When Don Shula was named Colts coach in January 1963, he inherited a dream situation. At least on the surface. Though it had been three years since Baltimore had last won a title, the Colts’ history of success and roster of stars made them one of the most revered professional sports organizations in the world.
To outsiders Baltimore may have been a smokestack city, a provincial town of small-timers, but it was the Colts who had lit the fuse for the pro football boom that was then just beginning. The team’s theatrical victory in the ’58 championship game, on national television, quickly catapulted professional football to the top of the sports entertainment industry. That particular contest created a longing in tens of millions of Americans to get in the game with a hometown rooting interest of their own.
One of them was Lamar Hunt. He watched Unitas choreograph the profound victory on a television in a Houston hotel room. The son of a Texas billionaire oilman, he wanted to own his own professional sports franchise and was trying to decide between baseball and football. You could say that the Colts and Giants and especially Unitas had persuaded him that football was his game. After two years of trying to get into the NFL through either a purchase or an expansion, he started his own competing league. When his American Football League started play for the 1960 season, the number of teams, players, and cities in professional football almost doubled. Even with all the new teams and cities, the Colts and their brand dominated wide swaths of the country, especially in the American South. Colts hegemony spread from Baltimore to the city-states of the South and the Southwest, stretching all the way to the shores of the Pacific.
As 1963 dawned many of the most important Colts responsible for the back-to-back championships of the late ’50s were still on hand. Johnny Unitas and Gino Marchetti were yet leading the franchise, though Marchetti was past his prime and Unitas had struggled since Alan Ameche’s torn Achilles tendon and subsequent retirement. Despite age or issues, Johnny U and Gino were considered the premier offensive and defensive players in the league.
The cast around them was excellent, too, owing to the fact that before his termination, Weeb had traded deftly and drafted wisely. In fact, he had left the team stocked with a great depth of young talent to complement Baltimore’s steel core of veteran stars.
Despite losing drafted players to the AFL, the crew Ewbank assembled would figure prominently in professional football for most of the coming decade. Included among them were premium young talents such as Bob Vogel, Tom Matte, Bobby Boyd, Dan Sullivan, and, of course, John Mackey.
One of Ewbank’s last draft picks at the helm, Mackey was a Syracuse fullback in the tradition of Jim Brown and Ernie Davis. Nevertheless, Ewbank’s prescient coaching staff saw a tight end in him. Dick Bielski, himself a converted college fullback playing tight end in the NFL, was brought in to tutor Mackey on the finer points of the profession. Mackey learned the lessons well and took the position much further than anyone else ever had before him. He teamed with Unitas and redefined the tight-end position.
When Mackey came into the league, tight ends, with the exception of the Bears’ Mike Ditka, were primarily extra blockers. But Unitas utilized Mackey’s speed to exploit defensive seams. Together they proved that the tight end could be a potent deep threat as effective as, or more so than, any wideout.
“We were the only team in football where the tight end was faster than both of the receivers,” Jimmy Orr said, praising Mackey while laughing at both Raymond Berry and himself.
Shula was blessed with a lot of talent, but he came to summer camp eager to show everyone that he was in charge of the team.
In his autobiography Lenny Moore remembered the young coach as “a guy who liked to holler and scream on the sidelines.” This surprised Lenny. He said that he and many of the other players were expecting someone much different.
“We felt that maybe since he played the game so recently [as a teammate of ours] that he would have an understanding of a player’s point of view and our problems,” Moore said. “I felt confident that we’d finally have a players’ coach on our side, but that didn’t last long.”
Shula hired one recently retired player, Jim Mutscheller, to help coach the receivers at summer camp. Mutscheller and Shula went way back together. In addition to being teammates on the Colts for many years, they also lived across the street from each other as very young men. Mutscheller lived with his pretty wife, “Pert,” while Shula lived with teammates. Needless to say, Shula and a few others spent a lot of time at Mutscheller’s clean and comfortable place, where the food was good.
But after only one summer of coaching with Shula, Mutscheller was done. Jim’s “idea or philosophy of what you’re supposed to do as a coach and what Shula did differed,” Pert said. “Shula hollered a lot, and Jim was a very quiet person.”
Unitas did things that grated on Shula’s volatile personality. That was apparent in their very first game as coach and quarterback, a preseason contest against the Philadelphia Eagles in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The Colts beat the Eagles in the meaningless game, but it wasn’t easy. Baltimore cruised to a 26–0 halftime lead, but Philadelphia scored all of the second-half points, including two late touchdowns. With just two minutes left to play, the Eagles had cut the lead to 26–21.
The Colts had possession, however, and after a first down there was only a minute left in the game. The offense merely had to hand the ball off for one or two perfunctory rushes into the line, and the game would be over.
But then something curious happened. Eagles cornerback Ben Scotti, a relatively small football player, began to taunt Unitas and challenged the quarterback to pass in his direction.
Johnny U took the bait. He sent Jimmy Orr in Scotti’s direction and launched a long pass. Scotti backed up his loud boasts and picked off the great passer, just as he said he would. As time ticked off the clock, the cornerback raced downfield to the Colts’ 10 and was headed for the goal line when, at the last second, the faithful and talented Orr, who had diligently pursued the play, grabbed Scotti’s ankle, tripped him up, and saved the victory.
Preseason or not, Shula was steamed after the game. He didn’t pull any punches when he called out the usually beyond-reproach Unitas and said that the quarterback had made “a bad call.” So in a rare feat the new coach had shown up his star player and engaged in a gross understatement all in one fell swoop.
Despite the wealth of weapons that were left to him, Shula would soon find that the job also presented many hidden difficulties.
The public assumed his biggest headaches would come from two places. First, there was a widely held belief that Ewbank’s loyal team of excellent assistants would disperse. That worry proved unfounded, however, as every coach Shula wanted to keep stayed. Initially, defensive coordinator Charley Winner was dismissed, a move everyone anticipated since Winner was Weeb’s son-in-law. More than that, Shula wasn’t sure how Winner would take to working for him since Shula had been a player under Winner’s tutelage only a few short years before. But pragmatism soon stepped in when the new coach realized, after talking to his players, that Winner was the only one who really knew the Colts’ highly successful defense. So Shula reconsidered and quickly brought Winner back.
Winner certainly didn’t have to agree; he was a man with options. When Ewbank was hired to replace “Slingin’” Sammy Baugh as head coach of the AFL’s New York Titans (soon to be renamed the Jets), he offered Winner a job with him. But eager to be viewed as his own man, Charley stuck with the Colts.
“Not that [Weeb] didn’t treat me well,” Winner said. “But everywhere I went people said, ‘Oh, you’re Weeb Ewbank’s son-in-law.’ I wanted to get away from that.”
Shula’s second concern, or so it seemed to the public, was how the Colts’ on-field defensive leaders might react to a former teammate taking control. Shula himself conceded the difficulties inherent when a mediocre ballplayer is plucked from the ranks to control excellent ballplayers. But this concern was unfounded, since it was Marchetti and Pellington who had secretly recommended Shula to Rosenbloom in the first place.
Real heartburn was headed Shula’s way, of course, but it would come from the most unexpected sources. First, Carroll Rosenbloom put immediate and enormous pressure on his new coach, as he did to Ewbank a generation earlier. He told the press, “If it were just a case of moving up to second place in our division, I never would have made the change. I think we will win the title, that’s why I hired Shula.”
The Colts had finished fourth in 1962 with a 7-7 record. Winning the title in ’63 would mean climbing the rungs of the Western Division and leapfrogging the Bears, Lions, and, of course, Green Bay, the defending world champs.
In ’62 the Packers had just completed their greatest season under Lombardi. They dominated the league on both sides of the ball and lost but one game all year. The Lions were the only team to slow down the Packers’ juggernaut. And that was primarily due to Shula’s work as defensive coach.
So Rosenbloom wasn’t expecting much. He demanded only that his thirty-three-year-old coach best Vince Lombardi and take a .500 ball club to the title in his first year on the job.
This pressure wasn’t all that Shula would contend with from his owner. Rosenbloom wore the uniform of white entitlement well. He had a conservative slicked-back haircut, he was attired in crisp suits accented with razor-sharp pocket squares, and he favored trim ties neatly knotted into starched collars. He looked every inch of what he was assumed to be—solid and conventional, an establishment figure. In fact, Rosenbloom was something quite different. He was a subversive of sorts who viewed laws, rules, and moral constraints with his middle finger high in the air.
The fawning press of the era presented him as a miraculous success story. According to their narrative, Rosenbloom had been an exceptional athlete who barely “got by” academically. Despite his supposed intellectual deficiencies, he was secretly the smartest man in the room.
In fact, Rosenbloom was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s elite academies, primarily due to his exceptional talent on the football field. After graduation he turned down lucrative offers to join forces with his father, a brilliant textile manufacturer, fearing that they would not be able to get along.
As the legend had it, Rosenbloom changed his mind and joined his father, but quickly broke away from the old man’s direct supervision anyway. He moved to West Virginia, where he commandeered one of his dad’s subsidiaries, the Blue Ridge Overalls Company. The elder Rosenbloom had only recently acquired the organization for the sole purpose of liquidating it. But Carroll saw potential and asked to run the company instead of breaking it up. By saving Blue Ridge from destruction, he made an even-greater success than his father ever knew.
His labors delivered him to a life of ease. He retired to a farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore while he was still in his midthirties. He was dragged back into business only by his father’s death and a request from an old friend. Bert Bell, who had been his coach at Penn, was now commissioner of the NFL. As it so happened Bell was searching for a solid man with deep pockets to take over the bankrupt Dallas Texans franchise, then relocating to Baltimore. He chose Rosenbloom, a native Baltimorean, for that opportunity.
Rosenbloom was a miracle businessman with incredible luck, timing, and understanding. But he also had an underside that went largely unreported. For one thing, his mercantile successes weren’t all in textiles. One of his nephews believes that Carroll started his march to wealth during the Prohibition era, selling illegal liquor. However lucrative selling alcohol might have been, the work brought him something else that was valuable. It was during Prohibition Rosenbloom made a lifelong friendship with Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the future president John F. Kennedy. Joe Kennedy was also flouting the law.
“In today’s world where there is so much Internet and so much that’s out there for anybody to find, Carroll probably would have been suspended by the league,” Rick Rosenbloom, Carroll’s nephew, said. “There’s no question that he had friends in Las Vegas, friends in organized crime. He and Joe Kennedy had friends in organized crime. There’s no question that they had business dealings that were not of the legal type back in the day. . . . The rumor is they bootlegged together.”
The public also thought of Carroll as a devoted husband and family man. He had three children in Maryland with his wife, Velma (or Dolly, as she was called). In fact, Carroll enjoyed family life so much he actually had two families at the same time. In addition to his acknowledged wife and children, Rosenbloom had a secret second family with two kids. The mother of these illegitimate children was Georgia Wyler, a singer and actress twenty years Rosenbloom’s junior. Georgia had already been married at least four other times before she met Carroll.
The same month that Shula was hired, Rosenbloom’s secret life was leaching its way into the newspapers. The league announced it was investigating the Colts’ owner for the most serious of professional sports crimes—gambling. Even worse, it was alleged that back in 1953 he had bet against the Colts. The case publicly tied Rosenbloom to a man named Michael J. McLaney, a casino operator in pre-Castro Cuba. McLaney, who reportedly had “Mob ties,” and Rosenbloom were friends, golfing pals, and business partners. Together they had purchased a Batista-era Cuban casino from the notorious Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. It wasn’t a good deal for the partners, however, as they bought the operation just months before Fidel Castro and his troops descended from the mountains and seized control of both the country and its casinos.
Despite their social and business ties, by the early ’60s Rosenbloom and McLaney were at odds with each other for a number of reasons. McLaney, in fact, was Carroll’s chief accuser in the gambling probe.
As a result of its 1963 investigations, the NFL ultimately suspended two star players for gambling, Alex Karras of the Lions and Paul Hornung of the Packers. Hornung and Karras were both banned by the league for a year. Five other players were fined for the same offense. Rosenbloom, on the other hand, skated free of any trouble. Then commissioner Pete Rozelle, a former Rams public relations (PR) executive who had ascended to his lofty job at age thirty-three after Rosenbloom had suggested him for the position, explained it away for the public. In a scene reminiscent of The Godfather, Rozelle reported that Carroll’s “three accusers later repudiated or withdrew their charges in new affidavits.”
Even as the NFL let Rosenbloom off the hook, however, it was clear that his behavior was troublesome. Everyone, it seemed, took it for granted that he was a gambler, and a big one.
“He [Rosenbloom] . . . freely admitted that he has bet substantial sums on activities other than professional football, principally golf games,” Rozelle’s report stated. Despite the league’s “findings,” it was an open secret within the Colts organization that Carroll bet on league games.
Rosenbloom “was a gambler,” Charley Winner said. “In those days I scouted the teams, and he would always call me when I would be on the road and would want to know my opinion on these games. I would say, ‘Carroll, I can’t really tell you. There’s too many things involved,’” Winner recollected.
“So later on, a couple of years later when I was off of the scouting and I was traveling with the team, I sat with Carroll on the plane going someplace, and he says, ‘You know, I’ve hired a full-time handicapper. You coaches can’t pick ’em. You analyze too many things.’ He’d get on the airplane every now and then and say, ‘Weeb, I put a hundred bucks on such-and-such a game for you.’”
Winner wasn’t the only member of the Colts organization who had encounters like that with Rosenbloom. Bert Bell Jr., the son of the previous and revered NFL commissioner, worked for the front office. He told Baltimore journalist John Eisenberg that he personally witnessed Rosenbloom placing a bet on the Colts.
“I walked into his room and he was on the phone and hollered to me, ‘Bertie, do you like us today?’” Bell Jr. said. “Then he said into the receiver, ‘Yeah, give me some of that.’ I just sauntered away.”
Bell Jr., once considered a candidate to be the Colts’ general manager, eventually left the organization, disillusioned with Rosenbloom. “I could never have worked as a GM under Carroll,” he told Eisenberg. “I knew there would come a day when he would have asked me to do something illegal.”
When the Colts drafted the great tight end John Mackey, he took a walk around the locker room with Rosenbloom before signing his contract. “[Rosenbloom] introduced me to Unitas, who looked at me and said, ‘Keep your eye on him [Rosenbloom] because he’ll fuck you.’ Rosenbloom replied, ‘That’s our John,’ as if it were a joke. But it was no joke.” Mackey recounted that story in his autobiography, Blazing Trails.
Prior to 1963 Rosenbloom had been painted only in heroic terms. His many virtues included his energy, intelligence, business acumen, civic-mindedness, and generosity as an employer. And, in fact, he was beloved by his employees.
“Carroll treated the players real well,” Charley Winner said. “He had a bonus schedule, and at the end of the year we all got a bonus, players and coaches alike, if you won so many games. It was a total of $15,000 divided. That was one of his sources of motivation.”
That bonus schedule was later deemed illegal by the league. Nevertheless, Winner said Rosenbloom enjoyed providing small kindnesses to his players and coaches and, especially, demonstrating that he wasn’t above them.
“We were practicing at the Pikesville Armory,” Winner said. “Carroll was late, and we waited about a half hour for him. He finally comes in and says, ‘Okay, I apologize for being late.’ And the late fine was 50 bucks for the players. He said, ‘Well, the fine for being late is $50, and tomorrow you’ll all have $50. And we all got 50 bucks the next day. That’s the kind of guy he was.”
The ’60s are generally remembered as an era when team skinflints controlled tight purse strings on the players. Mike Ditka of the Bears once growled about his beloved but cheap boss, George Halas: “He throws nickels around like manhole covers.” Halas, of course, was owner as well as coach. Vince Lombardi’s title in Green Bay may as well have been czar. When Jim Ringo, one of his best players, brought an agent to Lombardi’s office for contract negotiations, Lombardi supposedly stood up from his desk and departed the office. When he returned he announced to Ringo and his stunned agent that the All-Pro center had just been traded to Philadelphia.
In Baltimore Shula sought this same kind of dictatorial control over his players, and, eventually, his responsibilities were expanded to include player contracts. But thanks to Rosenbloom, it never carried quite the same cachet for Shula that it did for Lombardi. Colts players knew there was always a higher power to whom they could appeal.
Rosenbloom, if he liked a player, could be a benevolent presence at contract time.
“I had come up for a contract negotiation, and [Shula] wasn’t willing to give me anything close to what I thought I should be getting,” offensive guard Dan Sullivan said. “I played most of the . . . season without a contract. I was being paid on what I was making from the previous year. They could have gotten rid of me anytime they wanted, and I could have just walked away.
“In my personal opinion I thought Don Shula was too close [to the situation] to make a true evaluation of what I was worth in dollars and cents. I called [Detroit guard] John Gordy up from the . . . Lions and I called Jerry Kramer from the Packers that year, and when I told them what I was looking for from Baltimore they said, ‘Shit, go for it. You’re going to get it.’
“I knew Shula wasn’t getting anyplace with me, and I would eventually get a sit-down with Mr. Rosenbloom. I sat down with him, and I know he had access to every contract in the National Football League because he is an owner and all he has to do is call Pete Rozelle up. ‘What’s Kramer make? What’s Gordy make?’ Those were the premium guards in that era. He knew what they made. Now he didn’t know I knew what they made. So I said, ‘Here’s what I’m looking for.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Are you sure that will satisfy you?’ I say, ‘Yeah, that will satisfy me.’ He said, ‘Stand up.’ We shook hands, and we had a deal. Now that pissed Shula off, because he couldn’t do it.”
Running back Tom Matte remembered Rosenbloom galloping to the rescue for him, too. “He measured you by what he felt, and if you were really helping the team,” Matte said. “I remember . . . my contract was up, and I wanted to stay in Baltimore. They had made Harry Hulmes GM. Harry was a PR guy and didn’t have the first fucking clue about what was going on. Nobody even talked to me about my contract. So we go to training camp, and in those days if you got hurt in training camp, you got a 10 percent reduction in your salary and that was it. I finally went up to Shula, with a preseason game coming up, and said, ‘Don, I’m not going to play. I’m risking my life here, and I don’t even have a contract and Harry won’t even talk to me. What in the hell is going on here? I’m not going to play.’ So [Shula] calls Rosenbloom, and Rosenbloom calls me and says, ‘Now, Tom, I’m coming in on Monday. I want you to play in this game, and we’ll get this resolved right away.’ ‘All right, Mr. Rosenbloom. I’ll play.’
“[Rosenbloom] came in Monday and said, ‘Now, what is it you are looking for?’ I said, ‘I’d like to stay here in Baltimore, and I would like to have a three-year, guaranteed, no-cut, no-trade contract. He said, ‘It’s never been done before.’ I said, ‘Is there any reason it can’t be done?’ He said, ‘No, let me think about it.’
“So he calls me in after lunch and says, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do for you. I’m going to give you 65, 75, and 85 with some incentives. Guaranteed contract—you can go to the bank with it.’ I said, ‘Can I think about it?’ He said, ‘Don’t walk out the door and think too long.’ So I open the door, close the door, open it up again, and said, ‘You’ve got a deal.’”
“I guess if you played for the Baltimore Colts, you loved Carroll Rosenbloom,” Sullivan said. “He came into the locker room, and he knew everyone. He used to call me ‘Boston.’ And he knew the Kennedys. He used to say, ‘Hey, Boston, how you doing? I saw some of your old friends, Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.’ He knew them all. He was great with that type of thing. He always had the personal touch. Thanksgiving time you got a big, big basket with turkey and National Bohemian beer and all that stuff. It was really a nice touch. At the end of the season the wives and the players got gifts from Mr. Rosenbloom. So he was the type of guy that you looked up to and said, man, he’s some . . . guy, what a class act this guy is, all the way.”
He courted the favor of his players in many other ways. With Rosenbloom’s encouragement and assistance, Marchetti, Ameche, and Colts linebacker Joe Campanella founded a chain of hamburger restaurants that were a clone of the burgeoning McDonald’s business model. The Colts’ owner, sagacious in all mercantile matters, suggested that the players utilize the power of their celebrity as a business asset. Initially, there were “Ameche’s” and “Gino’s” restaurants. Eventually, all were consolidated under the “Gino’s” brand in order to leverage the ongoing popularity of Marchetti, the trio’s biggest star (literally and figuratively). McDonald’s largest sandwich was the “Big Mac.” Gino’s had the “Giant” and was the Baltimore distributor for Kentucky Fried Chicken, which was then also a new fast-food brand. The venture was highly successful and eventually netted the founder-players millions.
Rosenbloom’s largesse, however, wasn’t always so innocent. His charm and generosity could also appeal to a player’s darker side and affect team discipline.
“We were in Los Angeles to play the Rams,” one of the old Colts remembered. “And the night before the game I’m out with some girl in a bar, and it’s way past curfew. My wife was back home in Baltimore. I spot Carroll across the room; he’s also out with a woman who’s not his wife. I thought, ‘Shit! If he sees me I’m going to get fined for sure and in all kinds of trouble.’ So I snuck into the men’s room and waited in there for a while. When I thought the coast was clear, I came back out, and he was gone. I went over to the bar to pay my bill, but the bartender wouldn’t take my money. Instead, he handed me a room key. I said, ‘What’s this?’ And he says, ‘Mr. Rosenbloom paid your tab, and this is the key to his suite. He said he’s staying somewhere else. It’s all yours. Enjoy yourself.’”
Rosenbloom’s kindness for his players marked a sharp contrast to how he treated at least one of his siblings. His sister Rose Constam believed he was cheating her out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in transactions related to their father’s estate. She filed a breach-of-trust suit against Carroll and claimed misconduct by him.
When Rosenbloom’s father, Solomon, died at the beginning of World War II, he designated Carroll executor of his estate. It was a job that carried many ongoing responsibilities, as it left Carroll to run his father’s two large companies: S. Rosenbloom, Inc., and the Blue Ridge Overalls Company. In turn, Carroll was required to make distributions to his siblings/partners and their children.
Carroll’s personal holdings in these two companies were unequal. He only owned 9.948 percent of S. Rosenbloom (an equal share with his siblings), but he owned 32.82 percent of Blue Ridge. His sister alleged that Carroll diverted money and other assets from S. Rosenbloom, Inc., to Blue Ridge so that he would reap disproportionately from the estate.
In her initial filings Rose claimed that Carroll had benefited $1.5 million more than he should have owing to his many manipulations. She also said that she was bilked out of $500,000 when Carroll sold S. Rosenbloom, Inc., and delayed distribution of shares to her. These numbers would go up a great deal before the suit was settled.
The case ended up in court more than twenty years after their father’s death. Rose said she had to take that measure because she had asked Carroll to provide proper accounting of the estate assets, and he declined to comply. It took two years before the case was finally heard, but when it was it featured some sensational aspects. First, Rose claimed that Carroll had “fed a large volume of sales to multiply the profits and book value [of Blue Ridge].” In that way he was able to sell it to “the family trust at a capital gain of more than $700,000,” according to testimony that was reported in the Baltimore Sun. Second, to sort all of this out required ledger books from the Blue Ridge Company that detailed the years Carroll was in charge. These ledgers, according to the firm’s accountant, were mysteriously missing.
In the end the suit was settled out of court. Rosenbloom’s sister walked away with an amount “in excess of $400,000,” but after all was tabulated her lawyer claimed that Carroll had personally gained more than $5 million due to his many manipulations and shenanigans.
This problematic man was now Don Shula’s to handle.
The most significant headache Shula would inherit in Baltimore came not from ownership, the front office, the coaching staff, or the fans. In fact, it came from the most unexpected source, the one man most were certain would be Shula’s meal ticket.
That man was Unitas.
Johnny U was often, almost reflexively, portrayed as a “blue-collar guy in a blue-collar town.” But the description was a gross oversimplification. Baltimore’s row houses were filled with middle-class families, usually headed by a factory-worker father. The city’s east side featured the Dundalk Marine Terminal, Baltimore’s famous inland seaport with its nineteenth-century rail connections to the West. On a ribbon of concrete called Broening Highway, Baltimoreans made steel, automobiles, electric appliances, and aircraft components. Neighborhoods all over town had factories tucked into them, including those that made textiles, cans, tools, cigars, candy, underwear, beer, and much more.
But Baltimore, with Johns Hopkins University and Hospital within its midst, was also a city renowned for world leadership in the practice of medicine. For most of the twentieth century, until the ’50s, Baltimore was one of the nation’s intellectual centers. The Sunpapers of Baltimore had more foreign bureaus than any newspaper in the United States except for the New York Times. Baltimore housed Edgar Allan Poe’s tomb and celebrated it as if it contained the bones of Joseph. The Enoch Pratt Free Library was one of the nation’s oldest and best library systems. Baltimore’s most famous resident for the first half of the twentieth century wasn’t an athlete or businessman; it was H. L. Mencken, the celebrated Sage of Baltimore. Mencken was editor in chief of a major daily newspaper when he was still in his midtwenties. He moved on to become the nation’s most influential humorist, political writer, and literary critic. At the Democratic National Convention he was almost nominated for vice president of the United States, even though he was too young for the job, wasn’t a politician, and wasn’t running. Mencken wrote more than twenty books and edited two highly influential magazines, the Smart Set and the American Mercury. His work required him to be in New York on a weekly basis, but it was always a point of pride with him that he returned at the end of every week to Baltimore, where he maintained his permanent residence. His prestigious and energetic presence attracted many other literary figures to the city. F. Scott Fitzgerald called Baltimore home for five years and wrote Tender Is the Night during that time. Gertrude Stein, Upton Sinclair, Dashiell Hammett, John Dos Passos, and Ogden Nash were also residents for important periods of their lives or careers. Baltimore wasn’t just smokestacks; it was stacks of books.
Unitas appealed to every aspect of the complex and diverse town. He was the son of a coal-shoveling father and a mother who swabbed floors. Unitas worked construction after the Steelers cut him from their squad even though he had spent four years in college. After he entered professional football he was celebrated for his blue-collar qualities, including exhausting physical labor, enduring through pain, and performing while risking both his health and his life. All athletes worked out. Unitas outworked.
But on another level Unitas was an intellectual creature celebrated in Baltimore as a kind of Edison in cleats. The Sunpapers ran photos of him sitting at a school desk in shoulder pads and practice jersey, studying plays and opponents’ tendencies. His long, grueling hours on the practice field led only to the classroom, where he studied for hours more. When he finally got home more work was waiting for him, as he descended to his basement and poured over film for the rest of his waking hours. His daughter Jan remembered sitting in his lap at night as a little girl while he clicked the projector back and forth, looking for every tiny edge or advantage. Journalists celebrated his cerebral approach to the game in their articles.
In fact, Unitas took preparation to levels that had never occurred to even the greatest of his predecessors. Defensive coach Charley Winner remembered the first time he saw the blending of work ethic and innovation in the young Unitas.
“After [his] first season Unitas called me and said, ‘Charley, I would like to come over to your house in the evening and go over movies.’ So I got the films home, and he’d come over to my house and he said, ‘I want to learn defense.’ That’s the first quarterback I’d ever heard of who wanted to learn pass defense. He wanted to learn how to recognize certain things. He started it.”
Unitas’s plans were far from theories. He made them work in three dimensions. His talented flanker Jimmy Orr remembered that Unitas’s intellectual approach gave him a kind of fearlessness about attacking any defender in the league, regardless of how good he was.
Night Train Lane, Detroit’s spectacular cornerback, was the one player who gave Orr the most trouble.
“Night Train was six feet three and 215 pounds, and he could fly,” Orr said. “And he was punishment. He gave you that clothesline. I caught two touchdowns against him my rookie year in Pittsburgh before I understood who he was.”
No such luck on the Colts. In fact, Ewbank was so frustrated trying to attack Night Train, he told Orr and Unitas to avoid him altogether. In effect, the coach was giving up.
That didn’t sit well with Unitas or his receiver. Instead of avoiding Lane, they used film to set him up like the sucker in a confidence scheme.
“We get ready to play Detroit, and Weeb says, ‘We ain’t throwing over there,’” Orr remembered. “I said to Unitas, ‘No! We’ve got to throw over there.’ Unitas says, ‘We’re throwing over there. Don’t worry.’ So Unitas and I cooked this up. We had a pattern where you slant in and take off up the sideline 18 yards. For three weeks before we go to Detroit I slant in toward the sideline just like I’m running a regular out pattern. So we get up to Detroit, and I slant in, take off sideline.”
That was the move Night Train had seen on film for three straight weeks, the one he was expecting. “But now,” Orr said, “I’m going to the post. Well, as soon as I slanted in, Night Train just steps here, out where he thinks I’m supposed to be after watching three films. But I just stutter and [whistles] go. I catch the ball right in stride. He’s facing this way when I head that way. And he still slaps me on the heel as I crossed the goal line! That’s how fast he was. You had to work to beat him.”
But Unitas and Orr proved it could be done.
If there was a kind of poetry, science, or theater to what Unitas did, the implications of his genius were all business. In the days before football helmets were used like cell phones to blast plays and profanity from the sidelines to the quarterback, Unitas was a true “signal caller.”
In a very real sense this made Unitas chief executive officer (CEO) of the entire organization every Sunday. He held high-level strategy meetings in the huddle, drilling subordinates for the results of their field research. “Raymond, whattaya got?” he would ask again and again. “Dan, can you handle that guy, or do I need to call a trap and slow him down a little for you?” “Jimmy, have you set him up yet? Can you beat him to the corner?” In these huddle “meetings” no one spoke; no one was permitted to speak, unless Johnny U spoke to him first.
Right there on the field he literally charted the course of success or failure for the entire organization. If Unitas made intelligent calls on Sunday, the owner and the executives were enriched. If he made poor decisions, the fans stayed home and the advertisers took their dollars elsewhere. If Unitas threw more touchdowns than interceptions, the scouts were admired all over the league, the assistant coaches were stolen away to lead other teams, and the head coach could add immortality to his worldly rewards.
If Johnny U did his job well, it was all backslaps and picked-up bar tabs and fat paychecks for all the Colts. But if he was slinging it to the wrong shirts, everyone got fired in a thunderstorm of acrimony and derision. That was the pressure and those were the stakes.
In 1963 Johnny U was the biggest star in the game. Players all over the league admired, respected, and feared him. He was revered in Baltimore and by sports fans in all corners of the nation. But he was no longer quite the same player or person whom Weeb Ewbank had discovered and developed.
Weeb’s Unitas was young, raw, and hungry for opportunity. Don Shula’s quarterback had already won two championships and was a two-time MVP of the league and the championship game. He had established himself as the unquestioned leader of the team’s offense. Shula, only a few years prior, was Unitas’s teammate and practice-field competitor. At least he was until Unitas’s superior talent had chased him out of town. In their only meeting in an actual game, Unitas had one of the biggest days of his career, exploiting Shula’s porous coverage of Raymond Berry. Shula the player had been run off into oblivion, while Unitas quickly became the biggest star in football.
And now, incredibly, Shula was Johnny U’s boss.