#6

 

JOHNNY UNITAS

He is the standard that all other quarterbacks have in their minds. Johnny Unitas—Johnny U. to a generation of football fans—was the first of the great quarterbacks in the game’s modern era. Otto Graham was a tremendous winner and Bobby Layne commanded the huddle at least as well as Unitas, but when it came to throwing the football and putting it exactly where he wanted it to go, nobody who came before him could match Johnny Unitas.

His statistics will not match those of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady in today’s pass-happy era, but Unitas played when teams really did try to run the ball and balance in the offense meant mixing long runs with short ones to dominate games.

Unitas was the quarterback who changed the game. Weeb Ewbank, his first head coach in Baltimore, recognized how strong and accurate Unitas’s arm was. So did Colts wide receiver Raymond Berry, a glue-fingered type who spent hour after hour running precise patterns that both he and Unitas knew in their sleep. When Berry was running a square out, Unitas did not even have to look at the receiver. He knew that when he completed his dropback, all he had to do was take one step and fire the ball to the sidelines 12 yards ahead and Berry would be there at the time the ball arrived.

Unitas was the best quarterback in the NFL and perhaps the key to its growth—leading the Colts to the NFL championship over the New York Giants in the 1958 title game in what became known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” Unitas was the standard bearer for all the future quarterbacks who hailed from a football hotbed called western Pennsylvania. Everyone there wanted to follow Unitas, who was born in Pittsburgh in 1933. Western Pennsylvanians Joe Namath, Joe Montana, Dan Marino, and Jim Kelly all became legends and all patterned their games after what Unitas did. All four followed Unitas in the Hall of Fame.

Unitas was also a prolific passer for his era. He led the NFL in passing yardage four times between 1957 and 1963 and led the league in touchdowns four straight times between 1957 and 1960. But when you lead the league with 3,099 yards and 25 touchdown passes, it doesn’t quite get the point across. Those were outstanding numbers for the crew-cut era but they’re middle-of-the-road numbers in the new millennium.

While his talent was unprecedented, what made Unitas so special to his teammates was his toughness. Unitas was a pocket passer for the Colts from the moment he first tied his high-top shoes. He would wait until the last possible instant to get rid of the football and if he had to take punishment in order to wait for Berry or Lenny Moore to get open, Unitas did. He never opened his mouth about it.

“I’ll never forget the shots this guy would take in order to throw a pass,” said former Colts defensive lineman Art Donovan. “It was awful. This guy would get hammered out there just about every game and sometimes it seemed like he would get hit on every play. But nothing ever changed. He would stand in there and take it and he would not complain. He had to be the toughest Colt of them all because he took so much punishment.”

Most of Unitas’s records have long been erased from the NFL record book. For example, when Unitas was done playing following the 1973 season (which he spent in a San Diego Chargers uniform), he had thrown for 300 or more yards a record 27 times in a game. That record now belongs to Marino, who did it a whopping 63 times with the Miami Dolphins.

However, Unitas still ranks in the top spot for most consecutive games with at least one touchdown pass. He did it 47 times between 1956 and 1960, something that Brett Favre managed to do 36 times between 2002 and 2004. One of the reasons that Unitas was able to set that mark is that it never mattered to him that much. Yardage, touchdowns, completions, and attempts were just numbers to him. The only thing he was interested in was winning the game. If he could have played a game just handing off and the Colts had scored nothing but touchdowns, he would have been happy to do just that. Many quarterbacks will tell the media that personal glory means nothing to them, but they are telling bold-faced lies.

“I never paid much attention to the touchdown streak, not like the newspaper people and radio people did,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “My whole thing was to just win games, using everything at my disposal. It didn’t matter if we did it by running or throwing, as long as our concentration was on winning. Everyone was on the same page. There were no jealousies among anyone. The team ran the plays I called and never questioned them.”

At the end of his career and in the ensuing years, Unitas did not like what he saw on the football field. He did not like the proliferation of coaches and watching quarterbacks who no longer called their own plays. “Who knows more about what’s going on in the game than the quarterback?” Unitas asked. “That’s why the quarterback should be calling plays. To think that an assistant coach knows better about what will work on the field is ridiculous. They’re just trying to justify themselves. I want the quarterback to call his own plays.”

Unitas’s top rival during pro football’s prime growth years in the early 1960s was Bart Starr of the Green Bay Packers. While Starr never had the numbers that Unitas did, he was at his best when it was all on the line in championship games; Unitas had great respect for Starr’s ability to play winning football. Starr was always supremely confident—except when he took the field against Unitas and the Colts. “[Unitas] could do anything he wanted with the football in his hands,” Starr said. “He could throw it where he wanted and do it in an instant. When he was on the field the Colts always had a chance to win.”

Never mind that Starr won 10 of his last 15 head-to-head encounters with Unitas. He had the superior team. No quarterback ever did more for the game than Unitas, who lifted professional football up on his shoulders and then hurled it into the sports stratosphere.