The New York Giants faced the Baltimore Colts, and the winners would be the champions of the National Football League. But while it was a championship game, it did not sell out, meaning television was blacked out in the city where it was played. The Giants had the better record so the game was played in New York. Since the Giants didn’t have their own stadium, built for their game, they played in Yankee Stadium. Baseball was the American pastime. In the mind of the public, football was a college game, played by amateurs. Professional football was still a sort of orphan of the sports world, getting by on hand-me-downs. But that was all about to change. It was 1958.
The ground was hard and the air was cold and the game, by any strict measure, was a sloppy affair. Six lost fumbles and an interception made it something less than a masterpiece. Still . . . a few hours after the Colts had won, it was being called “the greatest game ever played.” Henry Luce didn’t know much about sports but he knew what Americans liked. So he had created a magazine that would cater to what he had spotted as an American passion for sports and hired a very shrewd editor named André Laguerre who knew the game had been big. Knew it right away and made sure that the readers of Sports Illustrated knew it, too, in the issue published immediately after the game and then, again, two weeks later in a piece called “Here’s Why It Was the Best Football Game Ever.”
Many of the 45 million who watched the game on television knew, too, even though the game was broadcast during the barren time between Christmas and New Year’s Day and in the afternoon. Professional football was not yet ready for prime time. That would come later. New Year’s Day was, of course, reserved for those college bowl games that were, in those days, the highest expression of the football arts, so much so that Red Smith, who knew sports almost as well as he wrote about them, turned in a newspaper column the next day on the firing of Notre Dame’s head coach. The pro game did not yet interest him.
Those who were interested enough to watch the broadcast saw something that looked, in the essentials, like the college game. But these teams were playing a different game. What the viewers saw was not spirit and emotion and “win one for the Gipper,” but professionalism—what Santiago saw in “the Great DiMaggio” and his creator famously called “grace under pressure.”
This was especially true with less than two and a half minutes left in the game and the Giants up 17-14. The Colts had the ball on their own 14 yard line, and after two incompletions, their quarterback hit Lenny Moore for 11 yards and a first down. Then it began.
Another incompletion, then it was Johnny Unitas to Raymond Berry for 23. Unitas to Berry for 15. Unitas
to Berry for 22. The time was ticking away as Unitas huddled the team and brought them up to the line for these plays. But there was no sense of panic. To the contrary. He looked serenely confident until, with the ball on the Giants’ 13 yard line and seven seconds left in regulation, the Colts’ kicker came out on the field and put it through to tie the score. The suspense had been exquisitely unendurable for the viewers, and this was made more so by the composure of Unitas.
There was something so precise and disciplined and professional about the drive, about the way Unitas would throw to the spot and the ball would be in the air before Berry made his cut, and the almost cold-blooded way that Unitas did it. Like John Wayne in the movies.
And then came overtime. It was a first. No championship game had ever gone into overtime. When the college teams, playing in their bowl games, finished tied, that was it. Nice game, see you next year. But this was professional football. There was money at stake and the winners, of course, got the bigger share. Enough to make a down payment on a house.
The Colts lost the coin toss. But they held the Giants, who punted on fourth and one. Unitas went back to work. By now, the millions watching—and probably a lot of the players on the field—just knew he was going to do it. The only question was . . . How was he going to do it?
Mostly the same way he had done it on that final drive: by throwing the ball—with precision—to Raymond Berry, who made an obsession out of running precise pass routes. But on one play, Unitas did the unexpected and called for a pass to the tight end, Jim Mutscheller. The Colts were close enough for a field goal so it was a gamble. But Unitas was the kind of gambler who bet only on sure things, and everything about him that day said he believed he was a sure thing, including the way he turned his back on one of his completions, like a Hemingway hero showing his back to the bull. Professional.
The Colts won on a fullback dive from one yard out. The winner’s share of the “greatest game ever played” was $4,718.77. Unitas turned down $500 to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show that night so that he could ride the train back to Baltimore with his teammates.
Unitas was the star of that particular game and also of The Game, of what the NFL became that day. But there were other players and coaches whose names became familiar to NFL fans, whose numbers increased, it seemed, exponentially and overnight. There was Sam Huff, the Giants’ middle linebacker, who eventually appeared on the cover of Time, in November 1959. (When Henry Luce had a hunch, he played it.) The article inside was called “A Man’s Game” and opened with these lines:
The four blue-jerseyed men facing him are mountains of muscle. Alert and agile as jungle cats, two linebackers crouch outside the ends. Ranged in an arc behind them are four lean, whippet-fast backs.
On the offensive side for the Giants, there was a running back named Frank Gifford who had the good looks of a movie star to go with his athletic gifts and who seemed to move through life according to some sort of special grace. This, at least, was the way Frederick Exley saw him in his novel/memoir A Fan’s Notes. The book, published in 1968, is a semi-obscure tour de force that goes to the heart of the American obsession with sports and the pain of being a spectator. Exley was a student at the University of Southern California when Gifford played there, and “the USC publicity man, perhaps influenced by the proximity of Hollywood press agents, seemed overly fond of releasing a head-and-shoulder print showing him the apparently proud possessor of long, black perfectly ambrosial locks that came down to caress an alabaster, colossally beauteous face.” Gifford went, inevitably, from football to a career in broadcasting.
There were two men on the Giants’ sideline who went on to glory and football immortality greater, perhaps, than any of the players. The defense was coached by Tom Landry, who became the face of the Dallas Cowboys and among the most successful head coaches in the history of the game. The offense was coached by Vince Lombardi. He, of course, went on to coach the Green Bay Packers and became the most exalted of all NFL coaches. Winners of the Super Bowl are awarded the Lombardi Trophy. Lombardi is probably best remembered for the line, “Winning isn’t everything. It is the only thing.” He may not have said it. Or he may not have been the first. Defenders of Lombardi insist that the actual quote was “Winning is not everything, but making the effort to win is.”
Whatever, as the current argot would have it. Lombardi certainly coached to win. He was not “about” building character or any of that college stuff. This was professional football. This was life.
On the Baltimore side of the field, there was a player who qualifies for tragic status. Eugene Lipscomb was a defensive lineman who weighed 300 pounds in a time when that was beyond uncommon. But he was no freak or fat boy. He was all athlete. He moved like a big cat, and when he tackled a runner, he often corralled the blockers as well. He described this style of play, saying: “I just wrap my arms around the whole backfield and peel ’em one by one until I get to the ball carrier. Him I keep.”
It was Lipscomb’s habit to call strangers, or someone whose name he had forgotten, “Little Daddy.” So he became “Big Daddy.” He was splendid and awesome to watch, and his personality was as large as his physique. A few years after “the greatest game ever played” he was found dead of a heroin overdose.
Randall Jarrell immortalized him in his poem “Say Good-bye to Big Daddy.”
After he’d pulled them down, so that “the children
Won’t think Big Daddy’s mean’’; Big Daddy Lipscomb,
Who stood unmoved among the blockers, like the Rock
Of Gibraltar in a life insurance ad,
Until the ball carrier came, and Daddy got him;
Big Daddy Lipscomb, being carried down an aisle
Of women by Night Train Lane, John Henry Johnson,
And Lenny Moore; Big Daddy, his three ex-wives,
His fiancée, and the grandfather who raised him
Going to his grave in five big Cadillacs;
Big Daddy, who found football easy enough, life hard enough
To—after his last night cruising Baltimore
In his yellow Cadillac—to die of heroin;
Big Daddy, who was scared, he said: “I’ve been scared
Most of my life. You wouldn’t think so to look at me.
It gets so bad I cry myself to sleep—” his size
Embarrassed him, so that he was helped by smaller men
And hurt by smaller men; Big Daddy Lipscomb
Has helped to his feet the last ball carrier, Death.
The big black man in the television set
Whom the viewers stared at—sometimes, almost were—
Is a blur now; when we get up to adjust the set,
It’s not the set, but a NETWORK DIFFICULTY.
The world won’t be the same without Big Daddy.
Or else it will be.
The game set up what became The Game. And it was perfect, somehow, for the times: new decade; new, young president who surrounded himself with technocrats whose pride was in being tough-minded and unsentimental, who cultivated the “Can Do” attitude. John Kennedy was fond of the “grace under pressure” line, and would doubtless have been equally fond of Lombardi’s “winning” quote, which wasn’t that far in spirit from the old Washington saw “Don’t get mad; get even.”
Pro football did not just grow, it exploded. Another, rival league was formed; one of its founders, Lamar Hunt, had been inspired by the “greatest game ever played.” For several years, the American Football League and the National Football League existed in a state of corporate war, bidding up the salaries of players like Joe Namath, who was signed by New York’s AFL team, the Jets, for the astonishing sum of $400,000. Johnny Unitas had made $17,550 the year of the greatest game ever played. In 1966, when it finally became clear that the new league was not going away and that the bidding war for players would continue, perhaps ruinously, there was an armistice and a merger, sealed by the scheduling of a game called—awkwardly, it seemed at the time—the Super Bowl.
The first Super Bowl was won by the Green Bay Packers. As was the second. Neither matched the NFL championship game, played both years between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, who were coached by Tom Landry. The second of those two games, played on December 31, 1967, added to the legend of pro football and became almost as iconic as the greatest game ever played.
This was the Ice Bowl. It was played in Green Bay and the temperature at kickoff was minus 15 degrees and dropping. An official blew a whistle to start the game. When he removed the whistle from his mouth, the skin of his lips came away with it. The blood froze instead of clotting. One fan in the stadium died. Many suffered from frostbite. The players could not feel their feet, the ball was like a rock in their hands, and when they went down it was on ground as hard as concrete.
The game was close and the Packers were behind with slightly less than five minutes left in the game, when their quarterback, Bart Starr, took them on a drive of some 68 yards that ended when he went over the goal line from one yard out. Starr followed the block of a lineman named Jerry Kramer, whose book Instant Replay became a bestseller.
The Packers went on to win the second Super Bowl, which qualified very much as anticlimax. But professional football was, less than 10 years after the greatest game ever played, firmly established both as a business proposition and in the national psyche. The game drew better television ratings than any sport, which seems only natural and logical. Pro football might have been made with television in mind. It had action, violence, drama—there was nothing in sports to match the suspense of a long drive, game on the line, less than two minutes on the clock, and a quarterback like Unitas or Starr over center. The game was a gift to television, and television returned the favor with slow motion, instant replay, multiple camera angles, and other innovations that made it, in the end, more satisfying to watch on television than in the stadium. Until, that is, the stadiums began installing giant television screens, like today’s Jumbotron in Dallas, so fans attending the game could see replays just like the people watching at home.
And the game provided something far greater than a rooting interest for many fans. There were, of course, stars to idolize for those whose fandom had never progressed much beyond the adolescent, autograph-seeking phase. There was the simple emotional release that came with cringing over a big hit. The white-knuckle thrill of watching one of those two-minute drives. And then there was the cerebral pleasure of learning the game and how to watch it with a cool understanding, the way a coach would when studying game film. You could learn to “read coverages,” identify the “hot receiver,” spot a blitz, and so forth. Learning the game and its intricacies could become anything from a pastime to an obsession.
And the various skills required of each position made it possible to follow players for reasons that went beyond mere star worship. Linebackers, for instance, represented one cluster of values and characteristics; defensive backs, another; and the men who caught the long passes, the wide-outs, another. You could fantasize about playing a position that fit with the essentials of your inner life and character. You could be Dick Butkus and a terror to anyone between you and the ball. Or you could be Jerry Rice, agile and graceful as a ballet dancer, elusive as smoke, with magic hands and the nerve to catch it over the middle; or Emmitt Smith, who could run over you or around you, depending on the need, then get up and do it again. You could even be Jerry Kramer and block for Bart Starr sneaking it over for the winning score. And you could, of course, be any one of those quarterbacks who followed in the footsteps of Johnny Unitas. You could be Roger Staubach, Joe Montana, Brett Favre, Randall Cunningham, or fulfill all your fantasies and be . . . Tom Brady.
The same sort of diversity (if you will) of character applied to teams and the followings they built. There were the outlaw Oakland Raiders. The Steelers, who were strong as, well, steel. Or the Cowboys, who . . . you get the point. The NFL supplied the world of fans with all manner of what would, today, be called “options.”
And then there were the values of the game itself. It was violent, plainly. Lombardi, or someone like him—Duffy Dougherty, perhaps—once said, “Football is not a contact sport. Dancing is a contact sport. Football is a collision sport.” But it is also a sport that calls for discipline and strategic thinking. It is a team sport that elevates individual stars. It was (is) the perfect American game.
So it thrived. The third Super Bowl became one of the greatest upsets in sports history. The New York Jets of the upstart American Football League, with Namath their quarterback, beat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts with Unitas, near the end of his career, coming in as a backup quarterback and coming up short. It helped that Namath had the sort of personality that made him a plausible “rebel” at a time when America had developed an attachment to iconoclasts, when Muhammad Ali was standing his lonely ground. Namath was actually not much more than a free spirit and a party boy, but the media made it work.
Football stayed right in step. And for the longest time, it seemed to play out that way. The NFL came to prime time with Monday Night Football, which became first a hit and then an institution, corralling celebrities and notables, including a president of the United States, to perform cameos in the program’s tease, in which they would ask, “Are you ready for some football?”
Millions, of course, were.
There were setbacks along the way. But somehow the NFL seemed always able to surmount them, adding, perhaps, to a sense that it was inevitable and bulletproof. There were player walkouts—strikes, they might be called, though it was hard to imagine Mean Joe Green and Larry Csonka singing “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night” in harmony.
During one player walkout, the team owners voted to continue playing the games with replacement players. It was an embarrassment, but the NFL survived it. The players came back and made ever more money, in spite of the imposition of a “salary cap” that was designed to keep owners from spending themselves into penury in their lust to get their fingers around that Lombardi Trophy.
There was plenty of money, from television, of course. Pete Rozelle, who became commissioner of the NFL a year after the greatest game ever played, had shrewdly persuaded the owners to agree to a revenue sharing plan that divided up the television money among all the franchises. This allowed teams in places like Green Bay and Buffalo to survive and, if they drafted wisely, even prosper. The draft was also a means of imposing equality on the franchises, which, while they were rivals on the field, were equal shareholders in a vastly profitable business monopoly.
The draft was (and is) anticapitalist in spirit, operating on the principle of “the last shall be first.” Lose all, or most, of your games and in the off-season draft of eligible college players, you get first pick or close to it. This came, of course, with no guarantee that you wouldn’t blow it and take a player who would never make the team, which happens often enough. And so, in addition to the coach who combined a cerebral appreciation of the game with an ability to lead (and strike fear into) great big men who were millionaires, a successful franchise needed a new kind of star, the personnel guy who could reach way down in the draft and find a jewel or trade for someone another team had not been able to motivate or find a place for and make him a star. And there were some who were both coach and personnel guy, New England’s Bill Belichick being the supreme example. These figures were to NFL junkies what celebrity CEOs are to readers of Fortune.
The game’s prosperity seemed to know almost no bounds. There was money from licensing, so team colors and logos appeared everywhere. The appetite for the NFL on television led to the creation of an NFL network on cable, which began to broadcast games on Thursday nights. So there is now Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, and Thursday Night Football. This on top of football all Sunday afternoon and a couple of Saturdays at the end of the college season and before the bowl games. Too much, it seems, is not enough.
The Super Bowl, which didn’t sell out the stadium for those first two Green Bay victories, became the top-ranked television show of the year, almost every year, with people tuning in around the world to watch. It is a global event and a quasi-official holiday in the United States, around which urban myths have sprung up, such as the one about 90 percent of the avocado consumed in this country being eaten on Super Bowl Sunday. Or how, at halftime, so many toilets are flushed simultaneously that small-town sewer systems are overloaded. Then there is the more serious one (famously debunked by Ken Ringle) about how hospital emergency room admissions for battered women spike dramatically on Super Sunday.
Any mention of hospitals and emergency rooms gets to a piece of what many see (and some welcome) as a crisis that threatens the very existence of the NFL.
Hard to imagine, as the ratings climb and the revenues roll in, that there could be honest speculation about “death of the NFL.” But that is the theme one encounters more and more often, and from sources that cannot be dismissed as crackpots. Troy Aikman (another of those quarterbacks with a name that might have destined him for the role) won three Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys and has gone on to a career in broadcasting. His life, then, has been football. And it has been a good life.
But recently Aikman was quoted as saying, “If I had a 10-year-old boy, I don’t know that I’d be real inclined to encourage him to go play football, in light of what we’re learning from head injuries. And so what is the sport going to look like 20 years from now? I believe, and this is my opinion, that at some point football is not going to be the No. 1 sport.”
Aikman suffered several concussions as a player. They came with the territory. He was tough, stood in the pocket, and took the hits, one of them in a championship game that left him, several hours later, lying in a hospital bed and asking his agent if he had played that day, and if so, how had he done. The next week, he suited up and led the Cowboys to a second consecutive Super Bowl win over the Buffalo Bills.
Aikman has said he is fine now and feeling no long-term effects. Other players, most of them less celebrated than Aikman, can’t say the same. Some former players have experienced the early onset of dementia and other debilitating conditions, to include extreme depression and violent mood swings, that can be traced to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). A number of them have joined in a lawsuit against the NFL that the league is eager to settle. A trial would be exceedingly harmful to the NFL’s image, win or lose.
The legal maneuvering goes on in relative obscurity. Not so the suicides of several players and former players with CTE considered at the very least a contributing factor. Junior Seau, a star linebacker, killed himself at 43, two years after his retirement. Interviews with his family suggest that Seau, who had been notable for his ebullience as a player, had become depressed, withdrawn, and subject to silences and exceedingly dark moods that were entirely out of character. He shot himself in the chest so that his brain would not be damaged and, thus, would be available for study.
Research of that sort goes on, and science learns more—none of it good—about CTE. Meanwhile, football, at all levels of play, does what it can about concussions. Players are pulled from games when they show symptoms. They are not allowed to return to games when it has been established that they have, indeed, been concussed. Protective equipment has improved and the rules are rewritten to eliminate, to the extent possible, those hits that cause concussions.
Still, Lombardi (or whoever it was) had it right. Football is a collision sport. The equipment can pad the head but it doesn’t do anything about those sudden stops where the brain keeps traveling and slams into the inside of the skull. Eliminate those big hits and you have . . . soccer, which works perfectly well, football critics might say, in most of the world.
One can almost sense a movement to ban football coming. It would start, of course, with the children. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that some 4 million concussions occur annually in high school football. A ban would be sold and justified as necessary to protect the health of boys too young to know any better. (And, not incidentally, too young to vote.) Many of their mothers would join the movement or, at least, pray silently for its success.
And there would be lawsuits, class action and otherwise, that could mean bankruptcy for high schools and even colleges without the resources of the NFL. Who would want to be a volunteer referee or coach if there were a risk of being named as a party in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit resulting from an injury suffered under those famous Friday Night Lights? Sponsors, too, might be sued. Why would the owner of a car dealership want to take on the risk?
This is not a hard scenario to imagine in a world where playground jungle gyms are disassembled and sledding hills closed as a way of avoiding “legal exposure.” And it could happen even though one feels certain that almost everyone playing football at what is called a “high level” is willing to live with the risk. Many, no doubt, embrace it, risk being a narcotic of sorts, like adrenaline, which is the first drug that football players become addicted to. Knowing that they will pay, somewhere down the line, makes their time in the arena that much more intense, that much sweeter. As Chicago Bears safety Chris Conte put it recently, “I’d rather have the experience of playing in the NFL and die 10 to 15 years earlier than not play in the NFL and have a long life.”
And how many men in the stands or in front of the television might think to themselves, “I’ll see your ‘ten to fifteen’ and raise you five”?
A comfortable, pain-free old age is little guarantee when the price is the kind of fame and money that comes with being a player in the NFL. And anyway, there are things that could cut you down in old age that have nothing to do with football. Life is tough and brutal that way—sort of like football but without the crowds and the cheering. Only a few get to experience those. Troy Aikman, conspicuously, doesn’t say that he regrets playing and taking all those hits, and he has refused to join the lawsuit against the NFL.
Conte missed parts of the season after suffering, among other injuries, two concussions. He chooses to keep playing. As long, no doubt, as he can. In the not-too-distant future, one suspects, players may not have the luxury of that choice.
You wonder, with the Super Bowl upon us, if Unitas and Lipscomb, Huff and Gifford, and the others would say that playing in the “greatest game ever played” was worth the risk and the eventual pains and infirmities that were the price of their glory.
No. Actually, you don’t. You don’t wonder at all.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
