Distant Reply - The Greatest Football Game Ever

Crabtownboy · Sep 19, 2008

How the greatest game in football history looks 50 years later, through the eyes of a modern NFL head coach.

Watching game film with Andy Reid, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, can make you woozy. He lounges behind the wide desk in his office, feet up, using a wireless control to freeze the image of a play on a screen at the opposite end of the room, and then starts rolling it forward and backward, forward and back, first the whole play and then only portions of it, forward and back, forward and back, until he has pieced all the moving parts together.

Reid is a very big man, a former collegiate offensive lineman, and when I met him last spring, he was in full off-season mode: tan, relaxed, and draped in a colorful Hawaiian silk shirt large enough to display the entire Amazon rain forest. Reid was coming off another winning year—the Eagles had made it to the second round of the postseason playoffs just months earlier—and he was already well into his preparations for the next season. Pro football is a year-round occupation these days, so he was doing me a favor by agreeing to help me with research for my book, The Best Game Ever, an account of the celebrated 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants.

I’ve written about football in the past, but I am by no means an expert, so I had gone looking for a pro coach to help me break down film of the famous game. I live just outside Philadelphia and once covered the Eagles for the local newspaper, so I phoned Derek Boyko, the team’s affable public-relations director. Boyko warned me that the club’s assistant coaches were probably too busy, but he nevertheless agreed to ask around. He called back to say that all of the coaches, curious about the way the game was played before most of them were born, had expressed an interest. “But they need permission from Andy,” he said. “I’ll ask him when he comes back from leave in a few weeks.”

Boyko called me weeks later to say, “Andy wants to do it.”

It seemed odd at first for a pro coach to have never seen film of this historic game—a little like finding a doctor of English literature who had never read Macbeth. But success in pro football, as in any intensely competitive, constantly evolving arena, depends primarily on current intelligence: What did my opponent last do against me? What did he do last week? A pro coach is not inclined to search for what he needs in old black-and-white film. History is … well, history.

But no craftsman or professional can be completely uninterested in seeing how he measures up against past standards of excellence. How good was the game then? How capable were the players? How clever were the coaches and schemes?
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Click here for the rest of the article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810/nfl-eagles

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Distant Reply - The Greatest Football Game Ever

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