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December 05, 2008
Photographer Of Famed ’58 Colts-Giants Shot Reflects
Fifty years ago, Neil Leifer snapped a now-historic photo of the great Colts-Giants game.
Stacy Karten
Contributing Editor
In what is considered “The Greatest Game Ever Played” in National Football League history — the 1958 championship overtime victory between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants — a photo of Alan “The Horse” Ameche plunging over the goal line for the winning touchdown became synonymous with the contest.
The story behind that famed shot adds to the lore of a game that put Baltimore on the professional sports map. The game’s 50th anniversary will be marked on Dec. 28.
Perched behind the end zone where Ameche bolted in was 16-year-old Neil Leifer, who captured that moment with his Yashica Mat twin lens reflex camera. He also took the famous photo of Ameche being carried off the field.
To make the day even more special, it was the young Leifer’s birthday.
“As a Giants fan, I was disappointed they lost. I would much rather have taken a photo of Frank Gifford [the Giants running back] scoring the winning touchdown,” Mr. Leifer, now a Manhattan resident, told the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES.
The photo, he explained, was not published until one year later when Dell paid him $25 for its use in a sports publication.
“I went home after the game and processed the film in my darkroom. The next day, I took it to Sports Illustrated but didn’t realize their deadline was Sunday night and the magazine was already put to bed,” he recalled.
The photo became iconic years later as the sudden death game started being labeled “the greatest game ever played.”
“I thought the photo was nice, nothing special,” Mr. Leifer said. Had he better used his camera, he added, he would have focused closer on Ameche. Yet when the photo was printed in full frame, not cropped, it captured the “mood and feeling of Yankee Stadium.”
Today, the shot appears on the first page of his recently published book, “Guts and Glory: The Golden Age of American Football, 1958-1978.” (Taschen).
Mr. Leifer remembers being an amateur hobby photographer in 1958 who had to get to that championship game — he went to every Giants regular season game.
“We were poor and couldn’t afford to buy tickets,” he said. “There was an Army Veterans Hospital in the Bronx [he lived in Queens] that brought vets in wheelchairs to the games. Between 30 and 70 wheelchairs would be lined up along a wall just past the end zone.”
Mr. Leifer would help bring the veterans into the stadium and then stay. He befriended the security guards by bringing them coffee, became known and was free to stay.
“They would look the other way. All the guards knew me by then,” he said, noting that by the time of the sudden death period, the guards were more concerned about drunken fans running near the end zone.
A hobby turned into a profession and Mr. Leifer became a staff photographer for Sports Illustrated and Time Magazine. Some 200 of his photographs have graced their covers, as well as those of Look, LIFE and Newsweek. He was only 18 when his photo of Y.A. Tittle appeared on a Sports Illustrated cover. Mr. Leifer now produces and directs movies.
On the occasion of the big game’s golden anniversary, Mr. Leifer will turn 66. Still, he fondly remember that cold, gray day at Yankee Stadium.
“As you get older,” he said, “look back at certain events that shape your life and career.”
Olesker’s Love Affair With Colts
Just in time for the reminiscing surrounding the Colts-Giants 1958 championship game, Baltimore writer Michael Olesker’s new book — “The Colts’ Baltimore: A City and Its Love Affair in the 1950s” (Johns Hopkins University Press) — explores the city’s relationship with the hometown team in that era.
“It’s not just a football book,” Mr. Olesker said. “It’s about why there was this intense love affair. I thought about writing this book a year ago. I knew the hold the game has been held in peoples’ imaginations and the affection for the team and the characters.”
Growing up in Northwest Baltimore, he remembered being a 13-year-old watching the game with four friends in his parents’ living room.
“It was the first time we felt good about anything in sports. We had just gotten the Orioles and Colts. All of a sudden, we had this team with performers and characters, and we had access to them,” he recalled.
He recalled the emotions of seeing 30,000 people come to the airport after the game to greet their championship team.
Mr. Olesker, 63, even remembers seeing Colts’ star Art Donovan at a brotherhood breakfast at Liberty Jewish Center, then in Liberty Heights.
“The Colts management was good about sending the players into the community,” he noted. “They were working guys like us. The ballplayers felt connected to the fans at the hip.”
In fact, the low salaries back then saw the players work at various jobs in town during the off-season and hang out with fans in bars and restaurants.
Beginning his career as a sportswriter with the Baltimore News American in 1966, Mr. Olesker, who now writes a column for the Baltimore Examiner, would get to know many of those players.
“One of the joys of writing this book was spending time in the Central Pratt Library reading all the old papers,” he said.
And, of course, he enjoyed interviewing the personalities of the era. “I spent three hours interviewing Raymond Berry in a hotel room. He reviewed every play of that game and said that game changed his faith in God,” Mr. Olesker said.
Ultimately, that game was more than a football competition, Mr. Olesker said.
“We were just little Baltimore. New York was everything. We were triumphant,” he said.
Writing the book, he added, confirmed the “depth of feeling we still have for the Colts.”