E-mail a friendMark Bowden
original airdate June 5, 2008
Author-journalist-screenwriter Mark Bowden has won many national awards for his writing. He's not only reported for The Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 20 years, but is also a national correspondent for The Atlantic and an adjunct professor at his alma mater, Loyola College of Maryland. His best-selling books include Black Hawk Down and the award-winning Killing Pablo. In his latest, The Best Game Ever, Bowden tells the story of how a single NFL championship game changed the history of American sport.
Author explains why the 1958 NFL championship between the Giants and the Colts was the birth of the NFL as we know it today. (2:20)
Full interview. (11:46)
Mark Bowden
Tavis: Mark Bowden is an acclaimed author whose previous titles include bestsellers like "Black Hawk Down" and "Guest of the Ayatollah." His latest, though, takes a look at one of the most famous football games ever played - the 1958 NFL championship between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts. The book is called "The Best Game Ever: Giants versus Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL." Mark Bowden, nice to have you back on the program.
Mark Bowden: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: Good to see you.
Bowden: Thanks.
Tavis: That's a bold, bold title - "The Best Game Ever."
Bowden: That's right.
Tavis: It's the best game ever why?
Bowden: Well, it is - first of all, I think if you're going to call a game the best game, you have to - it has to be an exciting game, first of all. And this was a tremendously exciting game where the lead changed hands numerous times. It was the best defense the Giants, in the league against the best offense.
They fought to a draw, and they played the first overtime game in NFL history. And it's still the only overtime game ever played in an NFL championship or Super Bowl. So without question, it was the most competitive and exciting of the championship games.
And then this was also a game that really wedded television to football. It garnered an audience of 45 to 50 million people, and was really one of the first of those sort of national communal events that television creates.
Tavis: When I think of a game - I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, Mark, of what makes an exciting game for me. And in the world that I've grown up in, at least, part of what makes a game exciting for me and a lot of other fans is that there's usually somebody on the floor that we're anxious to see.
Basketball on the floor or on the field for football. Were there arts in this game that made it more interesting to watch, or were these just everyday people playing a great game? Because you don't have to have stars to have a great game.
Bowden: Right, right. Well, but it does - I think if you're going to elevate a game to the argument that this was the best game, I do think you have to have stars, and this game had 17 future Hall of Famers on the field and on the sidelines, including players like Emlen Tunnell and John Unitas and Raymond Barry and Sam Huff and Lenny Moore.
Coaching the New York Giants, the two assistant coaches were Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry. The Colts' head coach was Weeb Ewbank, who would come back nine years later to lead an AFL team to a Super Bowl championship against his old team, the Colts.
So these were some of the legends of the NFL, and it isn't just that they have great names. The reason that they became legends is that they were playing - they were really in the vanguard of the evolution of the game itself, and so this game, on display were the sort of sophisticated offense and sophisticated defense that has created the modern NFL.
Tavis: You referenced television. I want to come back to that point in a second about the modern NFL and the role it played in establishing that, but first, since you referenced television earlier, to what extent did television help make this the greatest game ever?
Put another way, if it had not been televised, would we still be talking about it as the greatest game ever?
Bowden: No, we wouldn't, because clearly part of the claim to fame of this game is that it really captured the excitement of the country. This was the third NFL championship game to be shown on television, and because of blue laws in 1958, they didn't start NFL games until 2:00 in the afternoon. This was played on December 28th, so -
Tavis: The reason for that was what, now?
Bowden: The blue laws were - they had to wait until people had time to go to church in the morning, and it was a much more traditional country, and so the NFL couldn't start their games on Sunday until after 2:00, which meant that because this game went into overtime, it spilled over into prime time on Sunday night, which in 1958 was a much bigger deal on television than it is today.
There were only two or three channels on most television sets in the country at that time, so this audience of 45 to 50 million people who saw this tremendously exciting football game was far in excess of any audience that had ever witnessed a football game, and you can track the fortunes of professional football from this game. It just rose like a rocket.
Tavis: Tell me more about that, because that goes back to your point earlier that this really helped establish the NFL as we know it today.
Bowden: It did. This game was the NFL championship game. It didn't sell out.
Tavis: It wasn't called Super Bowl back then.
Bowden: No. But this was the biggest game of the year for the NFL at Yankee Stadium, one of their premiere markets, and they didn't even sell all the seats in the stadium. So it shows you what a second tier professional sport NFL was going into this game.
After this game was played, they sold out games all across the country forever. They still do. And the competition for football on television became so fierce that within two years, the American Football League was started up, 12 or 13 new franchises, which became an immediate success on ABC TV, I believe it was. And then within a decade you had the Super Bowl created, and eventually those two leagues merged to create the modern league that we see today. But television was a partner, really, in the development of professional football.
Tavis: One of the things that you talk about in the book, and I'm glad you did, is that there was this sort of - it wasn't on paper, but there was this sort of unspoken rule that you didn't want to have too many Negroes, too many colored folk on your team.
Bowden: That's true.
Tavis: I think seven was, like, the maximum number you wanted to have then. Talk to me about how we can classify this as the greatest game ever played in light of the fact that there had to be a bunch of other brothers who could have played the game who didn't get a chance to suit up that day.
Bowden: Well, it's a reasonable argument to make that it would have been a better game, certainly, if people were judged on the basis of talent alone. It's true that at that time there was an unwritten agreement - only seven players per team. And the Washington Redskins, owned by Charles Preston - what's his last name? I forgot his last name - Marshall - was an outspoken racist who wouldn't allow any Black players on his team at all until he was ultimately forced to do so by the Kennedy administration.
Clearly, the players who made it and were on the rosters were the cream of the crop of the available African American athletes. Emlen Tunnell, for instance, who was a defensive back for the New York Giants and who later went on to be an advance scout for that team and was considered to be one of the more brilliant football minds in the NFL, was playing because he walked into the Giants' headquarters and offered his services.
He hadn't been drafted, nobody wanted to sign him, but the Mara family decided, "Well, let's see what he can do." He turned out to be one of the best defensive players in football. Lenny Moore on the Baltimore Colts, he was probably the most outstanding natural athlete in the game, and he was a big guy who could really move, and he's in the Hall of Fame today, he was one of the great stars of professional football.
So I think you're right - if the league had been more open and had judged people on the basis of talent alone, you probably would have even had a better game.
Tavis: What did then NFL - and this is really inside baseball but I'm always fascinated by this kind of stuff - so you got the best game ever played, the NFL has to realize - obviously they're not stupid, they know what this game was all about, how great a game it was, etc., etc.
What do they take from this game with regard to how they're going to market, promote, sell this league to make it bigger and better? Because now there's nobody better, nobody does it better than the NFL these days. They know how to - they can sell a product. Did they take anything from this game?
Bowden: Well, I think they did, certainly in understanding how important television was. And it's hard to believe nowadays that you would ever even question that fact, but back in 1958, television was just another spectator. In fact, at the end of this game, when the crowds - remember the crowds used to crowd around the field at the end of the game to tear down the goal posts - they accidentally unplugged the cable, and 45 million television sets across the country went gray at the critical moment in overtime.
So NBC actually sent a junior executive to run around on the field and pretend he was drunk to delay the game. Nowadays, if there was a technology difficulty, (laughter) the game would wait, right? Back then, they weren't about to wait for television. So certainly the importance of television was understood, and I think it also validated this game in several levels.
Bert Bell as the commissioner, he had fought the owners to play an overtime period, for instance. He said you can't have a championship game end in a tie, which had been the tradition. And he had also fought to bring parity to the teams in the NFL by forcing the richer teams to concede to a draft that would allow the lesser teams, those who finished last, to pick first, which is today's standard.
But that was revolutionary at the time. So all these things had helped, first of all, to create the Baltimore Colts, which was a brand new franchise, just four years old when they went into this game - Baltimore had been able, with the draft, to build a really competitive football team. And then the advantage of playing an overtime period, of having it on television, all that, I think, really was terribly important.
Tavis: What did this game do for the two franchises, since you mentioned the franchises?
Bowden: Well, it made the Baltimore Colts a famous franchise, and the players from Baltimore, John Unitas and Raymond Barry and even Lenny Moore, to an extent, Gino Marchetti, they're household names today and they're legends, but they were not that well known football players in 1958. Baltimore had never had a professional sports team that went to a championship game, so it really was a major development for the city of Baltimore and certainly for the Baltimore Colts.
The Giants, if anything, it was a rude bucket of cold water, because they had won the championship in 1956, everybody expected that they were going to be the dominant team for a decade to come, and yet they lost in '57, I believe it was to the Browns, and then in 1958 they come out and they get killed by this little team from Baltimore. And so I think it was a bracing experience for them.
Tavis: The game was, as you mentioned, an exciting game, and for those of us who have studied this it goes back and forth and back and forth, the lead changes a bunch of times. Is there a particular play that stands out in your mind that when people talk about this game they go to that play? Because nowadays, for those of us who are sports fans, we can think about any game, historically or something we just saw last week, and everybody says, "What about that -" there's one play that everybody talks about.
Bowden: Well, the play that everyone talked about at the end of this game, and it was only one of many that ultimately turned important, was the one in the fourth quarter where the Giants had an opportunity to run out the clock and win the game, if they could just hang on to the ball. And Frank Gifford took the ball in a sweep around right end, failed to make a first down. And he was tackled one yard short.
He swears to this day that he made it. (Laughter) But on that play, Gino Marchetti tackled him and Big Daddy Lipscomb, who was following the play, didn't want that Frank Gifford squirming forward one more yard so he came flying onto the pile - he was a big man - broke Gino Marchetti's ankle.
So Marchetti's laying on the ground, howling, with a broken ankle, and the referee is sorting out the bodies and placed the football, and Gifford swears that he got distracted and put it down in the wrong place.
Tavis: Fifty years later - see, that's what sports is all about. Fifty years later, we still talking about that game, 50 - and breaking down plays, deconstructing the game 50 years later. They call it the greatest game ever played. The new book is called "The Best Game Ever: Giants versus Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL." Mark Bowden, nice to have you on the program.
Bowden: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: Glad to have you here.
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