For Mark Bowden, writing a book about the 1958 pro football championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants was a return to his roots.
Bowden made his name writing prize-winning articles for The Philadelphia Inquirer and best-selling books such as Black Hawk Down, his reconstruction of a disastrous U.S. military raid in Somalia, and Killing Pablo, his chronicle of the manhunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
But before all that came Baltimore. Bowden was 13 when his family moved to town in the mid-1960s. He graduated from Loyola College and worked for six years as a reporter for the Baltimore News-American. He still teaches a writing class at Loyola when he's not penning cover stories for The Atlantic or Sunday columns for the Inquirer.
Bowden also covered pro football for three seasons in Philadelphia. So between his old hometown and his old subject matter, The Best Game Ever offered him quite a trip into his past.
When you moved here, was the 1958 game considered a landmark event for the city?
The Colts were a power in the NFL when I moved to Baltimore, so everyone I met was a Colts fan. And yes, I knew that that game from 1958 was particularly revered.
How did you come to write a book about the subject?
I had just finished a book about the Iran hostage crisis that took about five years. So my publisher, who is always looking for more from me, suggested doing what David Halberstam used to do and interspersing shorter books with the longer ones. In that conversation, he suggested a book about the 1958 game. ... I usually ignore his suggestions, but in this case, it struck me as something that would be interesting, both because I remembered that Colts team as a kid and because I had been a football writer.
What did you see as the thrust of the book?
I covered a lot of football games, and I only used to feel that I was scratching the surface. I never understood what really happened, and the only way to really understand was to study film and watch it with players and coaches. So it was a fantasy project to watch a game and really study it, so I could understand why one team won and one team lost.
For example, I had always known that Raymond Berry was a great football player, but I never understood why. Only by watching the film did I understand that he was the key player in that 1958 game. And that led me into an exploration of how he became the player he was.
