When Football Grew Up

Fifty years ago today, my father took me to the National Football League's championship game at Yankee Stadium. The previous evening, we rode the train from Baltimore to root for our Colts against the glamorous New York Giants. As a teenager, I found New York unsettling -- too big, too fast. I hoped the Colts could adjust. My father and I spent the night at his Aunt Bea's apartment on upper Broadway. The next morning, we took the subway to the Bronx. Pop knew the way.

It was a gray day. We wore suits, ties and overcoats. Our seats were in the end zone, in the middle deck behind what would have been home plate and first base in baseball season. Pop and I loved the Colts. One Sunday in November 1950, we slipped away from the bedside of his dying father. Pop said it was okay, that something important was going to happen that afternoon and we had to be there. The Colts, he said, were going to win -- and they did. They had lost 14 straight.

But in 1958, they were the betting favorites to win the title game, and they had the best player, a daring young quarterback named Johnny Unitas. We took no comfort in the Colts' advantages. We thought of ourselves, and the team, as intruders from the provinces with dreams likely to be dashed.

To our surprise, the Colts took a 14-3 lead. And in the third quarter they reached the Giants' 1-yard line. The game probably would have been little remembered if they had scored a touchdown then. But on fourth down and 1, Unitas dared to call a play he hadn't used since training camp: 428, which meant that fullback Alan Ameche was to throw a pass to end Jim Mutscheller. But in the huddle Ameche did not hear the "4"; all he heard was "28." He thought he was supposed to run to the right. He did and was thrown for a loss. The play unfolded just below us.

"Who would have expected Ameche to throw the football?" Unitas asked me years later. "It was designed for Ameche to catch the pitchout, take two, three steps, just raise up and throw. Jim Mutscheller was wide open, standing in the end zone."

The Giants took advantage of the mistake and stormed back. They led, 17-14, and were running out the clock when Gino Marchetti tackled Frank Gifford on a third-down play. Gifford remains adamant that an official's placement of the ball denied him a first down, which probably would have let the Giants go on and win. Instead, they punted.

Two minutes 20 seconds remained when Unitas took charge at the Colts' 14. In the growing dark and cold, he put his signature on the two-minute drill.

To me, his three passes to receiver Raymond Berry, totaling 62 yards, were artistic strokes. But I could not bear to watch, even after traveling that distance, as place kicker Steve Myhra attempted a 20-yard field goal to tie the game with the big hand on the stadium's Longines game clock climbing toward zero. I've told this story time and again, for the kick meant everything to me and the moment has endured sharply: I buried my face in Pop's left shoulder; I remember the feel of his wool overcoat against my nose.

"What happened?" I asked.

"He made it!"

They would play sudden-death overtime, a first in NFL history. The Giants won the coin toss and took the ball. But they had to punt, and Unitas calmly directed an 80-yard touchdown drive. Ameche scored from the 1 to give the game to the Colts, 23-17. The photograph of him, expecting to be hit, his body lowered, has become an iconic image. That short run was probably the most significant touchdown in NFL history because it represented the league's first steps into a new age.

The game elevated pro football to national attention and married it to television, where it now thrives. Sports Illustrated called it "the best football game ever played," and it came to be known as the Greatest Game Ever Played. It had its flaws, but it was epochal: rallies by each team, a tying field goal, the unprecedented overtime, Unitas passing to Berry in the dusk. It didn't get any more romantic than that.

On the train home, Pop found us two seats in the dining car. We ate prime rib.

William Gildea, a Post staff writer from 1965 to 2005, is the author of the memoir "When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore: A Father and a Son, a Team and a Time."