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The Best Game Ever: Giants Vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL

By Dan Danbom, Special to the Rocky

Published June 26, 2008 at 6 p.m.

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* Nonfiction. By Mark Bowden. Atlantic Monthly Press, $23. Grade: B+

Book in a nutshell: Football in the '50s doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to football today. Players weren't as athletic, made less than teachers and were a distant second to baseball players on the celebrity ladder. Football leagues came and went, white players rarely fraternized with black players, and the blissful marriage of football and television was still in the dating stages.

The NFL championship game of 1958 began to change much of that because it went into overtime (and overlapped into prime-time TV) and ended in a dramatic fashion that Bowden treats as roughly equal to Moses' parting of the Red Sea.

Whether it was "the best game ever" is, of course, debatable. (I'd pick the 1998 Super Bowl - or any Colorado State win.) But it had a lot going for it. Seventeen players and coaches from the teams are now in the Hall of Fame. It was the first "sudden death" championship. It matched the best defense against the best offense. It was also a sloppy game, with a slew of fumbles and missed opportunities.

The game brought together some improbable heroes, none more so than Baltimore receiver Raymond Berry, who overcame substantial athletic shortcomings through sheer work and force of will to become the best receiver of his time. Quarterback Johnny Unitas, who created a nationwide demand for his signature high-top shoes and awful haircuts, supplemented his football salary by working in a steel mill. If coach Weeb Eubank didn't like something an opposing player did, he would simply hit him.

It's the personalities involved in the game that add the most interest to this book.

Best tidbit: Bowden details how television turned the game into "a communal live national event." It marked the beginning of huge player contracts, new television technologies and franchises with market values exceeding the GNP of many countries.

Pros: The stories of the players are fascinating: how Berry and Unitas virtually willed and worked themselves into professional athletes, and Bowden's tales of the regular lives players lived off-field.

Cons: You'd have to show me more to convince me this was "the best game ever."

Final word: If your cup of tea is a beer in the stands, this one's for you.