When pro football broke from the pack

Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and
the Birth of the Modern NFL

By Mark Bowden

Atlantic Monthly Press.

272 pp. $23

Reviewed by Michael Oriard

This is a familiar story, well told.

On Dec. 28, 1958, the Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants, 23-17, in sudden-death overtime to win the NFL Championship and the hearts of the American public watching on television.

Professional football, long an afterthought for American sports fans, was launched on the fast track to becoming the country's favorite sport.

The next week, Sports Illustrated's Tex Maule proclaimed the contest "The Best Football Game Ever Played." To mark its 30th anniversary, another journalist who had covered the game, legendary Baltimore sportswriter John Steadman, wrote a book titled

The Greatest Football Game Ever Played

.

Mark Bowden's

The Best Game Ever

now arrives to commemorate the 50th anniversary.

To ask whether another book is necessary is beside the point. With these ritual retellings, the game has taken on epic dimensions: a battle of mythological heroes, 17 of them immortalized in the Canton branch of Mount Olympus, slugging it out into the darkness after time has already stopped, until Odysseus-Unitas slips the ball to Chiron-Ameche, who gallops nearly untouched into the end zone.

Epics are not told once, but over and over.

I suspect that the Colts' sudden-death victory, like 1950s pro football more generally, has become a distinctly baby-boomer epic, resonating most powerfully with those of us creeping up on 60, or beyond, for whom names like Unitas, Marchetti, Lipscomb and Huff conjure up the innocent days of our own youth.

Bowden does not belabor the changes in the National Football League over the last half-century, but a stark contrast that speaks for itself is the whole point of retelling the story. The game that gave birth to the modern NFL also marked the end of its barbarian era.

Bowden, who once covered the Eagles for The Philadelphia Inquirer and was a National Book Award finalist for

Black Hawk Down

, evokes the larger-than-life personalities of several Giants, most notably Sam Huff, the escapee from West Virginia coal country with the intelligence to collaborate with Tom Landry in devising the revolutionary 4-3 defense and the mean streak to make it hurt.

But the Colts are Bowden's real heroes, and not just because they won the game. Like Green Bay, Baltimore was an NFL version of Brooklyn with its Dodgers: a blue-collar city in love with its football team, whose players reciprocated and truly belonged to the community.

The love affair between Baltimore and the Colts, as well as the raucous exploits of Art "Fatso" Donovan before the NFL became prettied up for television and Madison Avenue, are the most familiar parts of Bowden's story. But his is mostly a celebration of men at work, when players rather than coaches with computers controlled the game on the field.

Even more than John Unitas, who is usually assigned the role, Bowden's hero of heroes is Raymond (not Ray) Berry.

Less a harbinger of the technocratic NFL to come than an anomaly in any age, Berry illustrates the ancient wisdom about the narrow boundary between madness and genius. NFL players of this generation usually discovered sometime in childhood that their instincts and physical gifts made them better at football than anything else they could do. Slow, nearsighted and unathletic, Berry instead grew up not good enough, but he obsessively worked to become better than everyone else.

To so commit himself to football in the 1950s, with its meager salaries and minor celebrity, seems like madness. Berry filled notebook after notebook with observations from endless hours watching game films, along with notes on every possible move, head fake and body position that he might use for every pass pattern under every set of conditions.

Bowden tells us that Berry often wondered whether his obsessive preparation made a difference. Then his game of all games turned on three plays: one in which Berry's choice of mud cleats after finding a few soft spots in the turf enabled him to break away for a big gain; another in which Berry and Unitas made eye contact to change the pass pattern an instant before the ball was snapped. (The third belonged mostly to Unitas, who caught Huff cheating back to open up the middle for another pass to Berry.)

Validation.

After regulation ended at 17-17, Bowden tells us, several players would have been happy to walk away rather than play on. These were men at work. At stake was not enshrinement in a pantheon of heroes, but $4,718.77 for the winners, $3,111.33 for losers. A tie? Well, split the difference and call it a good day.

Fans, or historians, decided otherwise. For them (us), the stakes became higher. Bowden's latest account feels definitive, not needing future retellings, and 25 years from now there will be few boomers left to read them anyway.

But the epic story of the 1958 championship may call for further commemorations, if its larger-than-life yet still life-size heroes touch some longing in new generations.