Download The Best Game Ever: Colts vs. Giants, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL AudioBook Free
On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for this season’s NFL Championship game. Football, growing in popularity amid America’s post-war economic boom, was still greatly over-shadowed by the country’s favored pastime—baseball—however the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football.For the field and roaming the sidelines were seventeen future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry.Played on the freezing Sunday evening before 64,000 fans and around forty-five million tv set viewers round the country—in those days the largest crowd to acquire ever watched a football game—the championship would end up being the first sudden-death contest in NFL history. With two minutes left in regulation, Baltimore had possession deep in its own territory, and the ball in the hands of the still unproven quarterback Johnny Unitas.The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the annals of American sports.
