Frank Gifford, a gleaming hero of sports and television in an era when such things were possible, who moved seamlessly from stardom in the Giants’ offense to celebrity in the broadcast booth of “Monday Night Football,” died on Sunday at his home in Greenwich, Conn. He was 84.
His family confirmed the death in a statement.
A shifty running back and later a cagey and clutch receiver who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977, Gifford began his career at a time when the professional game was overshadowed by college football and by Major League Baseball — hardly the American obsession it has become. But as much as anyone, he helped push it in that direction.
By the time he retired as a player (for the second time) in 1964, the Giants and the National Football League had gained the national sports spotlight, and the versatile and handsome Gifford had become a celebrity. A few years later, in the early 1970s, he became one of the best-known figures in television sports (and maybe television in general).
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As the play-by-play man of ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” Gifford, with his low-key persona, provided the perfect backdrop to bring his boothmates — the contentious Howard Cosell (who died in 1995) and the country-boy-irreverent Don Meredith (who died in 2010) — into high relief. It was a formula that made the weekly autumn broadcasts must-see programming for much of America.
As a player, Gifford was the personification of the Giants during their glory years in the 1950s and early ’60s, the best-known figure on teams that featured many other stars, including quarterbacks Charlie Conerly and Y. A. Tittle, linebacker Sam Huff, fullback Alex Webster, defensive back Emlen Tunnell, defensive linemen Andy Robustelli and Roosevelt Grier, and his fellow running back and receiver Kyle Rote.
Gifford played for the team from 1952 until 1960, when a brutal injury interrupted and nearly finished his career. By then he had made seven consecutive Pro Bowls, been named to the all-N.F.L. first team four times and helped the Giants reach three N.F.L. championship games. They won one of them, 47-7, over the Chicago Bears in 1956, the same year Gifford was named the league’s most valuable player.
It was on Nov. 20, 1960, that Gifford was the recipient of one of football history’s most famous tackles. Playing against the Philadelphia Eagles, he caught a pass over the middle and was running with the ball when he was leveled, hit high and flattened by Chuck Bednarik, the Eagles’ rough linebacker and a future Hall of Famer himself.
Gifford dropped the ball and lay motionless on the turf as Bednarik waved his arms and shook his fists, an image that became one of football’s most memorable photographs. Bednarik later said he did not immediately know that Gifford was hurt, and Gifford himself said he considered the hit perfectly legal and bore Bednarik, who died in March, no resentment.
Gifford was carted off the field with a concussion, ending his season, and in February 1961 he announced his retirement.
He returned, however, after missing only the 1961 season, and his career had a resilient second act. In three subsequent years, the Giants reached the N.F.L. championship game twice (losing to the Green Bay Packers in 1962 and the Bears in 1963), and Gifford returned to the Pro Bowl in 1963.
All told, Gifford ran for 3,609 yards and 34 touchdowns, caught 367 passes for 5,434 yards and 43 touchdowns, and threw 14 touchdown passes on the halfback option.
“Frank Gifford was the ultimate Giant,” John Mara, the team’s president, said in a statement on Sunday. “He was the face of our franchise for so many years.”
Francis Newton Gifford was born on Aug. 16, 1930, in Santa Monica, Calif., one of three children of an oil-field worker hard pressed to find a steady job amid the Depression. By the time Gifford was in high school, his father, Weldon, had moved the family 47 times, traveling through California and West Texas.
Gifford became a single-wing tailback at Bakersfield High School in California and then displayed his versatility at the University of Southern California, where he was an all-American, running and passing out of the single wing, playing in the defensive backfield and place-kicking.
While at U.S.C., he developed a persona, however modest, beyond the football field, gaining Hollywood bit parts. In the 1951 Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis football movie “That’s My Boy,” it was Gifford who kicked the winning field goal as the stand-in for Lewis. A handsome campus hero, Gifford made his mark in contemporary literature as well, serving as the glittering object of envy for one of his classmates, Frederick Exley, whose 1968 memoir, “A Fan’s Notes,” is a staple of the genre (although the author freely acknowledged that some of it was fiction).
The Giants selected Gifford in the first round of the 1952 draft, and in his first two seasons, the team’s longtime coach Steve Owen often played him in the defensive backfield. But Gifford also filled in at halfback for the celebrated Rote, who had injured his knee and was eventually switched to receiver.
Before the 1954 season, the Giants’ fortunes, as well as Gifford’s, began to turn when Owen was fired and replaced by Jim Lee Howell, who hired Vince Lombardi to coach the offense and Tom Landry to oversee the defense. Lombardi gave Gifford the left halfback spot, and he soon thrived on power sweeps, taking handoffs from Conerly and following the pulling guards. Gifford usually ran upfield, but he also proved effective throwing the ball on the option play.
He was in his prime when the Giants defeated the Bears to win the 1956 championship. Two years later, in a thrilling championship game often cited for turning the fortunes of the N.F.L. because it was televised nationally, Gifford ran for 60 yards on 12 carries and caught a go-ahead touchdown pass in the fourth quarter, although the Giants lost in overtime, 23-17, to the Baltimore Colts. In 1959, the Colts rubbed salt in the wound, beating the Giants for the championship again.
By that time, Gifford had become a part of the New York celebrity scene. He appeared in advertisements for Lucky Strike cigarettes and Vitalis hair tonic. He made a guest appearance on the television show “What’s My Line?” and became a regular at Toots Shor’s, a Midtown restaurant and bar that drew high-profile figures from sports and the political world.
“All of a sudden, in a city where Mickey Mantle was a god and the memory of Joe DiMaggio even more sacred, there was an awareness of another sport, another player, another team,” Gifford recalled in his memoir, “The Whole Ten Yards,” written with Harry Waters (1994). “I was the player, and the Giants were the team. Heady stuff — and I loved it.”
Gifford’s luster remained undimmed after he retired as a player. He joined “Monday Night Football” in 1971, its second season, and the program — conceived by Roone Arledge, ABC’s director of sports, as a prime-time spectacle — became a TV phenomenon. As the game broadcaster and later as an analyst and briefly as a pregame host, Gifford remained with the show through the 1998 season, an evenhanded presence amid the theatrics provided by Cosell and Meredith and a host of others.
“Roone saw it not so much as a football game as an entertainment show,” Gifford said in his memoir. “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.”
After his concussion led to his first retirement, Gifford broadcast sports on the radio for CBS and became a Giants scout. When he rejoined the Giants, who had reached the league championship game once again in 1961 under Allie Sherman, Sherman played him at flanker.
Gifford started the season on the bench, but in the second game of the season, against Pittsburgh, he caught two big passes, one for a touchdown, from Tittle, a quarterback with whom he had not played before.
“All of a sudden, he got me in the huddle,” Gifford recalled about Tittle in a television interview years later. “And he said, ‘Got something, Frank?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ”
He added: “We needed a big play, it was third-and-long, and somehow I caught the ball. We get the first down, and I came back, and he said, ‘What else you got?’ I said, ‘A fly — give me a fly.’ Again he looked at me, like, ‘You out of your mind?’
“It was the most important catch of my life, I think. And I caught it just by the tip of the ball. And I was back.”
When Gifford retired after the 1964 season, he returned to CBS as a TV sports broadcaster, and he remained with the network until joining ABC. In addition to “Monday Night Football,” he appeared on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” and as part of its Olympic coverage.
Gifford was also in the public eye long after his playing days as the husband of Kathie Lee Gifford, a longtime co-host, with Regis Philbin, of the morning program “Live With Regis & Kathie Lee.” Frank Gifford occasionally filled in as a host.
In the late 1990s, Gifford’s image was tainted when his affair with an airline stewardess (who later posed for Playboy) became tabloid fodder. And in 2013, a book about Johnny Carson by his lawyer, Henry Bushkin, claimed that in 1970, when Gifford was married to his second wife, Astrid Lindley, Gifford had an affair with Carson’s wife.
Gifford’s marriage to Lindley ended in divorce, as had his marriage to his first wife, the former Maxine Ewart. He married Kathie Lee Epstein in 1986. In addition to her, his survivors include their son, Cody, and their daughter, Cassidy, as well as two sons, Jeff and Kyle, and a daughter, Victoria, from his first marriage.
None of the tumult in Gifford’s personal life dulled his light in the eyes of longtime Giants fans, or longtime Giants.
When he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Gifford was presented by Wellington Mara, the Giants’ owner at the time, whose roots with the franchise extended to its founding in the 1920s.
In 1997, when Mara (who died in 2005) was inducted into the Hall, he selected Gifford as his presenter.
Three years after that, Mara surprised Gifford at a dinner honoring him for his nearly half-century association with the N.F.L. Mara held aloft a white Giants jersey with Gifford’s No. 16 and announced its retirement.
As Mara put it, “he’s an all-time all-timer with us.”
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