NFL

Today, September 13, is opening day for the 2015 season of the National Football League (NFL).  I know there was a game Thursday night (the Pittsburgh Steelers lost 28-21 to the New England Patriots at Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Massachusetts), but for the other 30 teams, and traditionally, the game is played on Sundays (“On any given Sunday...”).  The League is currently the most popular sport in the United States.  But it wasn’t always that way.  Until the late 1950s, it lived in obscurity, overshadowed by the college game and especially baseball.  For example, in Philadelphia, fan support for the University of Pennsylvania Quakers was far greater than the Eagles in the decade of the 1940s.

Ninety-five years ago, on August 20, 1920, in Canton, Ohio, the league was first formalized as the American Professional Football Conference, consisting of eleven teams.  There are thirty-two teams in the League today.  The next month, September of 1920, it changed its name to the American Professional Football Association.  Two years later, now headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, it became the National Football League.

When I became a fan of professional football about thirty years later in the early 1950s, the NFL, led by Commissioner Bert Bell, consisted of twelve teams: the New York Giants, the Cleveland Browns, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Chicago Cardinals, the Washington R-word, the Detroit Lions, the Chicago Bears, the Green Bay Packers, the Baltimore Colts, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Los Angeles Rams.  The first six were in the Eastern Conference and the second six in the Western Conference.  After a twelve game season the two Conference winners would meet in a championship game, the site of which was determined on an alternating basis between the Eastern and Western Conference champions.  For example, in 1954 the Browns hosted the Lions in Cleveland, while in 1955 the Rams hosted the Browns in Los Angeles.

As I was a big sports fan in my youth, and as each of the games of the New York Football Giants (to distinguish them from my favorite baseball team, the New York Giants), were televised into our living room every Sunday afternoon in the fall, I became enamored of the NFL Giants.  In those years, as television was a black and white phenomenom, I couldn’t tell for sure what color their helmets, jerseys, or pants were.  One game between the Eagles (green) and the Giants (red and blue) became quite confusing as both teams wore dark helmets and a dark jerseys. 

Before  1956, the Giants were a loser, especially frustrated by the exploits of Otto Graham and Paul Brown’s Browns.  I remember one particular Sunday, November 30, 1952, when I sat through a loss to the Steelers by a score of 63-7.  However, in 1956, my loyalty was rewarded with a championship, the team’s first since 1938, when they beat the Bears at Yankee Stadium, 47-7.

In 1957, a rookie out of nearby Syracuse University, the one and only Jim Brown (the greatest football player I ever saw) led the Browns back to the NFL championship game in Detroit.  Unfortunately for the Browns, they lost to the Lions 59-14. 

In 1958, the Giants needed to beat those same Lions in Detroit in order to stay in the race for the championship.  On December 7th, they were leading (19-17) late in the game when Detroit threatened to score a go-ahead field goal.  Giant Linebacker, Harland Svare (#84) blocked it to insure the Giants victory.  The following Sunday, the 14th, the Giants hosted the Browns on the last game of the regular season, needing to defeat Cleveland in order to force a tie-breaking playoff game the following Sunday.  Legendary Pat Summerall (#88) kicked a forty-nine yard field goal as snow was blowing with about two minutes remaining to give the Giants a 13-10 victory.  Playing the Browns back at Yankee Stadium again on the 21st, the Giants shutdown Jim Brown and won the playoff game, 10-0.  That led to another game for the NFL championship at Yankee Stadium the following Sunday against the Western Champion, the Baltimore Colts, led by quarterback Johnnie Unitas.  That game, on December 28, 1958, would become known as the greatest game ever played and would forever change the destiny of the NFL.

The Colts scored two second quarter touchdowns on a two yard run by Alan “the horse” Ameche and a fifteen yard pass from Unitas to Raymond Berry to go into halftime with a 14-3 lead.  They took the second half kickoff and seemed to be putting the game away when they marched to the Giants’s one yard line.  However, the Giants held and the momentum turned.

A few plays later, Giant quarterback Charlie Conerly’s (#42) 33 yard pass connected with Kyle Rote (#44) at their own 46 yard line.  Rote broke a tackle and ran for another 29 yards when he was tackled from behind at the Colt’s 25 yard line, where he fumbled the ball.  Teammate Alex Webster (#29) picked up the loose ball and ran to the one yard line where he was forced out of bounds (86 yards on a pass completion plus run with a recovered fumble).   Two plays later, Mel Tripplet (#33) scored a touchdown to narrow the score to 14-10.  The Giants took the lead, 17-14, in the fourth quarter on a Conerly to Frank Gifford (#16) touchdown pass of fifteen yards.

With a little over two minutes left in the fourth quarter, Unitas drove the Colts 73 yards down the field for a game-tying field goal with seven seconds left.  That sent the game into the first ever Sudden Death Overtime to determine the NFL champion.  The Giants won the coin toss, but failed to get a first down.  They punted to the Colts who marched eighty yards down field with the clímax being Ameche again in the end zone on a one yard run.  Game over, Colts 23, Giants 17.  I cried.   

Even with the City of New York blacked out, an estimated forty-five million Americans watched the game on television, a record at that time.  As a result of this game, professional football became immensely more and more popular for years to come.  Because of this new popularity, in 1960, a rival league, the American Football League, with eight teams (Boston Patriots, New York Titans, Buffalo Bills, Houston Oilers, Dallas Texans, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, and the Los Angeles Chargers), started operating.  In addition, the NFL added expansion teams in 1960 (Dallas Cowboys) and 1961 (Minnesota Vikings).  Under the leadership of Commissioner Pete Rozelle, the two leagues merged a few years later and their respective champions met in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on January 15, 1967 in the first of what would become known as the Super Bowl, the most watched single sporting event of the year in the USA. 

Recently, Giant great Frank Gifford passed away.  It reminded me of that group of Giants (that meant so much to me in my youth) that were in the NFL championship game six times in eight years (1956-1963).  Unfortunately, they also lost to the Colts in 1959, the Packers in 1961 and 1962, and finally the Bears in 1963.  Ironically, I was at Franklin Field, then home of the Philadelphia Eagles, on opening day 1964 (exactly 51 years ago today) when this great run of sucess all came crashing down, with a 38-7 loss.  Besides Gifford and the others previously mentioned, I remember Rosie Brown (#79), Rosie Grier (#76), Jimmy Patton (#20), Sam Huff (#70), Jim Katkavage (#75), Andy Robustelli (#81), Emlen Tunnell (#45), Bob Schnelker (#85), Ray Wietecha (#55), and Dick Modzelewski (#77 – On Saturday night, September 26, 1964, I sat directly behind him in a Philadelphia movie theater showing Behold a Pale Horse, starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and Omar Sharif.). 

Tonight, the Giants are on the road to play the Dallas Cowboys.  Good luck to both teams and good luck to the NFL.  Hopefully, this year will be improvement over last year when, instead of great plays by players on the field, the talk was of player issues involving spousal abuse, child abuse, and game day cheating.