5 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Frank Gifford

Frank Gifford, a football legend who became a regular and welcome guest in living rooms across the United States as the voice of Monday Night fFootball after a stellar career with the New York Giants, died Sunday at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

• See: New York Giants Football Legend Frank Gifford Dies At 84.

Here are five things you probably didn’t know about him:

1. Gifford played his Giants games at Yankee Stadium. Of those days, he had this to say in “The Whole Ten Yards,” his memoir: “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. I was the player, and the Giants were the team. Heady stuff — and I loved it.”
2. His eight Pro Bowl selections came at three different positions—defensive back, running back, and wide receiver. He also played defense.
3. Gifford’s broadcasting resume includes “Wide World of Sports” and several Olympics. While his style was decidedly understated, ABC was not alone in describing his call of Franz Klammer’s downhill gold medal run in 1976 as a “broadcasting masterpiece.”
4. From Richard Goldstein’s wonderful obituary of Gifford in The New York Times: While at U.S.C., he developed a persona, however modest, beyond the football field, gaining Hollywood bit parts. In the 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.
5. Gifford called the 1972 Olympic basketball final between the United States and the Soviet Union, which ended in one of the most shameful outcomes in international sports history.