by Mark Bowden
“We can use you as a decoy,” Weeb told Moore.
The touchdown had come on a play that in the Colts’ book was called “17”: Ameche over the left tackle. Raymond’s job on the play was to line up just to the left of Jim Parker, the Colts’ left tackle, and then plunge right, into Rosey Grier, New York’s gargantuan right defensive tackle. Ameche would come banging in right behind him. Raymond was a great believer in The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale’s huge best seller, and he resolved to overcome the mismatch with Grier by girding himself with confidence. He also had the advantage of knowing the snap count. He figured that a much smaller man, coming off the line quickly, could knock over a much bigger man if he caught him off-balance. Remembering his personal admonition to “be a bulldog,” the wide receiver closed his eyes and on the snap launched himself furiously at Grier, who outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds. When Raymond opened his eyes, he was on the ground in the end zone. Colts fans in the lower seats were cheering wildly. He heard the big drum of the team’s official marching band banging in celebration. Ameche was on top of him, and he was on top of Grier. Touchdown! He got up and brushed off his uniform, mightily impressed with himself. It wasn’t until a few days later, watching film of the play, that he realized what had happened. Parker had gotten off the snap even faster than he did, so when Raymond launched himself, he had smashed full bore into his own left tackle’s rump. Parker was the one who had flattened Grier, but somehow in the jumble of big bodies had ended up rolling to one side. Raymond had wound up on top of the felled Giant. Still, for the rest of the game, Raymond was puffed up with a sense of accomplishment.
In fact, Grier was hurting. He had injured his knee the week before in the play-off game against the Browns, and had warned his coaches that he wasn’t his usual self. He couldn’t push off with much strength, or make the quick side moves he needed for a pass rush. Landry had wanted him to try anyway. Grier was such a presence on the Giants’ defensive line that teams usually worked around him. Maybe Baltimore wouldn’t notice, and sometimes in the game, when the adrenaline flowed and a player loosened up, he discovered that he had more to give than he thought. But two things were made clear by this play, and neither of them had anything to do with Raymond: one, Grier was not able to match up against Parker; and two, the Colts had noticed. They had aimed Ameche at what was normally the strongest point on the New York front, and it had folded like cardboard. Grier came out, replaced by Frank Youso, a rookie from the University of Minnesota who weighed about thirty pounds less. It was a big advantage for Parker, who would have little trouble for the rest of the game protecting John’s blind side. Grier spent the remainder of the game watching sadly from the sidelines, draped in his long blue team cape.
Sloppy play continued. A Gifford fumble had set up this Colts first touchdown, and another would set up the second. Unable to move the ball on the drive after the Colts’ score, the Giants were forced to punt it away, but the kick was dropped by Jackie Simpson, a fast rookie halfback who Weeb sometimes used for kick returns. His timing was disastrous.
—There’s a fumble! Let’s see who comes up with it; I believe Taseff [Colts safety Carl Taseff] recovered it. It is ruled that Carl Taseff recovered. Don Chandler punted and in the face of—Now it’s ruled that the Giants recovered! It’s the Giants’ ball, Roosevelt Brown. On the eleven-yard line!
The New York crowd roared happily. The Giants’ fumble had set up the Colts, and now Baltimore had returned the favor. But the cheers didn’t last long. On the first play from scrimmage, Conerly pitched the ball to Gifford again for a sweep around the left side, but Kyle Rote failed to block cornerback Milt Davis, who with a running start hit Gifford immediately and knocked the ball loose. It was recovered by Baltimore’s right end, Don Joyce.
So after two fumbles on consecutive plays, the sixth and seventh turnovers of the game, the Colts started the first truly sustained drive of the afternoon. Their offense was finally hitting its stride. They marched steadily upfield, mostly with modest gains of between five and ten yards. The Stadium crowd grew quieter and quieter. Raymond caught his first pass of the game for a five-yard gain. Ameche picked up a key first down with a ten-yard broken-field run. Then Moore, bad back and all, picked up another ten yards on a shifty run up the middle. The two backs took turns picking up yards for another first down. When the drive stalled on a third down play at midfield, John tucked the ball under his arm and with his peculiar shuffling gait took off, traveling sixteen yards before the surprised Giants defenders brought him down. Raymond made a diving sidelines catch and Ameche picked up another first down, so as the clock ticked off the final minutes of the first half, Baltimore was just fifteen yards away from the goal line.
When the Colts broke their huddle, they lined up in a formation that the Giants recognized as a running play, not unlike the “17” with which they had scored the touchdown. Raymond again took a three-point stance just to the left of Parker, and as the ball was snapped, ducked his head and threw himself into the line. Only instead of following through with the block, he lifted his head and slipped stealthily through the scrum and raced straight downfield. John faked the pitch to Ameche, which had the desired effect of fooling safety Patton, who took a long step forward as Raymond ran past him, and never recovered. The receiver was alone in the end zone when he caught John’s softly thrown pass.
—The Baltimore Colts drove eighty-six yards in thirteen plays. . . . Steve Myhra on the field to attempt the extra point. The snap, the spot, the boot. It’s good, and it’s now a fourteen-to-three football game. Joe?
—Well, the league’s best offense against the league’s best defense, and they really ground it out. The Colts this year gained over four thousand yards, forty-six hundred and fourteen to be exact, . . . so you can see this march of theirs was not a strange thing at all. They seemed to be inspired when they recovered the Giants’ fumble on their own fourteen and proceeded to go to work with tremendous dispatch. Unitas guided them skillfully. . . . The Colts are supported today by some twenty-thousand of their fans who have made the trip, by bus, rail, car, and by plane. . . . It has been a first half full of surprises, full of the pressures of a championship game, because fumbles and pass interceptions have played major roles in the action here to date. The second quarter belonged entirely to Baltimore.
The Giants ran three futile plays before the clock ran out. Backpedaling to pass, Conerly slipped and fell. On the last play of the half, fittingly, Alex Webster fumbled.
Giants Sam Huff threatening Colts head coach, Weeb Ewbank, as trainer Dimitri Spassoff looks on.
Raymond Berry (left) and Johnny Unitas (right) led the Colts during a thrilling fourth-quarter comeback. (Courtesy of Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated)
Steve Myhra’s game-tying field goal. (Courtesy of Sports Illustrated)
Overtime. (Courtesy of Sports Illustrated)
7
Three Plays
In their locker room at halftime, the Giants’ players felt they were lucky not to be further behind. Gifford’s fumbles had cost them dearly, and their offense had failed to move the ball. Landry, who never had much to say, told his defense to have faith in his game plan.
“If you keep doing what I’ve told you to do,” he said, “We’ll win.”
As the game moved into the third quarter, cold and darkness settled down on Yankee Stadium. In the stands, fans burrowed deeper into scarves and blankets. Pocket flasks came out as men fought the chill with hard liquor. The lights overhead began to throw the game into eerie contrast, the field brightly illuminated against the darkening stands, just in time for more and more TV sets around the country to tune in. Families were settling in for the evening, and many, finding this gritty drama unfolding on NBC, one of only two or three channels available in most places, were twisting their aerials to sharpen the image. And at just the right moment, the Giants made the game more interesting, first with a dramatic goal-line stand, and then with that grand and goofy play
—Conerly to Rote to Webster—to set up the first New York touchdown.
Suddenly the score was New York, 10, Baltimore, 14. Up in the NBC radio booth Joe Boland took over the play-by-play from Bill McColgan, and noted the shifting tide.
—New York has definitely come up with a more inspirational brand of play since that goal-line defense fired this crowd as I am sure it fired you listening across the nation. . . . Now let’s see whether that high emotional supercharge of the New York Giants team, which seemed to be lifted by that goal-line defense that stymied the Baltimore Colts, will enable them to stay alive.
At one end of the field with the wheelchair-bound vets, sixteen-year-old Neil Leifer had been snapping pictures with his camera, but he envied the more sophisticated equipment carried by the pro photographers, and the sideline passes that allowed them to move up and down the field with the action. He was trapped behind the end zone with a simple Yashica Mat camera and the lens that came with it. There was no chance of the close-ups sought by the newspapers, magazines, and wire services. Once or twice during the game he took a cup of hot coffee to the cop at his end of the field on the sidelines, and the cop winked at him and let him creep up the field a little. He took a few pictures before one of the pro photographers made a beef and the cop waved him back.
Emotions on both sides of the field were high. When Raymond was tackled before the Colts’ bench after snaring a fourteen-yard pass, a furious Huff, arriving moments late, threw himself on the downed receiver’s back. The next sensation he felt was a blow. Weeb had come flying out to defend his star receiver, and had punched Huff in the face.
—There is a disturbance directly in front of the Baltimore bench.
It startled Huff more than it jarred him. A sidelines photographer caught the moment, the angry coach, his gray overcoat flapping, being separated by a referee from the linebacker, who is standing with his back to the camera, towering over both men, his wide back with the big number “70” filling one-third of the shot. Huff looked like he was capable of devouring Weeb—years later, without a hint of sarcasm, he would say, “I was about to kill him.” Donovan and Marchetti and the other Colts defenders thought it was hilarious. For years Donovan would tell the story of how the diminutive coach—“that weasel bastard”—charged after Huff, “until he turned around and noticed none of us were following him.”
Watching from his own sidelines after the touchdown, Giants fullback Alex Webster could feel the shift in momentum, like a sudden strong wind. His teammates had stopped the Colts on the one-yard line, and seconds later, the Colts had been unable to stop the Giants from banging in from the same distance. The Giants’ stellar defense was like a force of nature. All season long the team had been coming back from behind to win big games because its defense allowed opponents so little. When the Huff-led defense caught fire, as they had since that goal-line stand, it could take control of a game. Here was the league’s best, on both sides of the ball, in full collision, the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. The general wisdom about football was that great defense beat great offense. Stopping the Colts four times on the one-yard line seemed to underline the truism. Just minutes later, put in the exact position, the Colts’ defense had buckled. If you were looking for a small sample of plays to divine an outcome for the whole contest, these back-to-back goal-line stands, one successful, the other not, seemed made to order. It was as though New York, while still trailing, had gained a purchase on victory. The whole team now began playing with authority.
When the Colts took over again after the Giants’ kickoff, the third quarter was drawing to a close and Baltimore seemed suddenly overmatched. John was sacked on the first play from scrimmage after the Giants’ touchdown, and wound up scrambling away from the rush on third down and being tackled after just a short gain. They punted the ball away.
Still, as dominant as the New York defense was, the team still had to score, which had been their problem all season. The disparity between the two halves of the team was felt most oppressively by Landry’s defense. Huff would goad the offensive players as they passed each other coming off and on the field. “Try and hold ’em,” he would sneer. “Try not to give up too many yards.” The defensive players all knew that their counterparts on offense tended to make more money and get their pictures in the papers with movie stars, and it was hard for them to contain their scorn in games where the hotshots failed to do their part. They were acutely aware of “Hollywood” Gifford’s two fumbles—Huff always felt that the running back was a show-off who tended to carry the ball away from his body in one hand, a maneuver that looked good in the stop-action photos but that made him vulnerable to being stripped. So as he and the rest of the defense blew hard on the sidelines after another successful effort, they watched skeptically as the offense tried once more. Conerly and company had managed only two first downs in the first half.
But the magic of that goal-line effort was still in the chilly Bronx air. The offense suddenly sprang to life. On the last play of the third quarter, Conerly faked a handoff to Gifford, then wheeled and threw a seventeen-yard pass to tight end Bob Schnelker, a canny veteran from Bowling Green who had played as a marine for the Corps’ team at Parris Island before joining the pros. He had been traded to the Giants two years earlier by the Eagles, and while never considered a star, he was a steady performer who rarely made mistakes. A future coach, he was having his finest moment as a player. The seventeen-yarder, his first catch of the game, gave the Giants a first down on their own thirty-nine-yard line. Then, on the next play, the first of the fourth quarter, with the offense aligned in the T-formation, Schnelker bolted straight downfield from his tight-end position. It was a classic “post pattern,” down the right center hash marks angling toward the goalpost. Ignored by the Colts’ right linebacker, Bill Pellington, he sprinted toward the center of the field between Baltimore’s right and left safeties, Andy Nelson on the outside, and Raymond Brown on the inside. Neither safety seemed too concerned about him, a fact Lombardi had anticipated.
The tight end was used as a blocker on most plays, and although he had caught more passes and scored more touchdowns that season than the team’s star receiver Kyle Rote, the Colts did not apparently regard him as a deep threat. They were aligned in a “cover three,” with the two safeties and the right cornerback each covering a third of the field, deep. Brown, in the center, let Schnelker run right past him, leaving Nelson to pick him up one-on-one. Only, as the tight end raced toward the open center of the field away from Nelson, the cornerback continued to play him loose, as if protecting the sideline. He let Schnelker get behind him. Conerly faked a handoff to Gifford, then set, and heaved the ball high and far. Brown threw his hands up in despair when he turned and realized that the tight end had gotten too far upfield for him to overtake. Once the ball was in the air, Nelson closed in fast, but not fast enough. Schnelker gathered in the ball in full stride, deep in Colts territory. The safety caught him on the fifteen-yard line, dove for his legs, and spun him down. Apart from the fluke play that had set up their first touchdown, this would be the longest Giants gain of the day.
—Joe, I don’t know who was supposed to cover Schnelker on that play but he certainly outmaneuvered him. He was out there all alone!
With a first and ten on the Colts’ fifteen, the Giants again assumed the conventional T-formation, with Gifford, Mel Triplett, and Phil King lined up directly behind Conerly. All three backs sprinted out of the backfield at the snap. The quarterback backpedaled, looking to his right, and slipped on loose turf before regaining his balance. He turned to his left and threw to Gifford, who caught the ball along the left sidelines just a few yards from the goal line. Before him was Colts cornerback Davis. Gifford ducked his head and plowed straight into the defender, who pounced on his back but failed to stop him. Gifford stumbled forward and fell into the end zone with Davis draped all over him for the Giants’ second touchdown.
The crowd erupted with joy as Summerall kicked the extra poin
t to give the Giants a slim fourth-quarter lead, 17-14. They had come all the way back. Strips of paper flickered in the lights as they floated down from the darkened stands to the field; Giants fans were tearing up their programs and the tissue paper that vendors wrapped around their hot dogs and using it as confetti. New York could smell another championship.
Up in the press box, N.P. “Swami” Clark, the Colts’ beat writer for the Baltimore News-Post, vented his disgust, loudly throwing in the towel.
“They’re going to get routed!” he announced, referring to his hometown team. “Have you ever seen such a bunch of fucking clowns?”
Word filtered down to the New York sidelines that sportswriters upstairs had voted Conerly as SPORT magazine’s Most Valuable Player of the game, an award that came with a new Corvette.
Baltimore was not about to give up, but even on their own sidelines they felt the game slipping away. Draped in their long blue capes, Donovan stood next to his linemate Marchetti.
“Gee, this is the first championship game we’ve ever been in,” Donovan said wistfully. “We’ve took a shellacking in all these years of pro football. We’re so better than these guys, and here we are fighting for our lives. If we lose this game, what a mistravesty of justice.”
“Yeah, you’re right, Fatso,” said Marchetti.
Time was running out, and for the next two possessions, the game seemed to be headed for the expected finish. The Colts’ offense sputtered. John passed them into the Giants’ half of the field, and Rechichar tried and missed from forty-six yards out. The crowd gave Huff and the Giants’ defense a standing ovation as they left the field.
