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

by Mark Bowden

  —Carl Karilivacz, the defending back, lost his footing when the end, Ray Berry, made his cut there on the forty-five-yard line. Karilivacz fell down and Berry hauled in the pass.

  “Unitas to Berry,” came the public address announcement. “First down.”

  Huff was tired, frustrated, and confused. He didn’t know what to expect. He felt like Unitas knew what he was thinking. The whole Landry defense was premised on anticipating what the other team was going to do, being one step ahead mentally, but time and again this Unitas seemed to be not one but two steps ahead—as though he knew what Huff thought he was going to do, and so did something else. Every play was a surprise. The New York defense was like a fighter who had been hit once too often by the same left jab. When an offense was clicking the way the Colts were, even the most disciplined defense begins to crumble. Mounting failure has a cumulative effect, taking defenders out of their carefully wrought schemes. Players begin to improvise adjustments, just as a fighter will start raising his right glove to ward off the annoying jab, only to leave open his midsection. This is what was happening to Huff.

  The left jab was that damned Raymond Berry. It was obvious to the middle linebacker that Karilivacz, the right cornerback, was overmatched, and moving Svare out to help him hadn’t worked. John and Raymond had a countermove for everything they did. The loudspeaker kept echoing, “Unitas to Berry.” “Unitas to Berry.” It hit Huff’s ears now like a taunt. So on this first down, the middle linebacker lifted his right glove. He cheated a little bit, stepping back away from his usual spot in the middle, between his tackles, and drifting a yard or two to his right, daring Unitas to throw that way again.

  Crouched behind his center, waiting for the snap, John saw it and immediately changed the play. He had the perfect play to exploit the situation, in fact, he had been waiting for this opportunity. It was based on everything he had observed in the game so far, but particularly on what had happened on the two previous plays. Two plays earlier, Modzelewski had come crashing into the backfield for a sack. The Colts’ right guard, Alex Sandusky, was having a hard time stopping him. So John called a trap play that would bring his left guard, Art Spinney, up behind the center and across the backfield to deliver a surprise blow to the charging Giants tackle from the right side. It would knock him to the ground. The center, Buzz Nutter, would snap the ball and then charge hard to his left to hit Spinney’s man, right tackle Frank Youso, and drive him out. The key to these maneuvers, however, was Huff. Normally, if the middle linebacker was lined up in the middle, the stunt by Nutter and Spinney would leave him unblocked at the center of the line, ready to eat whatever came through. But Huff wouldn’t be there this time. The completion to Raymond on the previous play, along with the eleven catches that had preceded it (eleven receptions was a remarkable achievement), had drawn Huff out and off to his right despite his better judgment. John was inside Huff’s head. He knew the linebacker would be leaning backward and to his right, and would never recover in time to plug the hole in the middle. The capstone on this play’s design was Colts right tackle George Preas, who would forego blocking defensive end Jim Katcavage, who would be too far from the direction of the play to matter, and instead charge across the backfield to deliver a running hit on Huff at precisely the moment he realized he’d been had.

  And the trap sprung exactly as Weeb had drawn it on the blackboard. Modzelewski crashed to the ground. Nutter stood Youso up and knocked him backward. John faked a handoff to Dupre, and gave the ball to Ameche. Huff realized too late, tried to reverse direction, and then Preas flattened him. Ameche raced straight up the middle of the field, right past the falling Huff, and into the Giants’ secondary. He sprinted between safeties Emlen Tunnell and Jimmy Patton.

  —Ameche’s at the thirty, the twenty-five, down to the twenty-yard line! So the Baltimore Colts have first down and ten yards to go on the Giants’ twenty. . . . The handoff to Alan Ameche and up the middle he went, going twenty-four yards from the forty-four yard line.

  It was the knockout punch. Forty-nine years later, a still vital and formidable Huff would throw his long arms wide and complain, “John had me psyched, you know? I thought he could read my mind after a while because it seemed like the son of a bitch knew every defense I was in. You know, it was frustrating to play against him, he was just a mastermind at it.” Ameche’s run up the Giants’ guts was virtually a game-winner. The crowd groaned and then grew silent. The Colts were now in easy range of a winning field goal, just one yard further out from where Myhra had kicked the game-tying one minutes earlier.

  But Weeb was not about to wager victory for a second time on the unreliable leg of Steve Myhra. Later, sportswriters would speculate that the Colts’ owner, Rosenbloom, whose fondness for gambling was known, had ordered his coach not to kick a field goal in order to preserve a more favorable point spread, but the owner was upstairs and Weeb was on the sidelines. Myhra was notoriously erratic, time wasn’t a factor, it was first down, and John was like a heavyweight champion finishing off a challenger with wobbly legs. Weeb wasn’t going to send out his kicker unless he had to.

  It wouldn’t come to that. The Colts tried a running play around the right side that went nowhere. On second down, John took one step back from center and rifled a pass to Raymond, who slanted across the field and caught the ball behind Svare and in front of Karilivacz. He fell down immediately, and realizing that he had not been touched, got up and lunged for the goal line. He was downed eight yards short. It was his twelfth catch, for 178 yards, the most ever by a receiver in a championship game. In this one game he had nearly matched his performance during his entire rookie season. Huff had to hear the loudspeaker once more announce, “Unitas to Berry.”

  The play earned another first down. Now the Colts were looking right up at the goalposts, and the Giants had their backs to it. New York called time-out.

  And then, as the climactic moment approached, TV sets in millions of homes went gray. NBC had lost its connection. Nowhere was this taken harder than in Maryland. The well-watered Colts fans at Henry Mack’s pub in Glen Burnie groaned and started throwing things at the set. Henry put himself between the mob and the screen. As William Gildea wrote in his book When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore, Joey Radomski, a dock-worker in Locust Point, who was watching the game with his eighteen-year-old daughter, Mary Margaret, who was praying the rosary throughout, got up and smacked the top of his set hard with a calloused hand. When nothing happened, he swore like . . . well, like a dockworker. In the novitiate, the nuns-in-training around the blanket-draped set worried that their dodge of the ecclesiastical ruling against watching the game had angered a higher power. In the relatively posh Baltimore suburb of Riderwood, the poet Ogden Nash and his wife, Frances, who were watching the game with four generations of Nashes, went temporarily mad with frustration. Shouting and oaths echoed from the normally dignified poet’s residence, as a rapid search was undertaken for that recently antiquated device, a radio. When one was located, an urgent dispute erupted over where to find the game on the dial. Nash’s daughter would say later, “Our behavior was something absolutely appalling.”

  Someone in the crowd milling behind the end zone had kicked the network’s cable and unplugged America. The Colts broke huddle and approached the line of scrimmage. The NBC TV sports directors upstairs were frantic but, remarkably, prepared. In years to come, the marriage between television and football would be so complete that games would routinely stop to allow time for commercials and broadcast emergencies, but in 1958 television was still just a spectator. The game would proceed with or without television coverage. But the TV men were clever. Two months earlier, in an article about TV coverage of football games in the New York Times, a CBS producer had speculated about ways his network might stop action on the field in a pinch.

  “Maybe we could cue a drunk to go out and interrupt things,” he told Times reporter John P. Shanley.

  —Play will be held up now. A fan running out on the field with t
hree of New York’s finest trying to corner him.

  The runner, a giddy-looking young man in a flapping winter coat, gave the cops a good run. He moved well, covering most of the length of the field before police reinforcements from the other end zone intercepted him.

  —and they get him [chuckling here] down at about the twenty-two-yard line. Now there are four or five policemen escorting him off the playing field.

  “God-dang, shouldn’t be getting me” said the man. “You should be getting that number nineteen [Unitas]. He’s the guy that’s killin’ us!”

  Newspaper reports would later refer contemptuously to the “drunk” who held up action at the penultimate moment of the game, but the man who ran out on the field was not drunk. He hadn’t been drinking, he had been working. His name was Stan Rotkiewicz, and he was business manager of NBC news, who on game days doubled as a sports statistician. He had played some college football, and in the service of his network dusted off his broken-field running just long enough for television engineers to find the plug and reconnect their cameras. Television sets blinked back to life in time to see the Colts line up, first and goal on the eight-yard line.

  On a play called “16 Power,” Ameche bulled his way forward two yards on first down, and was tackled by Huff. Then John once again did something unexpected. He made up a play. The Giants were digging in to stop the run. With the championship just six yards away and with the chance of an almost certain field goal if they reached fourth down, the last thing New York figured he would do is risk an interception by putting the ball in the air, but as the quarterback would later calmly instruct sportswriters, “If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get intercepted.” John had been watching Emlen Tunnell, the Giants’ strong safety, cover his tight end all day. But in this goal-line position, he knew Mutscheller would be covered by linebacker Cliff Livingston, who would be trying to take away an inside pattern. If the tight end broke wide, it left only Lindon Crow to pick him up, and Crow had been preoccupied all afternoon with Lenny Moore. He told tight end Jim Mutscheller to run a diagonal route to his right, angling for the goal line. “Get out there real quick,” he said.

  Once again, John’s play calling took the Giants completely by surprise. Nobody followed Mutscheller as he ran toward the sideline. The pass was lofted gently. The tight end turned and caught it with both hands on the two-yard line, right on another of the wet patches Raymond had noticed before the game, in the corner where the sun never shone. It was now ice. There was no one to keep Mutscheller from the end zone, but his feet wouldn’t take him there. He slid helplessly out of bounds at the two-yard line.

  So it was third down, two yards to go. If they blew this, Weeb would have to chose between trying a fourth time for the touchdown, or betting once more on Myhra. John leaned into the huddle and looked at Ameche. “This is the 16 Power,” he said. “This is the game right here. We can win the ball game with this play.” Two downs ago, on the same play, Ameche had altered course. He was supposed to plunge off the right end, but he had seen an opening and tried to cut up the middle, where Huff was waiting. This time it worked exactly as drawn. Mutscheller blocked left linebacker Cliff Livingston toward the middle of the field, and Lenny Moore stopped safety Emlen Tunnell with the best block he had ever made. The hole they opened up was so wide that nobody laid a finger on Ameche as he lunged into the end zone. He lowered his head and shoulders expecting to get hit, and when he met no resistance his momentum threw him face first into the cold turf, the end zone turf.

  —And the ball game is over! Alan Ameche has scored the touchdown, and the Baltimore Colts are the professional football champions of the world! Baltimore twenty-three, the New York Giants seventeen.

  Neil Leifer got the picture. He stood surrounded by drunken Colts fans and wheelchair vets, and by the accredited photographers who had crowded behind the end zone for the winning points. At the climactic moment of the game, the remote space in which he had been confined was suddenly the right place to be. The birthday-boy’s shot would be one of many trained at Ameche’s winning plunge. In film of the game there would be an explosion of light behind the end zone as the flash bulbs on all the cameras popped. Leifer envied the pros and their more sophisticated cameras with adjustable lenses. With those, they could focus in tightly on the fullback as he crossed the line, get the close-up. His Yashica Mat had only a normal lens, which meant that his picture would be not just of Ameche hurtling toward him, but of a broad panorama, John watching from behind the line, the hand that had given Ameche the football still outstretched, the long empty, illuminated field behind him, the encircling stands, the dark sky. Leifer didn’t consider it in that moment, but his picture told the bigger story, of a team that had just driven the length of the field, of a game that had stretched from early afternoon into night. It would be the first picture he ever sold, and would become the most famous photo of the game.

  Up in the owner’s box, Bert Bell was beside himself. He bellowed, “This is the greatest day in the history of professional football!” He told New York Times reporter Louis Effrat that it was, simply, “The greatest game I have ever seen.”

  Ameche was immediately mobbed by fans, one of whom stripped the ball from his hands. Buzz Nutter, the center, knocked the fan down, recovered the souvenir, and raced with Ameche for the locker room.

  Their quarterback wasn’t watching. By the time the running back hit the ground, John Unitas, now the most famous quarterback in football history, had turned his back and was coming off the field the same way he did in victory or defeat, shoulders stooped, head down, a man walking home from work.

  Ameche, a hero. (Courtesy of Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated)

  Johnny Unitas driving the Corvette awarded to him by Sport magazine. (Courtesy of Sport magazine)

  Colts return home. (Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries)

  9

  Epilogue

  Alone in the locker room, Gino Marchetti got the news when his teammates burst in shouting it, “We’re world champions!” Years later he couldn’t remember whether it was Bill Pellington or Ray Brown. There is a picture of him on the stretcher, being embraced by Jim Parker, the great offensive tackle he had humiliated on that day long ago in training camp. Parker is stooping, still in his full uniform and pads, the tape on his hands and wrists unraveling, his head resting on his injured teammate’s shoulder. Marchetti is clutching a bottle of soda pop.

  They celebrated with Coke and Nehi Orange, these new champions, many of them veterans of hard combat, because the NFL was squeamish about alcohol. The beer would come later, in cases, loaded into the charter plane for the quick flight home.

  Once Raymond saw Ameche cross the goal line, he ran for the locker room as fast as he could. In the earlier crush weeks before at Memorial Stadium, the noise level had been so great that if he had yelled at the top of his lungs he could not have heard himself. Strangers had scooped him up on their shoulders and swept him along. He hadn’t liked the feeling of being so out of control, so much at the mercy of a mob. In his rush at the end of this game, he was out of the arena before the sense of accomplishment fully hit him.

  Raymond had not had the religious experience that would shape the rest of his life, so he had no words yet for the feeling that overcame him in that moment, but later he would arrive at the understanding that would frame it properly. At the time he just felt overwhelmed with the perception that he had been touched by something powerful and other. Maybe destiny, although the term was hackneyed. Whatever it was, it shook him.

  “WHO OUTGUTTED WHO!” screamed offensive guard Art Spinney, referring to the Conerly newspaper column that had hung on their locker-room wall in Baltimore as a motivator all week. As more and more of the players made it off the field, the laughter and hooting and shouting created a happy din.

  Raymond retreated from it. He found an empty toilet stall and closed himself in for more than five minutes, a tall, lean man in a dirty white-and-blue unif
orm, his shoulder pads filling the small space. He thought about the high school team he had fought to make, the college scholarship he didn’t get, the provisional scholarship that allowed him to stay with the team at SMU, and the fluke of being drafted as a “futures” pick by the Colts. He thought about the desperation he had felt two summers ago, and about meeting John and their fortuitous partnership. And now they had done it. They were the best team in all of football, at the pinnacle of their sport, and he was not just a member of the team, but a key player. His catches today had set an NFL record, but, more importantly, along with key plays by a lot of his teammates, they had enabled victory.

  He thought about the three pass plays in the critical fourth-quarter drive, and about the pass he and John had improvised when Svare drifted out wide to take him out of the play. For the first time, he knew there was a moment in a game where they had triumphed for no other reason than preparation. He often had reason to believe his obsessive habits proved only that he was the nut his teammates said he was. There were times when even John treated him that way, like the time when he had suggested that they get together and go over some things, and the quarterback had protested, “Oh, Raymond, here you come again.” That had stung. But he could see why John might have felt that way from time to time. In all the years of his obsessive work habits, the pages and pages of handwritten notes he kept in worn three-ring binders, he had never been certain himself that it was worth it. He believed that it made a general contribution, but day in and day out he did it mostly on faith; it was something he had to do. Now there had come a moment that rewarded everything. Fate had delivered a moment that proved its worth, and not just in any game at some random point. It had come in the pivotal moment of the ultimate game of their careers. It had come on what was the most important play of his professional life. It was hard not to feel how spooky that was, and how wonderful. The timing . . . well, it went beyond just being good, or being lucky. He would come to see it eventually as the hand of God.