http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01390.html
By Leonard Shapiro
Special to Washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, December 9, 2008; 12:26 PM
Both casual fans and fanatical followers of professional football would be wise to do themselves a favor and set aside two hours Saturday starting at 9 p.m. to savor a goose-bump inducing ESPN documentary focusing on the historic 1958 NFL Championship game.
"The Greatest Game Ever Played" will air fifteen days short of the 50th anniversary of that stirring contest between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants played on Dec. 28, 1958 in Yankee Stadium. On a chilly winter day of pulsating drama, it also marked the first and last time an NFL title game ever went into sudden death overtime -- words (and the concept they represented) many of the players on the field had never even heard.
I saw the game, listened to it on radio, cheering for the Giants because too many kids I knew had suddenly switched from the Redskins to the Colts because the Colts were good. As if that mattered!
(CT is excused, since he says the Colts were his second favorite team!)
Wolff the immortal voice of the Nats, and Shirley Povich's kid!Former Washington Senators play-by-play man Bob Wolff, also in the film, did the radio broadcast that afternoon with a young spotter by his side named Maury Povich.
The back and forth between past and present players caught on Dahl's own ESPN cameras also is often priceless. Without giving away too much, at one point, recently-retired Giants defensive end Michael Strahan tells Hall of Fame Colts defensive tackle Art "Fatso" Donovan that "I'm so lucky I didn't play back then, oh my goodness." To which Donovan responded "you woulda' loved it!!!"
"The Mercury astronauts knew they were doing something very different," Chris Berman said in a conference call with reporters last week. "They (the players) didn't know it at the time, but in this game they became the Mercury astronauts of professional football. It's what allowed the pro game to become what it is today.
"I'm a history major...If you take a step back...if you put on the film of this game, it looks like modern football, even if the players are a little smaller. It looks like the game you're seeing today, and it really does begin with this football game."
