At the time, Raymond Berry couldn’t understand how a football game could make a man cry.
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The Colts’ receiver was leaving Yankee Stadium after his team’s victory over the Giants in the 1958 NFL title game when he saw tears rolling down the cheeks of then-Commissioner Bert Bell.
“I wonder what chord had been struck in Bert Bell?'” he thought, as he headed to the team bus 50 years ago today. “When you have tears in you eyes, that’s pretty strong.”
Berry didn’t realize how strong until years later.
Without the Colts and Giants competing in what has become know as The Greatest Game Ever Played, the NFL wouldn’t have evolved into the 32-team, $7 billion industry it is today.
It wouldn’t be the country’s most-watched sport.
It wouldn’t have nine-figure national television contracts.
It would still be behind baseball and college football in the hierarchy of sports coverage.
But on Dec. 28, 1958, inside a Yankee Stadium that wasn’t even filled to capacity, Alan Ameche’s 1-yard touchdown run changed the American public’s perception of the National Football League.
“The game being played in New York, the media capital of the world, helped the game garner a lot more attention,” said Bob Wolff, who called the television play-by-play. “It wouldn’t have been the same if it had been played in Cleveland or Baltimore.”
By 1961, there were 22 professional football teams, including eight in the upstart American Football League. Lamar Hunt, with his Texas oil money, formed the AFL after watching — with a then-record 50 million other viewers — the 1958 title game on television. Both the AFL and NFL eventually signed lucrative television contracts and got into a bidding war over players before merging in 1967.
“I have to believe [Bell] understood the tremendous significance of what happened to this league that he had been nursing along,” Berry said. “He was probably one of the few people there who really understood it.”
The players certainly did not.
To the Giants and the Colts, winning the game wasn’t just about bragging rights: It was an opportunity to make a little extra money at a time when players only earned between $10,000 and $20,000 a year. The winners picked up an extra $4,718.77; the losers received $3,111.33.
“It started gaining popularity after that,” former Colts running back Lenny Moore said. “The NFL is what it is today because of that game.”
Fifty years later, the players aren’t sure if a game that featured seven turnovers can be called The Greatest Game Ever Played.
“No one in that game thought what happened there would have the lingering impact it has had,” former Giants kicker and long-time broadcaster Pat Summerall said. “It wasn’t the greatest game ever played, but it might have been the most important.”
The game had 17 future Hall-of-Fame members, including some of the sport’s all-time greats: the Giants’ Gifford, Sam Huff and Andy Robustelli and the Colts’ Art Donovan, Gino Marchetti, Moore, Berry and of course, a quarterback named John Unitas.
The Giants’ defensive coordinator was Tom Landry, who invented the 4-3 defense and went on to win two Super Bowls as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. Vince Lombardi was the Giants’ offensive coordinator before going on to win seven NFL titles as coach of the Green Bay Packers. The Super Bowl trophy is named in his honor.
“[Giants coach] Jim Lee Howell didn’t have to do a lot of work,” Summerall said. “He told us when to be on the bus and what time practice started. That was about all he had to do with that staff.”
“When you build a great house, you have to have a great foundation,” added Huff. “That game laid the foundation of just how great the NFL could be. That game helped spur the NFL to what it is today.”
