Frank Gifford was the glamor face of professional football before the world learned that there was something glamorous about the sport. Before it became a national obsession. Before there were Monday night games and Super Bowls. Back when star players had off-season jobs because playing in the National Football League was part-time work for almost all of the men who labored there. If there had been such a thing, back then, many of the players would have been Uber drivers from January to September, when they put on the pads and laced up the cleats and went out on the field to play the game.
Gifford was the exception. He was a gifted running back and pass receiver who also played some defense, which wasn’t uncommon in those days. He was also movie-star handsome, articulate, and personable. He had the glow.
It didn’t hurt that he played for the New York Giants, the Manhattan team of the late 50s and early 60s, when the world was ruled, it seemed, by men like Gifford. Advertising, broadcasting, publishing … the world of image and vitality. Of American male triumphalism. He was profiled by Gay Talese who wrote in the New York Times in 1956 that Gifford was “a blithely audacious athlete of 26 with a quality of mind that makes him an anomaly among football players” and that Gifford “reads poetry, visits art shows, writes a sports column, appears on television, builds apartment houses and even has played in Hollywood movies.”
It seems almost fated that a Gifford daughter would marry a nephew of John F. Kennedy.
Gifford played for the Giants in the 1958 NFL championship game against the Baltimore Colts. One of the critical plays of the game came as time was running out in regulation and Gifford appeared to have picked up a first down. But the official didn’t give him the spot so Johnny Unitas got an opportunity to tie the game and send it into sudden-death overtime. The Colts won and the NFL triumphed. In the lore it became the “greatest game ever played” and professional football was launched on the path to become what it became.
Gifford was injured a couple of seasons later in what became the most famous hit in NFL history. Chuck Badnarik of the Philadelphia Eagles laid him out with a brutal but clean tackle that knocked Gifford unconscious. He missed an entire season recovering. The greatest game, greatest hit, all-pro at three positions. So much glory in one career that one couldn’t imagine a second act.
But Gifford went on to new triumphs. In broadcasting. He was one of the Monday Night Football trinity with Howard Cosell and Don Meredith. Fans thought of him as the normal one. He was the voice of continuity in the broadcast, lasting through more than 25 years and numerous other colleagues in the booth.
He was briefly and lamentably involved in a tabloid sex scandal but his marriage to TV talk personality, Kathie Lee Gifford weathered that storm and she survives him.
It seems almost fated that Gifford would be the illuminating center of the idiosyncratic and haunting cult novel A Fan’s Notes in which the author, Frederick Exley, sets himself up as the antithesis of Gifford. The narrative tracks Exley’s descent into alcoholism and madness against Gifford’s seemingly effortless ascent from one glory the next. An American failure against the American demigod. The novel is being republished this year.
Gifford read the book and told people that he liked it. He gave parties to celebrate the publication of Exley’s subsequent two books, neither of which were successful. But A Fan’s Notes endures. With Gifford’s passing, at 84, it will no doubt find new readers who never saw Gifford play or even broadcast an NFL game and knew him, if at all, as Kathie Lee’s husband.
Their loss.
Author’s note: In an earlier version of this piece, I erred in writing that Jonathan Yardley’s biography of Exley is scheduled for publication this year. The book, called Misfit, was published in 1997 and does able service given the thin resources Exley left for biographers to mine. I apologize for the lapse and blame the August heat.
