Where super Sunday started.

• Author: Callahan, Tom
• Position: SPORTS SCENE

THE NEW YORK TIMES, Herald Tribune, Daily News, Mirror, Journal-American, World-Telegram & Sun, Post, Long Island Daily Press, and Long Island Star-Journal were in the 21st (and, as it turned out, final) day of a delivery workers' strike that had left the dry without newspapers since Dec. 12, mining Christmas for both Macy's and Gimbel's. Sportswriters like Dave Anderson of the Journal-American were on a busman's holiday. Only the syndicated columnists, such as Red Smith and Bob Considine, definitely would be writing for Monday. Sports columnists of the day, the fedora set, wholeheartedly embraced only four games: baseball, boxing, horse racing, and college football. That was another thing that would change forever on Dec. 28, 1958. In his pregame "plugger," to be subbed in a later edition, Smith seemed to be missing the racetrack when, describing Baltimore's blue-Stetsoned cheerleaders, he wrote, "Fillies of provocative design paraded wearing the letters colts across bosoms that pointedly contradicted that label."

Some 45,000,000 people across the country, the largest television audience in the history of the National Football League, sat down to view the game over NBC on approximately 11,000,000 TV sets, many of them freshly delivered. This included nobody in New York City. At prices of $10, $7.50, and $4, only 64,185 customers were counted on a mild day in Yankee Stadium, 6,979 fewer than had paid to see the same two teams in November. So, Commissioner Bert Bell insisted on a 75-mile blackout of the telecast, telling syndicated columnist Milton Gross, "ff we ever start valuing the TV audience more than the paying public, we'll be in trouble."

At 6:45 of the NFL's first overtime game, what the paying public saw was Alan Ameche nan for a one-yard touchdown to give the Colts the championship. Without the slightest show of emotion, Johnny Unitas, Baltimore's 25-year-old quarterback, turned and walked off" the field. "You weren't going to see him jump up and down," said Colts safety Andy Nelson. "He didn't have to do that. It was one of the best things about him," added New York Giants assistant coach Vince Lombardi. "He has every gift a great quarterback needs--in abundance."

"You couldn't outthink Unitas," said Giants linebacker Sam Huff. "When you thought run, he passed. When you thought pass, he ran. When you thought conventional, he was unconventional. When you thought unconventional, he was conventional. When you tried thinking in...