The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL - Softcover

Bowden, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802144128 ISBN 13: 9780802144126

Publisher: Grove Press, 2009

Synopsis

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for the NFL Championship game. Played in front of sixty-four thousand fans and millions of television viewers around the country, the game would be remembered as the greatest in football history. 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. An estimated forty-five million viewers—at that time the largest crowd to have ever watched a football game—tuned in to see what would become the first sudden-death contest in NFL history. It was a battle of the league's best offense—the Colts—versus its best defense—the Giants. And it was a contest between the blue-collar Baltimore team versus the glamour boys of the Giants squad. The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sport. Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the championship, it is destined to be a sports classic.

About this title

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.

From AudioFile:

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. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0802144128
• ISBN 13: 9780802144126
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 340