Free Everything They Had by David Halberstam

bar to watch and eat and drink. The sense of a sport on the rise was obvious—and nowhere was that more obvious than in New York, where the football Giants began to become something new in pro football ranks, media celebrities. Football stars like Frank Gifford, movie-star handsome, were doing commercials (for very little money, mind you), and being welcomed as never before in bars like Toots Shor’s, where baseball players, fighters and jockeys had held forth. The game was coming of age.
    With the coming of network television professional football became a truly national game, with a national constituency. A fan did not have to live in Baltimore to be a Unitas or a Colts fan, or for that matter to live in New York to root for the Giants defense led by middle linebacker Sam Huff. Millions of sports fans who cared nothing about Pittsburgh, had never been to the University of Louisville, and had no intention of ever visiting Baltimore turned on their sets on Sunday to watch the daring exploits of a young quarterback from Pittsburgh who had gone to the University of Louisville and now played for the Baltimore Colts. The camera, it turned out, was quite dazzled by Johnny Unitas, the least likely, it would seem, of American media heroes.
    In a way his career marked America in a cultural and economic transition. He grew up under the worst hardships inflicted on blue-collar America in the Depression and post-Depression years, living in a home which received almost no protections from the government, and yet he became one of the early celebrities under the gaze of a new and powerful medium which was going to change the nature of the economy and make part of the society infinitely more glitzy. He knew all too well an America which was tough and poor, and he was largely unmoved by his place in this new America which was more affluent and more celebrity oriented. Unlike Namath (and Ali), who came after him and understood intuitively that in the new sports world created by television, it was always both sport and show, he always thought it was merely sport. His values had been set in that earlier age. Yet Unitas became the first superstar of the new age, the signature player of an old sport amplified by a new and loving medium, the perfect working-class hero for a sport just beginning to leave its working-class roots behind.
    To the degree that radio liked football, it loved offensive stars—quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers. But television was different, it had eyes for the defensive stars as well. Fans loved not only the long passes and the brilliant broken-field runs; they loved the savagery of clean hits. In this new era, living in the media capital of the world, Huff had become the first great national celebrity on defense. CBS did a documentary on him, “The Violent World of Sam Huff,” and Time magazine put him on the cover. Giants fans cheered more loudly when their defense came on the field than when the offense took over. “Our offensive unit was not highly regarded,” Kyle Rote remembered, years later. “When the offensive unit went out on the field, the defense shouted, ‘Get in there and hold them.’” Because of that new rivalries developed and flourished: If New York against Baltimore was not necessarily a historic rivalry, then that collision of the Colt offense against the Giant defense, a matchup perhaps without historic roots, was one the knowing fan could readily anticipate.
    In 1958, in what was later called the greatest game ever played, Unitas led the Colts to victory in overtime in the championship game against the Giants. He did it with two spectacular long drives, one at the end of regulation, the other in the sudden-death overtime. It was a signature game. Ewbank, not known for his pregame inspirational speeches, really pushed his players before the game. “In 14 years,” defensive end Gino Marchetti said about pregame pep talks, “I heard