The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL
By Mark Bowden
Product Description
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.
------------------------------------------------
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #714 in Books
Published on: 2008-05-05
Number of items: 1
Binding: Hardcover
240 pages
----------------------------------------------
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Mark Bowden is the author of seven books, including Black Hawk Down and Guests of the Ayatollah. He reported at The Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.
-----------------------------------------------
Customer Reviews
The Best Game Ever
Its a great book to read and to learn more about a game and football itself. The book takes you inside the huddle and puts you in the middle of the field and in the mind of the great Johnny Unitas.
Into the Wayback Machine......
I THINK I saw this game on our old B/W TV....
None the less, a great chronicle of this great game.
If you're my age, 55, it brings us back to another era, where really tough men played a really tough game, not for the big bucks, but because it was their one and only job. From this game, though, the NFL matured. The players became larger than life, a bit spoiled, but what celebrity/athlete hasn't become larger than life?
With father's day coming up, this is a good gift for an old fa*t my age!
The author is a journalist from the newspaper beat writer era, and I think this is a major plus. I only wish the pictures could have been a bit larger and glossy...minus that----this was a good read and well worth the time.
Will we ever see a video of this game? How about releasing the NFL Film's coaches tapes? It would be as riveting as the story....
The author was lucky enough to see these films, how about us?
The Raymond Berry Biography in Disguise
What you have here is not so much a book about the game but rather some feather duster treatment of a few of the people who played in it ... and a whole lot about Raymond Berry which, combined with the Epilogue, constitute the only redeeming features of the book.
You will read about John Unitas but there are certainly better books about him. You will read about Sam Huff, but oddly in this volume you will not read a word about the 1960 documentary narrated by Walter Cronkite called "The Violent World of Sam Huff" which will tell you more about the player than anything you'll find between the pages of The Best Game Ever. You'll find out about the tenacious kid who took a lucky picture of the final score in overtime but who really cares? And you'll soak a little in the late 1950's nostalgia assuming you are interested in how many people watched television back then.
To tell the truth, if it weren't for the Epilogue featuring some transcribed conversations among Colt veterans this would be a 1.5 star book. And without the Berry story, there would be virtually no book at all. The author handles language well enough. He just didn't produce anything close to The Best Sports Book Ever.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น