‘Best Game Ever’ a football battle for the ages
(“The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL” by Mark Bowden, Atlantic Monthly Press, $23).
Are you ready for some football?
Get in the mood by absorbing yourself in Mark Bowden’s book “The Best Game Ever” about the 1958 National Football League Championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. Senior fans will recall it as the first NFL game to go into “sudden death.”
Bowden does not keep the outcome secret. Instead, he generates prodigious excitement and anticipation by probing the people involved in this pivotal sport moment while dissecting the key drives of the game.
Few individual events in any sport can lay claim to such a defining moment as this game on Dec. 28, 1958, in Yankee Stadium. With professional baseball entrenched as the national pastime, pro football struggled as a diversion between the end of the World Series and beginning of spring baseball. College football was even considered the more popular of the two pigskin sports.
Bowden captures the sentiments of the period by recounting the lives of players, coaches, team owners, officials and fans.
Wide receiver Raymond Berry garners special attention. An unspectacular athlete who played sparingly in high school and college, he was drafted without any scout evaluations or game film analysis. Through determination, work discipline and attention to detail, he blossoms into an NFL star. Relatively unknown until the championship game, he snags seven passes, mostly in the fourth quarter when Baltimore drives down the field to tie the score. His catches in overtime prove crucial to final victory.
When the book approaches the last minutes of the game, it is as if the reader has followed both teams and the players for an entire season, in a time when life and sports were dealt with in different proportions.
Players lived in middle class communities and often worked second jobs, such as selling insurance, operating liquor stores, or doing manual labor in steel foundries; teachers typically made more than NFL rookies.
The game was only the third championship to be broadcast (in black and white) but would eventually draw 45 million viewers as word spread about the exciting contest that cold Sunday afternoon. Soon-to-be-coaching legends Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry were offensive and defensive coordinators, respectively, for the Giants.
Star players Frank Gifford and Pat Summerall would go on to successful broadcasting careers.
Johnny Unitas, the quarterback of the winning Baltimore Colts, made $17,600 in 1958. The $90,000 championship “victory fund” for the Colts was distributed evenly through the team roster. Five years later a captivating Alabama University quarterback received a $200,000 bonus for signing with the New York Jets (Joe Namath would lead them to a Super Bowl victory in 1969).
More than 97.5 million television viewers watched the New York Giants defeat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. The losing quarterback, Tom Brady, earned $6 million in 2007, according to WikiAnswers.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the fall games to begin.
Lt. Gen. (Neb., ret.) Roger Lempke is the former Adjutant General of the Nebraska National Guard.
Are you ready for some football?
Get in the mood by absorbing yourself in Mark Bowden’s book “The Best Game Ever” about the 1958 National Football League Championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. Senior fans will recall it as the first NFL game to go into “sudden death.”
Bowden does not keep the outcome secret. Instead, he generates prodigious excitement and anticipation by probing the people involved in this pivotal sport moment while dissecting the key drives of the game.
Few individual events in any sport can lay claim to such a defining moment as this game on Dec. 28, 1958, in Yankee Stadium. With professional baseball entrenched as the national pastime, pro football struggled as a diversion between the end of the World Series and beginning of spring baseball. College football was even considered the more popular of the two pigskin sports.
Bowden captures the sentiments of the period by recounting the lives of players, coaches, team owners, officials and fans.
Wide receiver Raymond Berry garners special attention. An unspectacular athlete who played sparingly in high school and college, he was drafted without any scout evaluations or game film analysis. Through determination, work discipline and attention to detail, he blossoms into an NFL star. Relatively unknown until the championship game, he snags seven passes, mostly in the fourth quarter when Baltimore drives down the field to tie the score. His catches in overtime prove crucial to final victory.
When the book approaches the last minutes of the game, it is as if the reader has followed both teams and the players for an entire season, in a time when life and sports were dealt with in different proportions.
Players lived in middle class communities and often worked second jobs, such as selling insurance, operating liquor stores, or doing manual labor in steel foundries; teachers typically made more than NFL rookies.
The game was only the third championship to be broadcast (in black and white) but would eventually draw 45 million viewers as word spread about the exciting contest that cold Sunday afternoon. Soon-to-be-coaching legends Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry were offensive and defensive coordinators, respectively, for the Giants.
Star players Frank Gifford and Pat Summerall would go on to successful broadcasting careers.
Johnny Unitas, the quarterback of the winning Baltimore Colts, made $17,600 in 1958. The $90,000 championship “victory fund” for the Colts was distributed evenly through the team roster. Five years later a captivating Alabama University quarterback received a $200,000 bonus for signing with the New York Jets (Joe Namath would lead them to a Super Bowl victory in 1969).
More than 97.5 million television viewers watched the New York Giants defeat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. The losing quarterback, Tom Brady, earned $6 million in 2007, according to WikiAnswers.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the fall games to begin.
Lt. Gen. (Neb., ret.) Roger Lempke is the former Adjutant General of the Nebraska National Guard.
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