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Remembering Casey Stengel: You Could Look Him
Up
Remembering
Frank Gifford
By
Harvey Frommer
The
news that one of my all-time football heroes and TV football
broadcasters had passed filled me with sadness. Frank Gifford was a
class act.
Number 16 will be missed.
When I began work on my soon to be
published When It Was Just a Game:
Remembering the First Super Bowl, I reached out to Frank to do the
foreword
for the book and be one of the many oral history voices.
A
great football hero and top notch announcer on
Monday Night Football, Frank was in the booth and on the field that
January day
in 1967.
His insightful comments about the
game and the personalities involved in it and his
compelling
and insightful foreword, added immensely to the depth and breadth of my
book. I will always be in his debts to the
kindly
and considerate gentleman.
Below
is the foreword by Frank Gifford that leads off When It
Was Just a Game:
It
was long ago and far away that I was at the Los Angeles
Memorial Coliseum, a field I had played football on as a college
All-American.
Now I was there this January 15, 1967 in the beginning stages of what
would
become for me a long and highly successful television broadcasting
career.
I
was a member of the CBS team that along with NBC, was televising
the game. That itself was something new for this newest of football
games that
pitted the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League against
the Green
Bay Packers of the National Football League.
No
one really knew what to expect. No one expected the
contest officially called the AFL-NFL World Championship Football
game to
become what it became - the Super Bowl, the greatest sports
event in
history. No one perhaps except for NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle,
who
wanted it to become bigger than the World Series.
`
I am one of the more than 50
oral history voices in the book talking about the game, the action and
remembering my experiences with the great Vince Lombardi pre-game and
post-game. You can read about those book-ended moments in the book.
Pre-game
was much more of a challenge as you will see than was post-game when I
was
there with Pete Rozelle and my former Coach “Vinny,” as he was
presented with
the championship trophy made by Tiffany that just a couple of years
later would
be named for him as the Lombardi Trophy.
In
this detailed oral and narrative history, author Harvey Frommer
dramatically creates a narrative arc that brings back the time. The
merger of
the American Football League and the National Football League, a
chapter
focused on the coaches, Vince Lombardi of Green Bay and Hank Stram of
Kansas
City, the pre-game preparations and struggles, the game itself on that
sunny
day in Los Angeles and a detailed look at the action on the field of
play, the
post-game fallout and a special chapter on what happened to many of the
participants afterwards.
Through
many exclusive interviews with
players, coaches, media, viewers of the game, we are there reliving a
special
time in American sports and culture. It all makes for the definitive
book on
that first Super Bowl.
About the Author
Written by acclaimed sports author and oral historian Harvey Frommer, with an intro by pro football Hall of Famer Frank Gifford, When It Was Just a Game tells the fascinating story of the ground-breaking AFL-NFL World Championship Football game played on January 15, 1967: Packers vs. Chiefs. Filled with new insights, containing commentary from the unpublished memoir of Kansas City Chiefs coach Hank Stram, featuring oral history from many who were at the game-media, players, coaches, fans-the book is mainly in the words of those who lived it and saw it go on to become the Super Bowl, the greatest sports attraction the world has ever known. Archival photographs and drawings help bring the event to life.
Dr.
Harvey
Frommer is in his 39th year of writing books. A noted oral historian
and sports
journalist, the author of 42 sports books including the classics:
best-selling
“New York City Baseball, 1947-1957″ and best-selling “Shoeless Joe and
Ragtime
Baseball,” his acclaimed Remembering Yankee Stadium was published in
2008 and
best-selling Remembering Fenway Park was published to acclaim in 2011.
Frommer mint condition collectible sports books autographed and discounted are available always from the author.
FROMMER SPORTSNET (syndicated) reaches a readership in the millions and is housed on Internet search engines for extended periods of time.