Mini-Review: The Best Game Ever

Mark Bowden’s “The Best Game Ever” is as straightforward as its name implies. There was once a game. It was the best ever. Mark Bowden will tell you about it. It’s a slim little book, less than three hundred pages. But it packs more explosive power than a dozen Tom Clancy novels pasted together with plastic explosive.

The Best Game Ever might be a bit of a misnomer. To be precise, it’s the best football game ever. The year—1958. The place—Yankee Stadium. Yes, Yankee Stadium. Remember, back in the 50s “America’s sport” meant cowskin, not pigskin. As Bowden points out, football was still a sideshow to America’s pastime. It was a sport for rowdies and roughnecks, played by men who clobbered each other for a couple months and then spent the rest of the year doing real jobs.

The game itself was the 1958 NFL Championship game between the New York Giants and the Indianapolis—sorry, the Baltimore—Colts. This was way, way back, when Colts-Giants didn’t mean Manning vs. Manning. It meant Unitas vs. Huff.

“Unitas,” of course, is Johnny Unitas, the flat-topped gridiron god still considered by many to be the greatest quarterback in history. The name “Huff” is a little less familiar. But Sam Huff was big back in his day, and in 1958 he was a bigger star than even the Golden Arm. He was the originator of the middle linebacker position, a ferocious competitor who declared that his only goal was the hurt everyone he hit.

That’s one of the greatest pleasures of Bowden’s book. It introduces us to the football heroes from the days of yore, back when a pass of any kind was considered a “long bomb” and when offensive lineman still looked like beefy people rather than beefy mastodons.

There’s Alan Amache, nicknamed “The Horse,” a massive fullback who was unstoppable near the goal line. Gil Marchetti of the Colts was one of the most feared defensive ends of the day. For the Giants, there was Frank Gifford, the glamorous halfback with movie star looks and Hollywood ambitions. Charlie Conerly, the Giants QB, didn’t just look like the Marlboro Man—he was the Marlboro Man. And then there’s my personal favorite, “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, the gargantuan defensive lineman who once asked, after sacking an opposing quarterback, “Little man, what you run so much for?”

Where Bowden excels is his ability to describe things. He doesn’t go in for much philosophizing, though he does toss in a few paragraphs about how the 1958 game CHANGED FOOTBALL FOREVER. He just tells things the way they were: how the Colts got there, how the Giants got there, and how things went when the unstoppable force of the Colts offense meant the Giants defense, the original immovable object.

He breaks down the game, making it understandable even to someone like me, the sort of person who knows only two football plays: “pass” and “not a pass.” When Bowden describes the thrilling last-second drive engineered by Unitas, you’ll swear you can hear the Yankee Stadium crowd howling right in your ear. When lineman Gil Marchetti goes down with a broken ankle you might find yourself feeling a twinge of pain yourself.

Bowden’s best known book, the wonderful “Black Hawk Down,” deals with how men perform under pressure, as individuals and as a team. The stakes aren’t as high here; losing a game, even a championship, isn’t on par with losing your life on the blood-soaked streets of Mogadishu. But don’t tell that to Johnny Unitas or Sam Huff. For the men who played in it, the Best Game Ever was a life-and-death struggle.

Fitting, then, that the game went to sudden death. I won’t give the ending away, though the curious will no doubt check Wikipedia beforehand. But the last chapter alone, “Living to See Sudden Death,” is worth the price of admission. Especially at 1958 prices.