The image did not add up in Raymond Berry's mind. There he was, sharing a moment of purest fulfillment with his Baltimore Colts teammates as they left Yankee Stadium on Dec. 28, 1958. World champions! They could call themselves that after beating the New York Giants in a tense overtime before a huge national television audience.
And yet, there stood National Football League commissioner Bert Bell, quietly weeping.
"I didn't comprehend why, but the memory stuck with me," Berry said recently from his home in Tennessee. "It struck me years later that he knew his baby just got born. I think he was by himself in understanding that."
What Bell knew was that 45 million people had just watched Berry and John Unitas create something beautiful on the most dramatic stage possible. What he suspected was that the NFL would never have to fight for attention again.
One can easily argue that dozens of games have been better, pass for pass and tackle for tackle. But consider the collection of famous names involved, the debut of sudden-death overtime, the expansion teams that formed in the game's aftermath, the record audience that tuned in and realized how perfectly pro football fit America's favorite new toy - television.
How many games can claim all those components? How many pulled together, in one day of drama, all the factors that transformed pro football from small time to the nation's most popular sport?
Author Mark Bowden was skeptical of the "Greatest Game" tag when he began research for a book on the contest. By the time the former Baltimore resident and News American staffer finished writing The Best Game Ever early this year, he was convinced.
"Off the field, you had the mounting interest in pro football, the extraordinary growth of television, and then you had the serendipity of a dramatic overtime game that spilled into prime time," he said. "Some game was going to ignite the interest in pro football, and that turned out to be the game."
In America's Game, his history of the NFL's rise to power, Michael MacCambridge pinpointed the game as a seminal moment. "In the 1958 title game," he wrote, "pro football had arrived as a viable alternative to baseball, not merely as the most popular sport, but the one that best defined America."
Such grandiose notions were far from the minds of players on that chilly evening. Maybe Tex Maule, in Sports Illustrated, was the first to stand back from the whole spectacle and say it to the world.
