2024 the best game ever review

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The NFL championship game that changed football forever: a New York Times–bestselling sports history classic by the author of Black Hawk Down.
 
Yankee Stadium, December 28, 1958. What was about to go down on this Sunday evening in front of sixty-four thousand fans and forty-five million home viewers—the largest viewership ever assembled for a live televised event—was the first sudden death overtime in NFL history. This one battle between the league’s best offense, the Baltimore Colts, and the best defense, the New York Giants, would propel professional football from a moderately popular pastime into America’s favorite sport.
 
On the field and roaming the sidelines were seventeen future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti; and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff; and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry. But they were opposing teams in more ways than one. It was a contest between Baltimore blue-collars, many of whom worked off-season taking shifts at Bethlehem Steel, and the trendy, New York glamour boys of splashy magazine ads and TV commercials who mingled with politicians, Broadway stars, and even Ernest Hemingway.
 
Mark Bowden “dives into the trenches of the 1958 NFL Championship game” for a riveting play-by-play account, the stories behind the key players, the effect it had on the league, the sport, and the country (Entertainment Weekly).
 
“Bring[s] the contest so alive that you find yourself almost wondering . . . years later, how it will turn out in the end.” —The New York Times
 
“The Best Game Ever is sure to become an instant Sacred Text.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B008V43T8W
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press; First Trade Paper edition (May 6, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 6, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5732 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 292 pages
Reviewer: Joseph R. Funaro
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Title Says It All!
Review: Captivating glimpse of football history. A page turner, amazing insights, stories and anecdotes in an easy to read style. Funny, accurate, poignant capturing the emotions of a wonderful sports phenomenon.

Reviewer: Bruce J. Wasser
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: an evocative and gripping journalistic description of a pivotal sports moment
Review: Appropriately dedicated to David Halberstam, "The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL" seamlessly blends a gripping journalistic description of the thrilling National Football League championship game with riveting personal stories of participants and witnesses. Author Mark Bowen clearly outlines the background and significance of the contest; he does so with both admiration and considerable affection for the men who fought on the semi-frozen Yankee Stadium turf that late December afternoon and evening. If Bowen extols the performance of the favored Giants, he reserves his greatest warmth for the underdog Baltimore Colts. Seventeen members of the NFL Hall of Fame participated in the contest, "the greatest concentration of football talent ever assembled for a single game."Bowen provides compelling portraits of some of the sport's iconic figures: Vince Lombardi, Sam Huff, Tom Landry, Frank Gifford, Art "Fatso" Donovan, Lenny Moore and Johnny Unitas. However, Raymond Berry, the self-made wide receiver for the Colts holds a special place in Bowen's heart. Undersized and undervalued, Berry quietly revolutionized the sport with his meticulous preparation and unceasing quest for information. As the Colts marched down the field for the winning touchdown, the public address announcer's repetitious statement, "Unitas to Berry," exemplified two emerging stars summoning peak performances during moments of unbearable pressure."The Best Game Ever" contains marvelous anecdotes about the game and its witnesses. Bowen informs us that some of the players did not know about the "sudden death" rule, designed to produce a winner in a championship game. He gives life to the most famous photograph of the day, one taken by a teenager who gained access to an end-zone perspective by pushing wheelchair-bound veterans to one end of the field. As well, Bowen expertly analyzes the nascent confluence of television and football, a relationship nurtured by prescient NFL commissioner Bert Bell.Ardent fans of professional football and students of American culture will find something to cherish in "The Best Game Ever."

Reviewer: Jim Lester
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Fun sports history
Review: This is a fun, well-written "behind the scenes" look at the 1958 New York Giants-Baltimore Colts NFL Championship game. Even after all these years, Bowden makes the game seem fresh and unpredictable. Just mentioning the names of some of the players--Johnny Unitas, Frank Gifford, Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore, Art Donovan, Rosey Grier--brings to mind the myths and legends of pro football. The book is a quick read that acts as a sports time machine and offers the reader an enjoyable visit to one of the real milestone games in the history of the National Football League. As someone who has written about sports in the fifties (Hoop Crazy: College Basketball in the 1950s), I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about the history of pro football or reading sports history in general.

Reviewer: Brad W. Swinson
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: What this book did for me.
Review: I really enjoyed this book. I do not consider myself a great reader but I plowed though this one in a few days. I will not be able to add or subtract from the other comments here so I will explain what I personally liked about this book. Born in the mid-60's I was too young to see Johnny Unitas in his heyday and Joe Namath was the often injured QB by the time I can remember watching the NFL on television around 1970-71. The quarterbacks that my peers idolized where the likes of Roger Staubach, Fran Tarkenton and Kenny Stabler. I would watch every NFL game on television no matter who was playing. Around the early 1980's my viewing began to drop off. As time progressed I soon found myself barely watching by the mid-1990's. What I missed was the feeling you were watching something unique and special. With the advent of non-stop sports highlights, interviews and multi-million dollar salaries, the game started becoming un-relatable to me. Every play, no matter how big or small, a player made became a fist pumping, chest thumping, I am better than you event. I found myself turning away from the television after almost every down. What I realized was I longed for was the days a player could just do his job and walk back to the huddle and keep a celebration for something extraordinary. What Bowdon's book did for me was to take me back not only to a game but an era when the men who played the game were not anymore moral or saintly as a whole, but more ordinary and relatable. A game where the fans seemed to have a more intimate relationship with their respective hometown teams. Something that, given the era I grew up in, will never ever get to know but though his writing was able to experience vicariously.