The Best Game Ever

by Mark Bowden

  I tried to interrupt his flow as little as possible. People often ask me, as a reporter, how to get people talking. The answer is usually, “Show up.” Of no story was that more true than this one.

  Visiting retired football players almost a half century after their glory days is, in one sense, a bracing lesson in the ravages of time, because I saw many legendary athletes who have undergone knee and hip replacements and whose once large and mighty frames have shrunken and grown frail, but in another sense it is a testament to the undying joy of fellowship and accomplishment. And of personality. Donovan’s once enormous body now shuffles behind a walker, unsteady but still formidable, and he motors around his small country club estate north of Baltimore on a four-wheeled cart, but when he starts reeling off the stories about Marchetti and Unitas and Weeb—“That weasel bastard”—he is a man of limitless appetite at an endless feast. And “Fatso” never tires of the fare.

  My older sister held her wedding reception at Donovan’s beautiful old clubhouse twenty-five years ago, and I remember him sitting on the sofa with my sister’s new father-in-law, a huge Colts fan who was very ill and would die not too long afterward. Fatso had never met him, but he entertained him for hours, the two of them rocking with laughter and slapping their thighs. My brother-in-law Milt was so touched that he told me once that I ought to consider naming a child “Fatso.”

  “But I don’t think people would understand,” he said, sadly.

  I had a long and hilarious lunch in Annapolis with Fatso and his old teammate, Alex Sandusky, along with Al Brennan, Raymond Berry’s old neighbor from Lutherville, who is now a retired Baltimore County judge. Wherever they go in the Baltimore area, these old football heroes are still treated like royalty. Donovan’s head still sports the same buzz cut he wore fifty years ago, and his dome rises slightly to a rounded narrow peak. He affects a look of absolute amazement when he tells his stories, wide-eyed astonishment, as though each one is coming out for the very first time. He and Sandusky were remembering cornerback Carl Taseff, whom they called “Gaucho” because he was so bowlegged he looked like he had grown up on a horse. They told their stories . . . well, like teammates.

  “How about when he hit Weeb with the water?” asked Donovan.

  Said Sandusky, “That’s a funny story. That’s a true—”

  “We were throwing buckets of water in the locker room during the season, and we had a guy, from Louisville, Lenny Lyles.”

  “And Ameche.”

  “But Lenny Lyles was in the whirlpool and they hit him with a bucket of water and he jumped out and hit his ankle on the heater.”

  “The radiator.”

  “The radiator, and he fractures his ankle,” said Donovan.

  So Weeb sends John Sandusky—he was our defensive line coach, we called him Spanky because he looked like Spanky McFarland in the Our Gang comedies. So Spanky comes out and says, “Weeb says if he catches anybody throwing another bucket of water, he’s gonna fine him five hundred dollars.” So everybody stops. But Gaucho was a little bit of a jerk. So Marchetti says, “Gaucho, one more bucket of water and then we’ll stop.” He says, “We’re gonna get the Horse [Ameche] when he comes around the corner. Gaucho, that dumb asshole, goes, he says, “Okay, Gino.”

  And here comes Weeb out of his office all dressed up to tape his weekly show, and Marchetti says, “No go.” But Gaucho doesn’t hear him and he unloads the bucket. Gaucho is going, “Jesus Christ!!” He’s brushing Weeb off, “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.” Guys are rolling on the floor of the locker room. Guys were crying they were laughing so hard.

  One story led to another.

  “Lenny Moore was the best offensive football player I’ve ever seen,” said Donovan. “He could just play.”

  “Put him anywhere,” said Sandusky. “Put him in the backfield, it’s six points. Put him on a flank, it’s six points.”

  “How about the catch he made against the Lions?” asked Donovan.

  “Most fantastic catch I’ve ever seen.”

  “He was out like this, parallel to the ground—”

  “—catches the back end of the ball like this,” Sandusky gestured with both hands outstretched. “We ended up losing that game.”

  “I got kicked out of the game.”

  “Yeah, you’re the reason we lost.”

  “I know. They had to call a time-out.”

  “Detroit gets the ball back and Donny [Donovan] gets us a fifteen-yard penalty for some kind of reason, kicking somebody.”

  “I kicked the guy in the face,” said Donovan, shrugging.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  “Because he hit Alex Hawkins, who wasn’t one of my favorite football players, but he was my teammate, and it was a late hit. I’ll tell you who it was, it was the tackle, what the hell was his name? Anyhow, he had been known for being really dirty and I was just running out on the field, and I see him hit Hawkins. I went by, he was laying on the ground. I kicked him in the face. Out and fifteen yards. We lost the game.”

  “Tell him about the time Big Daddy lost his money,” said Donovan.

  “We’re playing in Griffith Stadium. I’ll tell you, the locker room was about as big as a girl’s locker room. Christ, Big Daddy was right beside me, we were all squeezed in. We beat the Redskins.”

  “But you got to tell him what he did with his money, he gave it to Eddie Stearns.”

  “Eddie Stearns was one of the trainer’s helpers.”

  “So everybody used to put their wallets and their money in the valuables box before we left Baltimore. So Big Daddy, he’s got a wad, he was gonna buy shirts or something in Washington, he gives his money to Eddie to hold it. So anyhow, right at halftime, Eddie has to go to the john, he pulls his pants down and the money fell out of his pants. So during the third quarter, Big Daddy asks Eddie, ‘You got my money?’ Eddie says, ‘I lost it. I lost your money.’ Big Daddy says, ‘It’s my alimony money!’”

  “We beat the Redskins,” said Sandusky.

  “Big Daddy didn’t go in the game after that. He sits on the bench crying.”

  “Now we’re in the locker room, and Big Daddy is still sitting down crying, and Rosenbloom comes over and asks, ‘Big Daddy, what’s the matter?’ ‘Eddie Stearns lost my money.’ Rosenbloom peels off four hundred-dollar bills.”

  “He only lost about eighty,” said Donovan. “He told Rosey it was four hundred!”

  “Let me tell you something,” said Sandusky. “Everything you ever read about Raymond Berry is true.”

  “Yeah, but Raymond took a long time to get open,” said Donovan. “John could eat a sandwich before he threw the ball. I mean, our offensive line could pass block usually for about three seconds.”

  “And Raymond had all these zigs and zags and zooms and booms and what have you, you know, and him and John would practice during the week, you know, it would be a tough game and Raymond would come back and say that this certain play would work. Preas and I would bump each other in the huddle and look at one another because our bung holes would start quivering because we knew it was a five-second play.

  “Many times, John would say, ‘Raymond, I don’t have time.’ But Raymond was just super.”

  “He could catch the ball.”

  “Raymond could catch the ball. Raymond was great.”

  “How about the time you two assholes shot the groundhog?” asked Donovan. “I was gonna say that, too. Two goddamn hillbillies, you and Nutter, huh? Was it you and Nutter?”

  “It was me.”

  “It was you? You lying son of a bitch. It was you!”

  “At training camp, you know,” explained Sandusky, “I used to go after practice—a lot of times I didn’t go down and drink beer till six—so I’d get in my car and ride the country roads. And I’m a big hunter, and I had this deer gun that I used to shoot groundhogs. One day I shot one right through the eye. I come and put him in Donny’s bed.”

  “I come back from the movies and Spinney says
, ‘There’s some beer for you underneath the blanket.’ I said, ‘Oh, boy.’ I pull the blanket and there’s this one-eyed son of a bitch looking at me. Spinney says, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘How the fuck do I know what it is? It could be a lion. I’m from the city, I don’t know these things.’ There was blood all over my bed; I had to go upstairs to sleep. The next day I go over, it’s the last day of practice, I open my locker, and there’s this thing, hanging from the—”

  “I short strung it and put it in the locker on the shelf. Then he goes to open the door, and here comes the fucking groundhog! Hit him again.”

  “I made out I was really pissed off but I got behind the door, laughed my ass off,” said Donovan.

  He’s still laughing.

  When the ’58 game was played my family lived in Chicago. I may have seen some of it on television. My father would certainly have tuned in. But I have seen so many films clips of it over the years I don’t know if my memory of that brightly lit field against the dark backdrop of Yankee Stadium is the real thing or an implant. I do know that my interest in pro football began along with millions of others around that time. I was seven and would soon be playing the game myself on sand-lots and in community leagues. My uncle bought me a full football uniform complete with everything except the cleats, and I remember desperately wanting a pair of high-top black ones like Johnny U.

  When we moved to Baltimore a few years later, the Colts were in the middle of a resurgence. Weeb was gone. He was coaching the New York Jets in the upstart American Football League. In 1968, he would lead that team into the third Super Bowl and defeat the Colts, led by Don Shula, in the game made famous by Joe Namath’s bold guarantee of victory—this was at a time when the AFL was considered subpar and the Colts were being touted as the best team in the history of the game. The win made Weeb the only coach to lead teams from both leagues to championships, and established the AFL as its rival league’s equal. They would merge two years later. It was the first of the absurdly named uberchampionships to live up its “Super” billing, and launched pro football even further into the stratosphere of money and global media attention. John Unitas played in that game, too. He was an aging superstar by then, and had watched from the bench with a sore arm for most of it, but when Shula put him in, in desperation, in the fourth quarter, John briefly lit up the field. He threw for one touchdown, and ended up with more passing yards that Earl Morrall, the Colts’ starter, but the Colts had fallen too far behind for it to matter. John played for a few more years, including a brief sad stint with the San Diego Chargers, but I will always remember his stooped, bow-legged appearance in that Super Bowl as the final chapter in a great, great career.

  Even in the late sixties, the old Colts remained members of the community in Baltimore. Growing up there I saw many of them, like Donovan at my sister’s wedding. John had his restaurant in Towson, The Golden Arm, and if you went in he was often there to loan his star status to the place, his hair stylishly longer and his torso a bit thicker. The restaurant eventually went out of business, and John, the quarterback who worked on saying boring things to sportswriters, put himself back on his feet financially as a banquet speaker, traveling the country giving talks for various corporate sponsors. He died of a heart attack, working out on a treadmill, in 2002.

  Ordell Braase and Bill Pellington had more successful restaurants in the Baltimore suburbs. Shula’s house was just up the street from mine, and my younger brothers used to play with his boys, who would go on to become NFL assistant coaches themselves. I ran into Dave Shula on the turf at Veterans Stadium once in the early 1990s when I was the Eagles’ beat reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and we chatted about the old neighborhood. He was born too late to remember the ’58 and ’59 team, and I had come to Baltimore too late. But we both knew all the players as local celebrities, as neighbors.

  That is how most of the old players remembered it, a team in a great big neighborhood, and as such it belongs to a now-distant era in the pro game, like an old black-and-white photo on a postcard. Roughly half of the players in the great game of 1958 have died. Big Daddy Lipscomb went, in an overdose of heroin, in 1963, which was puzzling to many of his old teammates who remembered his outsized fear of needles whenever the team doctor scheduled inoculations. Alan Ameche is gone, as is Steve Myhra, Bill Pellington, Don Joyce, Jim Parker, George Preas, L.G. Dupre, and Don Joyce.

  Jim Mutscheller became a successful insurance man, his years as a Colts tight end no doubt opening many doors and wallets in Baltimore. I met him in his office at an industrial complex north of the city, and as we talked his secretary interrupted, despite his request that we be left alone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I have someone on the line who insists on talking to you right now. He said to tell you that it’s the ‘Pope.’”

  Mutscheller grinned and looked up at me. “Donovan,” he said.

  He took the call and then we talked about some of his other teammates.

  “Alan Ameche was such a good guy, funny, fun to be around,” said Mutscheller.

  He was quick, clever. A big joker. Weeb didn’t like him because he arrived as a bonus baby. Alan didn’t care, which bothered Weeb all the more. He was a bright guy. After he made all that money with Gino, I called him once for a fundraiser. It’s the kind of call anybody hates to make, leaning on a friend for money. “I’ve got to hit you up for some money,” I told him. “How much do you want?” He asked. “Hell,” I said. “I don’t know.” He gave me fifty thousand dollars, which was about a hundred times more than the largest figure I had in mind.

  He remembered Weeb fondly:

  He had all these little sayings, clichés mostly. Lenny Moore called him ‘The Little Mentor,’ or the ‘The Little Quaker.’ He says, ‘That little man, he knew more than we did!’ He never made any money at football, and he was tight. A frugal little Quaker. He had to look up at us. He’d say, ‘I never cut anybody, I help steer them into their life’s work.’

  I don’t think winning that game changed me or the rest of us at all. We all still had the same attitude. I might have made a little more money. I do think it changed pro football, though. Prior to that game we always had decent crowds, but afterward we always had huge crowds wherever we went. The game just turned popular.

  Charley Winner picked me up in Ft. Myers, Florida, in his tennis whites, wearing his ’58 championship ring, a handsome nugget of gold with a big horseshoe carved into the side. Winner has other championship rings from his long coaching career, “but I like this one the best. It was my first, and the rings today are big and gaudy, and I’m not a very big guy and they just dwarf me.” He coached with Shula after his father-in-law was fired, and then became head coach of the St. Louis Cardinals for five years. He worked again with Shula in Miami, and for a few years in Cleveland, and has been living with his wife, Nancy, Weeb’s daughter, in Florida since his retirement in 1992.

  “Big Daddy used to crack me up,” Winner said.

  He was really clever. Part of the annual physical was a rectal examination, where the doctor puts a little glove on, sticks his finger up your rear to check your glands. Our doctor, Dr. McDonald, was known to be a pious Catholic, so Big Daddy bends over, he says, “Hey, Doc, what are you going to do?” He said, “I’m going to give you a rectal examination. We do this every year.” Big Daddy says, “Well, get that thing off your finger. I’m Catholic.”

  He remembers how hard it was for some of the players from that team to call it quits—Donovan, in particular. Fatso was forced to hang up his pads three years after the ’58 game.

  Artie did not want to retire. He still holds it against Weeb for letting him go, you know, because he said he could still do it. He couldn’t. He stayed longer than he should have. And Marchetti made the statement one time that I’m going to quit while I still have some left because I don’t want people to see me like they see Donovan. We brought Donovan in one time to go over the films with us because he was bitching that we weren’t gra
ding him right. And he says, “Look, I’m getting by the guy.” And he was, but it was too late. He wouldn’t admit it to himself at the end.

  Winner pulled a photo album down from his shelf and turned the pages slowly.

  “Those were the days,” he said.

  They were the best days of professional football. I don’t care what anybody says now. They’re making all kinds of money. We had fun. We knew the players, and our families on Sunday during the preseason, our families would come to training camp, and we would all have dinner together. The kids would play together, the black kids, the white kids. One big family, one big family. We had so much fun. I went to work for the Cardinals and our first preseason game was against the Colts in St. Louis, and they beat us. So I’m putting my oldest daughter to bed and she was about maybe eight or nine at the time, and she’s crying. I think she’s crying because we lost the ball game. So I say, “Cindy, don’t worry about it. It’s just a preseason game. It doesn’t mean anything.” She says, “I don’t care about the game.” She had stood out by the bus, kissing the players good-bye, Jim Parker, Lenny Moore, Johnny Unitas, and all that. She said, “This will be the last time I’ll get to see my Colts friends.”