Great Memories

The dream comes to Sam Huff in the night, from out of that cold afternoon so long ago, when but for a hitch in his pads, he would celebrate today his greatest victory instead of his most painful defeat.

In the dream, the football thrown by John Unitas comes right for Huff’s head, like an incoming cruise missile.

“Bat it down! Get a hand on it!” he yells.

But he can’t, not even 40 years later.

The pass zips past his ear and is caught by Raymond Berry, just behind him, and the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts go on to fashion what’s generally accepted as the NFL’s masterpiece, a 23-17 Colt victory in overtime. The game was played Dec. 28, 1958, and it remains the the standard to which all “great” NFL games are compared. In arguably his greatest performance, Baltimore’s Unitas coldly reduced the game to mathematics, finding his least likely receiver, Berry, for one big reception after another.

“Forget Ray Berry,” says Huff, “we lost that game because the Colts had Johnny Unitas and we didn’t.

“A lot of people look back and say if we’d covered Ray Berry better that day [he caught a record 12 passes for 176 yards], we’d have won. Not true. It was Unitas. If we’d stopped Berry, Unitas would’ve done the same thing with Lenny Moore. Unitas [26 of 40 passing for 322 yards] was that great that day.”

The game went into the NFL’s first overtime, before 64,185 in Yankee Stadium and 40 million more watching on black-and-white televisions, most of them mesmerized by the intensity of it all.

December 1958:

* On the day the Colts beat the Giants, the major news story unfolding was in Oriente Province, Cuba, where dictator Fulgencia Batista’s 10,000 troops were being engaged in a major battle by Fidel Castro-led insurgents.

* In Los Angeles, the hot movie was “South Pacific” at the Egyptian. “Around the World in 80 Days” was at the Carthay Circle.

* New homes in the Country Club Estates tract in Anaheim, on Katella near Disneyland, were selling for $18,500. Westridge Estates homes, in Canoga Park, were going for $19,500.

And on the morning of Dec. 28, the NFL was about to become a major league.

And it all happened on a day when New Yorkers began reading newspapers again. The city’s newspaper deliverer’s union had struck Dec. 9, closing all newspapers until a settlement was reached the night before the game.

Recently, the NFL gathered together a few of that game’s principals--Huff, Unitas, Berry, Frank Gifford and Art Donovan--and rehashed it all again. Each Giant, it seemed, still carried around a demon or two, Huff his slow hand and Gifford three lost fumbles.

“I know and my teammates know that if I didn’t fumble three times that day we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation,” said Gifford, who’d played for Bakersfield High and USC before launching his 12-year NFL career in 1952.

Huff talked about Unitas’ laser-beam pass and his slow hand.

After the Giants’ 37-year-old Charlie Conerly had taken the Giants the length of the field in the final quarter and scored on a 15-yard pass play to Gifford, New York had a 17-14 lead, and the crowd--including 15,000 from Baltimore--was going wild.

Later in the quarter, still protecting the 17-14 lead, New York Coach Jim Lee Howell refused to gamble on a fourth-and-inches play in Giants territory. Don Chandler punted, putting Unitas and Berry in business again.

Never before or since has a receiver played so huge a role in a major drive in a major football game.

Berry, a slow but sure-handed receiver whose right leg was longer than his left, caught three passes for 62 yards, augmenting each catch with extra running yardage.

The last one was the third-and-four pass over the middle to Berry for the first down at New York’s 13, with seven seconds remaining for a tying field goal.

That was the pass Huff, the most feared linebacker of his day, still sees coming for his head.

“That pass was like a line drive, and it was coming right to my head,” he said in a phone interview.

“I played my position perfectly. I was in the right place and here was this pass coming right at me. ‘Knock it down!’ my brain said, but there was kind of a hitch in my shoulder pad and I couldn’t get my arm up. That ball went right by my ear, and Berry caught it.

“If I knock that ball down, we win and nobody remembers that play.

“Sometimes I’ve wondered if I’d lifted weights in those days I could have gotten my arm up, through that kink in the pads. Only a few guys lifted in those days, at night, after practice. I was always too tired. We just didn’t realize how much stronger you could really get with weights.”

Berry’s first down set up a hurry-up 20-yard field goal by Steve Myhra, and the NFL now had its first overtime.

And as brilliant as Unitas had been in regulation, he now ran the Colts’ offense with the cool of a blackjack dealer. He was aided by offensive linemen like Jim Parker, who kept New York’s Andy Robustelli at bay all day.

“If they give me three seconds to throw, forget it,” a cocky, 25-year-old Unitas said afterward.

New York won the overtime coin flip and took the kickoff, but couldn’t make a first down and punted. The Giants never got the ball back.

Unitas took Baltimore 80 yards in 13 plays, capping it with Alan Ameche’s one-yard burst through the right side.

“We got the halfback running ahead of Alan and we got a double-team block on the tackle,” Unitas told Sports Illustrated after the game.

“When I slapped the ball in Alan’s belly, I knew they couldn’t stop the play if we’d needed 10 yards.”

And before even Ameche’s delirious teammates could help him off the cold turf, the greatest game ever played had become a riot. The goalposts began coming down immediately when thousands poured out of the stands.

In Baltimore that afternoon, a man listening to Myhra kick the tying field goal became so excited he drove his car into a telephone pole, knocked himself out, and never heard the Colts’ winning touchdown.

Huff wishes he’d have run into a telephone pole late in the fourth quarter. Asked if he lives to be 90, what will be his last, vivid memory of that game.

“That football, whizzing right by my ear and being unable to do anything about,” he said.

He also recalled a pregame remark by the Giant defensive coach, Tom Landry (New York’s offensive coordinator was Vince Lombardi).

“He said, ‘When you play Baltimore, they’re ahead, 7-0, when the game starts because no one can stop Unitas and Lenny Moore from getting seven points. To win, we couldn’t allow them any more points.’ ”