On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for that 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 - but the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football.
On 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 a freezing Sunday evening in front of 64,000 fans and an estimated forty-five million television viewers around the country - at that time the largest crowd to have ever watched a football game - the championship would become 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 history of American sports. Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the championship, it is destined to be a sports classic.
It's been fifty years since the 1958 championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. More than simply a great game, it was a great game played at just the right time. The fledgling sport was about to step out from baseball's shadow as the medium of television stood poised to broadcast it to the masses in the 1960s. Bowden weaves solid research and mini-biographies throughout historical accounts of the time. Phil Gigante's deep tone is as steady as a scoring drive. The appropriate accents he uses to represent players, coaches, and others are the only creative enhancement needed to capture the inherent drama in this story. This should be required listening for any fan who doesn't yet know the significance of this seminal football game. M.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Mark Bowden is the author of seven books, including Black Hawk Down, Bringing the Heat, Killing Pablo, and Guests of the Ayatollah. He reported at The Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. He lives in the Philadelphia area.
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