The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL

Next Sunday, as you kick back to watch your favorite NFL team, don’t forget to thank the ’58 Colts and Giants. If you believe Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden’s thoroughly researched yet lively The Best Game Ever, today’s NFL—with its billion-dollar TV deals, superbly conditioned athletes and guru coaches—exists in large part thanks to one game: the 1958 NFL championship at Yankee Stadium between Johnny Unitas’s Colts and a New York Giants team with both Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry coaching on the sidelines.

In the 1950s, America’s ruling sports passion was baseball. Yankees pitcher Don Larsen captivated the country’s attention with his perfect game in the ’56 World Series, also at Yankee Stadium. But the tide turned on December 28, 1958, when the glamorous Giants and golden boy Frank Gifford fought it out with the blue-collar Colts team lead by Unitas. The game ran long, and the televised broadcast bled over into prime-time. Some 45 million people—at the time, the largest crowd ever to witness a football game—saw the Colts’ Alan Ameche’s sudden-death touchdown dive to win the game.

But it wasn’t just exposure, it was the NFL product that was changing in the late 50s, and Bowden masterfully weaves in page-turning tales of the athletes, coaches, journalists and even fans whose stories help define the NFL’s watershed moment. Unitas’s favorite target, wide receiver Raymond Berry, was one of the first football players to be a true “pro” athlete. While many, if not most, of his old-school teammates drank and smoked, Berry worked 24/7 on his game, lifting weights, running routes, studying film and seeking every conceivable edge over his opponents. Like the Giants offensive coordinator Lombardi and (especially) defensive coordinator Landry, Baltimore coach Weeb Ewbank incessantly studied the game, foreshadowing modern workaholic tactical geniuses like Bill Belichick and Mike Shanahan.

It was this incipient professionalization of football that made the ’58 championship game’s exposure count—fans got to see otherworldly athletes execute plays they’d never forget. Like the three brilliantly conceived and executed passing plays from Unitas to Berry—vividly recounted by Bowden—that moved Baltimore 65 yards in one minute into field goal range to tie the game with just 15 seconds left in regulation. Is the ’58 championship the best game ever? That’s arguable. But without question, today’s NFL is—sorry, soccer fans—the best sport ever.

—Sam Jemielity