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

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for the NFL Championship game. Football, growing in popularity amid America’s postwar economic boom, was still greatly overshadowed by the country’s favored pastime, baseball, but the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football. In The Best Game Ever, Mark Bowden delivers a brilliant narrative on the key players in that face-off, and the effect the contest had on the modern game of football and today’s NFL.

The championship, played on a freezing Sunday evening in front of sixty-four thousand fans in attendance and millions of television viewers around the country, 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.