Game of their Lives HBO Documentary 2001

when people say a man is made out of mud a poor man's made out of muscle and blood muscle and blood and skin and bones a mine that's a weak and a back that's strong you load 16 tons [Music] saint peter don't you call me cause i can't go i owe my soul to the company store i said to my dad they've offered me six thousand dollars to play pro football and he said let me see if i understand this right he said they've offered you six thousand dollars to play something i thought you had to work i said well what do you think i ought to do he said i think he ought to take it during the 1950s pro football's rough rugged image was embraced by a prosperous but placid america the sport gradually assumed a larger-than-life posture in the popular culture of the period but for those who played during this era the game of their lives was a small-scale sport minimal in scope modest in ambition when i first came into the league there were only 33 players on the team and there was not any movement of players and we played together year after year after year and the fans they didn't have that many players to learn and they all there every year and so they knew all of them they knew the names of every player on the team you had a 12-team league playing a 12-game schedule for most of the decade a nice little tidy little package the entire nfl season in those days consisted of 72 games today's season is over 240 games pro football's popularity grew by leaps and bounds per game attendance increased in every year of the decade season ticket prices are 21 individual game tickets if you prefer to buy them that way are four dollars and five dollars awkward baby steps marked this coming of age period on-field pageantry and on-air highlight shows had yet to reach maturity you have all the dope ready for this weekend glenn i sure have paul this week's script is really action filled thanks glenn and now here is our lovely miss antifreeze of 1958 yvonne lime thank you very much paul and what about game number one this week yvonne well our first game this week is the chicago cardinals playing the washington redskins at our nation's capital it was the era of crew cuts and crazy legs hop along and night train the hula hoop and the alu these nicknames like 50s fads and fashions became part of the american scene but at the dawn of the decade pro football was barely even on the map pro football was a relatively minor sport it was for aficionados people knew small number of people in each city knew that this was a great sport this national sports psyche was major league baseball the be all end-all was the world series suddenly there is this new game and it is a quantum jump for the average fan in what he has ever seen in terms of speed and power but it hadn't gotten hold of the national psyche [Applause] [Music] friends we greet you from the office of burt bell commissioner the nasda football league at 1518 walnut street in philadelphia pennsylvania the fastest growing sport in football and certainly one of the most spectacular birds bert bell was the guy who molded the clay of what professional football would become we expect that the greatest year and show the greatest football was never known the history of the world to deal with strong-willed people like george hales in chicago and george p marshall in washington took a diplomat on the order of disraeli there's no excuse for expansion in the national football league we furnish football now for free through television expansion can only weaken the personnel bert bell came to every training camp talk to us like a father if you never needed anything or so forth and so on yes you can get in touch with me each camp that he visited the same spiel but that always ended up with don't forget boys call me collect anytime night or day mohawk four four four hundred so i call the national football league office he picks up the phone you think you could call the national football league office today and the commissioner pick up the phone he'd pick up the phone say johnny what you need i say mr bell i'm getting ready to buy a house tomorrow i'm looking for my check i don't have it he says no problem so just come right over and get it and also remember this is a man who made up the league's schedule today they use a computer he would sit there with a table in narbath and i'd say what in the hell is this it was a checkerboard and domino's on there with the names of the teams i want to say that i never saw anything like this for 60 or 70 000 people to do this for the green bay packers in the city of green bay it certainly should set an example in football hungry green bay fans felt like they could drop in at any time the packers won just 35 games during the decade but with america becoming a tuned in nation television ensured that every nfl team could become a hometown franchise television allowed fans across the country to feel that green bay spirit certainly are no stranger at all to our television cameras as bob mentioned before if you aren't already do you plan to be a packer fan in the future well i certainly do there's no doubt about that i'm looking forward to that game this afternoon [Music] the chicago cardinals won fewer games and far fewer fans than the packers this hard luck franchise stumbled and sputtered in surroundings straight out of the twilight zone i remember one of our early practices with the cardinals we were at the university of chicago and we're on an old practice field that they had and i looked at up in the stands it was all covered with black tar the seats all the seats were covered over black tar and there were little smoke stacks sticking up through the stands and i said to whoever i was talking to at the time i said that's kind of funny-looking that they'd have stands that looked like that with little little chimneys coming out through the stands he said yeah that's where they invented the atom bomb [Music] with a pair of thriving franchises in los angeles and san francisco the nfl was pointing the way west for professional sports we had three games that we had a hundred and five thousand hundred and three thousand and then a hundred thousand in a row and that was before big television with exciting players like jaguar john arnett number 26 the los angeles rams were averaging 83 000 fans a game by 1958. the rams glossy sheen was enhanced by their proximity to hollywood one of the team's most prominent stockholders was comedian bob hope hey those long passes john those long runs boy you're almost as good as i am who are you they call you crazy hips yeah what about that nose watch it i'm a stockholder watch it the rams exuded class in the front office as well as on the field a public relations director named pete rozelle burnished the team's golden image the rams were kissed by sunshine and starlets they were envied by almost everyone who played east of the mississippi we used to take a lot of razzmatazz yeah from the opposing team with them given to mouth business calling us the hollywood or whatever they wanted to call us and and because you know we had it too good out here and and they didn't have that good back east and they didn't and edgar jones donnie lavallee and cliff lewis agree that they ought to be in pictures too the browns head for one of the sound stages hoping to get a glimpse at some star one time we got invited in at the allen land's house a little guy played shane or something like that yeah he's a good actor we were riding by and we saw him out there watching his car and he said hey you're alan led he says yeah i know you guys but i don't know your names you're the colts says yeah he said come on in so five of us went into his house when the 50s began pro football was considered a game for roughnecks and renegades but the rams roster was stocked with photo friendly athletes who possess genuine glamour as well as true grit quarterback bob waterfield was like gary cooper a strong silent type his wife was actress jane russell in hollywood jane russell accompanied by husband bob waterfield lead celebrities attending the gala imperial ball when i would go by the dressing room they wouldn't pay any attention to me they'd come out and they'd want the guy's signature and they never looked at me at all elroy hirsch was perhaps the game's most well-known player of the period hollywood placed a call to crazy legs but while hirsch was a game breaker on the field he proved to be a bust at the box office [Music] [Applause] it's no secret that the fans and papers are really honest you know what they're saying they were front runners they were folding now that the pressure is on us they're even saying we haven't got the guts to be a championship outfit well we're going to take it come on let's get out there now get set for the play of the day in real life just as in fiction the rams demonstrated their championship character [Applause] [Music] in the first game to ever be televised nationally the rams showed why they were arguably the most exciting team in any sport they also demonstrated how entertaining pro football could be [Applause] [Music] while pro football was beginning to take off leaving the ground could be an ordeal before the jet age took hold air travel was a marathon test of endurance and patience traveling from cleveland to l.a took you 24 hours we had four motor planes go from cleveland chicago chicago to denver and denver down to l.a welcome aboard cleveland brown we'll fly at 10 000 feet with a speed of 230 miles an hour and we'll land at denver i know we'll have a nice trip one time we're playing l.a coming out of denver all the fat guys sat in the back of the plane see and you got to go up over those mounds it took us an hour and that b-24 to go up over the mountains in fact our quarterback lamar mccann he was afraid to fly he would get on the plane and just lie down in the aisle and that's the only way he could bring himself to do it he'd have a couple of something to settle himself down and he'd lie down in the middle aisle and that's where he made the trip on these long flights planes were transformed into airborne training rooms and high altitude recreation centers one of the more interesting aspects of the trips are the card games that go on and bill o'connor half back tommy james and senator tommy thompson try to outdo each other with the 52. i guess that there were some teams traveled by plane i think one of the early ones was the packers but they traveled in two planes so the planes weren't big enough to really accommodate the whole team so it almost had to be train rides initially beat the bears shout the packer fans in a rousing send-off as the train leaves for the bear game at chicago the long train ride like from chicago to the la took three days where the train made an extended stop we'd be out doing calisthenics i can't remember a couple of times stopping and getting out and just finding an open field and practicing again no goal post no nothing cows had been there before us so it was a little hazardous we went out took three days to go to california by train we stopped and we practiced and then we finally got there and of course now we win the game and i say to myself oh my god now we got to go back three more nights and so forth four days by train on it was terrible johnny joshewski johnny o was my roommate on the train and we talked for hours and hours about what he had done growing up and what i had done growing up and what i hoped was going to happen in my life and what he hoped was happening in his life and it was a close time yes you made a lot of close friends because you had a lot of i guess you could call it intimate time with your teammates [Music] willie gallimore puts the bears on their way to another score willie gallimore reverses his field bobbles the ball gets it back shakes off tackler after tackler the game's broadening popularity was propelled by pure speed [Music] but my real name [Music] for the first time in pro football history because of the way the game had opened up and you had offensive players you could just get down the field so fast you literally had to defend every blade of grass on the field [Applause] [Music] baltimore's premier performer is number 19 johnny united in four seasons united shot from sandlot obscurity to professional football's player of the year detroit will be banking on its ace quarterback bobby lane number 22. laying a standout performer in past championship games plays at peak when the pressure is on quarterbacks with folk hero qualities became the focal point of the nfl's new narrative the farther the ball was thrown the more enthusiastically fans responded in professional football the major element in how it took off was how they perfected the forward pass now that didn't have to do with guys slugging it out in the trenches that had to do with superior athletes throwing and catching the ball and how quick striking it could be in the the long bomb ten seconds left the lions lead it 31-28 again to the right this has got to be the alley-oop there is no time there's this sense about the decade that just about anything was possible the teams were willing to try anything to move the football and to make the game more exciting and to become a more popular game nationwide the game's wide open style also included weird wild players these free-for-alls offered a bizarre blend of improvisation inspiration and desperation [Music] there was a lot of laterals and funny things sort of sand lot place sometimes if you might want to say so that worked [Music] it was more wide open we had what we call the dipsy dune where you'd fake a pitch out to a back and then you spin around get back to the fullback coming back and then hand off to an end around then there were those strange looking plays where a runner with the ball would be tackled maybe a leg tackle but the defender wouldn't hold him down and he'd sort of scramble up and run additional distance because at the time you had to be pinned down to end the play dangerous because oftentimes when you started to get up there would be somebody else arriving like a sam huff or a knight train lane or somebody like that and you could get hit pretty hard you had to make sure that if you made a tackle that guy was not going to get up and run again and it was hard on that running back because you'd think nothing about dropping your knees in the middle of his back so that he wouldn't get up and run you would sometimes make different moves you might go into someone that's going to tackle you but try to put yourself in a position to spin a little bit there was a couple incidents like that i knew i was going to get hit and i forearmed him thinking i would roll over him and be able to get up and run again san francisco's hugh mcelhenny was definitely a hard man to pin down a 49er coach had tabbed him the king of the halfbacks but the subsequent shorthand for this nickname ensured that pro football like rock and roll would have its own hip swiveling king michael henne is one of the great runners in pro football and he proves it right here as he takes tittle's short pass and eludes lion after line on a beautiful game-winning dash mcelhinney never ran for a thousand yards in a single season yet this bowl carrier who ran at breakneck pace symbolized the breathtaking tempo of pro football during the 1950s he was sort of a hero among all of us to be honest with because he looked like what a pro football player should look like he would walk in a restaurant they would say there's the kings [Music] settle back while marlborough takes you to the los angeles coliseum and meet one of the most spectacular runners in pro football john arnett of the los angeles rams you know i grew up in the area where every movie ever watched this person drank a cocktail and a cigarette meet paul horning of the green bay packers charlie connerly of the new york giants settle back with your marlboro charlie alex webster always smoked on the sideline yeah you know he would he would get under that cape and just you know the guys that didn't like the smoke had to get out of the locker room at halftime because they were going to get smoked on i'd say 75 80 percent of the players did smoke i did see bobby lane we had an assistant coach who smoked and he was smoking during practice and we were back in the huddle we came back in the huddle and bobby reached and got the cigarette from the assistant coach and took a couple of a couple of drags off of it while he was calling the play conditioning was awful i mean just bad dick doesn't go in much for fancy dan calisthenics but feels that plenty of this jogging is the best conditioner for his legs and body dick is never out of shape and a warm-up like this is all he needs to play a full game of bruising football crazy legs how do you keep yourself in condition that's easy captain midnight plenty of sleep exercise and the right kind of foods and i drink chocolate flavored ovaltine but be sure it's ovaltine and not just an ordinary milk flavoring art donovan used to bring hot dogs with him from home to the locker room the day of the game have him in his locker be sitting there eating five six seven so artie fell in love with eating hot dogs and he used to bring him on the field put him on the bench in a bag beside him eat him when he came out of the game narcotics or dope was never even a consideration nobody we didn't even know i think marijuana everybody talked about marijuana but i didn't know anybody smoked it so our biggest uh i guess biggest abuses would have been beer they said did you lift weights when you're playing the only weight i left there was a 24 ounce can of schlitz [Music] students in their seats figures on the blackboard that's coach paul brown at the head of the class lou groza has a question and coach paul has the answer paul brown epitomized what's going on elsewhere in the culture the ultimate organization man the ultimate bureaucrat the ultimate father figure treating his players as if they were children he stressed the good guy good person image and that was a part of the cleveland browns creed and if he felt a player couldn't meet that then he was gone he once traded hadkins because he caught him belching in a meeting paul brown founded the cleveland team named it and shaped it in his cool conservative image but to the players the man known as father football remained distant and aloof in all the years i played for him he never took a shower with the team he had a phobia about that he'd go back to the hotel clean up he always wore a shirt to practice shiny shoes and then he'd go back to the hotel from a coaching standpoint we have no regrets really we gave it everything we had and you just take it like it bounces and fight and scratch and do the best you can and our men tried hard the browns won four consecutive titles in the all-american football conference and when they joined the nfl in 1950 they were almost equally dominant led by players such as fullback marion motley number 76 the browns went to the championship game each of their first six seasons in the nfl quarterback otto graham number 14 embodied the paul brown ideal graham was a leader a winner and a clean-cut family man who became one of the decade's true marquee players plan on staying all night autumn this afternoon's game's over there'll be more games i guess we're about the worst team that you've ever had no you're wrong otto you gave your best out there today you and all the boys it's just the day you met a better team they deserve to win defeats and setbacks are all a part of growing up sometimes we learn more from a defeat than we do from a victory now you listen to me young man adversity not only tests one's character but it also strengthens it and don't you forget that otto graham said one sort of example and detroit's bobby lane said another lane was known for playing hard all the time even after curfew over the course of his career in in detroit lane really became the epitome of the good old boy you know the guy that working class fans would like to hang out at the bar and argue about football with their buddies could most easily identify with in the 50s you'd go down and pick up your check on on monday morning and bobby would be waiting for you there at the stadium barn and it take out a 50 bill or a hundred dollar bill and lay it on the bar and say okay let's have a few drinks and you would it bonded and gave you the camaraderie that i think a lot of other teams didn't have the detroit lions won a couple championships in the 50s and and they did so with a team that was at least known for you know a bunch of overgrown boys who knew how to party and have a good time certainly no lion was more overgrown than beefy lineman les bingaman number 65 the game's biggest player you're looking at les bingham 320 pounds of dynamite and here mounted on a lineman's blocking sled is ford's new lifeguard steering wheel watch what happens when these two tangles what a wallet but he wasn't injured because the steering wheel cushioned the shock and his body never touched the steering post but it was the indestructible bobby lane who stood as the lion's lightning rod this is a man's game that's the title of a cover story in time magazine bobby lane epitomizes that idea that pro football is the game played by men for men you know in the audience not women not kids you know this is this is a man's game part of the appeal for bobby lane was just this image of fearlessness he projected otto graham put the face mask on his helmet in 1953 a lot of quarterbacks did bobby never put the face mask on when he retired in 1962 he still wasn't wearing a face mask didn't wear hip pads didn't wear thigh pads and and the flimsy shoulder pads [Music] somebody got by me and threw bobby for a loss and bobby's got the ball and laying there on his back and he came up off that ground that index finger just at me right in front of the world just chewing my butt up down around and i looked down on on bobby and i said bobby i guarantee for the rest of my career i'll never ever let anybody everybody get to you and i think that's probably what made me end up as an all-pro that i didn't want to take the wrath of bobby lane because he wanted to win so badly if he said he could do it and if you get in time he would do it on the sideline the lion's body lane keeps his passing arm warm forward detroit trailing timely comes the all-important factor the clock shows less than three minutes to be played as bobby lane fades to fire another aerial lane's going all the way on this one he has a man open it's jimmy dorn and he grabs it for a sensational the lane led lions in cleveland met in three consecutive championship games detroit won two of them i don't know that the lions were in fact wilder and woolier than every other team they're probably wilder and woolier than paul brown's cleveland browns because brown wouldn't have allowed them to get away with it but because they were a championship team and because they had in bobby lane a particularly charismatic figure to focus on they're the team that developed that image [Music] my first year i played for eight thousand dollars that's what i signed for carol rosenbloom and dawn keller who was the general manager of the baltimore coast at that time they came down there and signed me dawn keller asked him did i have any money i said yeah 20 dollars so they gave me 250 and i thought maybe they were being nice and kind and giving me the money the first check i got they started taking it out i didn't know that was alone you kind of felt like you know you were second-class citizen at the time to baseball baseball had everything i mean 100 000 ball players you know ted williams was playing mickey mantle all these guys making a hundred thousand dollars in 1959 i was the most valuable player on defense in the national football league i was making nine thousand dollars playing in new york city i had to have a job so i went to a friend of mine who ran a thoroughfare market in in fairmont west virginia and i said hey you need somebody to buy groceries carry them the car and i can do that everybody had an off-season job and the practices would sometimes be scheduled so that the players could also earn a couple bucks at another job during the season and i play the game on sunday go to work seven o'clock in the morning on monday and did that for quite a few years and was making more money as the terminal manager for this truck line with the company car that it was making play in football we would have a meeting nine o'clock which lasted until 10 10 30. then we went out on the field at 11 o'clock and we stayed for an hour an hour and a half 12 30 we were done i got myself a sandwich and i went to work with a ready mix concrete company and that's where i got my nickname concrete charlie low salaries often force players to pool their resources it wasn't unusual for three or four of a team's bachelor's to share living arrangements during the season when i was single bill pelington shuler and i we bought a house well we used to go home at night and wrestle those two against me and they'd get me laughing and they put my two legs over my shoulders and they'd whop the heck out of me and i'd laugh i guess the laughing so hard and you know there were three wild guys and then schuler got married and the pelican got married then i got married wives of the players naturally are among the most enthusiastic fans jackie groza is on the left and her companion and the white scarf is mary ellis baumgardner wife of rex bum gardener a former bronze half back and now a sheriff in west virginia we had a tuesday rule and it was weeb's tuesday rule and everyone always laughed about the tuesday rule because you were not supposed to have any kind of intimacies after tuesday and they always said it was the worst kept rule in the league when a young man's in his 20s you think that everyone's going to have any effect i don't think so so i think that was totally a figment of weeb's imagination i mean that was bad news the fact that you did something like that the night before the game that was supposed to take so much out of you that was the myth that took so much out of you that you couldn't possibly perform the next day jane russell demonstrated that wives had ways to break these rules in a scene that recalled one of her movies the actress surprised husband bob waterfield and his road roommate don paul billy don's wife and i had gone to chicago because the game was going to be that sunday we were in the ambassador east and they had the team and the ambassador west but there was a tunnel underneath that you could walk through under the row under the street so i put on my fur coat over my pajamas and i went under the tunnel and i knocked on the door and don opened the door and he said what are you doing here and i said don go east i'm staying here tonight and he just had a fit but he went [Music] our camera has a tough time penetrating the blizzard as paige katherine attempts a field goal it's blocked and the steelers have killed the threat yeah i don't remember uh enjoying playing in those conditions we had uh like three or four charcoal buckets on the sideline that's the only way to keep warm that's the only way we had to keep warm we had one charcoal hamburger maker at yankee stadium and the quarterbacks and the kickers were all around it you couldn't get close to it you had a pail of water and three or four dippers if it was cold the water froze and you had no way to get water in the battle of the blizzard bowl as grimes takes a pitch out from roots he breaks through the line and heads for the sidelines where he crashes into several tacklers he slowed down but comes through without his helmet and races down the clearing for a td covering 57 yards with 10 of the 12 teams located in cold weather cities the nfl season was hard on players and playing surfaces most of the football fields we had to use them as practice fields also they didn't have these elaborate practice facilities like they have today you had to practice on the football field on which you played and it warm out quite a bit by november most fields were dusty and devoid of grass these deserts could be rendered perilous by pounding rain as evidenced by game at the polo grounds between the cardinals and giants during that game it rained so hard that one of our guys got in the bottom of a pile and the water was so deep he almost drowned while bad weather ruined the field for some players it leveled the field for others i love to play in a mud because i wasn't the fastest guy in the world but you put us in mud and i'm just as fast as most of the guys most guys can't run in mud the colts once experienced sloppy field conditions resulting from a force of nature unrelated to weather donna louisville we play the giants an exhibition game and the only thing they had before the football game was a circus all right so circus you got elephants and you got horses and for a whole week they're going all over the damn field and the day of the game they never even had the common decency to rate the field so every once in a while we put our hand down and some guy come on say jesus with a handful of horseman you know or elephant dunk so i said as long as we're moving flip it at the offensive line who cares [Music] for those who like their football rough and tough watch this unusual shot as recorded by our sideline camera blue carpenter grabs a pass and is hit and hit hard by three frozen browns the 50s was uh knock em sock em knock you down and didn't seem to be a tremendous amount of rules it's all legal in this great game of football you had the rule of the jungle and it was brutal the game was opening up and players were moving faster there were more collisions and less conscious the 49ers hardy brown used his shoulder to knock out 21 opponents in a 12-game season in 1951 throughout the league hitting became increasingly vicious and more players were injured but the stars were expected to play through the pain no matter how severe i cracked something here and by the time we flew home i went to the hospital and they said it was a severely sprained ankle so they wrapped it and i played up the rest of you as a matter of fact against green bay that made 157 yards and i went from 205 pounds to 178 i couldn't sleep at night my leg was aching so i went back to the hospital and the doctor says you know you had a broken leg so i played like this four or five games on on a broken leg tom tracy of detroit his knee came through chuck's bicep and just the the bicep the big muscle flopped down here on the forearm right in here so what they did they pushed it up taped it and i played and that's the way it is today we were able to do almost anything we wanted to defensively i mean clothesline guys guys come out of the backfield the first move the defensive end would do was bring his arm around and hit him right in the face and boom that was taught that was the practice the first move was to hook him under the neck might hurt him he might not be able to speak for a few days but you know that was just the way it was bill pelington he closed line the guy he hit a kid in the all-star game and the kid never played again kids swallowed his tongue our trainer eddie block saved the kid's life big daddy's saying don't look at him none of us don't want to play we could have beat the all-stars that game by a hundred points they didn't want to play anymore what kind of animals are we playing against they found out players of the 1950s were not afforded much protection either by the rules or by the flimsy equipment of the time so the players established and enforced their own system of justice this is the way it was whoever did any vicious head hunting or whatever you can believe they got paid back if they didn't get paid back that game if somebody else seen him they got paid back players would take care of that themselves and the officials knew that the officials knew that we would police the game ourselves [Music] i know there was a stage there in the middle 50s that it got really dirty and uh again i remember talking to carol rosenman about it and telling him you know i said they better do something that this or this game is going to get totally out of hand i think that the public just didn't care too much for that type of viciousness the people who loved it were the players and their friends [Music] a brawl could be the result of a short temper or a long memory chuck bed narick once waited a full year to avenge a late hit by cleveland's chuck knoll he's lined up next to lou groza who's going to do the kicking off and my roommate frank wydo was next to me and i said hey frank i said you see that number 65 there yeah charlie i said let's get them okay charlie and groza kicked the ball off i don't know who got it was a kickoff return left but i know all we did we went towards 65 and finally when we got to him and tackled him knocking him down stumped on a frank came along we're beating the crap out of him beating the crap on him he got up literally frothing from the mouth you settle you listen i'll get you i'll get you when this game is over i'll get you chuck noll and ben and eric are walking off the field chuck noll takes his cam helmet off with the face mask and bed mary pops him i went of course everybody gathers around we come in the locker room like this the first thing paul brown says he says chucky you know you shouldn't ever take a fight with bedneric with your helmet off at the time they were doing that the dumont television network they were televising they're doing closing credits as chuck beat up chuck noll so ben eric said when he got home that night the phone was still ringing he picks it up and the commissioner said what are you trying to do we're trying to sell this game and you you know work this guy over right on the closing credits if the league was to grow bert bell knew it had to clean up its image in 1955 when life magazine did a cover story on the nfl entitled savagery on sunday bell sued here's this article that comes out in one of the most influential magazines in the country with pictures the league decided they were going to challenge this article and and sue life magazine for libel the league won the case and what was more important as far as the nfl was concerned was that you never really saw a story like that about the nfl thereafter no other magazine attempted to write a story focusing on that part of the game again which was just what the nfl wanted and which was why they opposed a suit in the first place as commissioner bert bell was the league's most vigorous defender and he made sure the players were its most visible salesman he came to training camp and would tell us to be very friendly to the fans after the games before the games you shake hands you sign autographs and things like that because he was trying to build something he would go through all the do's and don'ts about where you hang out how you're seen off the field how you conduct yourself how important it is with the bubblegum cars now becoming a big thing to be a person that you know was presentable to make the game as exciting as they could but basically he was looking for that image again off the field it wasn't phony but presented them as people separate from the person you saw in the helmet ed sullivan's show on sunday night where he'd introduced the athletes on television my father said i want to make sure he's to tell the pr guy joe labrum i want one of our players on every goddamn sunday night i know that you'll get the kick i get but i'm saying alex webster close-up alex stand up there and take a bow are you please i'm professional football otto graham why a stand up there and take them out and i'd like also to ask one of the chicago beers one of the great ones in chicago bears stand up and take a bow rick cassaris rick would you stand up and think about i want them on television everywhere i want to wear a suit i want them to look good this is alan amici of the baltimore coast who today in the first sudden death playoff and professional football went across the goal line with the winning touchdown so let's have a tremendous hand he saw television the 50s these people coming back from the war they were looking for entertainment how would you take these great athletes what better way than on television major western this is johnny major we're at the club levarno there's a game all right but the only way we'll find out where is if we play well the giants play in new york and new york is the media capital of the world and therefore any great new york athlete is made larger driven more quickly to iconic status or superstar status because the owners of cbs and nbc in the new york times and all the magazines are based here the giants attracted that influential new york crowd by winning the nfl title in 1956. our sideline camera records the classic shot of the giant marvelous metal triplet the heart fighting pullback and a quake and shakum charge bulldozes to the chicago three-yard line the giant's success on the field led to even more success off the field and that caused resentment around the league most of the guys were making nine ten twelve thousand dollars and the guys in new york was they were getting all of this extra money for the advertisement the commercials and things like that and everybody in the league resented that i don't care what they say if you talk to somebody they say they didn't they telling a lie hey joe are you still using that greasy kid stuff on your hair what else vitalis that's what else then they have the all-american boy gifford that's it rub it in good gift was a kind of image and the first one in football of what ordinary american man would have wanted to have been oh i wish i could have been frank gifford is this feeling come on sport get that greasy stuff out of your hair and then try by thomas frank gifford may have symbolized the glamour of pro football in the big city but the giants of the 1950s became best known for their punishing defense [Music] it was in new york at yankee stadium that the fans first began chanting for the defense and it was there that a ferocious linebacker named sam huff number 70 became a national celebrity sam huff new york's great linebacker has won more publicity for the pro games defensive maneuvers than any other single player the end of the decade suddenly defense brutal hard defense is celebrated we went from venerating offense above all other things to defense to toughness sports tried to come up with key terms that would kind of pin this down sanctioned savagery they would call it vengeance with style you know try to get some kind of sense of that balance between the artistry of football and and the brutality of football the camera loves it because the camera catches the action the violence the collision and you can't narrate that on radio but you show it on television and the fans know immediately this is big time i remember when my father saw sam huff on the front of time magazine see boys he said there he is on the front of time magazine he said i told you defense is going to begin to take over the giants have made defense the big thing and i remember him calling chris shekel one time he said chris don't forget to introduce the defense the fans are in love with the defense not with the goddamn offense [Music] we'd like to take you into territory that is forbidden to persons other than the players and people on official business this is the door to the locker room of the baltimore colts what goes on behind the scenes well let's suppose it's a sunday morning the day most cold games are played the players get a briefing just like a pilot about to take off in a flight just before game time the backfield men warm up their pitching arms and now the colts are ready for action and here's how they did on the field during one of the most exciting seasons in national pro football history over the course of the decade the baltimore colts led by fullback alan amichi and quarterback johnny unitas went from being one of the nfl's worst teams to one of the best the colts quite literally owned the town and their players were among the first to use their names to score points in business this is alan i'd like to invite you to try a powerhouse sandwich at my drive-in at 5800 reisterstown road i'll meet you at amici i remember we bought our first row house we paid eight thousand dollars for this house john united came over and laid our kitchen floor everybody pitched in painted and helped us get that little row house ready there was never any you know your husband's name in the paper and mine isn't or you know you have a new car and i don't i don't think that anyone cared who scored the touchdown as long as someone scored it i used to come on the field then something would say look around the stands and see all these people in pregame warm-up and i turn around and i look around i said man phew i don't believe this i said i'm a baltimore colt i'd be pulling in my jersey looking at that blue the colts of the late 50s were rich in star quality yet they had a working-class humility that matched the blue-collar fabric of baltimore it was a dramatic contrast to the high-profile giants team they met in their first championship game [Music] yankee stadium jam-packed for the greatest playoff game in pro football history new york giants versus the baltimore colts for the national pro title it has been called the greatest game ever played but with eight fumbles and eight quarterback sacks it was hardly that it was really 59 minutes of prelude setting the stage for an unforgettable finish with only seven seconds left steve myra boots a field goal to tie up the score and that brings on the first extra period sudden death play in football history the championship game between the cults and the giants is everything people think it is because people think it is it came at a particularly dramatic moment and it happened in new york where all the media people had their ears to the ground they knew that something was happening here and that this was gripping theaters it's just everything the whole country wanted there were no losers really because the game is lifted up and it gets parody with pro baseball the football championship now is as important as the world series that's a great moment in american life and it has happened with astonishing speed for the baltimore players and fans the celebration was about one game and one championship but for bert bell it was much more it was the culmination of his life's work after the 58 game ended i remember bert bell standing there he was very emotional he was crying and then years later you know i began to realize that bert bell was a man that understood the significance of what had happened there that day he i think is accurate to say had been nursing the nfl along for quite a while and he knew that this was a turning point just 10 months later burt bell was dead he suffered a heart attack while watching an eagle steelers game at franklin field pete rozelle was named commissioner and the league office moved from bell's second floor walk-up in philadelphia to a suite on park avenue in new york it symbolized a move toward a larger more corporate game as the decade came to a close so too did an era in pro football for the nfl the 1950s was the decade that served as the bridge from the sandlots to the super bowl a time when the sheer joy of the game reflected the glow of post-war america for the players of that generation pro football was more than just a game it was the game of their lives i would have to say the main motivation for playing football in the era i played is because i like to do it i will bet you my life that i have more fun playing football than the guys do now my life is coming to an end and i'm very proud of what i did at my time and to be able to say that in my day i was one of the best that played the game not the best but one of the best and to say i was a part of that that was great in the 50s was the cornerstone i believe of what pro football is today i would say i was at the right place the right time with the right people and i think the most fortunate things that has ever happened to me was being able to play in the year of pro football that i got to play in i wouldn't trade it for any era of the nfl's history and it was an absolutely great experience it was just a bunch of guys who enjoyed playing the game with an opportunity to play for a living meager living but a living i was born one morning it was drizzling rain fighting and trouble are my middle name i was raised in the cane break by an old mama lion can't know a high tone woman make me walk the line you load 16 tons what are you getting another day older and deeper in depth saint peter don't you call me cause i can't go i owe my soul to the company stone [Music] if you see me coming better step aside a lot of men didn't a lot of men died one fist of iron the other of steel if the right one don't get you then the left one will you load sixteen tons [Music] [Music] to the company store [Music] you

Channel: deputay

Views: 196,745

Keywords: the game of their lives, 2001, hbo, documentary, nfl, pro football, 1950's, classic, sports, 50s

Id: wQqurzLCEmI

Length: 56min 32sec (3392 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020