Skip to content
News
Link copied to clipboard

Morning Report: NFL layoffs won’t spoil party

Teachers, guidance counselors, clergy and parents - not to mention football coaches - spend whole lifetimes telling kids to get their priorities straight.

Teachers, guidance counselors, clergy and parents - not to mention football coaches - spend whole lifetimes telling kids to get their priorities straight.

Sound advice.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell yesterday took time out from suspending druggies and gun nuts to announce that the richest sport in world history will lay off more than 10 percent of its staff in response to the still-developing economic downturn.

The NFL is eliminating about 150 of its staff of 1,100, including some of the nice folks employed at NFL Films in Mount Laurel, N.J.

However, league spokesman Greg Aiello said the NFL still plans to throw parties at the Super Bowl, whose elaborate events usually outdo Vegas and Hollywood in sheer spectacle.

However, local organizers say the companies that host their own parties are watching expenses, scaling back plans and inviting fewer guests.

Hey, you gotta get your priorities straight.

History lesson. If there is a sporting event that has been chronicled more extensively than the NFL's fabled overtime championship game of 1958, it escapes me.

When Baltimore's Alan Ameche pounded into the end zone at Yankee Stadium in the twilight of Dec. 28, 1958, to beat the New York Giants, 23-17, in the first nationally telecast NFL game, commissioner Bert Bell was left in tears.

That game - played the first year that New York was without its two National League baseball teams - is credited with propelling the NFL past baseball in the minds of sports fans.

And it has been ballyhooed to epic proportions by print and electronic chroniclers.

Now, almost 50 years later, there seems to be even more to the story.

On Saturday, ESPN will premiere a two-hour anniversary special that dissects the game, using 80 percent game action, original audio, original footage, some of it never before seen by the public, now fully colorized and in HD.

What makes this truly special is inclusion of tape never before seen. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a reel of film had been lost for half a century but was found amid a pile of film canisters in the late Weeb Ewbanks' house.

(Ewbanks coached the Colts that day, won another NFL title the next season, and won a Super Bowl with the New York Jets 10 years later.)

So, maybe, the most fabled pro football game of all time will get a little more famous.