Gracious Gifford was last of a type

When he died of natural causes at age 84 on Sunday, people started telling stories about The Giffer again. Actually, when you think about it, they never really stopped telling them. This is a tribute to Frank Gifford — that long after his playing career, it seemed he always was relevant.

He was more than relevant when Las Vegas resident Herb Jaffe was covering the New York (Football) Giants for the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger during the 1950s.

The NFL wasn't the behemoth it is today, but Gifford arguably was its best-known player — he was its Most Valuable Player in 1956. He also was handsome, and a matinee idol.

Jaffe said the Giants and the writers who covered them were traveling together by train for a preseason game in Boston, at old Braves Field. This was during an era when newspapers hired ballplayers to write guest columns during training camp — and the players actually wrote them, instead of asking Casper the Friendly Sportswriter to help them supplement modest incomes.

This particular train ride had commenced in Vermont, where the Giants had set up training camp at Saint Michael's College.

So Gifford asked Jaffe if he could borrow his portable Remington. Sure, Jaffe said. Gifford said thanks, that sure was nice. He said he would return the typewriter before the train arrived in the station in Boston.

Gifford did not return the typewriter.

Jaffe left for old Braves Field without the portable Remington. Gifford had disappeared, as if he was running post patterns in the Chicago Cardinals' secondary.

"Here I am, a sports writer who was supposed to cover the game, and I can't find Gifford," Jaffe said.

They played the game, and the Giants ran their Split T offense under coach Jim Lee Howell — Charlie Conerly, No. 42, at quarterback, with Gifford and Kyle Rote and Alex Webster at running back. Gifford wore 16 and Rote wore 44 and Webster was No. 29. If you covered the Giants then, or followed them at all after baseball season, you knew the numbers.

After the game, Jaffe borrowed a typewriter and filed his story. He made his deadline. Sometimes you gotta improvise, like Frank Gifford throwing an option pass.

Anyway, when Jaffe finally caught up to Gifford, No. 16 told him he had left the portable Remington on the other train.

"I owe you one," Gifford said to the sports writer with a smile and a friendly pat on the back.

Unlike Frank Gifford and Chuck Bednarik, their paths soon ceased to cross. Jaffe became an investigative reporter and spent 39 years at the Star-Ledger. He wrote a story on the trash business and organized crime that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Gifford went on to achieve additional fame and glory as a football player, and then as a broadcaster. Sometimes he would be in the audience at "The Ed Sullivan Show," and Ed would have him stand up and take a bow. Gifford would appear as himself on the NBC sitcom "Hazel"; he would marry television host Kathie Lee Gifford, also as himself.

Jaffe said when he and Gifford met years later at a dinner for Howard Cosell, Gifford remembered having borrowed Jaffe's typewriter and leaving it on the train.

"I still owe you one," the Hall of Famer said.

Don't worry about it, Jaffe said. That Remington was getting old anyway and needed to be replaced.

They laughed, and then Frank, as gracious as ever, posed for a photo with Herb's wife, Fran.

"In dealing with a guy like him, who had accomplished all that he had and had become a celebrity, very often people become arrogant," said Jaffe, who still writes a weekly column about the goings-on in Summerlin for the Review-Journal.

"Not Gifford."

Maybe there was a celebrity daliance here and there. But Jaffe said Gifford always was a gentleman when you asked football questions.

"He was one of the nicest guys, he really was."

Herb Jaffe had told me that story about the borrowed typewriter before. When Frank Gifford — the great Frank Gifford, the matinee idol who had accomplished so much as a football player, and afterward, too — died on Sunday, I asked if he would tell it again.

People probably won't ask other people to retell Tucker Frederickson stories, when his time comes, and they probably won't remember his jersey number, either.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him: @ronkantowski