As a 14-year-old, I joined my dad and brother on a jaunt from Annapolis to New York’s Yankee Stadium to see our beloved Baltimore Colts play the New York Giants in the NFL Championship Game.
The Colts’ 1958 season was just their second winning season since their founding in 1953. The Giants had five consecutive winning seasons coming into the game, including an NFL championship in 1956. The Giants had defeated the Colts 24-21 in the regular season. Both teams ended the regular season at 9-3.
We drove to New York in my dad’s Buick with a sign attached: “Moider dem Giants.” We had no idea the back-and-forth, knock-down overtime thriller on Dec. 28, 1958, would come to be known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”
Its legendary status was confirmed in a nationwide pro football writers’ poll in 2019. More than 45 million viewers watched the NBC nationally televised first overtime game on grainy black-and-white TVs. We witnessed it from the end zone behind what was home plate along with 64,182 other rabid fans, a sellout.
This back-and-forth brawl won by the Colts 23-17, included 15 future Hall of Fame players and coaches, and marked the beginning of the NFL’s popularity surge and eventual rise to the top of the U.S. sports market. Legendary players who showed their prowess on that cold December day included John Unitas, Raymond Berry, Gino Marchetti and Lenny Moore of the Colts and Frank Gifford, Sam Huff and assistant coach Vince Lombardi of the Giants.
The teams combined for six turnovers in the first half (three on each side), with the Colts converting two fumbles by the Giants into touchdown drives to take a 14–3 lead at the half. After averting a three-score deficit thanks to a goal-line stand in the third quarter, the Giants rallied on consecutive touchdown drives to take a 17–14 lead early in the fourth quarter.
But Unitas led the Colts on what is now viewed as the first two-minute drill. He marched them from their own 14-yard line to the Giants’ 13-yard line. It ended with a 20-yard field goal (the Colts’ first in three attempts) with just seven seconds left on the clock to tie the game at 17–17. It was termed one of the most famous drives in football history.
Marchetti, our No. 1 gladiator who we thought invincible, was knocked out of the game before the tying drive with a broken ankle. Carried off the field on a stretcher, he refused to leave for medical treatment and watched the rest of the game sitting up on the stretcher next to the Colts’ benches, even raising his fist in defiance.
In overtime, the Colts forced the Giants to punt on a three-and-out series. Unitas marched the Colts from their own 20 to the Giants 8-yard line. Then a guy ran onto the field delaying the game. Rumors persisted it was an NBC employee who created a distraction as the national television feed had gone dead. The delay gave NBC enough time to fix the problem before the next play. Fullback Alan Ameche ran for a yard and Unitas dared to pass, completing a 6-yarder to tight end Jim Mutscheller.
On third down at the one-yard line, Ameche plunged through a gaping hole with a key block by Moore. Unitas had done it — calling every play on a 13-play, 80-yard drive — and the Colts were world champions! Even though we were under the upper deck in the opposite end zone at Yankee Stadium, we went into a state of euphoria.
Berry, my all-time favorite football player, caught 12 passes for 178 yards and a touchdown. The 12 receptions set a championship record that stood for 55 years. The Unitas-to-Berry all but impossible-to-stop duo was born and befuddled NFL teams through the 1967 season, after which Berry retired.
Unitas set a record of 47 consecutive games with a TD pass, broken years later. Most folks might have forgotten that the Colts went on to beat the Giants again for the NFL Championship in 1959, 31-17, at a game we attended at Memorial Stadium. We never missed a home game.
Gross receipts for the Greatest Game, including television and radio, were $698,646. Each Colt received $4,719; each Giant $3,111. For the 2023 Super Bowl, winners received $157,000, losers got $82,000. Last year’s Super Bowl in-game ad revenue generated a total of $578 million.
Advertisers paid an average of $7 million to air a 30-second spot. Ticket sales generated $66 million. Almost all the Colt players had to hold second jobs as the average NFL salary was $16,353 in 1958; today it is more than $2 million.
My, how times have changed — but the legendary 1958 Colts victory lives on!
Gerald Winegrad is a former state senator who represented the greater Annapolis area and grew up rooting for the Colts and Orioles. You can reach him at: gwwabc@comcast.net.