The Best Game Ever, Mark Bowden
The Best Game Ever, Mark Bowden
3 Rating(s)
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The Best Game Ever
Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL

Author: Mark Bowden

Narrator: Phil Gigante

Unabridged: 5 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 05/12/2008


Synopsis

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for that season’s NFL Championship game. Football, growing in popularity amid America’s post-war economic boom, was still greatly over-shadowed by the country’s favored pastime—baseball—but the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football.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.Played on a freezing Sunday evening in front of 64,000 fans and an estimated forty-five million television viewers around the country—at that time the largest crowd to have ever watched a football game—the championship would become the first sudden-death contest in NFL history. With two minutes left in regulation, Baltimore had possession deep in its own territory, and the ball in the hands of the still unproven quarterback Johnny Unitas.The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sports.

About Mark Bowden

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul

The best thing, for me, about this recounting of the historic 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants is the sheer quality of the writing. The game, the first overtime championship game in the history of the National Football League, was so full of suspenseful......more

Adequate, short book, about the Giants vs Colts 1958 NFL Championship game, the first to go into sudden death overtime, the game that affixed football as the made-for-TV sport, and (it still is said) the greatest game ever played.......more