The Giants selected Gifford in the first round of the 1952 draft, and in his first two seasons, the team’s longtime coach Steve Owen often played him in the defensive backfield. But Gifford also filled in at halfback for the celebrated Rote, who had injured his knee and was eventually switched to receiver.

Before the 1954 season, the Giants’ fortunes, as well as Gifford’s, began to turn when Owen was fired and replaced by Jim Lee Howell, who hired Vince Lombardi to coach the offense and Tom Landry to oversee the defense. Lombardi gave Gifford the left halfback spot, and he soon thrived on power sweeps, taking handoffs from Conerly and following the pulling guards. Gifford usually ran upfield, but he also proved effective throwing the ball on the option play.

He was in his prime when the Giants defeated the Bears to win the 1956 championship. Two years later, in a thrilling championship game often cited for turning the fortunes of the N.F.L. because it was televised nationally, Gifford ran for 60 yards on 12 carries and caught a go-ahead touchdown pass in the fourth quarter, although the Giants lost in overtime, 23-17, to the Baltimore Colts. In 1959, the Colts rubbed salt in the wound, beating the Giants for the championship again.

By that time, Gifford had become a part of the New York celebrity scene. He appeared in advertisements for Lucky Strike cigarettes and Vitalis hair tonic. He made a guest appearance on the television show “What’s My Line?” and became a regular at Toots Shor’s, a Midtown restaurant and bar that drew high-profile figures from sports and the political world.

“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,” Gifford recalled in his memoir, “The Whole Ten Yards,” written with Harry Waters (1994). “I was the player, and the Giants were the team. Heady stuff — and I loved it.”

Gifford’s luster remained undimmed after he retired as a player. He 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. As the game broadcaster and later as an analyst and briefly as a pregame host, Gifford remained with the show through the 1998 season, an evenhanded presence amid the theatrics provided by Cosell and Meredith and a host of others.

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