As a 13 year-old growing up in Cleveland, I was in awe of pro football. The Browns had won a division or league title in all but one year of my life. Our longtime next door neighbor, Gene Crego, a native Chicagoan, had tales of the great Bears teams of the ’40s. But then came 1958 and three Browns losses to the Giants, and for only the second time in my existence, there would be no pro football championship game on TV.
But wait, the Giants would play the Baltimore Colts the day after Christmas and the title game would be nationally televised for the first time ever. So it would be off to Gene’s house with my dad to watch what would be the “greatest football game ever played” on the Cregos’ bigger-screen black and white TV.
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As the game wore on, sloppy though it was with fumbles and interceptions, it was clear that the tightness of the contest and the drama was making for some high theater. We despised the Giants for obvious reasons and were rooting like mad for the Colts. Gene compared John Unitas to the Bears’ immortal QB Sid Luckman.
When Alan Ameche plowed into the end zone and Yankee Stadium exploded with a mix of Colts fans, tuba players from the band, Ameche on shoulders and cheerleaders in skin-tight body suits, I thought about what kind of place Baltimore must be. We never got this excited about anything in Cleveland.
Little did I know that I would grow up to be the last Baltimore Colts sales director, that I would get to know both Unitas and Ameche plus many more of those glorious Colts, and that I would live the loss of the team, very personally. And little did I know that I would help in the effort to replace the Colts É with my own beloved Browns in 1996. It was a such a secret operation that I dared not tell even my own father, still in Cleveland, about it.
That 1958 game set off the value spiral in NFL franchises that caused the city-to-city competition for teams, but there we sat, a kid with two of his mentors watching magic unfold in black and white and not realizing the force being released.
Bob Leffler started an ad agency in the wake of the Colts’ departure. It is now one of the biggest sports/entertainment/media ad firm in the country and numbers The Examiner Newspapers among its client base.
