A Football Interloper’s First Gust of Success
By JOHN EISENBERGDEC. 15, 2012
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The 1958 N.F.L. championship game, won by the Baltimore Colts in overtime over the Giants, is one of the most important games in professional football history. Watched by an estimated 40 million television viewers across the country, it helped the N.F.L. e
… Moremerge from the shadows of major league baseball and college football.
Another overtime championship game is less heralded by sports historians but was just as vital to the process of propelling the N.F.L. into decades of growth. The contest 50 years ago to determine the American Football League championship on Dec. 23, 1962, was equally dramatic and important.
When millions of television viewers watched the Dallas Texans defeat the Houston Oilers, 20-17, on Tommy Brooker’s 25-yard field goal in double overtime, the N.F.L. realized the A.F.L., a pesky upstart confederacy, was not going away, as many in the older league had expected.
That day, it became inevitable that the rival leagues would have to merge, as they did in 1966, creating the N.F.L. that is now the United States’ pre-eminent sport.
Played at Jeppesen Stadium in Houston, a single-deck structure used for high school games, the 1962 A.F.L. title game had it all: momentum swings, wild weather, late-game dramatics, a shocking controversy and plenty of star power. The quarterbacks, Dallas’s Len Dawson and Houston’s George Blanda, later made the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
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