The most famous photograph in American sports history was almost never seen. In 1964, an editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette looked at the image and threw it away. He considered it inadequate because it was not an action shot, just a bald man on his knees with blood running down his face. Fifty years later, that same discarded photograph became the only memory a Hall of Fame quarterback could still hold onto.
Nearly everything most people believe about that picture is wrong. The identity of the man in it, the meaning of the moment, and the story of how the image survived have all been misunderstood. There was also a second man standing just a few feet outside the frame, a person whose story the photograph never told. The man on his knees was Y.
A. Tittle, born Wilberton Abraham Tittle in Marshall, Texas, in 1926. He entered professional football in 1948 and spent a decade with the San Francisco 49ers as part of their celebrated “Million Dollar Backfield. ” In 1954, he became the first professional football player to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
In 1961, San Francisco decided he was finished. At age 34, he was traded to the New York Giants for a young player named Lou Cordileone. Cordileone’s reaction remains one of the great comments in football history: “Me for Tittle? Just me?
” The 49ers were wrong. Tittle took the starting job from 40-year-old Charlie Conerly and led the Giants to the NFL championship game, then did it again the next year, and again the year after that. In 1962 against Washington, he threw seven touchdown passes in a single game with 505 yards. That record still stands, placing Tittle’s name alongside Peyton Manning and Drew Brees.
In 1963, at age 37, he threw 36 touchdown passes and was named league MVP. That single-season record stood for 21 years until Dan Marino surpassed it in 1984. Over 17 professional seasons, he accumulated 33,000 passing yards and 242 touchdown passes. When he retired, no one in league history had thrown for more.
He reached the championship game three consecutive years, and he lost all three. That is the part that matters most. He received every honor the game had to offer, but the one thing he wanted above all, he never obtained. By September 1964, he was 37 years old.
Everyone in football understood that his opportunity had passed. That leads to Pittsburgh on September 20, 1964. The Giants led 14-0 in the second quarter at Pitt Stadium and looked like the team that had reached three straight title games. Then Tittle dropped back to pass from his own 8-yard line.
Coming from the Giants’ right side was a 6-foot-7 Steelers defender called “Big John. ” His name was John Baker. Most people have never heard of him. That should not be the case.
Baker broke through the line and had a clear path to the quarterback. Tittle saw him coming. He turned to his left, trying to dump the ball and brace himself, the way every quarterback does in that half-second. He did not have enough time.
Baker arrived at the exact moment the ball left his hand. It was not a late hit. It was not a cheap shot. It came at the perfect moment, which made it worse.
The pass wobbled and fell incomplete. Rookie Chuck Hinton picked it up and returned it for a touchdown. Behind the play, out of sight, Baker drove Tittle hard into the ground. The hit knocked off his helmet, broke his sternum, tore the muscles around his rib cage, and caused a concussion.
At one end of the field, Pittsburgh celebrated the score. At the other end, a 37-year-old man kneeled on the grass, bareheaded, blood streaming from a gash above his eye, not moving. Pittsburgh scored 20 unanswered points and won the game 27-24. Decades later, Tittle described what he felt while kneeling there.
He said, “That was the end of my dance. ” A whole life felt finished. He was wrong about that, and it took the rest of his life to understand it. The photographer was Morris Berman, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff photographer who did not go to the game that day to shoot football.
He went looking for a human interest image, something showing a person, and he decided in advance to follow the veteran quarterback. Berman had built his reputation as a war photographer during World War II. His other famous photograph, taken before this one, showed the bullet-riddled bodies of Mussolini and his mistress. That is the man who stood in that end zone, a person who had spent his career documenting what happens to humans when things go wrong.
He submitted the photograph. The editor said no. In 1964, sports photography meant motion. A player catching the ball.
A player being tackled. Movement. A photograph of a person kneeling completely still was, by the standards of the day, nothing. The newspaper published something else, and Berman’s image went into a drawer.
The photograph survived only because Berman entered it in competitions himself. It won the National Headliner Award that year as the best sports photograph in America. It could not be nominated for a Pulitzer because the Pulitzer required the image to have been published, and this one never was. From there, it spread anyway, into exhibitions, into the Hall of Fame, and onto that wall in Durham, North Carolina, beside the Iwo Jima photograph.
Almost nobody knows one detail. Berman was not the only photographer in that end zone. There was also an Associated Press photographer named Dozier Mobley, who captured the exact same frame within perhaps a hundredth of a second. Mobley’s photo ran in newspapers across the country the next morning, as wire photos do.
Berman’s was rejected and hidden. Berman’s is the one that became famous. That is how thin the line is. Two men, the same end zone, the same second, the same subject.
One image went to a hundred newspapers and faded. The other was thrown in a drawer and now hangs next to Iwo Jima. The confusion reached the point where, when Tittle published his autobiography decades later, the photograph on the back cover was Mobley’s, and Tittle credited it to Berman. He got the attribution wrong for the most famous moment of his life.
Here is what the photograph does not tell you. Look at it and you see a lone man, abandoned in the end zone, with nobody else in the frame. That is the crop. That is not the real moment.
Within seconds, Giants coaches were around him. According to those who were there, the Steelers, the same team that knocked him down and scored on the play, stayed near him to help him back to his feet. That ritual of both teams standing around an injured player is not new. It was already happening in 1964.
It is simply outside the frame. The more important thing the photograph does not show is what happened next. Five days later. Tittle returned to football.
The Giants played Friday night that week at Yankee Stadium against Washington, so a 37-year-old with a cracked sternum and a concussion got four days of rest. Then he went out in front of 63,000 spectators and won the game 13-10. That means the most famous image in American sports history, the picture of a broken man, is a picture of someone who came back to the football field before the next weekend. He was proud of that for his entire life.
He used to tell people about it. Almost nobody listened because the photograph had already settled the story. The rest of that season was brutal. The Giants, reigning Eastern Conference champions, finished 2-10-2, the worst record in the entire league and their first losing season in 11 years.
In November, Pittsburgh beat them again, 44-17. Tittle threw for fewer than 1,800 yards all year, less than half of his MVP season total. He retired when the season ended. Seventeen years without a championship.
Now, return to John Baker. He barely appears in most accounts of this story. He should not be a footnote. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1935, he grew up in a neighborhood called Oberlin Village.
His father, John H. Baker Sr. , was appointed in 1942 as the first Black police officer in the history of the Raleigh Police Department. “Big John” attended Ligon High School and North Carolina Central University, then was drafted into the NFL in 1958.
He played for nearly a decade for the Rams, Eagles, Steelers, and Lions. In the offseasons, he returned home to Raleigh and worked as a youth counselor with the police department. That turned out to be his true career path. In 1970, he became the first African American appointed to the North Carolina Board of Parole.
In 1978, he ran for sheriff of Wake County, North Carolina. Here is what almost nobody knows about that campaign. John Baker put that photograph on his campaign materials. The photograph of Y.
A. Tittle bleeding on his knees. According to accounts of that race, the text below it was something close to this: “Look what John Baker did to Y. A.
Tittle. He’ll do the same to crime in North Carolina. ”
He won, becoming the first Black sheriff in North Carolina since Reconstruction. Consider that.
The most famous image of defeat in American sports, the photograph thrown in the trash by an editor, the photograph the man in it said ended his career, helped elect a Black man sheriff in the American South in 1978. The same image carried opposite meanings depending entirely on the man standing behind it. Baker held the office for 24 years. He finally lost in 2002 by about 2,200 votes.
Of everything he did during those years, one thing stands out. Sheriff Baker proposed building an independent school inside the county jail, an actual school for incarcerated children, based on the theory that if you give a jailed teenager an education, he is less likely to return. The school opened in 1997 and was named after him. So was a football stadium at a Raleigh high school.
He died in 2007 at age 72, after a marriage lasting about 50 years. The man who caused the most famous American image of a person falling to his knees spent the next 40 years of his life lifting people up. In the obituaries of both men, that one hit remained the headline. That brings the story back to the man on his knees.
Y. A. Tittle had a name for that photograph. He called it “the blood picture.
” He said over and over for more than 50 years that he hated it. But he kept it. It hung in his trophy room in California, in a silver frame, on a wall with his Hall of Fame plaque and his Sports Illustrated covers. When he published his autobiography in 2009, he put it on the back cover.
A writer who spent his final years around the family put it best. He said he never believed Tittle really hated it. Partly because he did not think the man was capable of hatred, and partly because he believed Tittle was proud of what happened before and after that photograph, the frames around it that history discarded. That assessment was probably right.
That photograph is not an image of an ending at all. It is a picture of a man in the middle of the worst ten seconds of a life full of good. A man who returned to the field within a week, surrounded by people helping him up, including the ones who knocked him down. He said it was the end of his dance.
It was not. He lived 53 more years, raised four children and nine grandchildren, and ran a business past the age when most men stop working. The story has been told as an ending because that made a better narrative than the truth. The truth was simply a tough 37-year-old from Marshall, Texas, having a bad afternoon in Pittsburgh.
Morris Berman’s editor was wrong about that photograph, and so was nearly everyone who ever looked at it. Then, at the end, life did something to Y. A. Tittle that nobody deserves.
In his late eighties, he developed dementia. His conversations narrowed. He repeated himself. He forgot who he was talking to.
But that photograph remained. The one memory he spent his whole life trying to get people to ignore is the one his mind refused to release. His family never mourned him while he was alive because he would not let them. He still filled a room.
He still told stories, some true, and some, in his own words, told as a lie to reach a truth. He loved his daughter, and he loved having someone sing to him. Near the end, on one night, someone played guitar for him. A Springsteen song about a brother taking care of a brother.
Tittle sat there and began to cry as he listened. When the song ended, the dementia returned, and he put his hand on the arm of the man beside him and said, “I’m sorry. What’s your name again? ” The man told him, and Tittle’s face brightened because he knew he had a joke ready.
He said, “That’s worse than Wilberton Abraham Tittle. ” He forgot who was in the room with him. But he never forgot his own name, or how to make a stranger feel welcome, or that photograph. He died in October 2017 at age 90.
Every newspaper obituary in America ran that photograph at the top of the page.