Entombed within a sprawling South Florida manse with a sweep of shimmering turquoise water behind him, and a lavish, manicured lawn and golf course in front, sits Don Shula, the most frequent winner in the history of professional football.
The trappings of his unprecedented success surround him: elegant furniture, magnificent statues, and original masterworks of the canvas. He is in a room deep within his huge home, and his home is deep within the heart of the community where he elevated football to higher levels than anyone else knew existed. But on this day he is no longer a choreographer of wild men; he’s white haired and enfeebled. Wherever he sits, his walker sits beside him. Despite his infirmities he is kind and friendly; he offers cold drinks and polite conversation. He is a comfortable and satisfied man.
And, perhaps, he also holds the answer to one of the few mysteries still extant in the overcovered, overanalyzed National Football League (NFL).
Today, mighty networks and their online affiliates follow the league around the clock, bringing more probing investigation to a felonious running back than any enterprising journalist in the world applies to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. There’s not much that happens in the league, has ever happened in the league, that the public doesn’t know.
But Shula’s secret is buried deep, and it comes from a city that’s so distant, it’s half a century away. Back then the coach wasn’t decrepit; he was ferocious, a young man with ambitions that were as red-hot as his volcanic temper. Because of his later success with the Miami Dolphins, where he lasted almost thirty years, coached two Hall of Fame quarterbacks, went to five Super Bowls, and led his team to football’s only undefeated season, few remember his first job. They don’t recall that Don Shula was once the brilliant young head coach of the mythic Baltimore Colts.
Some of the details are fuzzy even to him.
I asked him: “Who had a higher winning percentage? The Packers under Vince Lombardi or the Baltimore Colts under Don Shula?”
“I don’t know,” he said, smiling, the old competitive fires glinting behind his tired eyes. “Who?”
The answer is Shula’s Colts, by a single percentage point. From 1963 to 1969 they won more than 75 percent of their games against the likes of Halas and Butkus and Sayers, Jim Brown and Paul Warfield, the Fearsome Foursome, and, of course, Lombardi’s Packers, with whom the Colts shared a rivalry of unmatched intensity.
Yet the Packers won five championships in that tumultuous decade; Shula and the Colts, for all their success, didn’t win a single one. Twice they qualified for the big game. Both times they lost in spectacular upsets. The mystery of this success-failure dynamic only deepens if you know that Shula’s business partner in these pursuits was Johnny Unitas.
Since George Halas drafted Sid Luckman and aimed the quarterback’s Semitic right arm at the rest of the league, the coach-and-quarterback combination has been the most consistent indicator of success in football. That’s roughly been true from World War II to Brady and Belichick.
Unitas and Shula should’ve been the greatest of these duos. Shula’s coaching career would last more than thirty years, fueled by his unmatched success. Unitas would one day be eulogized on the cover of Sports Illustrated as “The Greatest There Ever Was.” Separately, they achieved as much as Lombardi and Starr, winning five world championships. Unitas won two, under Weeb Ewbank, before Shula arrived on the scene and one under Don McCafferty, the first season after Shula departed. As the Don of the Dolphins, Shula quickly went to three straight Super Bowls and won two of them.
They appeared, to the public, to be in perfect sync—two young and intelligent men, deeply competitive, and extraordinarily driven. But that was merely a facade. Behind the scenes there were tensions between them that few others knew or understood.
So what was their issue?
What is it usually between two men who are at odds, money, power, or, maybe, a woman?
Sitting on his sofa I asked Shula directly, “Why was it so difficult between you and Unitas?”
“Difficult!” Shula laughs as he responds. “We won a hell of a lot of games together.”
True enough. But his answer is so polished, so at the ready, it was as if he knew back in the mid-’60s that some swaddling baby was out there who would one day appear on his twenty-first-century doorstep with that embarrassing question. In the old days, by all accounts, an uncomfortable question like that one would have provoked an indignant answer.
But he’s not that guy anymore. Years of professional success and domestic bliss have softened what was once very coarse. He has had forty-five years, a lifetime, to work on his diplomacy.
Unitas died on September 11, 2002, but he remained, to the end, entertainingly bitter. He started his career by facing Shula on the practice fields of Baltimore when both were hard-nosed young players. His emerging success came at the expense of exposing Shula’s shortcomings. The quarterback soon ascended to the top of the profession, while the cornerback faded into obscurity.
Just a few short years later, in a turn of events that could happen only in the highest reaches of the military or the government, the inept player became the great player’s boss.
After leaving Baltimore Shula leads Miami to the only undefeated season in league history and is feted as one of the greatest coaches of all time. Meanwhile, an aging Unitas loses his footing as a player, surrenders his five children to end an unhappy marriage, and fails over and over again in business.
“Johnny U came here to visit me just a few years before he died,” one old Colts coach said, “and when Shula’s name came up he said, ‘If Shula was standing here right now, and he was on fire, I wouldn’t piss on him to put it out.’”
That unambiguously angry statement was delivered only about thirty years after Unitas last laid eyes on Shula in person. The anger of Unitas, much like the talent, knew no bounds.
That Unitas and Shula would square off in personal combat was not unusual, considering their time and place. They lived, operated, prospered, fell, and rose again in a universe of attack, conflict, and collision. That’s the world of football, but, more poignantly, it was also the state of the world in their era.
In the 1960s the United States was engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and a red-hot war in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Conflicts in Cuba and wars between the Arabs and Israelis both brought the world to a nuclear high alert. At home the culture wars raged between the so-called Greatest Generation and their own offspring, the boomers. The kids had longer hair and looser morals, to the horror of their parents. Music went from crooners like Sinatra to the weird dreamers of psychedelic rock, a musical journey that washed over the listener like a hit of acid.
Americans argued and fought about civil rights, exporting freedom at the point of a bayonet, and sexual awakening that uncloaked the beauty of the female form and unleashed the once repressed and “dirty” desires of American men.
It was an era in which domestic terrorists, like the Ku Klux Klan, lynched and bombed black Americans. Police officers, in a perversion of their mission to maintain law and order, turned fire hoses and nightsticks on peaceful citizens marching for equality. The old thought of the young as dirty, dumb, and lazy. The young were convinced that the old were venal, racist, and violent.
The ’60s began with the infectious enthusiasm of John F. Kennedy, a man who overcame his Irish Catholic roots to rise to the highest office in the white Anglo Protestant land. But Kennedy, too, had a dark side. He blundered at the Bay of Pigs, where he secretly and unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Fidel Castro. Soon after that he embarrassed himself and the nation at a disastrous meeting in which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev dominated him. As a consequence of his missteps, he stumbled into Vietnam, the original quagmire. He did so, he said, in order to be taken seriously by his communist counterparts. More than fifty thousand Americans would die for that cause.
Unitas and Shula’s theater of war was Baltimore, a place physically in the heart of America’s eastern elite, but far from it. The nation looked at the old harbor town as a gritty, grimy, smelly place with little of redeeming value outside of incomparable seafood.
In fact, Baltimore was an industrial powerhouse in steep post–World War II decline. While Baltimore’s smokestacks went cold, its citizens rhapsodized about their beloved city and abandoned it. The magnificent architecture and the charming old neighborhoods collapsed, while the ghettos that racism and real estate schemes created remained and grew.
Despite its masses of suburban refugees, Baltimore remained a relevant American city, and for several reasons. First, Johns Hopkins meant that Baltimore would always be the world’s medical capital. Second, as the dividing line of North and South, Baltimore was on the cutting edge of the country’s most crucial issue—racial justice. And finally, because of Unitas and Shula, Baltimore was the epicenter of the growing professional football juggernaut.
Pro football was just coming into its own during the ’60s, propelled in large part by the on-field theatrics of Unitas alone. He made the game telegenic. He raised the standard of excellence and heightened the level of competition. More important, his heroics awakened an urgent need in other cities to get into the game. Lamar Hunt, scion of a rich Dallas oil family, also felt that need. After watching Unitas defeat the New York Giants for the championship in 1958, he went out and created the American Football League (AFL), doubling the size, scope, and interest of professional football virtually overnight.
Unitas’s pairing with Shula seemed to fit Baltimore like a glove. The quarterback and coach with their Rust Belt roots and sensitivities appealed to their row-house dwelling fans. They were tough, manly, and indomitable, and their appeal traveled far beyond the provinces. They wore the Baltimore imprimatur, but they were American archetypes.
For a declining city in a deeply divided country, they provided a focal point of American goodness. They appeared to be hard workers and team players who were driven, tough, and, yes, even violent, but only in pursuit of the greater good.
That those two men were something far different from how they were processed and packaged said a great deal about their game and their world. Their brand was order, success, and teamwork.
Their reality was a whole other thing.
They vied with each other for control of the team and harbored competing visions for what the modern game should be. The rage they felt for each other propelled them and their sport to great heights, even while it broke their city’s heart.
And in the end, everything for which they had worked so tirelessly—all of it came tumbling down.