The Best Game Ever

by Mark Bowden

  So, much as Raymond had on the other side of the ball, Landry had turned himself into a student of wide receivers, scrutinizing them on film until late into the night, memorizing their moves and routes, charting their tendencies. When he made the move to player-coach under Howell, and then gave up playing, shedding his pads for the suit and tie and short-brimmed fedora that would become his trademark on the sidelines, Landry broadened his study to include the entire offense, looking for clues to its intentions in the flickering black-and-white shadows of his sixteen-millimeter film, and devising strategies that didn’t just react to plays, but anticipated them. By 1958, he had turned the Giants into the premier defensive team in the league.

  As talent scouts, the Maras were alert, and lucky. Emlen Tunnell, the mainstay of their pass defense, had not been drafted, primarily because the league shut out most black players. He walked into the Giants’ front office in 1948 not long after Wellington became the team’s vice president, and offered his services. Tunnell became the team’s first black player and one of the best defensive backs in league history.

  The Maras had signed Rote, the triple-threat running back, receiver, quarterback from SMU in 1951, at a time when he was coveted by every other team in the league, winning the chance when the league offered each team a bonus pick. When the owners chose slips of paper from a hat to decide on the order of selection, Wellington had drawn first pick. The next year, with the third pick in the first round, they drafted Gifford. Players wanted to come to New York. With the 1956 championship in their trophy case, the Giants were considered prime contenders. They paid top dollar for talent, and in the media capital of the world, achievement was not only noticed, it led to lucrative advertising deals. The Maras tracked down their big fullback, Alex Webster, in Canada in 1955, playing for the Canadian League champion Montreal Allouettes. Webster had been a late pick of the Redskins in 1953, but had been cut before the season started. Andy Robustelli, the Giants’ star defensive end, was obtained in a trade the Maras engineered with the Los Angeles Rams in 1956. The Rams threw in another player with that deal, their third-round pick from Penn State, a massive defensive lineman named Rosey Grier, because the big New Jersey native refused to play away from home. Grier had told every NFL scout that he would play only for the Giants. He wanted his family to be able to watch him on Sundays. His stubbornness cost him a hefty signing bonus, and handed New York a bargain. “That was me,” Grier joked many years later, “The great negotiator.”

  The Maras traded for the Chicago Cardinals’ superb place-kicker Pat Summerall before the 1958 season, a move which would pay big dividends, and they gave up a draft pick to acquire Detroit cornerback Carl Karilivacz. They used their first draft pick for Phil King, a star fullback from Vanderbilt who stood six-four and weighed 220 pounds, with a broad face and high cheek bones. He was part Cherokee, and so was of course immediately christened “Chief.” King was a modest fellow with good work habits and Lombardi liked him immediately. Studying film of an exhibition game against the Colts one night in the Bear Martin Inn outside Salem, Oregon, where the team held training camp at Willamette College, the coach barked, “Stop the picture!”

  It froze in the middle of an offensive play. Lombardi pointed to the screen.

  “Who threw that block?” he asked.

  Arthur Daley, a New York Times reporter, recorded the moment:

  There was complete silence.

  “Speak up,” roared Lombardi. “Who threw that block?”

  There was more silence.

  “Will someone answer?” said the coach. “Don’t be afraid to speak up. It was a perfect block. Did you throw it King?”

  “Well, coach,” said the Chief, “It looked like too good a block for me to have thrown it.”

  When the guffaws subsided, the modest Alex Webster shamefacedly admitted that he was the culprit.

  Deference like that from a rookie earned respect. King became a powerful addition to their running game.

  Of all the players Mara had assembled for this team, his biggest coup had come in 1955, with their third draft pick, the thirtieth player chosen. If there was a player on the New York squad who stood as a kind of equal and opposite number to the combination of John and Raymond in Baltimore, it was a broad-shouldered, baby-faced tackler named Robert E. Lee Huff.

  The world knew him as Sam.

  Sam Huff had been an exceptional two-hundred-pound lineman on offense and defense for the University of West Virginia, helping that team to thirty-one wins and only seven losses in his college career. Son of a coal miner, born in a mining camp, Huff was determined to never go back to the life that defined his father and brothers. There was a deceptive softness to his appearance, a round face and layer of body fat over his big frame, that disguised the powerful athletic build underneath. He was quick and tough and proud to a fault. He had nothing and wanted everything. Huff was an outsized character, with enough ambition on and off the field to frighten the faint of heart. He was outspoken, brash, and unapologetic. Some of the men who played against him swore that he had had the number seventy on the back of his jersey enlarged—“I think he even had seventy painted on the bottom of his cleats, so that on film none of his tackles would be missed,” said one. Neither claim was true, but it seemed like something Huff might do. He was not above a little self-promotion and he liked to be noticed. He played football with unmatched ferocity, reveling in the game’s violence—“On the field, I try to hurt everybody,” he said, cheerfully. He had come to New York City for the first time at the end of his senior season to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show with a group of other collegiate football all-Americans.

  Huff hit it off there with Paul Hornung, the Notre Dame star, who announced at a rehearsal before the show that he was going to score a date with the movie star Kim Novak, who was also on the show that week.

  Penniless, Huff couldn’t imagine taking anyone out on a date in Manhattan, much less a movie star.

  “How much money do you have?” he asked Hornung.

  “Twenty dollars,” said Hornung.

  Huff was dazzled, both by his new friend’s daring and his riches.

  It was at the same rehearsal that a dignified man in a business suit approached him.

  “Sam,” he said, “did you get my letter? I’m Wellington Mara.”

  Huff shook the Giants’ owner’s hand and said that he had gotten the letter.

  “Well, we drafted you, you know,” said Mara.

  “Yeah, that’s what you said in your letter, number three.” Huff sounded slightly displeased.

  “I’d like to talk contract with you.”

  Huff smelled money, maybe even Kim Novak dating money. Mara had brought a contract with him, which the college all-star scanned quickly. It offered $7,000.

  “Do you need money right now?” Mara asked.

  “Yes, sir,” said Huff.

  “How much?” asked Mara.

  Huff boldly tossed out the first big number that popped in his head.

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  Much to his surprise, Mara didn’t even blink. He wrote out a check for the full amount on the spot.

  Huff was agog, but wary. Still holding the contract, he said, “I can’t sign this.” He explained that he had promised his college coach, Art Lewis, that he wouldn’t sign anything without first consulting him.

  “Well, why don’t you give him a call?” Mara suggested.

  So Huff called Lewis.

  “Coach, I’m here with Mr. Mara of the Giants, and he wants to sign me to a contract for seven thousand dollars.”

  “Boy,” said Lewis, “sign that goddamn thing before he changes his mind.”

  Huff signed it.

  His sudden riches gave him bragging rights that day over Hornung, who still had a few years of college ball to play. Huff didn’t score a date with Novak, but it was more money than he had ever had at one time. It lasted him until the season started, when he discovered, to his alarm, that the team had deducted o
ne hundred dollars from his first check. He was told that it would be the same for the next four. He owed Mr. Mara five hundred dollars.

  Huff sought out the owner, and complained, “I thought that was a bonus!”

  “Son, you may be from West Virginia,” said Mara, “but it’s time you learned the difference between a bonus and an advance.”

  Losing his “bonus” was not the only thing discouraging about that first training camp at St. Michael’s College in Winooski, Vermont. Coach Howell tried Huff on both the offensive and defensive lines, and he wasn’t impressed. Huff had bulked up to about 250 pounds, but the man he was trying to block, Rosey Grier, weighed 295. Roosevelt Brown, who played offensive tackle, was about the same size as Grier and Brown was solid muscle, with a narrow waist and broad shoulders, the most athletic big man Huff had ever seen. Huff looked like a high school player alongside him. It was humiliating. Until a rookie settled into a position and was taken under the wing of either Lombardi, Landry, or one of the other position coaches, he belonged primarily to Howell, whose motivational methods burned Huff. The rookie lineman was busting his gut, doing everything the team asked, but it didn’t seem to be enough for the old drill instructor.

  “You’re not running fast enough!” he would shout at Huff. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Huff hated him. His ebullient, egotistical exterior had a flip side. He chafed at disapproval. He took poorly to the former marine’s methods. Shouting at players and insulting them was just Howell’s way on the practice field, and it was a time-honored approach in the profession, but it got under Huff’s skin. He considered the head coach a dumb son of a bitch from Arkansas, and between absorbing his abuse and his losing battles against bigger, more experienced players, Huff decided he had had enough. He was homesick and felt himself stranded in a hostile place. He had been a standout on the baseball team at West Virginia, too. Now he second-guessed his decision to try football. He told himself, I think I’m in the wrong game.

  As Huff would remember it years later, he and his roommate, Don Chandler, a rookie punter from Oklahoma, both felt the same way. They had met at the college all-star game a few weeks earlier.

  “I don’t like it here,” Huff told him one night.

  “I don’t either,” said Chandler.

  “And I’m homesick,” said Huff.

  “I am, too,” said the kicker.

  And as though listening in on their conversation, the popular country song “Detroit City” came on the radio, with its mournful refrain:

  I wanna go home.

  Oh, how I wanna go home.

  “Let’s get outta here,” said Huff.

  “How?” asked Chandler. They were in rural Vermont.

  “Let’s just go down and turn our playbooks in and then we’ll figure it out,” said Huff, determined now.

  The two went down two flights and knocked on Lombardi’s door, waking him.

  Lombardi opened the door and roared, “What the hell are you guys doing?”

  “We quit,” said Huff

  “What do you mean, you quit?” asked Lombardi, angrier now about more than being awakened. Chandler ran back upstairs leaving Huff to deal with the coach.

  “Coach, here’s our playbooks,” said Huff, handing them over. “We can’t take it anymore.”

  “What the hell do you mean, you can’t take it anymore?” roared Lombardi. “Goddamnit, we’ve had you here for two weeks now. You mean to tell me we wasted two weeks on you two goddamn guys?”

  “Coach, I just can’t take it anymore,” said Huff. “I don’t give a goddamn.”

  Huff went back to his room, leaving Lombardi swearing and sputtering. He and his like-minded roommate were packing when the offensive line coach, Ed Kolman, a former Chicago Bear, knocked on their door. Huff liked him.

  “Sam, I talked with Vince, and he said you’re leaving,” said Kolman.

  “Yep,” said Huff. “I can’t—you’ve heard Jim Lee Howell yelling at me, screaming at me. Goddamnit, I don’t take that from anybody; I never have. Hell, I can go home and teach school and make more money than I’m making here, you know, and be with my family.”

  This was true. Huff had been a good student and had earned a teaching certificate from West Virginia. Teachers were making more than rookie NFL linemen in 1956. Huff figured he would teach high school and coach, maybe try out for a baseball team.

  “Sam, if you leave here, it’ll be the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your life,” said Kolman. “I played this game, and I really believe you can be a star in this league.”

  “A star?” Huff said, surprised.

  “Yeah, I’ve watched you; I’ve coached you,” he said. “You can play.”

  “That’s not what Jim Lee Howell says, you know,” said Huff.

  “If you stay—I want you to stay—if you stay, he won’t say anything else to you,” promised Kolman. “I’ll take care of that.”

  “Okay, I’ll stay,” said Huff, mollified.

  Chandler complained, “Well what the hell am I gonna do?” No coach had come upstairs to tell him he was going to be an NFL star.

  So the kicker found another rookie who had a car, and who agreed to drive him to the airport in Burlington. Huff rode along to try to talk Chandler out of it, and ultimately, with Lombardi’s intercession—the coach drove out to the airport separately—the kicker stayed. Just to make sure, the rookie with the car got cut the next day.

  Just as he had mistaken an advance for a bonus, young Sam Huff had mistaken hazing for disapproval. The Giants saw his talent; they just had not yet figured out what to do with it. He was cocky and proud enough to know he had options in life, and that is an impressive thing in a young man. He continued to play offense during training camp, but unbeknownst to him he had attracted the attention of the team’s defensive coach.

  Landry had a new idea about playing defense, something to counter the complex Brown-style offenses they were seeing more and more. The standard pro defense for decades had been five down linemen, three linebackers to help plug holes in the line and stop the run, and three safeties who played deeper and guarded against the pass. But as teams began sending tight ends and running backs out for passes along with flankers, there were too many receivers for three defensive backs to cover. Steve Owens, who had been the Giants’ head coach when Landry was a player, had converted one of the linebackers into a deep man, creating a formation he called the “umbrella,” with five linemen, only two linebackers, and four pass defenders, two “cornerbacks” split wide, and two safeties who covered the middle of the field. Offenses adapted to this shift by throwing more short passes, taking advantage of the opening created by the missing linebacker. So Landry was experimenting with what he called “The Four-Three,” a radical departure that simply removed one of the down linemen, restoring the number of linebackers to three. It was radical because it granted offenses a standing mismatch on the line of scrimmage, which invited a running attack. The answer, Landry knew, was the man in the center, the middle linebacker. He would have to be a kind of superathlete, a man as big as a lineman, quick enough and fast enough to play pass defense, and smart enough to recognize which role to play with every snap of the ball. The player he had in that spot was Ray Beck, who was smart and fast, but about twenty pounds shy of the size Landry wanted.

  He had been watching Huff in practice. The beleaguered West Virginian with the baby face had improved enough playing against bigger men on the line to make the team as an offensive guard, but in the struggle had lost weight. He seemed doomed, too small for the line, too big for the defensive backfield. When Beck hurt his ankle in a preseason game and looked like he was going to be laid up for a few weeks, Landry thought about Huff.

  Training camp had broken, and Huff was living with a large group of players and coaches in the Excelsior Hotel on the Upper West Side. Landry had an apartment at the hotel with his wife Sheila and their two children. Huff’s phone rang one night.

  “What are you
doing tonight, Sam?” asked the coach.

  “I thought I’d just watch a little TV,” said Huff.

  “Well, good, I’m glad you’re not doing anything,” Landry said, as he recalled in his autobiography. “Why don’t you come down and we can look at some game films?”

  With his wife putting the children to bed, projecting film on his living room wall, Landry asked the rookie, “Have you ever thought about playing linebacker? I’d like to try you there and see how you do.”

  “Tom, I never played linebacker,” said Huff.

  “Well, why don’t you just try it?”

  The art of getting a man to excel hinges on understanding his idea of himself, and Landry had read Huff perfectly. The rookie liked to be the center of attention, and liked being entrusted with authority.

  “We’re going to play this four-three,” Landry said, “and I want you to play middle linebacker.”

  The thing that stuck in the rookie’s mind, the thing that clicked, was when Landry said he wanted to build his whole defense around him. Huff stepped into the role in practice, and it was a revelation. He felt like he had found the position he was born to play. He had spent his entire football career as a lineman, and had begun every play in the three- or four-point stance, his head craning up no higher than to see the big man similarly positioned across from him, eyeball to eyeball. That was what football had meant to him, a man-to-man struggle on every play. Now he was standing upright at the center of the line, and he was amazed at how much more he could suddenly see. It was as though he had played the game his whole life with blinders on, and now they were gone. With his peripheral vision, he could see the whole field, from sideline to sideline.