One of the things that makes the 1958 NFL championship game unique is the way it put professional football on the national and world stage. When the BOne of the things that makes the 1958 NFL championship game unique is the way it put professional football on the national and world stage. When the Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants, 23-17, in a tense and dramatic game, it was a first in a couple of ways: it was the first National Football League championship game to go into overtime, and it was also the first game to be televised nationally. Athletic drama combined with a relatively new and burgeoning technology to change American culture. There can never be anything quite like it in pro football ever again.
I make this statement because some fans might feel that the 1958 game has lost some of its uniqueness. After all, the 2016 Super Bowl, in which the New England Patriots defeated the Atlanta Falcons, 34-28, featured a 25-point comeback – something that had never happened before in any NFL championship game – and, like the 1958 game, it went into overtime. Truly, that Super Bowl was a great game – unless you were rooting for the Falcons.
But by the time that 51st Super Bowl was played, pro football had long since become an all-consuming spectacle; Super Bowl Sunday is now a civic holiday on par with Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, and over 110 million people across the globe watched the game. In short, the word is out regarding pro football. The 1958 game, by contrast, introduced pro football to that larger audience – and set the stage for the (arguably excessive) spectacle of today.
In One Sunday in December, veteran sports journalist Lou Sahadi provides a helpful look back at The 1958 NFL Championship Game and How It Changed Professional Football (the book’s subtitle). The book’s early chapters, setting the history of the NFL in the context of the larger American history, are okay if not terribly inspired; the football history is good, but the listing of events from U.S. history seems more like what one might get by looking at one of those “If You Were Born In the Year…” cards in the souvenir section of a Cracker Barrel restaurant.
Sahadi seems to be on firmer ground when he gives up on history and simply talks sports. He captures well the way in which “The world championship game had a unique story line associated with it, simply the haves against the have-nots. It was blue-collar Baltimore against the Madison Avenue Giants” (p. 158).
Looked at in that way, the 1958 championship does have a certain Rocky-style, triumph-of-the-underdog quality to it. After all, the Giants were an established team, in the nation’s largest city and media capital, with four NFL championships already under their belt at the time; if they had beaten the Colts handily, it would have been satisfying for fans all over N.Y.C. and its environs, but it would have been just another game. As the game developed, by contrast, it captured the imagination of a nation.
Sahadi captures well the personalities of the players who made the 1958 Baltimore Colts a unique team of characters. Defensive tackle Art Donovan, an inveterate jokester whose quick wit later made him a regular guest on David Letterman’s late-night talk show, “called himself a light eater. ‘When it got light, I started eating’” (p. 116). Halfback Lenny Moore, who was the first in his family to go to college, found that in then-segregated Maryland, restaurants and movie houses were closed to him, both in Baltimore and at the team’s training camp in nearby Westminster: “Take-out food was all he could get from a restaurant. He couldn’t even go for a beer with the white players. The football field was where he released his anger” (p. 126). Quarterback Johnny Unitas (the subject of another Sahadi book), a skinny kid who had played sandlot football when no pro team would give him a chance, sums up well the Colts’ anomalous situation: “We were a team nobody wanted. I was a quarterback no other team wanted, we had a coach that the owner really didn’t want….We were truly a team of football orphans that found a home together” (p. 113).
The book has its imperfections. Factual errors abound. For example, the Baltimore Colts are described as leaving Baltimore’s “Friendly Airport” on a United Airlines charter the day before the game; in fact, what is now BWI Airport was then called Friendship Airport, as a photo of the Colts’ itinerary on the same page clearly shows. There are enough factual errors of this kind that I can’t help wondering if the book was rushed into print in order to meet a 2008 publication date that would mark the 50th anniversary of the historic championship game.
Yet I don’t think anyone would argue with Sahadi’s conclusions regarding the cultural significance of the 1958 championship: “That one game set up professional football as a television sport….Technology such as slow motion, instant replay, and isolated zoom-in camera close-ups made the sport an art form and widened the appeal of the game. The union of pro football and television became so perfect that it honestly presented a clearer and more accurate perspective to the viewer than to someone sitting in the stands” (p. 196).
People I’ve talked to who saw the 1958 game testify to its significance. My father, a lifelong Washington Redskins fan (he received season tickets from his father as a present for his 12th birthday in 1945), watched the game when he was 25, and often told me of the drama of watching the Colts and Giants captains walking out to midfield, their ponchos blowing in the wind, as the referees prepared for the overtime coin toss; my dad said it was like watching Old West gunfighters setting up for a last duel. Other games, future games, may equal the 1958 championship in drama. None will surpass its cultural impact.
Indeed, we live in a time when the future of North American professional football may be in doubt. The sport is played almost exclusively in the United States and Canada; attempts to expand its reach (like NFL Europe, 1991-2007) have been largely unsuccessful. Moreover, a drastic increase in diagnosed cases of football-related chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has caused a number of NFL players to forbid their sons, and daughters, from playing football. Will football one day go the way of boxing – from universally popular media spectacle, to pay-per-view niche attraction? It hasn’t happened yet; and One Sunday in December conveys clearly the factors that caused the 1958 NFL championship to have such an impact upon American culture....more
The best thing, for me, about this recounting of the historic 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants is the shThe best thing, for me, about this recounting of the historic 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants is the sheer quality of the writing. The game, the first overtime championship game in the history of the National Football League, was so full of suspenseful twists and turns that it is still known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” and therefore it is no surprise that a number of writers have turned their attention to it. But Mark Bowden is such a skilled writer, achieving such heights of prose poetry through the sheer craftsmanship of his language, that this particular retelling of the historic game truly stands out.
In The Best Game Ever, Mark Bowden very effectively sets the 1958 NFL championship game in the context of its time. It helped, to be sure, that the Colts and Giants played tenaciously in a tough game characterized by many dramatic changes in momentum. But as Bowden makes clear, there were historical and cultural factors converging to create a social milieu in which professional football could become the wildly popular phenomenon it became. Bowden suggests, persuasively, that the post-World War II affluence of the suburbanizing 1950’s
…would prompt sweeping social change….One part of this new America would be an explosion in the attraction of spectator sports. Games had long been popular, but they were about to start generating wealth beyond even the most ambitious imagination, particularly in football. There was a unique confluence of trends. A vast market was forming for pro games just as the technology was being perfected to package and deliver them to every home. (p. 50).
It is against that background of technological advancement that Bowden’s saga of Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL (the book’s subtitle) unfolds. Along with those advancements in technology, the game was changing, becoming a faster-moving and more cerebral game. Responding to those tactical changes in the game, and indeed speeding them along, were innovative thinkers like Giants defensive coach Tom Landry, who believed that a strong response to a faster, more short-pass-oriented game would be reducing the number of linebackers from the then-current four to three – a set-up in which everything depended on “the man in the center, the middle linebacker. He would have to be a kind of superathlete, a man as big as a lineman, quick enough and fast enough to play pass defense, and smart enough to recognize which role to play with every snap of the ball” (p. 100).
Fortunately for Landry, he had in mind the perfect candidate for this superathlete position – Sam Huff, a Giants defender who so perfectly personified the rough-and-tumble qualities of 1950’s pro football that he had been the subject of a CBS television special, “The Violent World of Sam Huff.” After some initial hesitation regarding Landry’s suggestion of a change in roles, “Huff stepped into the role in practice, and it was a revelation. He felt like he had found the position he was born to play….Now he was standing upright at the center of the line, and he was amazed at how much more he could suddenly see. It was as though he had played the game his whole life with blinders on, and now they were gone. With his peripheral vision, he could see the whole field, from sideline to sideline” (pp. 101-02). The Best Game Ever captures well the excitement and drama of these changes; the game is getting faster and more interesting, just in time for the new technology to beam it out to a nation that will fall in love with it.
I also appreciated Bowden’s willingness to demythologize this mythic game, as when he writes that the early stages of the 1958 NFL championship “looked more like amateur hour than the NFL championship. Three of the first four drives had ended with turnovers” (p. 151).
As the game went on, however, both teams settled into their routines of doing what they did best – the Colts on offense, and the Giants on defense. And one player in particular – the Baltimore Colts’ quarterback, a skinny and awkward-looking Pennsylvania native with number 19 on his jersey – took command of the game. Johnny Unitas, mixing a few runs up the middle with a great many passes to his amazingly reliable wide receiver Raymond Berry, had taken the Giants off their game; and “When an offense was clicking the way the Colts were, even the most disciplined defense begins to crumble” (p. 200).
Sam Huff knew only too well what Unitas had done on that decisive drive; almost half a century later, he told an interviewer, “John had me psyched, you know? I thought he could read my mind after a while because it seemed like the son of a bitch knew every defense I was in. You know, it was frustrating to play against him, he was just a mastermind at it” (p. 202). As Bowden chronicles it, the Colts’ game-winning play that ended that drive and the championship game – running back Alan Ameche plowing through an improbably large hole in the Giants’ defense and crashing across the goal line – was an almost mathematically certain outcome of Unitas’ mastery of the game.
Bowden, a prolific and best-selling author, is probably best-known for torn-from-today’s-headlines books like Black Hawk Down; his suspenseful 1999 chronicling of the travails of a group of U.S. soldiers caught behind enemy lines in Somalia was adapted for the big screen by director Ridley Scott in 2001. Why then did Bowden turn to the subject of a football game that took place when Bowden himself was just seven years old?
Bowden states that “I had grown up for the latter part of my childhood in Baltimore, and remembered the great Colts teams and players” (p. 261). And he sounds like a true Baltimorean when he praises “the special relationship between the city and the team”, and laments then-team owner “Robert Irsay’s unforgivable decision to ship the franchise [from Baltimore] to Indianapolis” (p. 264) in 1984. “Unforgivable” may seem like a strong word; but you will hear people around Greater Baltimore using that word, and stronger words, when the subject of the Baltimore Colts’ relocation to Indianapolis comes up.
Well-illustrated with photographs from that long-ago time – now more than sixty years on – Bowden’s The Best Game Ever provides football fans with a direct connection to that distant and storied time when professional football was, for many Americans, something new and exciting....more
The Colts of the National Football League represented Baltimore for only 32 years, from 1951 to 1983; since relocating to Indiana in 1984, they have aThe Colts of the National Football League represented Baltimore for only 32 years, from 1951 to 1983; since relocating to Indiana in 1984, they have actually been Indianapolis’s NFL team for longer than that, from 1984 to the present (almost 40 years now). But in their three decades in Maryland’s largest city, the social and cultural impact of the Baltimore Colts was strong and enduring, as Michael Olesker chronicles in his 2008 book The Colts’ Baltimore.
Olesker was a longtime opinion columnist for the Baltimore Sun; when I grew up in central Maryland, and particularly when I lived in the Baltimore area during the 1990’s and early 2000’s, I always looked forward to reading his columns. His writing has a pithy, humanistic, down-to-earth quality and a strong regional feel – all of which lends itself well to this brief, energetic look at A City and Its Love Affair in the 1950’s (the book’s subtitle).
What emerges, over the course of The Colts’ Baltimore, is a sense that the Baltimore Colts were particularly well-suited to represent a city that, in the 1950’s, was going through a period of profound change. The Colts were Baltimore’s first major-league team of the modern era, coming to the city three years before the baseball Orioles; their presence in Baltimore meant that a city that had long been easy to overlook, nestled as it is between better-known neighbors Washington and Philadelphia, would henceforth command a larger share of the public spotlight. And Baltimoreans loved the way the Colts represented them.
Defensive tackle Art Donovan, who savored the way the ethnic neighborhoods of Baltimore reminded him of his native Bronx, became “the cheery public persona of the Colts”, suitable for representing the team to a tough, blue-collar industrial city. As Olesker tells it, the Colts were “scrapping for a living the same as those guys on the assembly lines down at the steel mill, same as the ones who built airplanes during the war. Life is tough; you do what you have to do, including knocking each other down. And then you share a few laughs about it, and some food and drink” (p. 50). Art Donovan – as anyone who saw him in later years as a regular guest on Late Night with David Letterman could attest – captured Baltimore’s quirky and individualistic spirit, and Baltimore loved him for it.
But Donovan was not alone in forging that uniquely strong bond between the city of Baltimore and its NFL team. All of the team’s stars – quarterback Johnny Unitas, fullback Alan Ameche, defensive end Gino Marchetti – worked actively to forge strong links with the ordinary people of Baltimore, supported in that endeavor by team owner Carroll Rosenbloom:
“[N]ot only were the Colts establishing a generation’s worth of familiar names – Unitas and Marchetti and the rest – but their owner, Rosenbloom, was encouraging them to stay in Baltimore during the off-season. They gave speeches and helped sell tickets. They mixed with people in bars and restaurants. They were identified as members of the community….Their general manager, Don Kellett, would say: Unitas, you’re speaking to this Cub Scout troop next week. Ameche, you’re going over to Our Lady of Pompei’s street carnival. Donovan, you’re doing Sunday breakfast with the B’nai B’rith. The whole ball club? You’ll head for that new shopping center out York Road. The Colts band will greet you when you step off the bus.” (p. 99)
The Baltimore Colts were a unifying factor for the city in other ways as well. In a time when the rigid segregation that had characterized Maryland life since the post-Civil War era was just starting to break down, the Baltimore Colts boasted African American stars like halfback Lenny Moore and defensive lineman Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, and Baltimoreans and Marylanders of all backgrounds cheered together the successes of this integrated team. It didn’t solve the problems of segregation, in Baltimore or anywhere else; but Olesker argues that “it set an example for the city, especially in the newly integrated public schools: If these guys could get along on the ballfield, maybe this was a glimpse of everyone’s future” (p. 127).
Unsurprisingly, Olesker places strong focus on the Baltimore Colts’ 1958 championship season, suggesting that throughout the city, from the beginning of that season, there was a sense that 1958 might be the Colts’ year. Just two games into the season, after the Colts had beaten the Chicago Bears 51-38, Olesker writes that that 1958 season “had already become more than a football campaign….In Baltimore we were not just on intimate terms with the Colts; through them, we were all praying to the same God now” (p. 150).
The Colts won the NFL’s Western Division title, and the right to go to New York to play the Giants, then a perennial championship team; and as his recap of the 1958 championship game unfolds, Olesker seizes the opportunity to reflect upon Baltimore’s longtime civic inferiority complex relative to other East Coast cities. As the Giants reverse the Colts’ early momentum and take a 17-14 lead, Olesker captures the civic despair that many Baltimoreans no doubt felt at that point:
“This is New York, and we are merely Baltimore. We know in our hearts that our football team is better than anybody on the planet’s, and we know that this no longer matters. We’ve been propped up…only to make New York’s storybook comeback even more heroic. It is their eternal destiny. We are merely Baltimore, and they are mighty New York. We are people who work on assembly lines and shipping piers, and New Yorkers are people who rule the world. For New York teams, the gods of sport always manage to work the proper angles.” (p. 201)
History records, of course, that the Baltimore Colts battled back, with a game-tying field goal that forced the first overtime period in NFL history, and a masterful Unitas drive that climaxed with Ameche blasting into the end zone for a Colts victory in what is still often called “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”
Olesker ends his book on that note of civic triumph, with the people of Baltimore celebrating the team’s arrival home at Friendship Airport – suggesting that for one brief shining moment, all the people of Greater Baltimore “had stepped away from the loneliness of the assembly line and the isolation of neighborhoods divided by race and religion and found thousands of people to be happy with” (pp. 217-18).
Olesker does not feel the need to tell the stories that constitute the Baltimore Colts’ postscript: the often-overlooked 1959 championship, won the following year at home in Baltimore, and then the team’s long slow decline and eventual relocation to Indianapolis. Perhaps he feels that that story has been told enough times before. Whatever the reason, The Colts’ Baltimore provides a fun, pleasant look back at those heady times, in a book that should appeal to NFL fans and nostalgia-minded Baltimoreans alike....more
Sunday afternoons in the autumn were different in Baltimore, in those days, from any other city in the National Football League. There were plenty of Sunday afternoons in the autumn were different in Baltimore, in those days, from any other city in the National Football League. There were plenty of cities where the league fielded teams, and NFL games generally started at 1:00 pm, local time -- except in Baltimore. There, the local NFL team, the Baltimore Colts, began play at 2:00 pm. The Catholic Church had asked that the team start its games one hour later than was the practice elsewhere in the league, in order that the games might not interfere with church attendance; and in Baltimore, where the church has had considerable power and influence ever since the promulgation of the Baltimore Catechism in 1885, the Baltimore Colts were only too happy to comply.
Can you imagine something like that happening today, in the 21st century? In the world of ESPN, and fantasy football, and millionaire players who live in gated communities and travel with their own entourages, and multi-gazillion-dollar contracts for TV rights and licensed merchandise? Truly, professional football was a different thing in those days. So, in some ways, was American life.
Vince Bagli's Sundays at 2:00 with the Baltimore Colts takes its title from that endearing regional peculiarity of the team's history, and will take any pro football fan back to an earlier time in the history of the game -- a time when ordinary Baltimoreans might find a star Colts player living right around the corner, or working summers in the liquor store down the street. Author Bagli, who worked with Chuck Thompson on radio broadcasts of Colts games, provides an engaging, impressionistic history of one of the NFL's most historic teams.
The book consists of 31 interviews, arranged in roughly chronological order, so that these 31 testimonials by people and groups with varying connections to the Baltimore Colts become a history of the team. One hears a variety of perspectives regarding Baltimore Colts milestones: the team's humble beginnings in Baltimore, the thrill of winning the 1958 National Football League championship ("The Greatest Game Ever Played"), the Super Bowl III upset loss to Joe Namath and the New York Jets, the Super Bowl V ("Blunder Bowl") victory, and the heartbreak of the team's midnight move to Indianapolis in 1984.
Bagli did an excellent job of rounding up testimonials from Colts greats from throughout the team's 33-year history: e.g., Art Donovan, Jim Parker, Gino Marchetti, Weeb Ewbank, Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore, Johnny Unitas, Tom Matte, Don Shula, Jimmy Orr, John Mackey, Mike Curtis, Earl Morrall, Lydell Mitchell, and Bert Jones, as well as front-office man Ernie Accorsi and broadcaster Chuck Thompson. And it is good that he wrote this book when he did; many of the luminaries who told their Baltimore Colts stories to Bagli have now passed on.
Highlights of the book include Weeb Ewbank describing how he forged the championship teams of 1958 and 1959, and halfback Lenny Moore discussing how Ewbank helped him and other African American players deal with the pervasive racial discrimination of the time. As Moore puts it,
It’s amazing, but the older I get, the more appreciative I am of Weeb Ewbank and his tactics. We came up at a time when there was real racial discontent. We were immature guys facing a lot of obstacles, outside of football as well as inside. The tactics that Weeb used were unbelievable, silly schoolboy things. We’d go to the movies in twos, coaches in the front and on the sides and behind us, just like grade school kids going to a museum. We’d start out at the hotel. He’d say, “All right, pair off in twos and line up at the door.” Here’s all these big men lining up and marching down to the movies….With all of his idiosyncrasies and things we thought were silly and childish, he was doing them to create fun and get your mind off other things. (pp. 57-58)
And Weeb’s silly, idiosyncratic tactics seem to have worked, judging from the two championships the Baltimore Colts brought home during his tenure.
The better you know your Baltimore Colts history, the more you will enjoy Sundays at 2:00 with the Baltimore Colts. I enjoyed, for example, hearing halfback Tom Matte recount how he had to serve as quarterback during the 1965 season, as injuries sidelined both star quarterback Johnny Unitas and backup quarterback Gary Cuozzo; famously, Matte quarterbacked with list of plays taped to his wrist, and took the Colts all the way to a playoff game against the Green Bay Packers!
Another colorful Baltimore Colts moment recounted here occurred when a drunken fan ran out onto the Memorial Stadium field in 1971, during a must-win Colts game against Miami. Linebacker Mike Curtis, a man known for his on-field ferocity, coolly describes how he responded to the fan’s uninvited visit to the football field: “[W]hen the guy ran up to us, I gave him a ‘flipper’ with my padded forearm – my weak arm, the left – not to hurt him or kill him….Down he went. They helped him off the field” (p. 139). Watch the video on YouTube, and you’ll see that it looks quite a bit rougher than that.
The nothing-personal, just-business aspect of professional football emerges here as well. Running back Lydell Mitchell, a player who was very popular throughout his time in Baltimore, recalls his disappointment upon learning that team owner Robert Irsay had decided to trade him to the San Diego Chargers: “It hurt so much….I didn’t want to leave. I had always envisioned myself playing in Baltimore forever, being part of those alumni groups that came back. I was comfortable here, an integral part of the team and the community, and all of a sudden you’re somewhere else and have to change your ways. It’s tough” (pp. 181-82).
And the entire Baltimore community experienced a comparable moment of dislocation when Irsay abruptly moved the Colts franchise to Indianapolis in 1984. Chuck Thompson responds thus to Irsay’s claims that he moved the Colts because of lack of fan support in Baltimore: “Irsay said he moved because the fans didn’t support him. Well, it was the other way around. He didn’t support them. He let a wonderful football franchise completely deteriorate. And he thinks the Baltimore football fans were going to thank him for that? I wouldn’t” (p. 222).
When this book was published in 1995 by Centreville, Maryland-based Tidewater Publishers, it was quite an event locally. I remember the book being advertised on WBAL radio, with a book signing or some comparable ceremony at the Greetings and Readings book store (another Baltimore institution that, sadly, is now gone). At that time, no one outside of a few select circles had any idea that pro football would be returning to Baltimore within a year, as a result of the Cleveland Browns' relocation to Charm City and rebirth as the Baltimore Ravens. As a result, the book has a kind of valedictory quality; and perhaps that is as it should be. When the Colts left Baltimore, it was truly the end of an era.
Sundays at 2:00 with the Baltimore Colts is well-illustrated with photographs of players, coaches, and Baltimore Colts memorabilia -- everything from ticket stubs for the Baltimore Colts' first and last games, to Johnny Unitas's Super Bowl V ring, to a bottle of National Bohemian beer ("Ain't the beer cold!"). One finishes this book with a strong sense of the factors that created such a strong attachment between the city of Baltimore and its original pro football team....more
Football in Baltimore has long enjoyed the status of a civil religion; and in his book Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia, Ted Patterson sFootball in Baltimore has long enjoyed the status of a civil religion; and in his book Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia, Ted Patterson shows how far back the gridiron history of Maryland's largest city goes. Patterson, a longtime radio broadcaster with a substantial history of providing play-by-play and color commentary for Baltimore's football teams, is also an avid collector of football memorabilia for Baltimore clubs; and his extensive collection provides a basis for this book.
If you're expecting to see the Baltimore Colts and Ravens discussed in this book, you will not be disappointed. But Patterson, a thorough and diligent student of the game, goes back much further than the Baltimore Colts' 1947 debut as a member of the old All-American Football Conference -- as far back as the 1890's-era beginnings of college football at area universities such as Johns Hopkins and the U.S. Naval Academy.
One gets to meet local college football luminaries like Earl Banks, longtime coach at Morgan State University. Of his players at Morgan State, an historically African-American university in North Baltimore, Banks says, “About two days a week I talk life, not football, to my boys….I tell it like it is and they know that. They know they’ll hear it straight from the shoulder, with no frills or fancy talk. I tell them if they act like a man they’ll be treated like one. They may come to us as boys but they leave as men. Good men with a purpose in life” (p. 51). Coach Banks’s ability to inspire his players comes through loud and clear.
The longtime football rivalry between City College High School and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute -- folks in Baltimore just call the game "City-Poly" -- also receives its due. And while the University of Maryland plays most of its home games at the university's main campus in College Park -- much closer to Washington, D.C., than to Baltimore -- Patterson dutifully chronicles the times when the Terrapins have played at one or another of Baltimore's stadiums.
But the heart of the book, for many fans, will be Patterson's chronicling of the Baltimore Colts. First, we hear about the underachieving AAFC team in green and silver; then, we learn about the short-lived first NFL incarnation; and then, finally, we are introduced to the classic team of Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore and Raymond Berry and Big Daddy Lipscomb and Art "The Gladiator" Donovan and Alan Ameche and Gino Marchetti. That team, a relocated Dallas franchise, was, oddly enough, “assigned to the Western Division [of the National Football League], even though they were farther east than most other teams in the league” (p. 102). It is for that reason that the Baltimore Colts almost never played against the team that, logically, should have been their main regional rival, just 35 miles down the road in Washington, D.C.
From humble beginnings, the Baltimore Colts became the team that won the 1958 NFL championship, "the Greatest Game Ever Played" (and the 1959 NFL championship, too, though not as many people seem to remember that one). Patterson's comprehensive collection of all things relating to the Baltimore Colts really brings this part of the book to vivid life, particularly on the many pages of color plates.
Testimony from members of those historic Baltimore Colts team further emphasizes the strong ties that existed between the Baltimore Colts – then a new team that constituted their city’s first major-league franchise in any sport in the modern era – and the fan community of Baltimore, historically an industrial, working-class city whose people felt overlooked among larger, wealthier, better-known Eastern cities like New York and Washington, D.C. Defensive end Gino Marchetti, looking back from the perspective of the 1990’s, pays eloquent tribute to the Baltimore Colts fan community’s love for the team:
If someone told me during my rookie year that people would still be talking about us after 40 years, I’d have never believed them. We belonged to the Baltimore community. We’d go out and speak at banquets and make personal appearances. We didn’t make any money but we were out there. I used to say of the 57,000 who came to our games every week, I personally shook hands with every one of them. That made a big difference. If you talked with a fan for two minutes, that fan now knows you. You’re not a number, you’re a person to them. (p. 102)
The long sad story of the Baltimore Colts' decline in the 1970's and 1980's, and of owner Robert Irsay's midnight move of the team to Indianapolis in 1984, is here as well. A preview of those unwelcome times came after the 1971 season, when team owner Carroll Rosenbloom, unhappy that neither Baltimore City nor Baltimore County would commit to build and pay for a new stadium for the team, “announced after the season that the Colts would leave their Western Maryland training camp after 19 years and train in Tampa, where they would also play three exhibition games. Bumper stickers appeared on Maryland cars that read ‘Don’t TAMPA With Our Colts,’ reacting to rumors that the Colts were being courted by Tampa’” (p. 200).
History records, of course, that the Baltimore Colts did not move to Tampa; rather, that region of Florida got its own expansion team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But the Baltimore Colts did leave their city, in 1984, when then-team owner Robert Irsay loaded the team’s assets onto Mayflower moving vans in the middle of a snowy March night and moved the team west to Indianapolis. It is a moment that many Baltimoreans still look back upon with a certain bitterness.
Thorough as ever, Patterson chronicles oddities from the city's 12 years as an unhappily NFL-free zone. Examples of that time include the United States Football League's mid-1980's Baltimore Stars (a team that played in College Park and achieved the unusual distinction of winning a pro-football championship for Baltimore without ever setting foot in the city) and the Canadian Football League's Baltimore CFL Colts/Baltimore Stallions -- still the only U.S. team ever to win the Grey Cup as champions of Canadian football. I remember walking through the Inner Harbor one day in the mid-1980's, and looking up and seeing on the roof tiles of the old Power Plant an inscription that read, "The NFL Is Watching -- Support the Stars." Reading Patterson's book brought back those memories.
This edition of Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia was published in 2000, and therefore the city's second NFL team, the Baltimore Ravens, is included as well. At the time that Patterson was collecting the memorabilia included in this book, the Ravens still had their old logo (a shield-shaped, winged-"B" curiosity that eventually got the team sued by a South Baltimore resident claiming copyright infringement), and the team had demonstrated dogged persistence but relatively little success. Few people at the time of the book's publication in 2000 would have made bold to suggest that the team would be Super Bowl champions by 2001. I certainly would not have done so; I saw the Ravens lose a perfectly boring 9-7 game to Washington's NFL team, at Landover in the fall of 2000, and was glad to be proven wrong about the Ravens a few months later.
As a Marylander and a fan of Baltimore football, I enjoyed Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia, with its collection of Ted Patterson's football memorabilia. Any student of football history would probably enjoy this book as well....more
From the beginning to the end to the beginning of N.F.L. professional football in Baltimore, John Steadman was there. The dean of Baltimore’s sportswrFrom the beginning to the end to the beginning of N.F.L. professional football in Baltimore, John Steadman was there. The dean of Baltimore’s sportswriting community, Steadman was a mainstay of sports journalism in Maryland’s largest city for decades, from 1945 up until his death in 2001. In the process, he attended every game that the National Football League’s Baltimore Colts played, from 1950 through 1983, and saw all 34 of the Super Bowls that took place during his lifetime. It is fortunate for all football fans that he set down his memoir From Colts to Ravens in 1997, four years before his passing.
The organization of this book -- A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Baltimore Professional Football, according to its subtitle – might seem curious to some, but makes a great deal of sense upon further reflection. Chapters 1 through 5 of this 16-chapter book deal with what might be considered the end of the story – the process by which the Cleveland Browns, a historic team with a fervent following throughout Northern Ohio, unexpectedly relocated in 1995 to Baltimore, causing among Clevelanders the same kind of anguish that Baltimoreans had felt just 11 years earlier with the move of the Colts to Indianapolis. Those chapters come first, I think, because in 1997, the relocation of the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore was still big news. Steadman no doubt realized that readers would want to hear his insider’s perspective on the move, first and foremost.
Why would Art Modell do it? Why, after building up decades of goodwill as team owner and civic benefactor in Cleveland, would he suddenly choose to uproot a team that enjoyed such loyal and consistent support, knowing that doing so would make him, virtually overnight, the most hated man in Ohio? As Steadman sees it, the key factor in Modell’s decision to move may have been the Cleveland Indians’ rebirth as a competitive team in a brand-new stadium, pushing the Browns down to second-tier status in Cleveland sports media. According to Steadman, “Father Art and son David took the popularity of the Indians quite personally. There seems little question, then and now, that this was a significant force, maybe even more compelling than any promised financial bonanza in Baltimore, that drew Art Modell towards the crab flats of Chesapeake Bay” (p. 15). Is that all it takes for a sports-team owner to decide that he will break the hearts of millions?
It was a painful and troubling time in Greater Baltimore when the Browns made their move. Speaking as a Marylander and a Baltimore Colts fan who was deeply saddened when the team made its midnight move to Indianapolis, I can testify that erstwhile Baltimore Colts fans certainly wanted a new N.F.L. team; but we of the old Baltimore Colts fan community didn’t want a team that had been taken away from another city the same way the Baltimore Colts were taken from us. Steadman captures well the moral ambiguity of those times. He also conveys well an unwelcome reality of modern professional sports: no community, no matter how loyal its sports fans are, is ever safe if a team owner sees greener pastures elsewhere.
The remaining chapters of From Colts to Ravens provide a history of the Baltimore Colts, from their 1947-49 tenure as a member of the All-America Football Conference, through a singularly unsuccessful 1950 season during which the Colts were “a poor excuse for a professional operation” (p. 51), through disbandment and eventual re-establishment for the 1953 season. Steadman truly hits his stride when describing the 1958 Colts that defeated the New York Giants for the N.F.L. championship in a game that is still referred to as “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” In a striking marker of the way in which Steadman and the Baltimore Colts always seemed to have a special bond, Steadman looks back at how, “for the only time in a sportswriting life, I had actually predicted the exact outcome, the Colts winners at 23-17, and published it in the Sunday American only hours before the kickoff” (p. 149).
Steadman describes other Baltimore Colts highlights, such as the 1959 N.F.L. championship that “stands as the only championship the Colts ever won before the home audience, right there in Memorial Stadium” (p. 154), as well as the team’s 1971 victory over the Dallas Cowboys in the mistake-filled Super Bowl V that was “either the sloppiest or the most exciting of all Super Bowls, depending on the point of view” (p. 179). Dutifully, he also chronicles lowlights like the time when the Colts, favored by 16½ points, lost Super Bowl III to Joe Namath and the New York Jets. The reason for that 16-7 loss? According to Steadman, “The overly confident Colts…figured they could win by merely showing up – but it didn’t happen that way. It never does” (p. 177).
After 1971, sadly, the story of the Baltimore Colts was mostly lowlights. Owner Carroll Rosenbloom, miffed that neither Baltimore City nor Baltimore County was willing to build a new stadium for him, arranged an elaborate team-for-team trade of the Baltimore Colts for the Los Angeles Rams – a process by which Robert Irsay came to Baltimore as the Colts’ new owner, in what might be regarded as Rosenbloom’s parting shot toward Baltimore. Instability in the front office was reflected in inconsistent performance on the field, and the relationship between Baltimore and the mercurial Irsay deteriorated until March 28, 1984, when Mayflower moving vans took the team to Indianapolis in the dead of night.
For Steadman, who worked for the Baltimore Colts for a time and covered them for three decades, it was like a death in the family. Watch the videos covering the Colts’ midnight relocation on YouTube, and you can see the heartache in his face and hear it in his voice. A striking moment in the book occurs when Steadman describes a run-in with Irsay at the Colts’ new stadium in Indianapolis during the 1984 season:
I thought maybe he was coming to gloat over the new “house” his team was playing in, compared to Memorial Stadium. He appeared to put out his hand and I got up to say hello. With that he pulled me in close to him and said, “How does it feel to be a shit-heel?” I pushed him away and replied, “How does it feel to be devoid of common decency?” (p. 223)
That passage captures well Steadman’s pessimistic feelings regarding the behavior that can be expected from professional sports team owners in the modern era. Root for a team as much as you like, but be aware that you can’t count on that team always being there for you. Civic loyalty counts for nothing. When enough money talks, sports teams walk.
John Steadman died on January 1, 2001. Had he lived 27 days longer, he could have seen the Baltimore Ravens defeat the New York Giants, 34-7, in Super Bowl XXXV at Tampa, Florida. How would it have felt for him? I’m sure he would have liked the historical irony of a new Baltimore team triumphing over the Giants, the Baltimore Colts’ old antagonists from the 1958 and 1959 N.F.L. championships. But I don’t think he would have felt the same degree of emotion in 2001 that he felt back in 1958. For Steadman, “The Colts remain irreplaceable”, even though the Ravens could, from the 1996 season onwards, play “before new generations of followers who deserve the chance to have a team of their own” (p. 224).
Those new generations are running things now. A Baltimorean born on March 28, 1984 -- the day the Baltimore Colts left town -- is 38 years old now, and has had the Ravens to root for since they were 12 years old. Additionally, as of the start of the 2019 N.F.L. season, the Colts have been playing in Indianapolis longer than they played in Baltimore. The earth belongs to the living.
Still, like a number of Baltimoreans I know who are of Steadman's generation, Steadman would rather “Hold dear the memory” (p. 225) of the Baltimore Colts than transfer his loyalties to the Baltimore Ravens.
From Colts to Giants is well-illustrated with photographs from throughout the Baltimore Colts’ history. Published by Tidewater Publishers, a no-longer-existent Centreville, Maryland, publisher that excelled at publishing Chesapeake Bay and Maryland regional material, this book deserves a place on the shelf of any pro football fan, or any student of Baltimore’s history and culture....more
Where the Baltimore Colts once played professional football, at horseshoe-shaped Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street in North Baltimore, nothing remains. Where the Baltimore Colts once played professional football, at horseshoe-shaped Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street in North Baltimore, nothing remains. One would never know that that empty grass oval near some apartment buildings was once a beating heart of Baltimore’s civic life. It was called "The World's Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum," and it was a place where thousands of NFL fans cheered their hearts out on autumn Sundays, for their gridiron heroes in royal blue and white. Four decades have passed since the Baltimore Colts shocked their home city with a midnight relocation to Indianapolis; but throughout Greater Baltimore, memories of the Baltimore Colts and their bond with Maryland's largest city remain strong.
In When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore, longtime Washington Post journalist William Gildea takes the reader back to the time of the Baltimore Colts’ beginnings – a time when “Baltimore was trying to live down a reputation as little more than a traffic jam between Washington and New York” (p. 5) -- and provides a most enjoyable look at A Team and a Time. Yet what makes this book more than just a football history is its nuanced presentation of how sports can provide a medium of bonding between fathers and sons, as emphasized in the other portion of the book’s subtitle -- A Father and a Son. Passages like this one capture the importance of that part of the book:
Pop loved the Colts from the start, and soon I did, too, and our love for each other grew as we kept on going to the games. Sunday was a ritual we shared. We’d go to Mass early and then drive together across the city to the stadium. (p. 5)
U.S. culture has often encouraged men to be stoic, to hide their emotions, on the singularly dubious pretext that open expression of one's feelings is somehow "unmanly." Gildea's reflections on how the Baltimore Colts helped bring him and his father closer together makes me wonder: How many fathers and sons, across this country, who otherwise might have had trouble talking to each other about feelings and emotions, have found a way to come together through a shared love for the local sports team?
Throughout When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore, Gildea emphasizes the depth and strength of the bond between the people of Baltimore and their first professional football team. As Gildea puts it early in the book, “Bumbling or not, the Colts were Baltimore’s first major-league team, and to many Baltimoreans they bestowed big-league status on the city” (p. 5). Looking at how Baltimore poet Ogden Nash referred to “our Colts” in a 1947 letter, Gildea remarks that “In their first month the team already was part of the city’s fabric” (p. 50).
One gets to know dedicated fans like Hurst “Loudy” Loudenslager, whose wife Flo cooked 726 walnut cakes for the Colts during their 31 years in Baltimore. The way in which local and national patriotism were intertwined as part of Baltimore Colts fandom for “Loudy” – and, no doubt, for many other Baltimore Colts fans – comes through in this passage:
Loudy loved Memorial Stadium, especially its curved façade with the stainless-steel lettering dedicating the structure to the war dead. TIME WILL NOT DIM THE GLORY OF THEIR DEEDS – the words made his eyes water. “They may tear this place down someday,” he said, “but they better save the front and put it someplace where everybody can see it.” (p. 98)
“Loudy” would no doubt be glad to know that, close to the stadium that is today home to the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, those words from the old stadium’s façade are indeed preserved, shining forth in their Art Deco typography.
Interviews with former Baltimore Colts luminaries like defensive end Gino Marchetti and halfback Lenny Moore are also a compelling trait of Gildea’s book. The players emerge as an unpretentious, emotionally centered group of people – hard-working men who felt fortunate to be playing football for a living, and did not let their fame give them an inflated sense of self-importance. Marchetti recalls this conversation with a Colts fan: “One time a guy says, ‘Jesus Christ, you’re talking to me.’ He was an electrician. I said, ‘I don’t know anything about electricity. You don’t know how to play football. So we’re even’” (p. 149). Such lack of pretension seems particularly suitable to Baltimore, with its working-class industrial heritage – and may do much to explain why the fans of Baltimore felt such a strong bond with the Baltimore Colts.
The book’s photographs are comparably evocative. I particularly like a photo of Johnny Unitas as a rookie in 1956, reclining on a bench during Baltimore Colts’ training camp at Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) – a very young man, with the whole world ahead of him. The 1958 NFL championship (“The Greatest Game Ever Played”), the Pro Football Hall of Fame, his own restaurant known as the Golden Arm – all those things, at the time of that photograph, are nothing but a gleam in the eye of a skinny Pennsylvania kid with a crew cut, relaxing on a bench.
Gildea also chronicles the long slow passage of time, and the often-painful changes that it brings. In one of the book’s saddest passages, he writes about when he learned in 1963 of the death of defensive lineman Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb from a heroin overdose. Lipscomb, just 31 years old when he died, had provided moving testimony regarding the factors that made him feel different from other Colts players – his upbringing in a rough neighborhood of Detroit; the early and violent death of his mother; his lack of a college education; his status as an African American in a still-segregated community and nation. “You wouldn’t think so to look at me,” the 6-foot 6-inch, 283-pound All-Pro tackle once said, but “I’ve been scared most of my life.” And when the news of Lipscomb’s death appeared in the papers, Gildea writes, “Big Daddy’s death struck me as a demarcation, evidence that, as we’d learned growing up, anything is possible and not at all pleasant. It shook me” (p. 249).
Gildea acknowledges the trauma that the city of Baltimore experienced when team owner Robert Irsay moved the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in the middle of the night in 1984; but, in contrast with some others who have written about the topic, he does not dwell on it. Rather, he focuses on the grief that he felt when his father passed away. His sense of priorities seems proportionate.
When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore is poetically written, and provides a singularly moving evocation of the life of an American community, and of the passage of time. If you are a football fan, or if you ever bonded with a parent over something as seemingly trivial as a professional sports team, this book should be on your list....more
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