CHAMPIONSHIP FOR A GOLDEN AGE

People like to call the 1950s and early 1960s the “Golden Age” of Giants football. It was a very exciting time for the franchise, to be sure. They were among the first football players introduced to American living rooms via television, they were featured in advertisements and profiles in popular magazines, and yes, they won a lot of games. From 1956 to 1963, they played in the NFL Championship six times in eight years.

But Golden? Hardly. In fact, it would be more accurate to call it the Silver Age of Giants football, since they finished second so often.

Between the 1958 Championship Game against the Colts (a.k.a. “The Greatest Game Ever Played”) and the 1963 Championship Game (the team’s last postseason appearance for almost two decades), the Giants lost at the precipice of a title three other times.

Those teams were stacked with Hall of Famers on the field and on the sideline, but there was only one moment when they were the best team in football. That happened on December 30, 1956, when the Giants trounced the Bears, 47–7, to win their fourth championship.

It was the franchise’s only title in a window of nearly half a century—their first in 18 years—and they would not win another for 30 more years.

That team featured nine men who would one day have their busts enshrined in Canton: Owners Tim Mara and Wellington Mara, assistant coaches Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi, and players Rosie Brown, Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, Andy Robustelli, and Emlen Tunnell. There were another five men associated with the team who would eventually land in the team’s Ring of Honor: Owner Jack Mara, head coach Jim Lee Howell, players Charlie Conerly and Alex Webster, and trainer John Johnson. Six of them were Pro Bowlers in 1956, and five of them were named first-team All-Pros. Gifford was named MVP of the NFL, Brown was named Lineman of the Year, and Huff was named Rookie of the Year.

Members of the 1956 NFL Championship team gathered for a reunion in 1996. Pictured here are (l to r) Andy Robustelli, Sam Huff, Wellington Mara, Frank Gifford, Roosevelt Brown, and Tom Landry. (Copyright © New York Football Giants, Inc.)

In other words, it was one of the greatest assemblages of talent the NFL has ever seen.

So, how did that squad come together?

It began with a million-dollar move.

The Giants had always played at the Polo Grounds, but in 1955, Tim Mara was offered $1 million to move the team from the upper Manhattan stadium they’d occupied since they were born in 1925 across the river to Yankee Stadium.

“If we are worth $1 million in Yankee Stadium and nothing in the Polo Grounds, then we had better look into this,” Tim Mara told his boys, Jack and Wellington.

Negotiations quickly began with the Yankees, and the Giants played their first game in The Bronx on October 21, 1956. The deal made financial sense, but it was also a lucky decision for the Giants. By the summer of 1957, the baseball Giants announced they were leaving New York and the decrepit Polo Grounds for California. Had the football Giants stayed put, they would have been left with a vacant, crumbling stadium.

The new address put the team in closer proximity to stardom, too. Most of the players lived at the Grand Concourse Hotel near Yankee Stadium, and they would mingle with their newfound stadium-mates like Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, who also lived nearby. It was a movie star life for many of them, several steps up from the dingy Polo Grounds.

The shift in home fields wasn’t the only move made by the 1956 Giants. They already had a good nucleus of players, but that offseason, perhaps spurred on by the financial windfall of the Yankee Stadium deal, perhaps trying to keep up with their new home’s namesakes, the Maras decided to be aggressive in the offseason. They drafted a 21-year-old guard from West Virginia and issued him number 70; when linebacker Ray Beck was injured in training camp, Sam Huff kept that offensive lineman’s number but switched to a position he had hardly played in his life. He wound up as one of the best to ever do it. Then, they traded for Andy Robustelli from the Rams and Dick Modzelweski from the Steelers. Those two would become cornerstones on the defensive and offensive lines, respectively.

Modzelewski arrived in New York with a bold prediction. His brother, Ed, had been traded to the Browns the year before and helped them win the 1955 Championship. When he showed up, he told Howell: “This year it’s your turn.”

The Giants hadn’t finished two games better than .500 in seven of the previous nine seasons, so winning it all wasn’t on a lot of minds. But as the team began the schedule with a 6–1 record, the notion began to pick up steam. When the Giants beat the Redskins, 28–14, on December 2, to improve to 7–2–1, offensive coach Vince Lombardi told his players in practice the following week: “I’m beginning to smell something.”

It was the faint odor of a championship.

Conerly was flinging the ball, Gifford was putting up great numbers running and catching it (he was the first player in league history to finish in the top five in both categories), and the defense was smashing opponents. In fact, it was the defense that was carrying the team, and the fans of New York appreciated it. Chants would rain down on them from the multiple decks of Yankee Stadium when opponents had the ball: “De-fense! De-fense!” they would shout.

With Landry and Lombardi each running one side of the ball, head coach Howell said his only jobs were to inflate the footballs and make sure everyone made curfew. He likely paid more attention to the footballs.

The Giants finished in first place in the Eastern Conference with an 8–3–1 record, setting up the Championship Game meeting with the Bears. It would be in the same building where less than three months earlier, Don Larsen had pitched a perfect game in the World Series. Perhaps that thought inspired Howell to call the 47–7 thumping of the Bears “the closest thing to a perfect game I have ever seen.”

Just like the 1934 Championship Game against the Bears, this one was decided as much by footwear as by football.

It was so cold that the mustard at the concession stands was frozen and the mimeograph machine in the press box seized up. An ice storm had moved through New York the previous night into the early morning of the game. By the time kickoff rolled around, it was a sunny day, but the temperature never got above 26 degrees, and the 30 mile-per-hour winds made it even more frigid.

Before the game, Howell conducted a little experiment. He put defensive back Ed Hughes in cleats and running back Gene Filipski in sneakers and had them run sprints. Just a few strides into his run, Hughes fell on his face. Filipski finished his test upright. Howell gave the order: “Everyone wears sneakers!”

Unlike 1934, the Giants did not have to borrow (or steal) the sneakers from Manhattan College for this one. Robustelli coowned a sporting goods store in Connecticut, and he had the foresight to order 48 pairs of state-of-the-art shoes from Keds a week before the game was played in anticipation of such conditions.

The Bears wore sneakers, too. They had learned from the 1934 game. But theirs were not as good as the Giants’ fresh-out-of-the-box models.

Hall of Fame linebacker and tackle George Connor was an assistant coach for the Bears in that game.

“I looked at one of our shoes, and it had No. 3 on it,” said Connor after the game. “Honest to gosh, it was Bronko Nagurski’s old shoe!”

Nagurski hadn’t played in the NFL since 1943.

With Gifford, Webster, Conerly, Huff, and the rest of those iconic Giants able to stay upright on the ice, the Giants rolled to an easy victory. Filipski took the opening kickoff 53 yards, and the Giants scored on the opening possession thanks to Mel Triplett’s 17-yard run. They led, 34–7, at halftime on two touchdown runs by Webster, and Conerly poured it on with two touchdown passes in the second half.

“They had good traction, that was a psychological thing,” the Bears’ Harlon Hill would say. “They were slipping some, too, but we were slipping and sliding around. We saw that, and I think that just knocked us for a psychological loop.”

Howell gave Robustelli a game ball. It was in part for his play in the game, but really it was for providing the traction with his sneakers that gave the Giants their big edge in the game. Robustelli wound up giving the ball to his defensive coordinator, Tom Landry.

The following few years would see the Giants gain fame and win plenty of games, but never again would that group of players combine to clinch a championship. The closest they came was in 1958, when they beat the favored Browns in a thrilling Eastern Conference Playoff game, 10–0, then lost to the Colts, 23–17, in the NFL’s first overtime game. The Colts tied it at 17 on a field goal with just seven seconds left in regulation, and then Alan Ameche plunged into the end zone in sudden death. Known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” it is largely credited with spurring the growth of professional football.

The 1959 Championship was a rematch, but not as close. The Colts won that one, 31–16.

In 1961, the Giants lost to Lombardi and the Packers in the Championship, 37–0, at Lambeau Field. Kyle Rote dropped two would-be touchdowns for the Giants in the first half, and Paul Hornung, on leave from his duty with the Army, scored 19 points on touchdowns and kicks.

In 1962, the Giants made a better game of it against the Packers, losing, 16–7, at Yankee Stadium. Their only points in that one came on a blocked punt recovered in the end zone by Jim Collier.

In 1963, Y. A. Tittle tried to win a championship with the Giants but came up short, 14–10, against the Bears at Wrigley Field. Playing with a bad knee, Tittle threw five interceptions.

They may have been the envy of every other team, the faces of football, for nearly a decade. They may have become iconic members of the franchise and the sport, playing in an era when black-and-white images began to arrive in full color, when stagnant pictures in newspapers were replaced by those that moved on television screens, and when being a pro athlete began to shift from a part-time job to something that could bring year-round income through endorsements and other ventures.

They may have even been the wintertime Kings of New York Sports, or at least the closest thing to kings without wearing pinstripes.

But there was only that one year when they wore the crown as the NFL’s best.