After the first few practices, before he had even played the position in a scrimmage, Landry told him, “I think you’re doing good.”
“What do you mean I’m doing good?” said Huff. “I haven’t even played.”
“I really think your catching on as to what, you know, we need to do,” said Landry, “but I want to say something to you. I don’t ever want you to try something in a game that you don’t think you can do.”
Huff was startled. No coach had ever talked to him like this. You never told a coach you couldn’t do something. It suggested a lack of heart, a paucity of desire. Here was Landry inviting Huff to declare his own limits. It made him feel less like a soldier, and more like Landry’s partner. They were creating something new, collaborating. Landry was feeling his way, just as Huff was. This was exactly the opposite of Howell’s heavy-handed approach.
“If you think you can’t do something, you tell me because we’re going to develop this defense, and it’s going to be developed around you,” reiterated the coach.
In his first try against the Giants’ offense in scrimmage, Huff was lined up in the middle, just a few steps across the line from the team’s great center, Ray Wietecha. On the defensive line, the tradition was to assign each tackle responsibility for a hole, or running lane, either to the inside or the outside of the offensive guard lined up to block them. In Landry’s new system, whenever the defensive tackles went to the outside, no one immediately attacked Wietecha. The center had a clean shot and a running start at the new middle linebacker. He knocked Huff on his duff.
“Tom, I can’t play that the way you want me to play it,” Huff complained to his collaborator. “I can’t play off the center like that. He comes right out after me.”
Landry made adjustments to ensure that the center always had somebody to contend with, which shifted still more responsibility to Huff. To prevent big holes from opening up in the line, he had to quickly read the play and move toward the ball. And with that, Huff and the four-three defense started to click. Now it was the middle linebacker who had a running start, and he started hitting the runners on his own team so hard they complained.
“What the fuck are you doing?” said Gifford, after Huff flattened him in a scrimmage.
“Come through here again and I’m gonna knock your fucking head off,” growled Huff.
Just like Raymond and John, Huff and Landry formed a partnership, spending almost every night studying film on the coach’s living room wall. Landry didn’t waste a lot of time trying to teach all of his players. He figured there were only four who really understood the lessons he took from his film study: defensive end Andy Robustelli, outside linebacker Harland Svare, safety Jimmy Patton, and Huff. Wellington Mara once sat in on one of Landry’s coaching sessions, during which Grier fell asleep. Mara pointed it out to the coach.
“Let him sleep,” Landry said. “He wouldn’t understand what I’m saying anyway.”
Huff understood. He became Landry’s prize pupil, and saw very little of New York as a result. He and his coach were perfecting their scheme. Armed with insight into the opposing team’s tendencies, Huff felt like he knew on almost every play exactly what the quarterback had planned. What he didn’t recognize from his film studies with Landry, he began to pick up on his own. He would notice the way a center distributed his weight before the snap. If he had his weight off the ball, back on his haunches, it meant he was preparing to backpedal and protect the quarterback—a pass. If the guards had their weight off their front hand it usually meant they were preparing to pull—an end sweep. Huff would read and intuit and then shout out blocking assignments to his tackles. Then he would move to the ball and hit somebody. He would later boast that he was “the first designated hitter in football.” He wanted his opponents to fear him. If a contending player walked past him on the field after a play, he would sometimes throw an elbow at him, just for the hell of it.
Huff took a job selling cigarettes in West Virginia in the off-season, bought his father a twenty-four-acre farm and set him up as a breeder of Shetland ponies, and for the rest of the year set about making himself the most feared football player of his era. In just a few years, his face would grace the cover of Time magazine, a symbol of the hard-hitting game. On their way to the championship that year the New York crowd would chant, “Huff! Huff! Huff!”
Even his name seemed perfect.
Giants quarterback Charlie Conerly, Marlboro Man.
Giants running back Frank Gifford. (Courtesy of NY Times)
Carroll Rosenbloom, owner of the Baltimore Colts. (Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries)
Pat Summerall’s game-winning kick against the Cleveland Browns, Dec. 21, 1958. (Courtesy of AP)
5
Getting There
When the Giants won the championship in 1956, on the heels of another triumphant Yankees season—Don Larsen had hurled the only perfect game in World Series history that October—they became full-fledged celebrities in the city of cities. The New York Giants baseball team had shipped out to San Francisco, so now the football club had sole possession of the name. They got the best tables and free drinks and meals at Toots Shor’s, the restaurant on Fifty-first Street (Shor insisted it was a “saloon”) that was the place to be seen for Manhattan’s famous and infamous. The football players shared the spotlight there with politicians, Broadway and movie stars, racketeers, playwrights, and authors—Gifford dined there with Ernest Hemingway. They were introduced courtside at Madison Square Garden, and became hot commodities on Madison Avenue. Gifford, with his matinee idol good looks, was earning $16,000 a year from the team, one of the biggest salaries in the game, and having put his silver-screen ambitions on temporary hold, was starring in TV commercials for shaving cream and hair oil, Jantzen swimwear, and Lucky Strike cigarettes. To his teammates, he was “Hollywood.” The veteran quarterback Charlie Conerly, who at age thirty-seven was the most senior player at that position in the NFL, was featured in national advertising as the Marlboro Man, every inch the iconic American cowboy (although he was from Mississippi) with his weathered, chiseled features and dignified graying temples. He and his wife bought a 225-acre cotton farm just outside Alligator, Mississippi. Those few who attracted the attention of advertisers began to make many times more money than their teammates, most of whom were paid less than $10,000 a year.
The extra money was especially welcome because it was nearly impossible to squeeze more out of the Maras. After his freshman season, the twenty-two-year-old Huff had established himself as starting middle linebacker on the best team in the league, and was on his way to defining the position. He asked for a $1,500 raise. In the off-season, Wellington Mara sent him a new contract offering $7,500, a $500 raise. Huff sent it back unsigned. When they met at training camp, the owner upped the offer to $8,000, and Huff tried to stand his ground. Mara threw a tantrum. As Huff would remember it, the pale Irishman’s face turned red and the veins in his neck bulged. He stood up, grabbed all the papers on his desk, and flung them in anger around the room. “You will sign this contract or I will trade you so fast you won’t even know where you’ve landed,” he said. “Now you sign this contract!”
Huff signed. He would get another $1,000 raise after a sterling season in 1957.
Many of the Giants’ players and their families lived during the season at the Concourse Plaza Hotel, a large, luxurious complex just a short walk from Yankee Stadium. Its apartments were famous for their sleek modern furnishings and sunken living rooms. The players’ children played across the street in Joyce Kilmer Park, often shepherded by the team’s biggest star and most famous bachelor, Frank Gifford. Conerly’s wife, Perian, occasionally wrote charming columns for newspapers and magazines about the glamour and fun of in-season life, about their outings to Broadway shows, major sporting events, and the city’s upscale nightspots. “The managements of our favorite restaurants are extremely sports conscious,” she would write in her memoir Backseat Quarterback
, “and welcome with a broad show of recognition not only the players but also their wives.” They rarely paid for a meal or a drink.
The limelight could be fun, but it had a down side. When the Giants were losing a lot in Conerly’s early years, and New York’s famously outspoken fans were holding up signs in the stands that read, GO BACK TO MISSISSIPPI, YOU CREEP and CONERLY MUST GO, he and Perian stayed home nights because the quarterback did not want his wife to encounter such hostility on the streets. Age took an increasing toll on the quarterback, whose physical stamina seemed to decline as the team’s fortunes rose. In the 1958 season, he would get so beat up during games that on train rides home in sleeping cars, his roommate, Gifford, the running back, would take the top bunk, knowing Conerly would have a hard time climbing up and down. He had stormed the beach at Guam with the marines, and affected an unshakable nonchalance about the pressures of football, which was, after all, just a game, but he relied on sedatives to help him sleep through the night during the season—a problem he didn’t have in the off-season when he routinely slept a sound nine hours. Things got better with wins. The bruises and aches went away faster, and Perian wrote chattily again about hobnobbing with movie stars and politicians, shopping at Saks and other fine stores on Fifth Avenue, visiting museums and galleries, and about the exclusive club formed by the players and their wives. Sometimes she would take in a show with her friends and then sit up all night playing cards and talking.
This life was a far cry from the strictly blue-collar existence of pro football families in Baltimore. As Colts, they were working-class members of a decidedly unglamorous city. Encouraged by Rosenbloom to settle there, they bought homes in Baltimore’s booming suburbs and sent their children to the local public and Catholic schools. Most of the players held jobs in the city, many of them working right through the season. Tight end Jim Mutscheller sold insurance at a firm downtown, where people would stop him on the street to congratulate or commiserate with him about the latest game. He would report to work early, work all morning in the office, and then take off in the afternoon for practice. He would then return to the office most evenings to work into the night. Art Donovan was a liquor salesman, and would take off after practice to visit stores through Maryland, Delaware, and even Virginia, wining and dining store owners who were always delighted to see the hilarious “Fatso” walk through their door. John Unitas, Gino Marchetti, and other players worked shifts at Bethlehem Steel, the mammoth industrial facility in Dundalk, along the city’s waterfront. Raymond Berry tried a job at the steel plant for a few weeks, and while he found that his repetitious chore, drilling holes in steel beams, helped strengthen his lower back, it bored him so that he quit and went back to his film studies.
The Colts’ players enjoyed celebrity status, but it was a strictly local variety, akin to playing for the high school team in a very big small town. But the team was a phenomenal success. Season ticket sales had nearly doubled. Memorial Stadium was packed for home games, and the town had formed booster clubs and a marching band that traveled to every away game. Local sportswriters coined the term “Coltsaphrenia” to describe the local excitement generated by the “Steeds.” The city was hooked on football, from the steel mills in Dundalk to the surgical theaters of the city’s world-renowned medical school at the Johns Hopkins University—as noted by the team’s most famous literary enthusiast, Ogden Nash:
The lucky city of Baltimore
Is famed for medicos galore.
It’s simply teeming with fine physicians
With surgeons, occultists, obstetricians,
All dedicated men in white,
All at your service days and night
Except—and here’s the fly in the ointment—
When with the Colts they have an appointment.
And the vast Memorial Stadium rocks
With the cheers of fifty-thousand docs.
In a way that would be impossible in years to come, as athletes began to earn millions, the team was part of the community. They would be stopped on the sidewalk, or in restaurants, or out grocery shopping by those fans who recognized them without their pads and helmets, and would receive congratulations or commiserations or long-winded theories for how to approach their next opponents. But they were not besieged. The local embrace was enthusiastic but polite. It was part of what made playing in the city a pleasure.
That pleasure was shared by the team’s black players, but mostly in segregated terms. The Colts’ blacks—the terminology then was “negro”—were celebrated by all of Baltimore, but they often found they were only welcome off the field in the city’s black neighborhoods. Their superiority on the gridiron made all the more galling their inequality off of it. On road trips to southern states, they were often forced to stay in “negro” accommodations, which, because it got them out from under their coaches’ watchful eyes, was sometimes more fun. It was also humiliating, but as such was just part of the general experience of African Americans in an overtly racist country.
It was widely believed, and the pro rosters provided ample evidence, that NFL owners had an unspoken agreement to employ no more than seven black athletes per team. The Washington Redskins, owned by the outspokenly racist George Preston Marshall, had none. Marshall did not integrate his team until 1962, when the federal government effectively forced him to—and he died the following year. The Giants in 1958 had just four black players: Rosey Grier, Roosevelt Brown, Emlen Tunnell, and Mel Triplett. There were six on the Baltimore roster: Lenny Moore, Lenny Lyles, Milt Davis, Jim Parker, Johnny Sample, and Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb.
Lipscomb, a giant at six-eight and three hundred pounds, towered over most of his opponents but, surprisingly, he was not that strong. He rarely managed to throw off a blocker and sack the quarterback, as his linemate Marchetti did several times in almost every game. What made Lipscomb effective was his speed: he had terrific lateral moves. His specialty was gliding sideways to plug holes in the line, stopping runners cold. He was so big that halfbacks would seem to disappear in his grasp.
Big Daddy had been signed right out of high school. On a form he filled out for the team, where it asked for his alma mater, he had forthrightly written, “No College.” Someone inserted a period after the “No.” For years afterward he was introduced on radio and television as a graduate of “North College.” He was a pro wrestler in the off-season, and was known for his ferocity on the field, even in practice; he often got in fights with his own teammates. He had been let go by the Rams because his behavior was considered ungovernable—he kept getting thrown out of games for fighting or for threatening referees. Yet when the mood lifted he was genial and quick-witted—the Colts considered him, next to Donovan, the funniest man in the locker room. He was haunted by childhood fears—as a boy he had seen his mother stabbed to death in Detroit—and when he was forced to room by himself on the road would slide a dresser in front of the door to secure it before climbing into bed. Black men as a rule were considered menacing and dangerous, and Big Daddy was not above using the stereotype to his advantage. The mustache that wrapped around the corners of his mouth seemed to fix his face in a dangerous scowl.
At one training camp, after the annual physicals, the team doctor announced that one of the players was infected with crabs. This was a potential catastrophe in a setting where players shared a locker room, towels, toilets, and shower stalls. Something of a prude anyway, Weeb was beside himself.
“I don’t know how a pro football player could do something like this,” he complained to his son-in-law, assistant coach Charley Winner.
At a team meeting, the head coach announced that the team doctor would be driving back to Westminster to treat everyone, but in the meantime asked, “Does anybody have any home remedies?”
Big Daddy put up his hand. He had the fixed attention of the eighty-or-so players and hopefuls in the room.
“Coach, whenever I get them, I take them to the movies,” he said. “I feed them popcorn. Whenever they go ou
t to get a drink of water, I change seats.”
On the practice field during one particularly hot summer workout session, Big Daddy called across the field to Jim Parker, who sold cemetery plots as one of his off-field jobs. Parker was called “Boulevard” because he was so wide.
“Hey, Boulevard, I’ll take two of them plots, but I want ’em both in the shade!”
Blacks were considered suitable only for positions that were presumed to call for primarily physical, as opposed to mental, acuity. They were running backs, wide receivers, defensive backs, and linemen. Like so much of racist logic, the presumption that such positions didn’t require intelligence was clearly false and widely accepted. Raymond, the most cerebral of wide receivers, was not the most intellectual player on the Colts’ roster. That would have been Milt Davis, the team’s right cornerback, whom his teammates called “Pops” even though he was only twenty-eight years old. The scholarly Davis was a polymath who would eventually earn a doctorate in education from UCLA and become an avid ornithologist and teacher of natural history. In 1958 he was not considered civilized enough to drink, dine, or sleep in the same establishments as his white teammates.
Lenny Moore, who was a jazz lover, had a part-time job as a disc jockey on a “negro” radio station in Baltimore. He played his way into the Hall of Fame catching passes and taking handoffs from Unitas, whom he looked up to as an inspirational leader, but in later life he would say, “I wish I could tell you I knew Johnny better. As with the other white players on the team, we never mingled.”