"
Gifford died Sunday, a week shy of his 85th birthday, and Michaels recalled just how important he was as a legendary New York Giants player, a broadcaster and a larger-than-life presence in New York City."
“You had to live in New York in the ’50s and ’60s to truly understand what a gigantic figure Frank Gifford was,” Michaels said in a tribute during halftime of the Hall of Fame game Sunday night (watch it here). “He was right there with Mickey Mantle.”
“I’ll forever remember Frank as a man who, no matter what was going on around him, was always the coolest guy in the room.”
Gifford made the job look effortless.
“So many of us, especially in these high-pressure, high-profile businesses, there’s a tendency to have these knee-jerk responses to things,” Michaels told Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times. “That was never Frank. Frank was always the guy who would assess it. He would do it quietly. Then he would very often have something on the back end, when everything had calmed down, that was well thought out.
“Frank never wasted any energy flying off the handle.”
