• by Thom Forbes , August 10, 2015

Frank Gifford turned his rugged good looks and multi-faceted skills as a New York Giants football player into a lucrative broadcasting career, pitching everything from Vitalis Hair Tonic to Jantzen sportswear to Lucky Strike cigarettes to milk, Florida orange juice and Dry Sack sherry along the way. He died suddenly Sunday at his home in Greenwich, Conn., at 84.

New York was made for the All American boy from Santa Monica, Calif., who was a standout with the University of Southern California Trojans before becoming a versatile star with the Giants from 1952 through 1964 and then, among other broadcasting gigs, spending 27 years in the booth for “Monday Night Football.” 

“He could run, throw and catch. To this day, his name is still jotted throughout the Giants record books,” broadcasting colleague Al Michaels said Sunday, writes Chris Ariens for TV Newser. “You had to live in New York in the ’50s and ’60s to truly understand what a gigantic figure Frank Gifford was. He was right there with Mickey Mantle.”

“It was in New York that Mr. Gifford became a darling for advertisers, his hair featured in Vitalis magazine advertisements. In the off-season, he used his Hollywood roots to land small acting roles,” Kevin Clark writes for the Wall Street Journal.

“From 1957 through the late 1960s — during his playing years and after — Frank Gifford appeared in dozens of clothing, sportswear, and swim wear ads for the Jantzen brand,” according to an extensive piece on The Pop History Dig about Gifford’s influence as a broadcaster, occasional actor and earnest pitchman.

“Also in the mid-1950s, Gifford appeared in a TV commercial for Florida orange juice in his Giants uniform. In this appearance, the spot was set up with some newsreel footage of Gifford catching a pass for a touchdown. The scene then cut to the locker room, supposedly at ‘half time,’ where star Frank Gifford was partaking in his half-time refreshment, a glass of Florida orange juice.”

In the early 1960s, Gifford was featured in television and magazine ads for Lucky Strikes. “A Lucky Strike smoker, Frank remembers how great his first Lucky tasted,” reads the caption for a photograph showing him relaxing with a book and a cigarette in a wood-paneled trophy den. “‘And Luckies still taste great,’ he says.”

A 60-second television spot that shows us what really “happens in the huddle” then cuts to Gifford enjoying a smoke in a similar room. “Sometimes we get lucky and go all the way for a touchdown,” he says. “After the game and a good shower, I always get Lucky …”

“I’m wondering if, knowing what we now know about the adverse health effects of tobacco, you have any regrets about your association with Lucky Strike?” Mark Weinstein asked Gifford in a wide-ranging interview with Athletes Quarterly magazine.

Gifford replied: “I do, but only in the sense that when the Surgeon General’s report came out, I very openly quit smoking. I quit the day the report came out. And that was the end of the advertising, too. I was making more doing that — potentially, anyway — than I was playing football. But that was the end of it.”

Gifford “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,” write Richard Goldstein and Bruce Weber in the New York Times.

“Roone saw it not so much as a football game as an entertainment show,” Gifford said in his memoir, they continue. “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.”

Gifford is survived by his third wife, Kathie Lee Gifford, the television personality, and their two children, as well as by three children from his first marriage to the former Maxine Ewart.

“We rejoice in the extraordinary life he was privileged to live, and we feel grateful and blessed to have been loved by such an amazing human being,” the family said in a statement, NBC News reports.

“Frank Gifford was an icon of the game, both as a Hall of Fame player for the Giants and Hall of Fame broadcaster for CBS and ABC,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said. “Frank's talent and charisma on the field and on the air were important elements in the growth and popularity of the modern NFL.”