The Best Game Ever

It was a time when elementary school teachers earned more than professional football players.  Most players worked second jobs, and physical conditioning was not only mocked, coaches strictly discouraged it.  Football was mostly a bunch of hard drinking, hard playing hard heads, who just loved the game.

Almost no one watched football in 1958, until a fluke put the greatest game into the living rooms of millions of Americans across the country.  It was a marketing dream come true, and it was a da* good game.  Mark Bowden's (of Black Hawk Down fame) The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL is also a da* good read.

I grant you, this is a fairly targeted book, not likely to put goosebumps onto the sports-averse reader.  I'm no rabid fan of the game, but it's a great story, and what really hooked me were the characters.  Raymond Berry, now considered one of the greatest receivers of all time, was slow, had poor vision, and was born with one leg shorter than the other.  Bowden captures the times, the characters, and the thrill of the game.

Bowden also digs up some nearly unbelievable stories.  I'll just tell one.  Near the end of the tied game, when millions of people were holding their collective breath, a fan accidentally unplugged the extension cord connecting the only television camera in the stadium.  TV screens across the country went black... I'll leave it there, but the story goes on.

Photos are printed throughout the book, but I was so excited about the game itself that I had to hold my hand over the images to keep from spoiling the story.  Even the photographs have a "cinderella story" to them, as revealed at the end of the book.