Pat Summerall, the New York Giants kicker and legendary TV announcer poses with his shoe and football in this Dec. 27,1958 photo during a workout at Yankee Stadium. Summerall died on Tuesday at the age of 82.

(1958 AP File Photo)

Pat Summerall should forever be remembered in New York as the man who, in the wind and driving snow in December 1958, kicked a golden 49-yard field goal at Yankee Stadium to beat the Browns and launch the Giants’ journey toward an NFL championship game against the Colts that forever changed the face of professional football.

Even as Summerall reached for his helmet, the man in charge of the Giants’ offense — Vince Lombardi — vehemently argued with head coach Jim Lee Howell against the decision. Lombardi said the kicker had already missed from about 31 yards out.

When Summerall reached the huddle, quarterback Charlie Conerly looked up in surprise. The Giants needed to beat the Browns that day and again a week later just to make the title game.

"What the hell are you doing out here?" Conerly said.

"I am going to kick a field goal and win this game," Summerall retorted.

"Really?"

"Really."

He did.

On the sidelines, Lombardi reached toward him for what Summerall thought would be a victory hug. Instead, he shouted, "Damn it, Summerall, you know you can’t kick a ball that far."

That could have been the end of the love affair between the Great Megalopolis and Summerall, who died Tuesday in a Dallas hospital at age 82 while recovering from hip surgery. But destiny does not always tap the most obvious shoulder when she hits you with a road map, which might explain why Conerly was in the shower one day after practice when the guy from WCBS called. Conerly was Summerall's roommate for as long as the two played for the football Giants. "Tell Charlie to be ready," the guy from WCBS said.

"I will," Summerall said.

"Tell him and Alex (Webster) and Kyle (Rote) that the audition is at 2 p.m."

"I will," Summerall said.

"And, hey, you’ve got a pretty good voice, yourself. You come, too. What did you say your name was?"

Of course, Summerall got the job — the first fortuitous step on the way toward a second career that would make him even more famous. Not only was he part of the franchise that had taken New York by storm beginning in the mid-’50s, he was also on a five-minute radio show in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, too, along with everyone in Queens, Brooklyn and North Jersey all season.

After his playing days in the early ’60s, Summerall began a whole new life as the color man for Chris Schenkel’s play-by-play of the Giants games. It was a glorious time, coming on the heels of an even more glorious era.

"The city had discovered pro football," Summerall told me one day in 1971, recalling a time that will remain magic for anyone who lived it. "In terms of memories, New York was the best time of my life. And the guys in that locker room were terrific. It wasn’t until after I retired that I realized just how bright some of them were. I loved the city — the nightlife, the restaurants, the excitement of being in the media capital of the world.

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"Everything was the Giants. I can’t remember ever paying for a meal back then, and that was a big deal because we didn’t make much money. I loved hanging out at P.J. Clarke’s, all of us rubbing elbows with celebrities." A kind of awe always crept into his voice when he recalls his playing days. "You could not play for those Giants and ever be unhappy."

Sadly, as he later learned, it was a town where you could be too happy.

Always, he was the professional. But in later years there was too much alcohol and too little understanding of what he was doing to himself.

"They came to me in Philadelphia," he told me in total candor about his family confronting him about his drinking in the early 1990s. "It was an intervention. They were people who loved me. And one of them handed me a letter from my daughter that said, ‘Lately, dad, I’m sorry we have the same last name.’â"

Which is why he went to the Betty Ford Clinic — he eventually served on the board of the rehab facility — and how he reinvented himself in the sixth decade of his life and was sober every day afterward.

"I’m excited about what’s next," he said ... and he was right.

His understated tone of voice combined with his total command of the game he loved stamped him before and after that intervention as a kind of friend you could trust when you listened to his broadcast.

The time he spent sharing the game microphone with John Madden was a partnership made in 100-yard heaven. Together they were superb and never better than at the Super Bowl.

The last time they shared the booth, it was February 2002. And to use the euphemism the suits use each time their pollsters belch out new demographics, Fox had decided to "go in another direction."

The theory was patter, chatter and clatter was in. Without snappy stories and disco beats, you are in mortal danger of broadcasting, well, a football game. And wouldn’t that be a problem?

Madden and Summerall were more than colleagues. They were friends. Madden had a year left on his contract, and it was Summerall’s thinking that Fox would permit the two contracts to expire at the same time. When Fox didn’t, he made his announcement on his own. But he left with no bitterness. Talking to him he made it clear that "another direction" did not exactly mean the same things to him as it does to Fox.

What it meant to Summerall was, well, remaining Pat Summerall. He said Fox was good to him, which it was. He never said it but he could not and would not make himself into a hip, peripatetic MTV-style sportscaster.

He simply was right to the end, very good at what he did. He showcased his laid-back-never-lose-perspective approach throughout a 50-year association with the NFL as a player and broadcaster. He worked a record 16 Super Bowls for television.

Nobody appreciated him — except, of course, all the viewers in America ... and anyone lucky enough to recall that kick in 1958.

Jerry Izenberg: jizenberg@starledger.com