The Best Game Ever

by Mark Bowden

  —They are chewing up that clock with seven minutes, fifty seconds to go.

  The Colts got another chance, gift-wrapped, when this workmanlike march ended with still another Giants fumble. Conerly handed the ball to King, who was hit by Lipscomb before he had a firm grasp of the ball. As he fell, it skittered on the turf behind him.

  —A scramble for the ball, and . . . ah, a Baltimore recovery, I believe! Looks like Lipscomb came in and hit them and forced the fumble, with Myhra making the recovery of the ball for Baltimore on New York’s forty-one-yard line. So Baltimore takes advantage of a hard-hitting defense, a resultant fumble, and a break with this fumble in New York territory, with New York leading seventeen to fourteen . . . it’s Baltimore’s ball on the, looks like the forty-two-yard line!

  A huge break for the Colts, the play set up their potent offense on the Giants’ half of the field. They needed only to get in field-goal range to tie it up. But again the New York defense rose up. Two big defensive plays pushed Baltimore backward and well out of field-goal range. First, Andy Robustelli, exploiting a mistake on the Colts’ line, sprinted into the backfield, unblocked, and dropped John for an eleven-yard loss. Then left tackle Dick Modzelewski came straight up the middle to tackle the quarterback nine yards further back. The threat of a field goal was erased. It had the feel of a decisive stand, an exclamation point on what was beginning to look like a certain New York victory.

  Joe Boland smelled it up in the radio booth:

  —This New York team is aflame defensively. They fired through on Unitas and dropped him for another loss. . . . Five minutes and forty-nine seconds still to go in the ball game. Bill, can New York run out most of that clock?

  —Well, I know they hope they can. This is a mighty big drive.

  Taking their time between plays, letting it tick off in great chunks, the Giants’ offense began moving methodically upfield again, grinding out a critical first down, and then another. Baltimore had to stop them now or its offense would not get the ball back. Two more plays brought the Giants to another third down, this one on their own forty-yard line with four yards to go. There were under three minutes left in the game. It was dark now, and every minute that passed added hundreds of thousands of TV viewers. At this point, up in the mezzanine, league commissioner Bert Bell could hardly have asked for more. The game was close, and every play was charged with excitement.

  —Joe, the thought just occurred to me that this is the closest-matched championship game in the last five years.

  —There’s no question about it. It is. And an amazing comeback by these high-flying New York Giants. That clock keeps running and New York is taking all the time in the world, waiting until the last second to get up and out of their huddle and over the ball. It’s third down and, make it about four yards, just a shade under four yards to go for the first down on the New York forty-yard line. Two-fifty left to go in the ball game. New York leading seventeen to fourteen in the final period here in Yankee Stadium for the biggest of all prizes, the world championship of professional football.

  If the Giants could make one more first down, they could probably run out the clock. Baltimore fans watching on TV saw their hopes fading.

  New York coach Jim Lee Howell sent in a play—“Shoot-25 Trap”—which called for the left halfback to follow the other two backs into the right side of the line, off tackle, between Donovan and Marchetti. It was a gamble. The more likely move would have been to run at the other side of the Colts’ line, away from Baltimore’s strongest tacklers. Howell was betting that the Colts would overshift the wrong way, and he guessed right. They had a balanced front line, three down linemen to the left and the right, but Don Shinnick, the middle linebacker, positioned himself forward and to the right, and the rest of the defensive backfield shifted with him. The alignment left only cornerback Carl Taseff in the defensive secondary on the weak side. If the ball carrier could make it past Donovan and Marchetti, he would only have to dodge the smaller defender to pick up the first down or more.

  As Marchetti got into his three-point stance, he was so sure the play was going away from him that he reminded himself to get off the ball quickly in order to evade the block and pursue the play to the other side.

  New York again assumed a T-formation, with Webster, Triplett, and Gifford in a row three yards deep. Ordinarily, Webster would have carried the ball on a Shoot-25 Trap, but Lombardi wanted to give the ball to Gifford. At the snap, Schnelker and guard Jack Stroud hit Marchetti and tried to drive him out. Behind them, Webster and Triplett ran interference for Gifford, who saw an opening and cut inside them. Marchetti had come off the ball so fast that he had surprised the two Giants blockers, who were wrestling with him when Gifford shot past. The defensive end fought away from the two, twisted his body awkwardly and lunged at the running back, catching Gifford’s legs from behind and hauling him down. The end, the running back, Stroud, and Schnelker tumbled forward in a flailing heap. Marchetti had just made the biggest tackle of his career. Up in the radio booth, McColgan thought Gifford was shy of the first-down marker on the forty-four-yard line, but in the tangle of bodies he could not be sure. He estimated that Gifford had been stopped on the forty-three.

  —It’s going to be close!

  Trailing the play, Donovan, Shinnick, and Lipscomb had all thrown themselves on the pile, hoping to prevent Gifford from squirming forward the extra inches needed for the first down. Together it was three-quarters of a ton landing hard. Absorbing this blow, stretched out beneath the running back, was Marchetti. When Lipscomb came down on him he heard his ankle snap and felt a blinding pain.

  He howled, and struggled to pull his wounded limb clear of the pile. The men slowly untangled, grunting and swearing at each other, “Motherfucker!” and “Get yer ass off me!” But as they peeled away, Marchetti stayed on the turf, holding his leg, rocking back and forth, bellowing. His parents in San Francisco, who were watching the first pro football game they had ever seen on television, looked on with alarm as their son writhed. In the midst of this commotion, Charley Berry, the line judge, a former pro baseball player, tried to stay focused on the football. He retrieved it and set it down close to the forty-four-yard marker.

  Gifford was certain he had made it. He hadn’t even glanced back as he got up. He eyed Marchetti’s performance cynically. They knew each other. They had played against each other in college games in California. The running back thought his canny old friend was pulling a typical ploy, angling for a delay to stop the clock without wasting a team time-out.

  “Get your damn butt off the ground, Gino,” he said. “The play’s over.”

  “Frank, I can’t get up,” said Marchetti.

  —Marchetti is down on the field for Baltimore as time-out is taken for him and a measurement. Time-out taken for Gino Marchetti, and time in for Bill McColgan.

  —Well, Joe, Marchetti has been chasing Charlie Conerly throughout much of the afternoon, and he now goes over to see what’s wrong with Gino as the Baltimore trainer comes out on the field. Two minutes and thirty-two seconds. That’s unofficial time, of course, the official time is kept right on the playing field by the back judge. . . . This is a mighty important measurement coming up right now. The trainers are still working on Gino Marchetti. It was Marchetti who was on the bottom of the pile in stopping Frank Gifford on that play. The Giants have the ball on about their own forty-two-and-a-half, forty-three-yard line, and most important to them right now is to pick up this first down and run the clock out. Gino Marchetti is going to be taken from the playing field. Regarded by most football observers as the most outstanding defensive end in pro football, he is being helped off the field. . . . The Giants did not make the first down!

  When the chain was run out to the spot and stretched, it confirmed that the ball was inches short. Jack Stroud, the offensive guard who had been battling Marchetti with only marginal success all afternoon, was delighted to see him being carried off the field on a stretcher—he would later complain to him,
“Gino, if you were gonna get hurt, why couldn’t you have done it in the first quarter?”—but he was furious with the spot of the ball. He was hopping mad. Stroud told the line judge that he had made a mistake; coming in from the sideline he had set his right foot down to mark Gifford’s forward progress, but after he found the ball, distracted by Marchetti, he had inadvertently set it down in front of his left foot, which was about a yard short. Berry serenely ignored the protest.

  Gifford also complained loudly, insisting, “I made it! I made it!”

  “Why don’t you shut up?” said Donovan.

  Gifford would be voicing the same lament a half century later.

  But the ruling had been made, which meant that it was now fourth down and inches. The Giants’ argument shifted from the field to their own sidelines, where coaches and players crowded around Howell. With the injury time-out and the measurement, there was time to debate. Jack Kemp, the rookie backup quarterback, was in the middle of it. He would remember Gifford and Lombardi begging Howell to let them try.

  “We gotta go for it,” said Gifford. “We can do it.”

  The Yankee Stadium crowd and all of New York wanted Howell to go for it, including his wife in the stands (who would tell him in no uncertain terms later), but it was the head coach’s call. In Don Chandler he had the best punter in the league, and his defense had been playing inspired ball. With the game on the line, Howell was being asked to lay down his chips on one half of his schizophrenic team, and without much hesitation he chose the defense. As Red Smith noted with characteristic understatement, “Later, the wisdom of this decision would be debated, but it seemed wise then.” Giants fans would be debating it a half century on, but such is loneliness at the top.

  —And we see that Don Chandler, the punter, has come into the football game. So the Colts will get the ball once more . . . and, Joe, it looks like this one is going right down to the wire.

  —It’s not only going down to the wire. . . . There is a possibility that Baltimore might tie this up at seventeen-seventeen and we might see a sudden death, but that’s only a “might.”

  That possibility receded with Chandler’s punt, which went high and far. Taseff signaled for a fair catch on the Colts’ fourteen-yard line. With two minutes and twenty seconds left in the game, the Colts had a long way to go. The game had come down to the perfect matchup again, the league’s best offense against its best defense. Howell had gone with the established wisdom.

  As Huff took the field with the rest of Landry’s squad, he was pleased. He would have been angry if the coach had decided the other way.

  Exuding the calm surety that always inspired his teammates, John leaned into the huddle and said, “We’ve got eighty-six yards and two minutes. We’re going to go straight down the field and score. Let’s get to work.”

  He led off with a bomb, launching the ball fifty yards upfield for his tight end Mutscheller, who had caught a thirty-two-yard pass early in the third quarter with the same route, straight up the middle. This time he was bracketed with New York defenders, who were watching for anything deep. John had seen it and threw the ball well over all three men’s heads.

  Marchetti was watching from the sidelines, sitting up on the stretcher. His litter-bearers had been ordered to take him off the field, but the big defensive end demanded that they set him down. The Colts’ fans in the stands behind him began chanting, “Gino! Gino! Gino!” All he could do now was watch. After every play the bearers would move him further down the field, prodded by the police, but as the Colts broke their huddle he would insist that they put him back down so he could watch the next play. A sideline photographer caught him, soiled and battered, a towel draped over his broken right ankle and foot, sitting up on the stretcher, craning his thick neck to see downfield, a study in intensity.

  John’s deliberate overthrow brought the game to the two-minute warning, which gave Landry and his defensive captains a chance to plan their strategy for the final stand. Everything was in the balance. It had been a very physical game, but at this critical moment, a delicate war of tactics would play out. Landry was a diligent student of the game, and of the Colts. He had spent many hours charting tendencies and trying to climb into the head of John Unitas, and he knew exactly what to expect.

  All game long they had been double-teaming Lenny Moore when he lined up as a wide receiver to the right, and the Colts had countered by throwing often and successfully to Raymond Berry on the other side. He had caught seven passes, including a touchdown. He was clearly the quarterback’s favorite target in second-and-long and third-and-long situations, and it was equally clear that the Giants’ right cornerback, Karilivacz, was struggling to stay with the canny Colts receiver one-on-one. So Landry decided to do something drastic. On certain throwing downs, he would take away Raymond Berry. If Unitas wanted to move the ball upfield in this final drive, he said, he was going to have to do it without his favorite target. Landry instructed his right-side linebacker, Harland Svare, to abandon his usual position and split way out, lining up directly in front of Berry, head-to-head. His assignment was to stay with him, get in his way, prevent him from running his route.

  The move was radical. It was designed to rattle Unitas, who would be in his hurry-up offense, calling two or three plays at a time in the huddle. From all of his film study and charting of tendencies, further confirmed by what had happened in this game, Landry knew that in this critical moment of the game, the Colts’ quarterback would go to Berry, and that the route would almost certainly be a sideline pattern, which would stop the clock whether the pass was caught or not. It was basic clock-management strategy, and nobody was better at the sideline pattern than Berry. If the Giants could take it away, it would throw the Colts off-stride. Once derailed, in the hurry-up offense there wouldn’t be time to regroup.

  And Landry was right. John completed a key eleven-yard pass to Moore for a first down, and then missed on a short pass to running back L.G. Dupre, which stopped the clock and allowed the Colts to huddle. There was only one minute and fifteen seconds left to play. This was the Colts’ last chance. Failure to make a first down or score here would give the Giants victory. What followed were not just the most important three plays of the game, but the most important three plays of Raymond’s and John’s careers.

  At second and ten, it was a clear passing situation, and John called two consecutive passing plays, both sideline patterns to Raymond. On the first, the receiver was to run an “L-cut,” just a simple down-and-out toward the Giants’ sideline, exactly what Landry had guessed they would do. Karilivacz had been playing well-off, guarding against a deep route, more or less conceding a short sideline pattern, and now the Colts would take advantage of it. But when Raymond trotted out to his spot along the left sideline, much to his surprise, Svare came with him. The linebacker set himself directly across from the receiver, just three yards deep.

  —Here’s Berry, flanked wide to the left now.

  In all of his meticulous pages of notes for this game, in all of his film study of the Giants, Raymond had never seen one of their linebackers do this. It was the perfect counter to the play John had called, because even if he could shake Svare on the route, he would be slowed enough for Karilivacz to jump him from above—just as he had done in the first quarter to intercept. It appeared as though Landry had outsmarted them.

  But the one thing the Giants’ coach could not have known was that he was facing two players who were as obsessive about film study as he was. Years earlier, in one of their private film sessions, Raymond and John had seen this play. It wasn’t Svare. It wasn’t even the Giants. Raymond could no longer recall which team it was. But he and John had seen on the flickering image on his white apartment wall a linebacker drift out and line up nose-to-nose on a wide receiver. It had surprised them, and they had come up with a countermove. This exact situation. They had decided that Raymond should make a quick outside release to fake the linebacker, and then just slant pell-mell toward the center of the field.
When you split a linebacker wide like that it leaves a gaping hole in the secondary. John told Raymond he would hit him in stride.

  In the seconds before the ball was snapped, Raymond looked over at John and their eyes briefly met. Does he remember? He guessed that the quarterback did. Raymond assumed his three-point stance, and at the snap of the ball took two steps wide, pulling Svare outside, and then broke toward the middle at such an angle that Svare couldn’t touch him. John’s quick pass reached him six yards downfield, in full stride. He had remembered.

  —Berry in the middle of the Giants’ secondary, shakes one man off, shakes another as he’s finally caught up with at about the fifty-yard line where he is brought down by Sam Huff, the middle linebacker in that Giants defensive platoon. A twenty-five-yard gain.

  Huff was so surprised that he had run right past Raymond as he angled across the field. He had turned upfield and caught up to the slow-footed receiver from behind. Baltimore called time-out. There was one minute and five seconds remaining, and the Colts had just leaped to the middle of the field. A game-tying field goal suddenly seemed very much in reach, and with it the first ever overtime period. The successful second-down play had stunned the Giants. It was spooky. Landry and Huff felt like this Unitas was inside their heads.

  Upstairs in the radio booth, for the first time the game announcers began to seriously contemplate a tie score.

  —Joe, you are quite familiar with what a minute and five seconds means in the National Football League, and right now I know what Johnny Unitas and Weeb Ewbank would like to do, not go all the way but pick up another ten to twenty yards and get in position for a field goal. For the first time in the history of the National Football League we would witness a sudden-death play-off. And in case you are not familiar with the ruling on such a thing, if the game came to regulation time and was tied, then there would be a three-minute delay. There would be a toss of a coin, a new kickoff, and the first team to score would be declared the winner. If they went through a period without a score, then there would be a brief intermission and they would go right back out to play again.