Frank Gifford, who turned a high-profile playing career with the New York football Giants in the 1950s and ‘60s and his matinee-idol looks into an even higher-profile career in network television that lasted more than 25 years, died Sunday at his Connecticut home. He was 84.
His family announced his death.
“It is with the deepest sadness that we announce the sudden passing of our beloved husband, father and friend, Frank Gifford,” the family said in a statement, via “Today,” where his wife, Kathie Lee Gifford, is a cohost. “Frank died suddenly this beautiful Sunday morning of natural causes at his Connecticut home. We rejoice in the extraordinary life he was privileged to live, and we feel grateful and blessed to have been loved by such an amazing human being. We ask that our privacy be respected at this difficult time and we thank you for your prayers.”
Gifford, who won an Emmy as a sportscaster on “Monday Night Football,” was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977 and who was named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player in 1956, when he led the Giants to the NFL championship, had two separate parts to his 12-year playing career.
After being selected by the Giants with their first-round pick in the 1952 NFL Draft following a stand-out career at the University of Southern California, Gifford spent his first nine seasons playing on both sides of the ball as a defensive back and running back.
But his career appeared over after he was leveled by a vicious blindside blow to the head from Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik eight games into the 1960 season. Gifford, who suffered a deep brain concussion and was hospitalized for 10 days, missed the rest of that season and all of the 1961 season.
As Gifford lay motionless on the Yankee Stadium field that November afternoon in 1960, Bednarik could be seen waving his arms in celebration. And while some who witnessed the display, many of Gifford’s teammates among them, were convinced Bednarik was enjoying the havoc he had wrought, the linebacker always insisted he was celebrating the Eagles’ recovery of Gifford’s fumble to ice a victory that would help propel them to the NFL title that season.
“Chuck hit me exactly the way I would have hit him,” Gifford said years later. “With his shoulder, a clean shot.”
It would be decades before Gifford would learn he also had suffered a spinal concussion on the play. X-rays, all those years later, also revealed a fractured neck vertebrae that had healed by itself.
“After the Bednarik play, they never X-rayed my neck,” he said. “They just X-rayed my head.”
Gifford would announce his retirement in February 1961, lured from the game by the concern of his friends and family and by, what he called in his 1993 autobiography “The Whole Ten Yards,” an “out of the blue” long-term contract offer from CBS Radio for whom Gifford already worked. The contract, he said, paid him nearly twice as much as his Giants salary.
But Gifford couldn’t stay away and before long he was back at practice with the Giants, for whom he had continued to work as an advance scout, running that week’s opponent’s plays against the Giants’ defense.
“I started to think that I could do this again,” he said in a 2010 interview. “I had been out of it for a year but, I thought, what a terrible way to have gone out. And I thought, if I don’t do it now, in 1962, I’ll never be able to do it.”
He returned to the active roster for the 1962 season, this time as a flanker, and would play three more seasons, helping the Giants to their fifth Eastern Conference title in seven seasons. They lost the NFL Championship Game to the Packers at Yankee Stadium. The following season they would again reach the title game, losing to the Bears in Chicago. He retired following the 1964 season after the Giants slumped to a 2-10-2 record. A personal favorite of longtime Giants owner Wellington Mara, who presented Gifford when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Gifford’s No. 16 is among those retired by the Giants.
Frank Newton Gifford was born in Santa Monica, Calif., the son of an itinerant oil driller. As Gifford recounted in his autobiography, an oil worker’s job would last anywhere from 30 to 90 days depending on how fast the well was dug. When the well was completed, it was on to the next town.
By his mother’s count, the Giffords — Frank, his parents, his sister and brother — lived in 47 different towns by the time he started high school. Gifford said he doesn’t remember starting and completing a single grade in the same grammar school.
“I’ve read ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ and I guess we were part of that scenario,” Gifford wrote in his autobiography. “We just never realized it. As a little kid, growing up in the thirties, I thought everyone lived like this.”
After starring at Bakersfield High School, Gifford attended Bakersfield Junior College on his way to USC. Hoping to be taken in the 1952 NFL Draft by the Rams so he could remain in southern California, where his first wife, Maxine, had given birth to a son, Gifford instead was selected by the Giants. Apparently Mara, then the team’s personnel boss, had been impressed while watching Gifford do a little bit of everything in a game against Army at Yankee Stadium a few weeks earlier.
Gifford would spend his entire NFL career in New York, the biggest name on a star-studded team that shared the city, Yankee Stadium and the bar at Toots Shor, a popular watering hole for athletes and celebrities, with the Yankees. He was selected to the Pro Bowl eight times at three different positions — first as a defensive back in 1953, when he played on both offense and defense. then as a halfback (1954-59). In 1963, he was selected as a receiver — then called a flanker — when he helped the Giants reach the NFL title game.
During his 12 seasons with the Giants, Gifford had 3,609 yards rushing and 34 touchdowns. He also caught 367 passes for 5,434 yards and 43 touchdowns. Gifford also threw for 14 touchdowns and had six passes intercepted — both totals the most by a non-quarterback in NFL history.
Throughout his playing career, Gifford had dabbled in local television and radio. When his playing days were over, he was an analyst and host for NFL games on CBS. But he got his big break in 1971, when Roone Arledge picked him to replace Keith Jackson as the play-by-play man in ABC’s “Monday Night Football” booth, then in its second season, alongside Don Meredith and Howard Cosell. Gifford would remain in that booth, either as a play-by-play man or analyst, until 1997.
“Roone saw it not so much as a football game as an entertainment show,” Gifford said in his biography, written with Harry Waters. “Howard was the elitist New York know-it-all, the bombastic lawyer Middle America loved to hate. Don was the good ol’ country boy who put Howard in his place. As for me, I was cast as the nice guy, the guy who got the numbers out and the names down and the game played.”
Gifford was also a mainstay of ABC’s Olympic coverage. He did the play-by-play for the controversial U.S. basketball team’s loss to Russia in the gold medal game at the 1972 Games in Munich. Gifford also hosted the “Wide World of Sports,” then the network’s signature sports property, for many years. He twice was nominated for an Emmy.
He is survived by his wife, five children and five grandchildren.