four seasons, and won again in 1954 and 1955. Otto Graham retired after that season, by which time the rest of the league finally caught up to Brown, although his team would remain a powerhouse for years to come. It was late in this dominating run that the owner of the newly formed Baltimore Colts hired away one of Brown’s assistants, Weeb Ewbank.

  Weeb was a faithful disciple of the Cleveland system, which he had helped run for five years, but he was no Paul Brown. Brown was a stern, aloof figure on the football field: tall, lean, ascetic, and commanding. Alongside him, Weeb was more like Sancho Panza: short, stocky, and energetic, full of brio. He had a broad face with a lower half that was a third longer than the top, which under his crew cut gave him a low forehead and an extraordinarily wide, round jaw. In most photographs of Weeb his mouth is open.

  His unusual name came from childhood; Wilbur had been too hard for his little brother to pronounce, and it had become Weeb so far back that most people would never even know his real first name, which might have been the point. In his youth, he had been a good athlete. At Miami University of Ohio, he had played quarterback during football season, on the same team as Paul Brown, and during the summer he played semipro baseball under an assumed name in order to preserve his status as an amateur. His true vocation, however, was coaching, and he had started at a high school in Oxford, Ohio, where he took over the school’s baseball, basketball, and football teams. He reconnected with Brown during the war, helping to coach the Navy team at Great Lakes, and after a few successful postwar years coaching football at Brown University and Washington University in St. Louis, Brown had hired him on in Cleveland.

  As dissimilar as they seemed in appearance and personality, they were both serious students of the game, great believers in study and preparation, and they were alike in something else. Lacking the size and talent to play at the highest levels of the game themselves, both coaches reveled in their complete control over the destinies of the bigger, more physically talented men they coached. More than in any other sport, coaches can make or break football players, and some relish that power more than others. Both Brown and Ewbank had a mean streak, a tendency to belittle players, sometimes cruelly. Brown called it “needling.”

  Ray Renfro, who would go on to become one of the best receivers in Cleveland history, remembered Brown seeking him out on the sidelines early in his career, after he had dropped a pass. Brown sneered at him, “You always choke.” The insult stung, and stayed with Renfro long after his playing days were over.

  At its best, this could be seen as a motivational technique. All pro players who make mistakes in games face the ignominy of having their errors replayed during film sessions in slow motion at team meetings the following week, but Browns and Colts players knew the embarrassment would come spiced with pointed official derision. Players cut from the team were often sent packing with gratuitous insult and scorn. The upside of this meanness was the way it made those who remained on the roster feel special, part of an elite, exclusive club. Pet players, the team’s enduring stars, formed lasting bonds of affection with Weeb, but the tendency to needle also alienated some exceptional players, those who, for whatever reason, found themselves in the doghouse and who resented the coach’s acid tongue.

  Baltimore’s fun-loving, devil-may-care running back Alan “The Horse” Ameche rubbed the coach the wrong way early in his career, most likely because his broader interests—he was an opera lover and a shrewd businessman who would later make millions in the fast-food business—made him appear less focused and dependent on football than his teammates. He seemed incapable of showing up for meetings on time, and was often fined for failing to get his ankles taped before games with the rest of the players. He had a
tanklike body and a jovial, boisterous, and sometimes crude nature. Ameche was famous for loosing horrific farts in classrooms, sometimes so bad that everyone would have to clear out for a few minutes. He would curl up with laughter. Weeb would scowl. He got the idea that his big fullback, a fierce competitor on the field, for some reason needed to be goaded into playing hard. “You didn’t have to do that to Ameche,” Unitas would say years later. Despite the running back’s remarkable performances—he was elected to the Pro Bowl four times—he was a constant butt of Weeb’s ridicule. He retired after only six seasons, still hale and hearty, largely because he disliked playing for the coach.

  It was an ugly side to the winning method Weeb had learned in Cleveland, one that some of even the old coach’s most loyal players feel he might have done better without. Raymond would reflect years later that Weeb might have corrected it himself if he had been called on it by the players closest to him, but none of them, Raymond included, had the gumption in those years to do so.

  Despite this tendency, Weeb at first lacked the sure hand of his mentor in Cleveland when it came to head coaching. In his first year, Weeb asked his players to help him make the final cuts at the end of training camp. The team was assembled in the Pikesville Armory, where they began working out when training camp was over. The six players still considered potentially expendable were asked to leave a team meeting and wait in the hallway outside. The coach then asked the shocked remaining players to vote on which of the six should be allowed to fill the two remaining spots on the roster. At first no one in the room wanted to speak. Most players felt a certain solidarity with their teammates and were reluctant to torpedo the dreams of those they had been working alongside for weeks. Wasn’t this supposed to be the coach’s job? Finally, Bert Rechichar, a defensive back and kicker, spoke up.

  “That damn Enke ain’t gonna help us any,” he said, referring to quarterback hopeful Fred Enke, Jr., who after seven years in the NFL was about to head home to a lifetime of cotton farming. “Let’s get rid of him,” said Rechichar.

  “Okay,” said Weeb, “that’s one. Who else?”

  Somebody suggested that they cut Jim Mutscheller, a prospective rookie tight end, because he had “Army legs.” The Notre Dame graduate had just returned from a tour of duty in Korea, and it was assumed—in keeping with the odd notions of that era about exercise—that hauling a knapsack on long hikes made one unsuited for the short bursts of speed demanded by football.

  The discussion continued. Most of the players were horrified. Finally the veterans asserted themselves and refused to do the coach’s dirty work for him. Weeb never tried that approach again. For the rest of his life, even after he had developed a deep affection for the coach, lineman Artie Donovan would always refer to him as “That weasel bastard.” The players who had contributed suggestions would never fully shake their reputation for being turncoats.

  The coach kept Mutscheller, “Army legs” and all, and would be glad for the rest of his life that he did.

  * * *

  In the years Weeb was apprenticing in Cleveland, pro football was making its way back to Baltimore by a circuitous route. The Colts were one of the three AAFC teams absorbed into the NFL when they merged, but despite the enthusiastic efforts of Baltimore Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro, Jr., who also brought the city the Orioles, its major league baseball franchise, the club struggled so badly on the field and at the box office that its owners sold it back to the league in 1951. For two years the franchise drifted. In New York it became the football Yankees, and was then moved to Dallas, where interest was so low that midway through its first season the club went bankrupt. The players and coaches were put up in a hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania, for the remainder of that season, and played all of their remaining games on the road.

  Determined to keep the franchise alive, and pestered by Mayor D’Alesandro to give Baltimore another chance, Commissioner Bell turned to a wealthy Baltimorean named Carroll Rosenbloom, who had played on a University of Pennsylvania team Bell had helped coach in 1927. Rosenbloom had made a fortune in the war manufacturing khaki uniforms. Bell talked his former player into teaming with several Baltimore partners to buy the club, and then challenged D’Aleasandro to sell fifteen thousand season tickets in six weeks to demonstrate a fan base in the city. The ticket packages sold in just four. When the new Colts won only three games in their first season, Rosenbloom bought out his partners to become sole owner, and eased out head coach Keith Molesworth, promoting him to club vice president. Then he started searching for someone who could build a winner.

  Weeb got the job partly by virtue of a timely plug from Charley Winner, who had played for him in college. Winner had flown seventeen missions in a B-17 in the war, and spent six months in a German POW camp before returning home and playing for Weeb at Washington University. In those years he met and married one of the coach’s daughters. He was coaching at Case Western University and scouting for the Browns in 1953 when he found himself on the same plane with Don Kellett, the Colts’ general manager. Both men were on the way back from scouting talent at the annual Blue-Gray Game, a college all-star game. Winner struck up a conversation with Kellett, knowing the Baltimore club was looking for a new coach. He wasn’t above a little subterfuge on behalf of his ex-coach and father-in-law.

  He got Kellett talking about the coaching search, and, knowing the Baltimore executive knew nothing of his marital connection to Weeb, asked, “Did you ever consider this guy Ewbank?”

  “Yeah, we wanted him but Paul Brown said he didn’t want to be head coach,” said Kellett.

  “That’s not true,” said Winner.

  Winner knew Brown to be jealous of his assistants, and that his father-in-law had lost several college head-coaching opportunities because Cleveland wouldn’t release him from his contract. The NFL had rules about such things, however, and Winner knew that if the Colts wanted to talk to Weeb, Brown couldn’t stop it.

  He told Kellett that he thought Ewbank would be very interested. Every team in the pro league was trying to emulate Brown’s system, so a line on one of Cleveland’s assistants was valuable.

  “Give me his home number,” said Kellett. By the next season both Weeb and his son-in-law had jobs in Baltimore. Winner was younger than some of the veteran Baltimore players he coached that year, but would go on to spend almost forty years on NFL sidelines, including two stints as a head coach. With the Colts, he became his father-in-law’s right-hand man.

  Weeb arrived in Baltimore with a bang. He boldly promised an NFL championship in just five seasons. Putting the Cleveland grading system in place, he began assessing players on a scale numbered zero through five. Zero meant a missed assignment. If you knew what to do and didn’t do it, that was a one. If you got a lot of ones, that meant you knew what to do, you just weren’t good enough to do it. If you got a two, it meant you knew what to do and you did an average job. Three meant you knew what to do and did it well. Once in a while a player would do something truly remarkable and earn a four. Fives were exceedingly rare. Players would earn a five maybe once or twice in a season. Those who scored zeroes and ones were soon pursuing other lines of work, and in time Weeb weeded out players who scored a lot of twos. He prized mean, aggressive players and awarded extra credit for the useful application of violence.

  This kind of incentive sometimes startled opposing players, who were used to an unwritten code of conduct between professionals. San Francisco 49ers fullback Joe Perry was running a standard decoy pattern on a running play in 1954, well away from the action, when he was clubbed to the ground by a Colts tackle named Tom Finnin.

  “Hey, Finny, what the hell are you doing?” he complained.

  Finnin shrugged.

  “I get points for that,” he said.

  Weeb worked hard to simplify the vocabulary of Brown’s playbook, which like many things that evolve over years had become needlessly complicated. He was always working to improve on it, to invent new twists for successful plays. Like his old b
oss, at heart Weeb was a teacher, and he could be obsessive about it. Winner recalled that at his father-in-law’s it was hard to make even a small comment at the dinner table without provoking a little homily from the coach. One of his receivers in those early years, Royce Womble, remembered catching a pass in a game and running it into the end zone, only to have Weeb corner him on the sidelines to offer further instruction.

  The coach said, “Womble, the next time you run that pattern, try making this move just as you’re coming out of your turn,” executing a little dance step to demonstrate.

  Womble just stared at him.

  “Hell, Weeb,” he said, “You can’t get any more than six points!”

  John Unitas had the best and most eager arm on the practice field that summer of 1956. He knew it was likely to be his last chance to latch on to a pro job after his year on the sandlots in Pittsburgh.

  “We’re looking for a backup quarterback for George Shaw,” Kellett had told him in what would later become the most storied eighty-cent phone call in football history. John looked up a Colts roster and saw that the only quarterback they had backing Shaw was a rookie, so he thought he might have a chance. Still, he told the friend who drove with him out to the Colts’ training camp, “This may be a total waste of time.”

  John was convinced Pittsburgh had never given him a fair shot. He had been such a standout at the University of Louisville that he became the school’s starting quarterback in his freshman year, when he weighed only 141 pounds. After his stellar first season there, the university decided to de-emphasize sports, and fifteen of the team’s players lost their scholarships. John had to play both offense and defense for a team short on talent, and despite quarterbacking performances that became legend at the school, the Cardinals teams he led mostly lost. Then an injury sidelined him for most of his all-important senior season. The team won only one game, and its benched starting quarterback was not a highly sought-after prospect by the pros. His hometown team drafted him in the ninth round, and cut him before the season started.