Another voice of my youth died this past week.

Frank Gifford disproved the claim that everyone is famous for (only) 15 minutes. He was known to my generation as the play-by-play voice of ABC’s Monday Night Football for a decade. To my parents’ generation, he was known as a football player for the New York Giants when the NFL began to pass Major League Baseball as this country’s favorite pro sport.

Gifford was ideally situated to become football’s answer to Mickey Mantle. Both were great athletes playing on a championship-level team in the nation’s biggest media market. He was the 1950s and 1960s answer to Matt Forte or LeSean McCoy, running backs (admittedly in a much more run-heavy era) who could also catch the ball. (In fact, after Gifford missed part of the 1960 season and all of the 1961 season because of a head injury, he returned as a wide receiver.) He even threw from his running back position, generally going to his left, which is not easy for a right-handed thrower.

Between 1951, when Mantle reached the big leagues, and 1964 Mantle’s Yankees played in 11 World Series, winning seven. (Remember that between 1958 and 1961 the Yankees were the only New York baseball team, with the former Brooklyn Dodgers and former New York [baseball] Giants in California, and the Mets hadn’t been born yet.) Between 1956 and 1963 Gifford’s Giants played in six NFL championship games, winning only one.

Gifford played in the 1958 NFL Championship game, claimed for years afterward as the greatest NFL game ever played, because it was the first NFL game to go into overtime. (In those days the only games that could go into overtime were playoff games.) His offensive coordinator was a guy named Vince Lombardi, who went on to Green Bay, where he told his misused running back Paul Hornung that from then on he was going to be the Packers’ Frank Gifford.

Gifford dabbled in acting as a player …

… but after his playing career ended moved to TV, announcing football for CBS (as did teammate Pat Summerall), Giants games with Chris Schenkel (who later joined Gifford at ABC) and then games with Jack Whitaker (ditto). His assignments included the first two Super Bowls and the 1967 NFL championship, better known as the Ice Bowl:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9VN2d3O7QI

Before the 1970 season, the head of ABC Sports, Roone Arledge, contacted Gifford about joining ABC for its new Monday Night Football. Gifford, however, was still under contract to CBS, but suggested his friend, former Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith. Meredith joined Keith Jackson and Howard Cosell, and then one year later Gifford replaced Jackson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8EM4FMXat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsrFWwmb0H4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wftI5kX2h-E

Gifford also worked the Olympics for ABC, including the infamous 1972 gold medal basketball game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union …

… and Winter Olympics downhill skiing:

Gifford was not particularly well regarded by TV critics because he didn’t say clever things. (During the Ice Bowl, however, Gifford said, “Give me a bite of your coffee,” which Jack Buck declared the funniest thing Gifford had ever said.) TV critics may have bought into Howard Cosell’s loathing of the “jockocracy” as well. However, he was part of the highest rated TV program for seven consecutive years. He did his job well — keeping Cosell separated from Meredith, or Alex Karras, or Fran Tarkenton. He also wrote one of the better sports autobiographies, The Whole Ten Yards.

I started this by saying that Gifford was famous twice. Actually, he was famous three times. The third was for being Kathie Lee Gifford’s husband.