October 11, 2008
Glories of football past
Memories: As the Ravens prepare for the Giants, old-time fans recall fabled Colts of yore -- Unitas and Berry, Marchetti and Moore -- and `The Greatest Game Ever Played.'
Like a few thousand other Baltimore fans counting down the days to Super
Bowl XXXV, Brian Cooper can't help feeling as if he's been here before.
Depending on how you look at it, he has.
It was 1958 when his parents, Joseph and Annette Cooper, traveled to New
York to watch the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants battle for pro
football's championship in what became known as "The Greatest Game Ever
Played." They left their two young sons at home, but they had company of
sorts: Annette was four months' pregnant with Brian.
This weekend, Brian Cooper makes a return trip to the championship game,
heading to Tampa, Fla., with his father and two older brothers for the
Ravens-Giants Super Bowl. If he feels a twinge of deja vu at kickoff, he says,
he'll know why.
"I tell people I was there [at the '58 game] and they say, `How were you
there?' Then they figure it out," says Cooper, whose family owns Alex Cooper
Auctioneers in Towson.
For many now rooting for the Ravens, such references to bygone days of
Baltimore football are out of place in the era of Ray Lewis and Shannon
Sharpe. But the select fraternity of fans whose football education dates to
the 1950s and 1960s says these harbored Colts memories are in no way a
betrayal of the present.
For them, the Ravens' rise merely closes a circle that rolled through the
years, only to be severed with the Colts' dead-of-night flight to Indianapolis
in 1984. Now, like a wayward uncle welcomed home after a long and mysterious
absence, Baltimore football is back, and all again feels complete.
A similar enthusiasm
"There was a real enthusiasm, very similar to what we're witnessing the
last few weeks. Everybody seemed to be connected to what was going on," says
Ray Marocco Jr., recalling the days when he accompanied his father to Colts
games at Memorial Stadium. "It's something we've rarely experienced since
then, something that seemed to have disappeared with the advent of the modern
sports age. It's nice to see we can still experience it."
For some, the associations are particularly vivid. Take Kay Wargowski.
Sometimes, when a Ravens opponent is threatening late in the game, her mind
winds backs four decades, and she's calling out names that mean nothing to the
11-year-old nephew watching at her knee.
"I'm telling people, the only thing we need to have now is Lenny Lyles or
Milt Davis, to make sure that long pass doesn't get away," says Wargowski, 59,
invoking the names of two former Colts defensive backs.
Fans with a long memory link today's Ravens with yesterday's Colts, while
recognizing that the comparison is imperfect - so very much has changed since
the Colts' Alan "The Horse" Ameche broke into the end zone for the winning
touchdown in sudden-death overtime of the 1958 game.
The game took place at a time when sportswriters breathlessly reported the
amount that winning players would take home as a championship payoff: $4,600
each. It was a time when Friendship Airport touted the imminent introduction
of commercial jetliners; when classified ads listed a "colored garden
apartment" on Cherry Hill Road for $13.75 a week.
Back then, Wargowski watched the games with her father, James Bory, a
sports fan with eight children but not a boy among them. Together, father and
daughter struggled for Sunday television rights at their Highlandtown home
against Kay's seven younger sisters, who had no taste for football.
"I felt so sorry for Dad, having to work six days a week and then fight
with my sisters to watch the games on his day off. So I kind of sided with
him, and became a big fan with him," Wargowski recalls.
Sometimes, Bory won a pair of tickets to Memorial Stadium through his
employer, H&S Bakery. When he did, he shared them with his ally Kay, who
helped him bag bread on Saturdays. The games were nothing like those at PSINet
Stadium, Wargowski says - there were no fancy food counters, no escalators,
just big blue banners and chants specific to every section in the park.
"Now, it almost makes you feel like you're not outdoors. For outdoor
screaming, it was Memorial Stadium. It was the insane asylum," she says.
"That's the shame with the great purple thing they have now - people who take
their young ones now won't be able to take them to see the craziness at
Memorial Stadium."
Ravens maniacs who paint their bodies purple might dispute this assessment
of relative rowdiness, noting that Colts fans, after all, attended games in
suits and fedoras and didn't even tailgate.
But Wargowski isn't imagining things - accounts of Colts fans at Yankee
Stadium in the moments after the 23-17 win in 1958 describe one small man who
accosted a much larger Giants fan with the greeting, "We beatcha. Wanna make
something of it?" Another "rather undignified gentleman overindulged in his
ecstasy" had to be carried out of the stadium, but "every now and then would
blink his eyes open and yell `Yeah' in a soft voice, then let his head loll
again."
Neither Wargowski nor her father made the trip north for that game,
although she was later given, via the bakery, a ball signed by several Colts.
The ball, she was told, had been used during the championship game, and she
has passed it on to her truck-driving son, David.
Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun
