Book Review: "The Glory Game," Frank Gifford Looks Back

The two greatest football books never published are Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing with the 1975 Oakland Raiders and David Halberstam's history of the Baltimore Colts-New York Giants 1958 Championship game.

Though Thompson said he bonded with several Raider players by prowling with them and providing very high quality drugs, his work was never submitted for publication. Perhaps the notes still sit, collecting dust, buried in an attic in Aspen.

Halberstam died doing his book. The acclaimed author was killed in a car wreck in San Francisco while driving to interview Hall of Fame quarterback YA Tittle.

It's amazing how events ripple through history, a game in 1958 leads to the death of the writer of so many insightful sports books and, more importantly works that shook the American political system in the Vietnam era and after.

Halberstam was the victim of a series of accidents, as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, we all are. But his book lives on. His last book has long legs, his last book lives on as a legacy of a bygone era thanks to Frank Gifford.

In Halberstam's memory New York Giant Hall of Famer Frank Gifford, along with Peter Richmond, has picked up the pen and completed Halberstams' story, and completed it well. The author would be proud.

Gifford book is entitled "The Glory Game: How the 1958 Championship Changed Football Forever." 

Gifford completed Halberstam's interviews with all the surviving players of the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts.

Still living legends like Lenny Moore, Art Donovan, Gino Marchetti, Sam Huff, Pat Summerall, Raymond Berry, Rosie Grier, Andy Robustelli and others etch a bitter sweet look at another era in sports and America.

An era before "look at me" celebrations and end zone dances. A long dead era where players worked off-season jobs, walked to the stadium and drank in bars and "speakeasy saloons" with fans and friends. An era a long time gone.

One can taste the beer and smell the swirling cigar smoke at Toots Shur's place as the players gather for the post game parties. Dead legends are prominent in the book, seemingly lurking just behind the cigar smoke.

Icons of the era peer from cloudy corners Toots, Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Earl Warren, and others from Ike's Era.

The young legends Vince Lombardi and Tom Laudry are scheming for the Giants. The diminutive Weeb Ewbank is shouting from under his fedora. Big Jim Parker and Rosie Brown are pulling trying, in vain, to block time itself.  Alan Ameche, "The Horse," runs to daylight, forever.

And Johnny Unitas is always calm and in control, of course, amidst it all.

Giant owner Wellington Mara, obsessed with drafting offensive players and enraptured with every aspect of his team and vilified Colt owner, the gambling, slightly shady Carroll Rosenblum, equally in obsessed with his beloved Baltimore sit cheering in the cold stands.

But perhaps the most haunting portrait's are of Gifford's two closest friends on the Giants, Kyle Rote and Charlie Conerly, and two Colts that died before their time, Big Daddy Wilkerson and Bill Pellington. Their lives and careers provide a window into the NFL's past which has all but vanished but Gifford has lovingly preserved.

Conerly, the Giants QB, was Gifford's closest friend. Famous for being the Marlboro Man, the silent Conerly was a marine combat veteran of World War Two and a Mississippi Cotton farmer in the off-season.

He was also famous as one of the greatest athletes Old Mississippi Rebel sports history, for being sacked 17 times by the Philadelphia Eagles when he toiled for poor Giant's teams in the early 50s, and for leading the Giants to glory later.

Gifford agrees with Wellington Mara, who once said Charlie Conerly is the best player not in the NFL Hall of Fame.

The melancholy tale of Kyle Rote has a slightly sadder tinge. Rote, like Conerly, grew up during the Depression and life dealt him an even tougher hand when his mother was killed when he was young in a car accident involving, oddly, a mule. His father soon followed, and his brother was killed at Iwo Jima during World War II.

Rote, a legendary Texas footballer who once while at SMU ran for 115 yards, passed for 146 yards, scored 3 TD's and pointed for a 48 yard average against Notre Dame, destroyed his his knee his rookie year in training camp by stepping in, of all things, a gopher hole on the practice field.

The surgery, an iffy thing then, was botched and his magnificent speed was lost forever but he had a long, productive career playing basically on one good leg. Still Rote became perhaps, beside a poet, the most valuable team mate on the Giants.

Colts LB Bill Pellington, a war veteran and a sometime iron worker on towering Gotham bridges in the off-season, was known for his vicious head hunting and sometimes late hits. 

Despite his Hall of Fame teammates many Colts say Pellington was the fire that lit their vaunted defense's blue flame.

The hits took their toll, as Pellington death from Alzheimer's is detailed in the aftermath.

Perhaps one of the saddest story in NFL football is Colts DT Big Daddy Lipscomb. The 6'5 320-pound tackles' childhood was shattered when his mother was murdered, stabbed 55 times at a bus stop in Detroit, and Big Daddy carried that sadness with him all his life.

On the football field, when motivated, Big Daddy was a dominant force and against the Giants that cold day in 1958 he was motivated.

It was the high point of his career in 1963, after winning the Pro Bowl MVP as a Pittsburgh Steeler, Big Daddy died of a heroin overdose in Baltimore. Questions still linger about his death, according to his old Colt teammates.  

Gifford seems a step back into an old sweet smelling saloon of the fifties, A nostalgic time trip with the old ghosts of glories past lurking and laughing, sipping beers and swapping tales in the smoky corners. Step inside, pull up a stool, and enjoy the read.

And what other book has aging Art "Fatso" Donovan singing "I Wish You Love" in a bar?

Goodbye, no use leading with our chins, this is where our story ends,
Never lovers, ever friends.
Goodbye, let our hearts call it a day, but before you walk away,
I sincerely want to say.

I wish you bluebirds in the spring, to give your heart a song to sing,
And then a kiss, but more than this, I wish you love.
And if you like lemonade to cool you in some lazy glade,
I wish you health, and more than wealth, I wish you love.
My breaking heart and I agree that you and I could never be,
So with my best, my very best, I set you free.
I wish you shelter from the storm, a cozy fire to keep you warm,
Most of all, when snowflakes fall, I wish you love.
(musical interlude)
I wish you shelter from the storm, a cozy fire to keep you warm,
Most of all, when snowflakes fall, hot time, I wish you love.
All kinds of love, a whole gang of love.

Leave it to Fatso to try to steal the show.

But the book is the only place with Fatso on the jukebox.

And listen to these old men sing their fine old songs while they still can.