I was just over a month old when my parents took me back to the hospital on a Sunday afternoon. Not to exchange me, I have been assured, but because as young first-time parents, they over-reacted to my symptoms. What those symptoms were, no one can really remember. But we went to the emergency room, and then as now, waited for hours for reassurance.
My father did not mind waiting.
That's because the hospital waiting room was equipped with coin-operated televisions that, for a quarter, allowed 30 minutes of viewing time. and that afternoon, the first nationally televised pro football game, the 1958 National Football League Championship between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, was being broadcast live from Yankee Stadium.
That is widely considered the game that introduced the NFL to a mass audience; it was a thrilling affair that the Colts won in sudden-death overtime, when on third down Baltimore quarterback Johnny Unitas stuck the ball in the gut of halfback Alan "The Horse" Ameche, who plunged into the end zone from one yard out to give them a 23-17 victory.
As recently as 2019, this game was affirmed as the "greatest ever played" by a panel of 66 media members polled as part of a celebration of the NFL's first 100 years. (Second place went to the 1981 NFC title game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys in which Joe Montana threw a pass to Dwight Clark that has become known as The Catch; while third place went to the 1967 NFL Championship game, aka The Ice Bowl in which the Green Bay Packers defeated the Cowboys on the, ahem, "frozen tundra" of Lambeau Field.)
I have watched the 1958 NFL Championship (ESPN presented a colorized version of the game in 2008; you can easily find the original footage on YouTube) and can unequivocally state that, stripped of its historical import and nostalgic resonance, it's not really that great a game. Six times during the game the ball was fumbled away. Field goals were missed, one of Unitas' passes was intercepted. At times the play was sloppy.
Toward the end of the game, Giant running back Frank Gifford appears to make a first down that will allow the Giants to run out the clock. Still, referee Ron Gibbs spots the ball inches short of the first down marker, at the Giant's 40 yard line.
(In 1985, as Gibbs lay dying, he asked his son to tell Gifford he wasn't sure they'd made the correct spot on that fourth down play. In 2008, ESPN analyzed the play and determined there wasn't enough evidence to overturn the call. So, reviewed 50 years later, the call on the field stands.)
On the sideline, Giants offensive coordinator Vince Lombardi urges head coach Jim Lee to go for it. Give the ball to Gifford one more time, Lombardi counsels. Gifford begs for one more chance. But Lee decides to punt the ball away and the Colts take over with two minutes to go on their own 14-yard line.
Unitas begins the drive that will make his legend inauspiciously. He throws two incomplete passes. But then he finds halfback Lenny Moore for an 11-yard gain and a first down. Unitas throws another incompletion, then three times in a row he goes wide receiver Raymond Berry to leave the Colts on the Giants' 13-yard-line with seven seconds left.
Unitas has called all these plays. He is in effect the Colts' offensive coordinator. He wants to call a trick play, one that will have Ameche throwing to tight end Jim Mutscheller in the end zone. But, for once, head coach Weeb Ewbank overrules his quarterback and sends in kicker Steve Myrra in to hit a chip shot that ties the game at 17-all as time runs out.
And just then, the time ran out on my dad's coin-op TV. And he was out of quarters.
Like a lot of the players on both teams, he'd never heard of overtime. In those days, when football games ended in a tie, they ended in a tie. He expected that the Colts and Giants would be named co-champions.
While the NFL had experimented with sudden-death overtime in pre-season games a few years back, it had never been implemented in a game that mattered. And most of the personnel on the field were unaware that NFL commissioner Bert Bell had mandated that were the title game to end in a tie, it would be settled in a sudden-death period.
The Giants won the toss, took the kickoff, ran three plays and punted. The Colts took over on their own 20-yard-line, and Unitas engineered the 13-play drive that ended with Ameche stumbling into the end zone.
My father was 22 years and 11 days old when he missed the ending of the greatest game ever played. For many years he teased me that I was the reason he'd missed the ending, but when I was in high school my mother let slip the fact that they hadn't owned a TV at the time. None of their friends had either.
So maybe I was the reason he saw any of the game at all.
"I could have watched it in a bar," my dad said.
I guess if I were a romantic, I could claim the 1958 NFL Championship game as my football baptism, but I doubt I paid much attention to the game. Two-dimensional representations probably didn't mean anything.
My own football career probably peaked in fourth grade, when I was a pretty good two-way player--a linebacker/fullback. I played through junior high, but when I walked onto the first practice at my Louisiana high school, I understood that some of those 260-pound tackles could actually catch me. (I did have a season of glory as a dink-and-dunk intramural flag football quarterback during my sophomore year at LSU.)
I respect the game, a lot more than some of the mouthier callers-in to sports talk shows. You can't really know football unless you're willing to devote your life to the game. It's a sport where scheme and preparation can matter more than who's got the biggest, strongest and most agile athletes. I'm impressed and intimidated by the layers of the game. People who really know football know a lot more than those of us who mainly watch where the ball goes.
But football isn't the most popular sport in America because it's the most cerebral, or the one that requires the most cooperation and sacrifice from it players.
Football has been America's game since 1958 or so for a couple of very simple reasons. First, it is a game made for television. As soon as TV--as opposed to radio or live attendance--became the way most Americans consumed their sports, the more kinetic, easier-to-parse football was bound to overtake baseball as our most popular spectator sport.
Secondly, it is a violent and martial game, a kind of ritualized warfare that allows us occasion to express our tribalistic nature. It's balanced on the knife's edge between ballet and blood sport. And it is possible to both love it and to be deeply disturbed by it.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com.