The Colts careened out of the gate in 1957. They won their first three games, including impressive victories against league powerhouses Detroit and Chicago. That created the impression that Baltimore had finally turned the corner. But in a rematch with the Lions at home, the Colts met with heartbreak.
The day started beautifully. Before the fourth quarter, Unitas had already thrown four touchdown passes, including a 72-yard bomb to Lenny Moore and a 66-yarder to Jim Mutscheller. But the Lions had Bobby Layne, a pretty decent quarterback in his own right.
Layne was the kind of guy who wouldn’t quit on the field—or at the bar. His players would give him their full attention in the huddle because if they didn’t, Bobby might deliver an uppercut, right out in the middle of the field.
The Colts’ Art Donovan once ended up in the same pile with Layne and got a pretty strong sense of what Bobby’s social life was like. “His breath reeked of whiskey,” Donovan remembered. “I said, ‘Dammit, Bobby, we’re gonna get drunk smelling your breath. You must’ve had a hell of a night last night.’ Layne said, ‘Last night? I had a few at halftime.’”
Even on the sauce, Layne knew what he was doing. He led the Lions to three fourth-quarter touchdowns against the Colts that day, throwing for two of them. He even kicked all of the extra points, as Detroit came back and beat Baltimore, 31–27. It was a stinging defeat for Ewbank’s team.
The following week would be even worse.
Playing Green Bay, the Colts were handling the atrocious pre-Lombardi Packers in Baltimore, 14–0, at the end of three quarters. But the Pack’s Golden Boy, Paul Hornung, the young Heisman-winning halfback from Notre Dame, ran for two big scores in the fourth, and Green Bay stunned the Colts, too, 24–21.
But the cherry on Baltimore’s crumbling cake wouldn’t come until the next week. The Colts came home to play the Steelers, traditionally one of the worst franchises in football. Continuing the trend of the last few weeks, the Steelers outscored the Colts 12–7 in the second half. No future Hall of Famer would undo Baltimore this time. It was second-year quarterback Earl Morrall, a young but already well-traveled man, who did the honors. He threw for two touchdowns in the Steelers’ victory.
Ewbank was on thin ice. After three straight losses, his team floundering at 3-3, rumor had it that Rosenbloom might fire him at any time. The owner had supposedly asked the Washington Redskins for permission to talk to their coach, Joe Kuharich, who just happened to be Gino Marchetti’s old college coach.
With three straight embarrassing losses in the Colts’ rearview mirror, the Washington Redskins—Kuharich’s Redskins—lay in wait. Washington was just 2-4 when the Colts traveled the thirty-five miles down to DC’s Griffith Stadium for the early November game. It might not have been a big story line with the press or fans, but the game would revive the old, intense practice-field rivalry of Unitas and Berry versus Shula.
As it turned out, it wasn’t much of a contest.
Lining up directly against Shula, Berry had a huge day. He abused his old mentor so badly, the Washington Post beat reporter called it a “murder.” There was something to that.
Berry had an expert’s knowledge of Shula’s abilities and tendencies from practicing against him so often. More than that, he understood, like no one else, Shula’s weaknesses. “[He] was limited in his speed,” Berry said.
“They were used to running against Shula every day in practice,” Charley Winner said. “It was hard for Shula coming in and playing Baltimore. [Unitas and Berry] knew what they could do to him. If you find a weakness, no matter who it is, or who you’re playing, you’re going to come back to it. You’re going to come back to it until they do something to stop it. [Unitas and Berry] knew [Shula’s] weakness before we went into the game.”
Berry demonstrated the mismatch on his first scoring reception of the day, a 67-yard touchdown. His second trip to the end zone was a mere 11 yards, but he used his size and toughness to haul it in with “’Skins all over him like a second skin,” as the Washington Post wrote.
By the end of the game, Washington’s defenders were so paranoid about Berry, Unitas easily outfoxed them. He sent Raymond deep into the end zone, where all the Redskins followed him; meanwhile, Johnny U’s intended target, “Long Gone” Dupre, was wide open underneath. He snatched the perfectly thrown pass and easily scampered into the end zone for the winning tally as the Colts won, 21–17.
“I knew how great [Unitas and Berry] were,” Shula said. “My whole thought in the game was that they weren’t going to get behind me; I wasn’t going to give up the cheap touchdown.”
Then he stopped and smiled for a second. “But they caught a lot in front of me,” he said. “I was making a lot of tackles on those 15- and 18-yard passes.”
Undoubtedly, the biggest star of the day was Berry, who caught twelve Unitas passes for two touchdowns and a whopping 224 yards. Most of that magnificent haul was at Don Shula’s expense. After the game the young, still unmolded Berry told the press two things, one of them astonishing. First, he stated the obvious: “It’s the greatest day I’ve ever had,” he said. And then, weirdly, in the afterglow of his triumphal moment, Berry said that he actually preferred to play defense. That revelation would have astounded anyone who had just watched his brilliant and dominating performance catching the ball, but no one more than Don Shula himself who, after the day he just had, must have taken no pleasure at all in playing defense.
The Redskins game was the start of better times for the Colts. After Washington they reeled off four victories in a row, before two losses to the Rams and the 49ers on a grueling West Coast trip dropped them out of contention. But for the first time Ewbank and his team finished the season as winners (7-5), and they had stayed in the thick of the race until the very end.
The telling series for the season was with Detroit. The Colts beat the Lions once and, save for Layne’s miracle, narrowly missed nailing them a second time, too. That was significant because Detroit ended up as the league champs, crushing Cleveland in the title game, 59–14. The young Colts were holding their own against the very best teams in the league now.
After their long journey in the wilderness, the Colts were finally and clearly upper echelon.
Shula’s humiliating day against Unitas and Berry was the end of the road for him as a player. He had already been traded by one team and cut by another. He could clearly see, via the Raymond Berry show that had just unfolded right in front of him, that the game had quite literally passed him by. Invoking Paul Brown’s old, worn phrase for washed-up ballplayers, Shula said he knew “it was time to find my life’s work.”
In a sense Unitas and Berry had pushed Shula out of his job in Baltimore, and now they were playing a pivotal role in ending his playing career. Is it possible that permanent hard feelings had been created, especially between Shula and the quarterback who was so intense and irritating, that man who was so much like him?
“It was never in my mind, and I never heard that expressed, that there were hard feelings,” Charley Winner said.
“No, I don’t think so at all,” Raymond Berry said. “When a game starts you kind of go into a zone anyway. I don’t think you are all that aware of personalities or whatever. I wasn’t even aware that [Shula] was out there. You go into the huddle, you hear the play, and then you do your assignment. That’s about what it amounts to.”
So everyone agreed that there was nothing personal in the one-sided practice and game rivalry Unitas and Berry established with Shula. But there was also no denying that Shula had paid a terrible price for coming out on the short end of it. Losing an encounter like that, unlike in high school or college, meant far more than a mere ego blow. Shula had lost his standing and his livelihood and found only bitter disappointment. The career, into which he had invested so much of himself, was slipping away.
Perhaps Shula really did take it all in stride. And maybe he truly maintained the bearing of a professional and carried no lingering bitterness whatsoever for his rivals. But that wouldn’t have been in character for Shula—or anyone else who wasn’t canonized. Shula was a man everyone knew as proud, hypercompetitive, and extraordinarily intense. Had he taken that beating well, it would have been utterly contrary to his nature.
Nevertheless, that November day in Washington was a turning point for all of the parties involved. Ewbank kept his job. Unitas and Berry discovered their mystique. And Rosenbloom, sated by success, backed off his constant threats.
The next few years brought everlasting fame to the Colts, whose excellence and on-field charisma catapulted the enterprise of professional football to the forefront of sports leagues and American entertainment. And at the center of it all was Unitas, whose indomitability and coolness under fire were almost cinematic.
It wasn’t that he refused to lose so much as he prepared to win. If the game was tight and he had a chance, he knew how to work the sidelines and preserve the clock. He and his receivers used an entire game to set up defenders just so that they might unleash something totally unexpected at the game’s most climactic moments. And Unitas theater could be seen in living rooms all across the United States, as the 1958 championship game was the first one ever broadcast on national television.
Shula, his playing days over, was living a striking contrast to his old mates. While they ascended, he seemed to disappear. He went from one to another in a string of low-paying, low-profile jobs. First, he coached the defensive backs at the University of Virginia. Then he went to Kentucky to work under the former Paul Brown assistant Blanton Collier. And in 1960 Shula returned to pro football, on the defensive staff of Coach George Wilson’s Detroit Lions.
Motown was where Shula’s precocious brilliance began to show. The Lions were formidable winners in those years, though they no longer had offensive superstars like Bobby Layne and Doak Walker to lead them. The Lions’ attack was put in the hands of a string of lesser lights such as Jim Ninowski, Milt Plum, and Earl Morrall, who all took their turns under center for Detroit.
With Layne gone, defense became the Lions’ bread and butter. Shula built a juggernaut on that side of the ball with genuine heroes like “Night Train” Lane, Alex Karras, and Dick Lebeau. During Shula’s tenure the Lions more than held their own against their Western Division rivals.
In 1962 the Packers could manage only three field goals against Shula’s defense, but those nine points were all the Pack needed to squeak out a 9–7 victory over the Lions in their first game of the season against each other. In the rematch the Packers did much better and actually crossed the goal line twice. But Green Bay suffered its only defeat of the season, losing to the Lions 26–14.
Shula’s defenses were even more effective against the Colts. The young coach must have taken great pleasure as his unit often frustrated and contained Johnny U and Berry and whipped Ewbank’s Colts five of the six times he faced them.
The living-color Kennedy years weren’t nearly as kind to Ewbank’s Colts as the black-and-white Eisenhower era had been. After winning two straight titles, Baltimore was wilting under a variety of factors, including the weight of expectation, the aging of their workforce, and the inability to sign draft picks. But nothing hurt the Colts more than the loss of one key man, cut down in the prime of his career.
Baltimore was rolling along to a third straight title in 1960 when the Colts met the Lions at Memorial Stadium on December 4. Shula’s defensive squad frustrated Unitas and Berry in a way that Shula the player never could. Through three quarters the Lions held Baltimore to just six points and had already intercepted Johnny U three times. But in the fourth quarter, when Unitas hit Lenny Moore for a diving 38-yard touchdown right in front of Night Train Lane, the game appeared to be over. There were just fourteen ticks left on the clock, and the Colts held a 15–10 lead.
Then, in an instant, the unthinkable happened. Detroit’s backup quarterback, Earl Morrall, hit Jim Gibbons with a 65-yard touchdown pass just as time ran out. Shula’s defense had neutralized the NFL’s vanguard offense, and Morrall’s lightning strike traumatized and beat the champs. And it all presaged some very rough days to come for the Colts.
More painful than the defeat was an injury suffered by Alan Ameche. His powerful 220-pound frame was rendered inert and useless, not by a break to one of his massive femurs but by a tear to the delicate tendon that connected his ankle to his leg. It was a torn Achilles that felled the mighty Horse, and he would never play again.
The other Colts, of course, had no choice but to ride on without Ameche. Nevertheless, his loss would have a profound, long-lasting effect on Baltimore’s vaunted attack and overall success.
From 1960 through 1962 the Colts would achieve little more than an average team, winning just twenty-one games and losing nineteen as they fell from the top back to the fringes of contention.
To the fans and the owner, all of this must have seemed unfathomable. When the Colts destroyed the Giants to end the ’59 season with a second straight title, Weeb Ewbank, the little genius who had patiently orchestrated their success by recognizing great players and painstakingly developing them, still had a long career ahead of him. Unitas and Berry were both just twenty-six. Marchetti and Pellington were getting along in age, but were still maulers. And many more championships appeared to be easily within Baltimore’s grasp. The fact that the Colts instead slipped back into the lassitude of a .500 ball club made Ewbank an easy scapegoat to the fans and, of course, the ever-aggressive Rosenbloom.
But deep under the surface a complex array of forces was eroding the team.
“The downfall of the Baltimore Colts from our great championship years began with Alan Ameche’s Achilles tendon,” Raymond Berry remembered. “It totally changed our offense, and I don’t know that any of us were all that aware at the time. I know it took me a while to grasp the significance of it. But we lost our balance when we lost Alan Ameche.”
In 1959, with Ameche lining up behind him, Unitas had the best year of his storied career, throwing for thirty-two touchdowns and just fourteen interceptions. But without his star fullback, his interceptions outpaced his touchdowns; from 1960 through 1962 he coughed it up seventy-one times and put it in the end zone only sixty-four times. The ratio wasn’t very good for any quarterback, let alone the fabled Golden Arm.
But who was to blame?
Berry understood what the owner and the fans could not see. “The pass rush began to reach a tempo that we had never experienced before,” he said. “And it was because they did not respect our running game, and they started teeing off on the snap of the ball. We had lost Alan Ameche. . . . We started throwing the ball more and more. The defense wouldn’t worry about our run. The pass rush started coming. And we did not have much time to throw the football. We were throwing too much without enough time, and our interception rate started going up.”
Ewbank, of course, understood the problems and the solutions, better than anyone. He took immediate corrective measures. For Weeb, the builder, that always began with the annual player selection.
In 1960 the Colts experienced a brilliant yet enigmatic draft. With their first pick they selected a future Hall of Famer, Ron Mix, an offensive tackle from the University of Southern California. Jewish and highly intelligent, Mix fitted the Ewbank mold: he was unconventional and smart. He was nicknamed “the Intellectual Assassin,” a moniker that spoke to his teammates’ respect for his cleverness and physical play. After his playing days he became a successful lawyer.
The Colts envisioned Mix pairing with Jim Parker to provide Unitas an impenetrable shield; they saw in him another mauler to open gaping holes for the franchise’s next great rusher. But Mix never played a down in Baltimore. He got a better offer from the AFL, the new league just formed by Lamar Hunt, the Texas oilman who said he had been motivated to enter professional football by his admiration for the Colts’ dramatic victory in the ’58 championship game.
Mix signed with the Chargers instead of Baltimore. It was a huge loss, but worse than that it was the start of a trend. All told, four of the Colts’ first five 1960 draft picks signed with AFL clubs. The other defections included Don Floyd (a defensive end and two-time AFL champion and All-Star for the Houston Oilers), Marvin Terrell (offensive guard who went with the Dallas Texans and became an All-Star), and Gerhard Schwedes (a running back signed by the New York Titans).
This was an unusual situation for the Colts under Carroll Rosenbloom’s demanding ownership. They were a ball club that traditionally did whatever it took to win. But that was under the old rules. The business of pro football was changing, thanks to the AFL, and the Colts were learning all about it the hard way.
When Rosenbloom reluctantly entered the football business, he did so with the full knowledge that it was a risky financial endeavor. The first Baltimore professional football franchise known as the Colts was a mess on the field and a financial loser, too. Its owner ultimately surrendered it to the league. But even that operation looked like U.S. Steel compared to the Dallas Texans, the bankrupt group the NFL sent limping back into Baltimore as a replacement.
Rosenbloom had no intention of running a faulty, failing franchise. He adopted a similar business model to the most successful professional sports team in the world, baseball’s New York Yankees. Yankees general manager George Weiss was compensated with a bonus that would go higher based on how low the sum of all Yankees player salaries were. As a result Weiss was a cold man who dampened much of the joy of working for the world’s premier professional sports organization. No expense was too small to carp about. He harangued his scouts for lying about bridge tolls and charging the team a dollar per trip instead of the fifty cents it actually cost. Rosenbloom’s GM, Kellett, was similarly expected to play a key role in the team’s financial viability. In fact, his compensation included a percentage of the team’s profits. With this arrangement in place, Kellett, too, was a skinflint.
“We had a hard time buying a pencil or supplies because [Kellett] checked everything,” Charley Winner said.
An executive who kept a keen eye on the paper clips to make sure his own pockets were full certainly wasn’t going to overspend for players. In the spring of 1960, after two straight championships, perhaps Kellett was lulled into the belief that great players were abundant commodities, at lease for his invincible Colts. And so the stars of the future, the ones Ewbank was counting on to extend his great dynasty, were all lost, squandered, in a futile attempt to pinch pennies for the benefit of just one man.
Eventually, Rosenbloom called everyone, his coaches and executives, to his home in Miami to sort it out. With Ewbank and Kellett in the same room, eye-to-eye, the owner changed Kellett’s contract to remove the profit incentives. But the damage had already been done.
Perhaps Baltimore’s biggest personnel loss of all wasn’t to the new league, but to another NFL team. In the ninth round the Colts selected Don Perkins, a 204-pound fullback from New Mexico. Perkins clearly and immediately could have filled Ameche’s horseshoes and restored the Colts’ running game. But in an odd arrangement, and with the league’s blessing, Perkins had already signed a “personal-services” contract with the Dallas Cowboys before the draft. Dallas did the same thing with quarterback Don Meredith. The league permitted this unusual practice because Dallas, an NFL expansion team in 1960, had been hastily organized in order to fight Lamar Hunt’s AFL franchise, the Dallas Texans, head-to-head. With everything moving so quickly, the Cowboys franchise wasn’t prepared to participate in the NFL draft. The “personal-services” contracts signed with two college football heroes from the Southwest were the league’s way of ensuring Dallas could build a credible and compelling roster for its fans. Dallas was going to be a key battleground city in the coming war against the AFL, and the last thing the NFL wanted was for its product to look inferior either on the field or at the gate.
The Colts’ “make good” from the league for losing Perkins was an additional ninth-round selection in the 1962 draft, but that meant little. Perkins was a hard-to-find late-round gem, not to mention the rusher they needed. Although he was injured and couldn’t play in his first season with the Cowboys, he proved his worth the following year by rushing for 851 yards. When he retired, in 1968, he did so as the fifth-leading rusher in NFL history.
Had the Colts merely been able to sign the players they selected in the 1960 draft, Ewbank almost certainly would have kept his job, and there’s no telling how many titles Baltimore might’ve won. Instead, in that one moment, on that one draft day, they saw everything flutter away.
And so the loss of “the Horse” was just the beginning of a stampede of lost talent that would haunt the Colts for many years.
In 1961 Ewbank took bold but vain measures to ameliorate his team’s reversals. He traded the massive defensive lineman “Big Daddy” Lipscomb to the Steelers and received in return a brilliant young receiver named Jimmy Orr. Orr enjoyed playing with Bobby Layne, one of the greatest quarterbacks in league history, and his performance showed it. In his rookie season Jimmy caught seven touchdown passes, six from Layne. Jimmy was short and slow but smart. Using, as he put it, “skullduggery,” he fooled defenders for huge gains. In his rookie season his yards per reception, 27.6, was the highest in league history. Unfortunately, Layne and Jimmy hit it off a little too well. They became running companions off the field, where Layne was already a hall-of-fame drinker. And anyway, despite his fondness for Layne, Orr didn’t think much of the Steeler organization as a whole. After the 1960 season he made the decision that he would rather quit the game than go back to the losing Pittsburgh franchise. So while his teammates were assembled for training camp in Pennsylvania, he was still home in Georgia, playing golf. And then he got an unexpected call.
“Will you play for Baltimore?” Don Kellett asked him.
Orr said, “Yes.”
“Well, how long will it take you to get here?”
“I don’t know,” Orr said. “About a week.”
“This ain’t Pittsburgh,” the GM shot back. “Have your ass here tonight.”
After much phone wrangling with airlines, a plane from Georgia landed in Baltimore around ten o’clock, and Orr’s ass was on it.
For Ewbank, Jimmy offered a corrective. With this talented new flanker in the receiving corps Lenny Moore would be able to move to halfback, where he could resuscitate the Colts’ broken running game. But removing Moore with his speed, hands, and moves from the aerial attack was a risk. The “Reading Rocket” was one of the fastest men in the league, and with Unitas heaving him the ball he was a threat to score from anywhere on the field at any time. But Moore’s diverse skill set also made him the most likely candidate to fix the team’s running woes. In years past, playing out of the backfield, he had averaged more than 7 yards per attempt, an incredible figure.
Ewbank’s moves offered an extraordinary and innovative solution to the Colts’ problems. Yet many fans were enraged with him for removing Moore from the passing game. They believed, and not unreasonably, that it was a terrible waste of talent.
The results on the field only fueled fan displeasure. The 1961 Colts, though they had their moments, were ultimately an unsatisfying team. That was especially true in a city that harbored championship expectations every season. In ’61 Baltimore narrowly lost to Detroit, by a single point, in the first matchup between the teams. The Colts beat the Lions in their second game. In Green Bay the Packers humiliated the Colts, 45–7. But just a few weeks later the Colts crushed the Pack, 45–21, in Baltimore. The Colts finished 8-6, good enough only for a tie with the Bears (a team that had beaten them twice) for third in the Western Division.
In 1962 the Colts teetered back and forth all year before going on a three-game losing streak to their Western Division rivals. First, they lost to the Packers in a close game. Then, the following week, the Bears took the Colts apart at the seams, 57–0. Finally, Detroit beat Baltimore, too. Two Baltimore victories at the end of the year could salvage only a mediocre 7-7 record for the season.
It was increasingly clear that no matter what Ewbank did, he couldn’t win. He saw himself engaging in a necessary rebuilding process to overcome the many problems that were out of his control. But owner Carroll Rosenbloom chose to see a team that was floundering.
The players saw it both ways.
“Comes a time,” said Dan Sullivan, an excellent young Colts guard from Boston College, “when your system wears thin with the players. It gets monotonous after a while. Weeb was a great coach, but it was probably time [for him] to move on.”
Wide receiver Jimmy Orr, who had been acquired by Ewbank, agreed. “Weeb had been there quite a while. He had a lot of success there and won two championships. He knew he had a lot of good players, and he just figured they were going to play. I believe in the theory that you’re not going to get more than you demand. It was a complacency deal. They weren’t as great as they were in ’58 and ’59. It didn’t seem like the same fire was there. They weren’t demanded enough of, probably.”
But Raymond Berry, who went back almost to the beginning with Ewbank, saw it differently. “Carroll Rosenbloom made a big mistake [when he fired Ewbank]. He was looking at won-lost record and not the injury factor, which cost us our balance. We didn’t have the personnel to run the ball. [Rosenbloom] got a quick trigger finger and fired the best coach in the business; Weeb wasn’t the problem.”
Nevertheless, when the 1962 campaign concluded, Rosenbloom’s patience for the man he never quite took to was exhausted. With a smile on his face the owner saw Ewbank and his wife off on a well-deserved vacation, paid for by the team. It seemed like a typically generous Rosenbloom touch, but it had a sinister purpose. No sooner had the Ewbanks left town than Rosenbloom spirited Don Shula into Baltimore for a secret interview for Weeb’s job.
Behind the scenes Rosenbloom had consorted with Gino Marchetti for some time. He asked his great defensive end whom he should hire in the event that Ewbank was fired.
“There’s only one guy,” Marchetti responded. “Shula.”
Rosenbloom was nonplussed with the suggestion. “You mean that guy that used to play here who wasn’t very good?” he asked Marchetti.
Eventually, “the Giant” convinced the owner that Shula might not have been a great player but that he had the makings of an exceptional head coach, and an interview was arranged.
Fifty years later Shula could still recall his meeting with the owner. Rosenbloom asked him if he was ready for the job. That, of course, was the key question. Shula was only thirty-three years old, younger than some of the players, and he had never been a head coach before at any level.
But combining forthrightness with cleverness, Shula had an answer that couldn’t be refuted.
“‘The only way you’ll find out,’” Shula said to Rosenbloom, “‘is if you hire me.’ [Rosenbloom] liked that answer,” Shula said.
Considering how much Ewbank had meant to the franchise, the depths from which he had raised it and the heights to which he had taken it, the ax fell callously. It came swooping down upon Weeb’s neck amid a great deal of speculation, intrigue, and deception.
After a third straight disappointing season the assistant coaches were understandably fearful for their jobs and looking for reassurance. And they got it, for what it was worth.
“In those days Weeb coached the Senior Bowl every year,” Charley Winner said, “and you could take two assistants with you. So every year he took two, and the other two assistants went to the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] meeting to talk to the coaches about players and so forth. Well, that year was my year to go to the NCAA meeting. So I called Weeb . . . and I said, ‘Weeb, should I be out there doing Colt business, or should I be looking for a job?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, I just talked to Carroll, and everything is okay.’”
That sense of well-being didn’t last long. Moments later Charley’s wife, Nancy, who also happened to be Weeb’s daughter, received a call from Cameron Snyder, the Baltimore Sun’s Colts beat writer. Cameron delivered contradictory intelligence.
“Nancy,” Snyder told her, “you’re going to be fired.”
“They just told Dad he wasn’t [getting fired],” Nancy replied.
“I know he is going to be fired,” Snyder said.
“We got fired the next day,” Winner recalled, laughing.
So Ewbank was terminated. If Shula felt any pangs of remorse about deposing his old mentor—the man who had discovered him, believed in him, brought him into the league, and coached him on two different teams—it was all pushed aside by his more pragmatic desires to achieve and provide for his family.
“It was an opportunity,” Shula said flatly.
But it was also far more than that. The coaching transition that fateful January day was maybe the most extraordinary that had ever taken place in professional sports. Ewbank, the deposed coach, had used his knowledge and intelligence to quickly and methodically build a dynasty from a bankrupt franchise. Many believed his champion Colts of the late ’50s represented professional football’s highest achievement. Ewbank also had another, less obvious, accomplishment. He left the NFL as the only coach who ever had Vince Lombardi’s number. He bested Lombardi’s offense in the ’58 championship game. In head-to-head competition as head coaches, Ewbank and Lombardi split their lifetime series, and Weeb would become the only coach in NFL history without a losing record to Lombardi. Because of Ewbank’s excellence the horseshoes affixed on the Colts’ helmets during his tenure became as iconic in professional sports as the NY on the Yankees’ caps.
Though the Colts’ on-field performance had regressed under Ewbank’s watch, he handed to Shula a franchise that was still extraordinarily well stocked. Unitas, a man widely acclaimed to be the best player in the game, six future Hall of Famers, and many future All-Pros were all still on hand. He also left behind a superb coaching staff that included Don McCafferty, the offensive coordinator, and Charley Winner, architect of some of the best defenses in NFL history. Both would one day be NFL head coaches themselves. So would Raymond Berry, still an active player. McCafferty and Berry would eventually coach their respective franchises to the Super Bowl. McCafferty would have the further distinction of winning the ultimate game in his rookie season as coach.
So the cupboard left to Shula was far from bare.
Ewbank may have met an ignominious end in Baltimore, but he would soon sit atop another franchise and make that one famous, too. He would discover and develop another of the game’s greatest quarterbacks. And he would again coach and win one of the most historic championship games in league history.
But that would all be far off into the future. For the moment Ewbank was humiliated. He was forced to hand over the reins of his team to a former protégé, a man he had personally discovered and brought into professional football, a player he coached and nurtured, a man whose heart he had once broken when he cruelly let him go.
And now Don Shula, a young man without a single day of head-coaching experience at any level, was the head coach of professional football’s glamour franchise. Though he was a big question mark on the day he was hired, he was in fact beginning a run of more than thirty years at the top. He would eventually accrue more coaching victories than anyone in professional football history, including Lombardi, George Halas, Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, and Ewbank. Shula would win his own richly historic games and suffer his own humiliating defeats, but he would one day be defined as the only NFL head coach who would preside over an unbeaten and untied championship season.
Standing above this theater, pulling the strings on all of these extraordinary actors, was Carroll Rosenbloom. He was a man bold enough to fire one future Hall of Fame coach and visionary enough to land another. That transaction would take all of them, and the business of professional football, headlong into the future.