One of the trickiest situations Don Shula would have to navigate in his first season as a head coach was the status of Lenny Moore. Weeb had run into trouble with his owner and especially the fans when he made the bold stroke of trading Big Daddy Lipscomb for flanker Jimmy Orr.
Ewbank’s plan was to fix the team’s broken running game by moving the multitalented Lenny from flanker to halfback, even though Lenny was then the most potent deep threat in the game. Ewbank viewed these manipulations as a necessity, since the Colts’ fortunes had plummeted after the injury and subsequent retirement of Alan “the Horse” Ameche, their great fullback.
One of the first decisions Shula made after being named coach was to follow Weeb’s path. He would also start Orr on the outside and allow Lenny’s running to grind out the yards and take the heat off Johnny U. It was a solid plan, but no matter how creative and well conceived it was, it never quite worked out for Ewbank, and, in 1963, it wouldn’t work well for Shula, either.
On Friday the thirteenth, just two nights before the season opener against the New York Giants, Moore came down with a “red-hot appendix.” At least that was the team doctor’s diagnosis. Less learned men might have referred to it as acute appendicitis. Either way, Moore was expected to be out of action three to four weeks.
In fact, Lenny Moore would play very little football during Shula’s entire first season as Colts coach. Later in the year, after the appendix had healed, Moore was kicked in the head and suffered a severe concussion. His symptoms included dizziness, vertigo, and nausea. All told, he would miss seven weeks.
There were no concussion protocols in 1963, only concussions. The long-term implications of head injuries were simply not understood then, and the doctor’s advice was treated as secondary to the wants and needs of the football coaches. The Colts claimed that there was “nothing physically wrong” with Moore, and the coaches didn’t bother to conceal their disappointment at his inability to get on the field and play. The newsmen, taking their cue from team management, described Lenny as “controversial.” Eventually, they would call him trade bait.
For Lenny all this was beyond the pale. He saw something sinister in it and believed the team was trying to portray him as a shiftless Negro. His bitterness was understandable. He was clearly one of the most unique and productive players in the history of football. His career rushing yards per attempt was 4.8, higher than Walter Payton (4.0 yards), one of the most celebrated running backs to ever play the game. As a receiver Moore averaged 16.6 yards per reception. That number eclipses Calvin Johnson, the best receiver in football in the 2000s, who averaged only 15.9 yards per reception.
Moore wasn’t only about gaudy statistics; he was money in the bank. He had a streak of scoring at least one touchdown in eighteen straight games. It was a record that stood unequaled for forty years until Ladanian Tomlinson finally tied him in 2005. Their shared record was still unsurpassed in 2016.
Statistically speaking, if Moore were playing today, he would be among the best running backs and finest wideouts in the game. There is no comparable contemporary player to Lenny Moore. For that matter, no player in history compares to him.
Moore’s accomplishments could not have come from a lazy player looking for excuses to avoid games. They could have come only from a man who was extraordinarily impassioned and highly motivated for success, a man who worked hard and worked well with his bosses and teammates.
Yet somehow when Moore suffered his catastrophic injury, it seemed that no one was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. When Shula, the Baltimore fans, the press, and some of Moore’s own teammates looked at him, they saw a shirker. Was he merely unlucky, or was there some larger force at work that explained how they viewed him?
Lenny was sure he knew the answer. In 1958 the Colts played San Francisco in a crucial late-season game with the opportunity to clinch their first-ever division title. But they weren’t playing well, and at halftime they were losing 27–7. A huge part of the Colts’ legend, the brand that endures to this day, was built in the furious second-half comeback they made that day against the 49ers.
Engineered by Johnny U’s deft play calling, the turnaround featured Lenny galloping to the end zone for a 73-yard touchdown. Moore was so hot that at one point, Unitas called his number six times in a row. After the last carry Lenny came huffing back into the huddle and told his quarterback that he was simply too winded to carry the ball again, for a seventh straight time.
That episode of heroic play followed by the plea for no mas became an anecdote in the mouth of Art Donovan, the team’s huge and wry defensive lineman. Moore claimed that Donovan’s story had Johnny U responding to his request for relief by replying, “Don’t tell me to cool it! I’ll run your ass until you die.” Moore said the story was not only untrue but racially motivated, an attempt at portraying him as “a lazy nigger.”
Was Moore correct in his interpretation? It didn’t really matter. How he saw it, rightly or wrongly, pointed to a larger truth. NFL players in the 1950s and ’60s, though rising stars achieving a celebrity status in a somewhat integrated work environment, felt the same racial divide experienced by other Americans. For the black players especially, that chasm brought frustration, humiliation, and paranoia. It was highly destructive and contributed to a great deal of unhappiness and even tragedy.
On the field the Colts’ players appeared to be a band of merry brothers, working together to elevate football to higher levels of excellence than the game had ever known. Behind the scenes, however, many of the black players mistrusted their teammates.
“Leonard Lyles was one cornerback for me, and Bobby Boyd was another cornerback, a white and a black,” coach Charley Winner remembered. “Well, Leonard Lyles made a mistake in coverage, and I got him on that telephone and I said, ‘Leonard if that happens again, I’m going to get your ass out of there.’ You know, just like that. So after the game Leonard came over to me and said, ‘Coach, if that had been Bobby Boyd, would you have said the same thing to him?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’
“I didn’t see what he was getting at, at the time,” Winner said. “But I told him, ‘I’m going to correct whoever is making a mistake and get him out of there if he isn’t doing the job.’”
Later, Winner would better understand where Lyles was coming from.
“One of my best friends [on the Colts] was Milt Davis, a black player from UCLA [the University of California at Los Angeles],” Winner said. “Milt and I stayed in touch, and he told me one time [many years later] how bad it was between the blacks and the whites. They would never socialize. [The black players] were never invited to anything. At training camp they would never mingle.”
One exception to this voluntary social segregation between the players was Johnny Unitas. Perhaps looking to avoid the expectations or cliques of the white players, the quarterback would often seek out the black ones, at least at work.
“Johnny Unitas would go over and eat with the black players most of the time,” Charley Winner said, though he was at a loss to know what made the quarterback more progressive than his contemporaries. Charley assumed that Unitas was simply less spoiled and more grounded than many of his teammates.
“I guess John came from a working background,” Winner said. “He was just an open person. He seemed to get along with everybody. He didn’t bitch or moan. John was always right there. He could get the biggest honor there was or lose everything he had, and his disposition was always the same.”
When the Colts drafted Lenny Moore in 1956, he reported to Western Maryland College in Westminster, Maryland, for training camp like the other players. He quickly found, however, that his ethnicity made his experience there quite different from the one the white players had. While the Caucasian Colts would remember their time in Westminster with great fondness and recall how easily and enjoyably they mingled with the fans and residents, Moore said the experience for black players was different and dispiriting.
It “was a blatantly racist town where, outside of going to practice once or twice a day, there was nothing for a black person to do,” the running back wrote years later in his autobiography. “We couldn’t go to the movies or the restaurants. The only thing we could do was walk the streets. Thinking back it was dehumanizing and we hated it.”
He said the worst part was accommodating fans with souvenirs after practice: “All of us would be besieged by autograph seekers of all ages, which we would gladly accommodate,” Moore wrote, “but see one of these townies on the street later that night and the white players would be invited into the local tavern for a beer on the house while the rest of us received scowls.”
In Baltimore things weren’t much better. Moore found that the chemistry between the races on the field did not translate into camaraderie after hours. When practice and games were over, the black players went in one direction and the white ones in another. They never were invited guests in each other’s homes; they didn’t drink together or chase women together. They did those things, of course, but white players did them with white and black players did them with black. Colts blue and white had its limits. Off the field there was only black and white.
This wasn’t merely a case of people finding a comfort level with “their own.” Moore told Michael Olesker, one of Baltimore’s most important print and television journalists for more than thirty years, how frustrating it was just to go out and see a movie with his wife.
“When he reached the box office,” Olesker wrote, “the woman inside said, ‘You can’t go in.’
“‘What?’ Moore said.
“‘Sir, you can’t go in.’ Then she pointed to Moore’s wife, who was light-skinned. ‘She can go in, but you can’t.’”
In the context of 1963 Baltimore that incident might have been humiliating but understandable. It could be written off as simply the way things were in an old racist town. Far worse than that were the outrages the Reading Rocket encountered all over the league. In fact, the wider world of the NFL wasn’t much more enlightened than Baltimore. Moore and other black players believed that all the teams kept them in short supply by adhering to an informal, hidden quota system that limited each franchise to only seven black players. Those players, he said, were further confined to the positions they were allowed to play. Moore said blacks had to play as far away from the football as possible. Every new black player who came to the team was signed at the expense of another black player’s roster spot. The one losing his job might be released late at night and hustled away before daylight to make the racial machinations less obvious.
Though integration was generally viewed as a positive development in progressive circles, it came with complications for both the league and the black players. One particularly dramatic example occurred in August 1959. The Colts were slated for an exhibition match against the Giants, whom they had just defeated the previous December in “the Greatest Game Ever Played,” the ’58 championship game. The preseason rematch was being played in Dallas.
Earlier in the decade Dallas had its own NFL franchise, the Texans, but that team was a spectacular failure on the field and in the ledger books and folded in January 1953 (when it was moved to Baltimore and renamed the Colts). But as the decade came to a close the city was growing in size and importance, and oil money was transforming the old town of western legend into a major American metropolis. Professional football had its eye on Dallas again, and in 1960 it would have not one but two professional football franchises, the NFL’s Cowboys and the Texans of the start-up American Football League. The Colts and Giants were flown in to prime the pump.
But in 1959 Dallas was still a virulently racist town with its own segregation customs that were about to surprise the black players on both teams. When the Colts landed they were met at the plane by two buses. The white players were shepherded onto those vehicles, while the black players (Lenny Moore, Big Daddy Lipscomb, Sherman Plunkett, Jim Parker, Milt Davis, Johnny Sample, and Luke Owens) were left behind.
“That was the first time we knew,” Moore told Michael Olesker about being separated from the white players. While the white players were quickly and comfortably motored to the Sheraton in Dallas, the travel-weary black players stood at the front of the airport and watched five empty taxicabs pass them by. Don Kellett, the Colts’ general manager, eventually hailed them a cab and squared them away at the Peter Lane Motel, a run-down hotel in one of Dallas’s black sections. The accommodations were so basic, they didn’t even include a TV or a radio. The room was good for little more than a flop. Kellett stayed just long enough to make sure there would be no trouble and then quickly joined the rest of the “white” team at the Sheraton.
Meanwhile, the black players on both the Colts and the Giants (also duped by their employer) found each other by phone and set up a meeting at a diner to discuss how they might respond to the outrage. The players’ first reaction was to boycott the game.
But Emlen Tunnell, the veteran Giants safety, disagreed. He cited the courage of Marion Motley, the dignified Cleveland fullback who had preceded them in the league, and other black players who came before them and endured worse. He reminded everyone that some of those players had to deal with much more than a lousy motel; they heard regular death threats. Moore chimed in and told the others that he was thinking about Jackie Robinson. He mentioned that Jackie was the only black in his sport and had no one else to talk to, but he still went out and did his job every day.
In the end, they all agreed to play.
The next day, in a “meaningless” game, the Colts bullied the Giants 28–3. Unitas played only two quarters but threw three touchdown passes. Lenny Moore, outraged though he was, shook off the distractions and gave the fans a show with a 44-yard touchdown run. The people of Dallas didn’t want to see him wandering their streets or sleeping in their sheets, and the NFL disregarded his dignity. But when the turnstiles clicked and the lights went on and the greatest football players in the world took the field, Lenny Moore was a star attraction.
At least, you might think, the football owners would be grateful for the graceful, athletic men like Moore whose rare blend of talents was creating the demand and enthusiasm for their enterprise. But it wasn’t so.
John Steadman, the legendary sports editor of the Hearst-owned Baltimore News-American, later told Olesker about a sports banquet in Baltimore in the 1960s attended by Redskins owner George Preston Marshall. Marshall, a West Virginia native, had long been known around the league as a bigot’s bigot. His team was the last one in professional football to integrate. One of the evening’s featured speakers was black, a fact that enraged Marshall, who sought out Steadman to vent his displeasure.
Olesker quoted the Redskins’ owner: “‘I’m never coming back here [to Baltimore],’ Marshall thundered. ‘Never, ever again. To have a nigger speaking. You don’t bring those kinds of people up here to speak to an audience. Those are the kind of people you use to clean out the toilet in your bathroom.’
“‘It was Lenny Moore he objected to,’ Steadman said.”
By 1963 attitudes such as those demonstrated by the unreconstructed Marshall were starting to change. Harper Lee’s seminal novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, was published in 1960 to great critical acclaim. Lee borrowed a literary device from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, when she showed the corruption of racism through the innocent eyes of a young child.
Harper Lee’s message and technique were a triumph. Lee and her fictional ideal man, Atticus Finch, emerged as heroes to “enlightened” Americans, and tens of millions of copies of her book were sold. Decades after it was written, To Kill a Mockingbird remained one of the most frequently taught pieces of literature in the country.
Television in the early 1960s also presented southern characters, especially lawmen. Southern cops appeared nightly on the national news programs, where they were seen aiming high-pressure fire hoses or turning snapping dogs on peacefully gathered black citizens. The cops shouted at black Americans through bullhorns and blocked them from entering public schools. Some of these southern lawmen were uncovered as members of the Ku Klux Klan terrorist organization, and a few of them were even implicated in conspiracies to murder civil rights workers.
On commercial television, where everything was as processed as white bread, The Andy Griffith Show presented a totally different kind of southern lawman. In the fictional Thomas Wolfe–inspired town of Mayberry, North Carolina, the streets were loosely patrolled by sheriff Andy Taylor and his best-friend, deputy Barney Fife. Andy was a sagacious hillbilly who handled problems with a smile. He and Deputy Fife did no wrong, as they maintained clean, crime-free streets without the aid of weapons. (Barney had a firearm, but due to his many self-inflicted accidents, he was allowed to carry only one bullet, which he was required to keep in his shirt pocket.)
All the show’s charm and humor might have been lost had the producers merely depicted an ordinary black man sitting down at the counter of the town diner and ordering a cup of coffee. Would Andy and Barney have handled it with a smile, or would they have acted as many police in their region did and delivered a beating to that coffee drinker’s black skull?
The country simply wasn’t ready to know.
Baltimore’s attitudes and customs regarding race went all the way back to the Civil War. Maryland, a slave state, remained in the Union. Even so, Baltimore had enough Southern sympathizers to credibly threaten Lincoln’s life as he passed through on his way to Washington. Southern sympathizers also attacked Union troops passing through the state, provoking the first bloody confrontation of the war. Lincoln coerced Maryland’s loyalty by aiming cannons at the city and threatening to fire them in the event of a secession vote. Nevertheless, he prevented the possibility of such a poll when he threw the Baltimore mayor, a Maryland U.S. congressman, Baltimore’s police commissioners, and the entire city council into jail.
Lincoln also suspended habeas corpus in Maryland, a citizen’s most basic defense against unlawful detention, before locking up private citizens who were outspoken in their support of the South. One of the facilities used to imprison these offenders was Fort McHenry. Ironically, one of the inmates rounded up by Lincoln and imprisoned at the old fort was Frank Key Howard. Fifty years earlier Howard’s grandfather, a lawyer, had been at Fort McHenry, too, arguing for the freedom of prisoners held by the British. While he was there he wrote a poem. That verse was “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Howard’s grandfather was Francis Scott Key.
Many ex-Confederates, despite their powerlessness during the war, were a vital part of Baltimore’s business and political leadership in the late nineteenth century. They and their descendants played a huge role in shaping the city and its racial attitudes for the next one hundred years. Baltimore was home to three monuments to the Confederate cause, but only one erected to the Union. All of the Confederate statues were commissioned and constructed in the twentieth century. In 1917 the city also named one of its many handsome parks “Robert E. Lee,” in honor of the Confederate general.
Baltimore schools were completely segregated by law for the first half of the twentieth century. Real estate investors conspired to create segregated neighborhoods, first through laws and then through protective covenants that buyers were forced to sign. These tactics not only kept the races apart but also kept Gentiles separate from Jews, since the Chosen People were also considered detrimental to home values. Some Baltimore-area swim clubs infamously hung signs at their entrances that read, “No blacks, Jews, or dogs.”
Journalism, that supposed watchdog for the people, offered no salvation for the oppressed races. Publisher and majority owner of the Baltimore Sun Charles Henry Grasty was also a residential real estate investor, and he played a key role in the development of the protective covenants. The Sun’s most famous writer, H. L. Mencken, had a national following and was considered one of the most important editors, authors, and critics of his era. Mencken was an outspoken opponent of the lynching phenomenon, and he also advocated for the right of black citizens to attend public universities, in some instances, and to be able to utilize public facilities, such as parks and tennis courts. But Mencken was a German American who wrote negatively of the Jews. He also wrote a positive literary review of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s demented and blatantly anti-Semitic manifesto, in the early 1930s.
These were the cultural influences that shaped Johnny Unitas and Don Shula’s Baltimore in the 1960s. Two separate-but-equal societies, as the town fathers promoted, never existed. The city was a single coarse community that was an embarrassment to both black and white, Jew and Gentile. Although these groups lived near each other and interacted in most public places, white Gentiles held a position of privilege that wasn’t exactly earned, while blacks languished in an underclass that was all but impossible to escape.
The year 1963 was a particularly hard time for race relations in Baltimore. That was evident in the tragic deaths of three black Baltimoreans, the causes of which ran the gamut from overt to covert racism.
The first one happened exactly one month, to the day, after Shula was hired and feted in luxury at the swanky Belvedere Hotel. Just a few blocks away from there, at the Emerson Hotel, a barmaid named Hattie Carroll lost her life and helped accelerate the civil rights movement.
The night started off happily, with the Emerson hosting the annual “Spinsters’ Ball.” A tradition for the city’s “postdebutantes,” it was meant to offer a genteel forum for young society ladies to invite gentlemen out for a formal evening. In 1963 the theme, portentously, was “Old Plantation.” By the end of the night one of the guests, William Zantzinger, would prove he was no gentleman.
A farmer from southern Maryland, Zantzinger arrived at the ball rip-roaring drunk and twirling a toy cane he’d bought at a carnival for about a quarter. He spent the entire evening annoying just about everyone with whom he had come into contact by running his roaring mouth and lashing out with the stick. All night long he delivered racial epithets and an occasional whack with the cane to wait staff. At some point he actually pushed his own wife to the ground.
This sad evening’s nadir came only when Zantzinger ordered yet another drink, this time from a “matron” named Hattie Carroll. Carroll was apparently too slow to please Zantzinger, so he struck her on the neck and shoulder with the cane and called her “a black bitch.” Soon after that attack she sat down and suffered a massive stroke. She was taken to nearby Mercy Hospital, where she died the next morning.
Zantzinger was arrested and led out of the ball in handcuffs. Still intoxicated, he left the scene barefooted and screaming for both justice and his shoes.
Mrs. Carroll cut a highly sympathetic figure. She was fifty-one years old, and, despite the hue of her skin, she possessed an abundance of American virtues. She was a churchgoer, a hard worker, and a mother. When she died, she left eleven children behind.
The next Sunday the Reverend Theodore C. Jackson was at Gillis Memorial Church, Hattie Carroll’s place of worship, seething in the pulpit.
“There is something wrong with this city,” Jackson thundered. “There is something wrong when a white man can beat a colored woman to death and no one raises a hand to stop him.”
White Baltimoreans might’ve been ashamed of the simple truth of Jackson’s spare, elegant statement, but the Sun did not send a single reporter to cover Carroll’s funeral, and it published no obituary for her.
Hattie’s life and death escaped the notice of the journalists in her hometown, but one aspiring young writer in New York took notice. Sitting in some all-night greasy spoon, reading the details in the New York Times, twenty-two-year-old Bob Dylan instinctively understood that a human being had died, and, black or white, she had a highly poignant story.
Dylan penned “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” that night, a factually inaccurate and clumsy ballad, though it demonstrated his storytelling ability and righteous passion. Curiously, the song never even mentioned Carroll’s race, as though it were incidental to the larger tragedy of the powerful abusing the weak.
Back in Maryland lawyers, judges, and medical examiners discussed whether there was a cause-and-effect relationship between a strapping young man striking a middle-aged woman with a weapon and her death just a few moments later. The white power structure moved the trial from Baltimore ninety minutes west to Hagerstown. They put the case in the hands of three judges instead of a jury. Those wise men ultimately determined that Zantzinger’s crime was manslaughter, not murder. His penalty for forcefully taking the black woman’s life was only six months in jail and a paltry $500 fine. For Dylan the matter was far simpler than all of that. When he noticed that Zantzinger rhymed with murder, the civil rights movement had one of its earliest anthems.
The death of another black Baltimorean that year hit even closer to home for the Colts. Big Daddy Lipscomb, a famous member of their championship teams in ’58 and ’59, died in a way that was becoming all too common for young men in the ghetto.
Lipscomb took well to the streets of Baltimore, probably because they were so similar to the ones in Detroit where he grew up—and grew and grew and grew. Nevertheless, the streets were never good to him.
He was gargantuan, six feet six and almost 285 perfectly proportional pounds. He could run like a gazelle and tackle ferociously. He became a three-time All-Pro defensive lineman, though he had never played a single down of college football. Pete Rozelle, the future commissioner of the league, was the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams when he discovered Lipscomb. At the time Big Daddy was playing his ball in the U.S. Marines. He gave himself his unique nickname by constantly referring to everyone smaller than himself as “Little Daddy.” Naturally, they called him “Big Daddy” in return.
In those early days his talents were crude but undeniable.
“I remember one game at Green Bay,” Charley Winner said. “Lipscomb dropped out of the line to cover [Packers running back] Tom Moore on a close flare-pass situation. He chased Moore for 40 yards and then knocked down the pass in the end zone. It was one of the best efforts I’ve ever seen by a big man against an offensive situation which is almost impossible to stop.”
Lipscomb’s Superman appearance and abilities were highly effective camouflage for the complex and highly vulnerable man beneath the surface. Eventually, though, signs of his inner pain rose to the surface. He suffered from relentless insomnia, and instead of sleeping he paced the halls all night long. When he got into bed it was usually with a gun under his pillow and his bed frame jammed up against the locked door.
Both of Big Daddy’s parents died when he was still a little boy. His father passed away before he was even old enough to know him. When he was just eleven his mother was murdered. She was killed by her own boyfriend, stabbed to death right out on the street, the blade plunged into her forty-seven times.
Lipscomb came under the care of his mother’s parents, but that, too, was a troubling experience. He worked several jobs because his grandfather demanded rent and board. Once he pilfered a bottle of whiskey from the old man and drank the whole thing. When his grandfather discovered the theft, he tied his grandson to the bedpost and whipped him.
Lipscomb survived this desolate upbringing and even managed to grow into an ebullient manhood. He had a great sense of humor and was highly popular with his teammates, both black and white. He traversed the town in a flamboyant yellow Cadillac convertible. In the off-season he put his magnificent physique on display and worked as a professional wrestler. He was also generous to a fault, with a soft spot for children. His teammates saw him pick up more than one poverty-stricken kid off the street to buy the child shoes and clothes.
But Big Daddy could also wander in gloom. When friends had a drink, he demanded a bottle. His thirst for women was equally insatiable. He married three times, and two of his wives overlapped. That was hardly enough to satisfy him, as he was also known for his trysts with hookers and hotel chambermaids.
Other encounters with women were less loving. In November 1960 a Baltimore waitress brought suit against him, alleging he slapped her. She asked for $15,000 in damages.
All of this took a heavy toll on him. His close friend Lenny Moore remembered that Big Daddy could suddenly and utterly lose his composure.
“We’d be in a cab,” Moore told Michael Olesker, “and he’d start crying. I’d say, ‘Hey, man, what’s wrong with you?’ He’d say, ‘The Daddy don’t feel too cool, man. . . .’ These episodes would happen all of a sudden. He’d just break down and cry.”
There were many sources of that sadness, but an anecdote that Art Donovan, Big Daddy’s Colts teammate and friend, used to tell was unintentionally revealing. It was less dramatic than most Lipscomb stories but also a little sad in its own right.
One day Big Daddy asked Donovan about his ancestry.
“Irish, of course,” Donovan replied.
Happy to play the straight man, Donovan replied, “What descent are you, Big Daddy?”
Without a trace of a smile Lipscomb replied, “I like you Artie, so I’m Irish, too.”
This story, reported by the Sun’s Colts reporter Cameron Snyder back in the ’50s, derives its comedy, such as it is, from the ludicrous idea that a giant black man could be Irish. Of course, the humor ignored how a man might feel who had no ancestral language, culture, religion, or food to tie him to his forebears.
In July 1961 the Colts traded Big Daddy to Pittsburgh in a multiple-player deal that also included the outstanding young receiver Jimmy Orr. Big Daddy became a Steeler, but he never really left Baltimore. He continued to make his permanent home there. That didn’t turn out to be a wise decision.
Baltimore was the place of his biggest achievements and best friends. But not all of those friends were good for him.
One of them, Timothy Black, a young construction laborer who had known Lipscomb for about a year, had a long history of arrests and a bad habit that he soon passed on to Big Daddy. That habit was heroin.
Black bought Lipscomb his first taste of the drug, and it wasn’t long before Big Daddy was a regular user. According to Black, his football player friend was “shooting up” three times per week.
One night in May 1963 Lipscomb spent the evening hanging out at Black’s apartment. Around midnight the two left in Big Daddy’s Cadillac to pick up beer and prostitutes. They left again around three in the morning to take the girls home and came back an hour later with about $12 worth of heroin. Lipscomb had a bad reaction to the drug and lost consciousness.
Black and an unidentified man he called for help tried to revive Lipscomb. They slapped him and applied ice packs to awaken his senses, and then they injected him with saline, which, at the time, was believed to be an antidote for a narcotics overdose. None of it helped.
All told, Big Daddy was unconscious for about two hours before an ambulance was even called. He died in the back of that emergency vehicle wearing a polo shirt and slacks. He had $73 still jammed into his pockets, though he had started the night with $700.
The cops found a homemade syringe and other drug paraphernalia in Black’s apartment, and he was eventually charged with the possession of those items. Those charges were dropped, however, when it was discovered that the Maryland General Assembly, which had recently revised its drug laws, had somehow forgotten to include a penalty for possession of narcotics paraphernalia. Nevertheless, Black was in jail by that October, sentenced to eighteen months on a burglary charge, unrelated to the Lipscomb case.
More than twenty thousand people filed through the Baltimore funeral home where Lipscomb’s body had been taken. Eventually, Big Daddy’s remains were released back to his grandfather, the same man who had brutally whipped him as a child.
Friends were shocked by Lipscomb’s death and professed disbelief. Unitas, like many of the Colts, thought that Big Daddy had been murdered. Charley Winner wasn’t sure what had happened.
“Every year, for the physical, we would get some shots,” Winner said. “Big Daddy hated the needle. Somebody had to get him addicted. Buddy Young [a Colts front-office official and former player] came back from [Big Daddy’s funeral] and said that his arm was like a pin cushion.”
The chief medical examiner, Dr. Russell S. Fischer, felt that Lipscomb’s overdose was “possibly administered by accident.”
Nothing was ever proven, nor ever would be.
Whatever the truth, in the eyes of the majority culture the circumstances of Big Daddy’s death would strip away his life accomplishments. In the eyes of whites the man who was once one of the greatest defensive linemen in the history of the league was, in death, just another pathetic ghetto junkie.
White attitudes were summed up a decade later in the movie The Godfather when powerful Mafia don Zaluchi spoke up, not only for the solid business advantages of selling heroine but also for the exact marketplace. “In my city,” Zaluchi said, “we would keep the traffic in the dark people—the colored. They’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.”
There would be yet one more prominent and telling death in Baltimore’s black community in 1963 when prizefighter Ernie Knox was killed in the ring.
Knox was a rising star in Baltimore’s boxing scene, though sometimes it was hard to understand why. In his five-year professional career he was only 10-5-3, and he had never earned a purse larger than $300. Despite these lackluster numbers, he quit his job as a hod carrier hauling bricks on construction sites to concentrate full-time on his boxing career.
Knox had once been a promising amateur good enough to tally a 31-3 record. One of those three amateur defeats was a disputed loss to Puerto Rican Jose Torres, a future Boxing Hall of Famer. But Knox would never know the same success as a professional. One reason for his professional struggles may have been that he was a natural light heavyweight who fought as a heavyweight (175 pounds or more), probably a financially motivated decision. He often weighed in at 178 pounds, but it was unclear if he was truly that size or cheating his way through his weigh-ins to qualify for heavyweight bouts. If cheating, he was facing off against men who were significantly heavier and stronger than he was.
Not surprisingly, he gained the reputation of a defensive fighter.
“He was the best ‘taker’ I’ve ever handled,” his trainer, Mac Lewis, said. But that “achievement” only gave rise to the belief that he wasn’t aggressive enough, something that didn’t bode well for a boxer aching to contend.
“I’ve told him that no one is going to come out to watch him block punches,” Lewis said. “He’s got to be aggressive and sell himself to the fight crowd.”
In October 1963, when he signed to meet a savvy and experienced fighter from New York named Wayne Bethea, Knox hoped to find his moment.
Bethea, thirty-one, was a tomato-can packer by trade and a little past his prime, but he had once been a bona fide contender who had beaten the former heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles. In fact, Bethea had taken on a host of formidable fighters and had a solid reputation. In 1958 he unfortunately ran into the rock-hard fists of Sonny Liston, who knocked him to the canvas in little more than a minute, just enough time for Bethea’s knees and his whole career to buckle.
Bethea would never quite bounce back from his embarrassing loss to Liston, but his career in the ring was far from over. He enjoyed a 1960 victory over Ernie Terrell, a top contender. In ’63 Bethea broke out the American Express travelers’ checks and toured Europe. He outdistanced an Englishman, lost two decisions to the same German fighter, and then abused a bevy of Italians.
By the time he came to Baltimore to meet Knox, Bethea was a little long in the tooth but experienced and dangerous. Lewis emphasized the importance of the Bethea bout for Knox with prophetic words.
“Ernie realizes this is the fight that will make or break him,” Lewis said.
The fight was scheduled for the Baltimore Coliseum, a grandly named dump. In fact, it was a facility with all the trappings of a Depression-era high school gym. Sitting on the corner of Monroe Street and Windsor Avenue, it was on the edge of the ghetto. Knox and Bethea’s Monday-night tussle drew a measly crowd of little more than eight hundred souls, this despite regular and well-written newspaper coverage that created a strong narrative and hyped the possibilities.
What that sparse crowd saw was something less than sport. They witnessed a grueling and brutal affair in a sweltering kiln, the stifling air made even more unbearable by the bright lights trained on the ring.
According to Alan Goldstein, the magnificent boxing writer for the Baltimore Sun, the ninth round was the fateful one. Knox “was bullied against the ropes,” Goldstein wrote, “where Bethea scored heavily with right uppercuts to the body and short left hooks to the head.” Knox was “in a state of near exhaustion” when “Bethea floored him with a looping right.”
Knox, so desperate for success, wouldn’t stay down. He composed himself and gamely resumed the fight after a standing eight count. But the damage had been done.
“Bethea was quick to follow up his advantage and decked Knox again with a volley of blows,” Goldstein wrote.
This time Knox did not get up, not for a long time. He was on the canvas, semiconscious, for about ten minutes. Meanwhile, Knox’s friend Joe Sheppard, an artist with an interest in boxing who sometimes sparred with him, was a ringside spectator for the bout. Sheppard watched on in horror as the inept staff fumbled to help Knox. He saw them vainly and inadvisably try to improve the fighter’s condition, while others frantically attempted to locate a stretcher, a piece of emergency equipment that should have been easily at hand.
Through all of this chaos Sheppard had the presence of mind to sketch the scene. His hastily scribbled figures tell a pathetic story of three men working at cross-purposes. They don’t seem to know whether the inert athlete should be carried away or merely put back on his feet. The simple but heartbreaking sketches reveal a grotesquerie in progress, a man so destroyed he looks like a limp marionette.
Knox was eventually taken by ambulance to Provident Hospital. At one in the morning he asked a nurse to get him a glass of water, and those were the last words he ever uttered. Soon after that he fell into a coma.
On Wednesday morning a neurosurgeon made a last-ditch effort to save Knox’s life. He drilled two holes into the boxer’s skull to relieve pressure, but the fighter showed no improvement. He died soon after the operation; the official cause of death was subdural hematoma, a hemorrhage of the brain.
But Knox’s end was only the beginning of the controversy.
Dr. Charles S. Petty, Baltimore’s assistant medical examiner, unleashed a bombshell when he announced that the fighter’s autopsy weight was just 153 pounds. Two days earlier the fighter weighed in for the bout at 178. It would have been illegal for him to be in the ring at anything less than 175.
The huge discrepancy prompted an investigation by the state’s attorney and the Baltimore grand jury. Sheppard, who was in the gym the Thursday before the fight, said he saw Knox on the scales unofficially weighing himself. The artist confirmed that his friend weighed 178 pounds.
But something didn’t add up.
At the official weigh-in both fighters wore trousers. This was highly unusual; the athletes would typically strip down for the scales. Bethea’s manager, Bobby Gleason, one of the people present at the weigh-in, later told Sports Illustrated, “With those clothes on Knox weighed 184 pounds. They credited his clothes with weighing six pounds and made his weight 178.”
Had Knox been hiding lead weights in his pockets?
“No one bothered to check,” Sports Illustrated reported.
Dr. Petty didn’t need to speculate; a man of science, he did the math. He said that Knox might have reasonably lost a pound every round in the sweltering heat of the arena. But that would have only brought his weight down to 169 pounds. He also said that a man deprived of all food and fluids would lose anywhere from one and a half to four pounds. That would have brought Knox down to about 163, still ten pounds more than his weight at autopsy. Of course, the young fighter was not deprived of fluids; in fact, he was receiving them intravenously at the hospital. Dr. Petty also accounted for the weight that might have been lost due to Knox’s emergency operation, but he said such a procedure would have reduced the fighter’s weight by only a few ounces. So there was simply no reasonable explanation as to how Knox could have lost 25 pounds between his official weigh-in and his autopsy just a few days later.
Unless, perhaps, there was a deception at the scales.
The more investigators and journalists looked into Baltimore’s night of boxing, the more plausible that seemed.
The Knox fight wasn’t even the worst fiasco of the evening. The undercard featured a feared and experienced local welterweight named “Irish” Johnny Gilden. His scheduled opponent was a Washingtonian named Hal Bristol. But just prior to fight time Bristol disappeared without explanation.
When the bell rang a substitute fighter named Kenny Joseph timidly walked into the ring to a chorus of boos. Joseph was a slight man who Sports Illustrated said “did not appear to weigh more than 125 pounds.” That would have been too light to meet a welterweight, as Gilden supposedly was. Joseph’s “official” weight, at weigh-in, was 146.5 pounds.
The point was moot anyway. Gilden’s official weight was 147.5 pounds, half a pound more than the welterweight limit. No matter how you looked at it, by rule, the two should have never entered the same ring.
To make matters even worse, Joseph didn’t even appear to be a legitimate prizefighter. Goldstein wrote that he was “obviously a complete novice.” Accordingly, Joseph attempted to keep Gilden at bay like a school-yard coward might. He raised a knee. Even that embarrassing tactic was in vain, however, as Gilden bashed the unskilled fighter until the referee stopped the action just sixty-two seconds into the bout.
Two such fishy matches naturally brought scrutiny on the event’s organizers. And the more it was looked into, the more it looked like the underside of a lifted rock. There were plenty of disgusting creatures scurrying in the light. Many on the Maryland Athletic Commission appeared not to know anything about boxing or even their own responsibilities. In fact, the commission chairman, D. Chester O’Sullivan, created that impression himself when he said, upon his appointment, “I’ll do the best I can do on this job as soon as I find out what I’m supposed to do.”
O’Sullivan was primarily a political creature who delivered Irish Catholic votes for the type of civic hacks who hired him. Appointments to the commission weren’t made on knowledge or merit, but rather doled out as a kind of patronage distributed in return for political favors. At least O’Sullivan showed up for work. One of the commission members said he had never seen his other two colleagues.
Even that sorry crowd looked like the architects of the Manhattan Project compared to the promoter, Civic Sports. Benny Trotta, an eminently disreputable man, headed up that organization. Trotta’s other business interests included ownership of a strip club on the Block, the city’s sleazy red-light district. A nefarious character, Trotta was reportedly also a draft dodger and a thug. He had been stripped of his promoter’s license back in the 1950s due to his connection to the notorious New York gangster Frankie Carbo. Carbo’s outfit had an iron grip on boxing and had been accused of “fixing” bouts in a number of states.
Despite all this, the Maryland Athletic Commission restored Trotta’s license in the summer of 1960, but it didn’t take him long to land right back in hot water. Just a few months before the Knox fight, Trotta’s license was once more in question as federal tax agents arrested him for bookmaking.
All in all, the various forces that led to Ernie Knox’s death painted a grim mosaic that even his artist friend Joseph Sheppard would have had a hard time fathoming. Many triumphs lay ahead for Sheppard’s career. He would win important commissions for public art all over the world. His sculptures would adorn cities, and his paintings would hang in prestigious private collections and in major museums. Yet one of his most enduring works would be The Death of Ernie Knox, a huge, extraordinarily dramatic piece depicting the gloriously muscled form of the fallen fighter descending from the ring, his lifeless arms lifted by others. In Sheppard’s eyes the fighter was a bronze-hued Christ descending from the cross at Calvary.
But Ernie Knox couldn’t absolve any of the many sinners around him, nor would he ever spend a penny of the measly purse from his exhaustive night’s work, just $250. It wasn’t much by any measure, of course, except what he gave up to earn it.
Lenny Moore wouldn’t die in 1963, like these other black Baltimoreans, but at times it felt like his career might expire. Lenny would have to endure both his physical problems and the taunts he believed were directed at him from the team, but he would have to do so largely alone. The 1963 season would go on mostly without him.
In Shula’s first game as Colts coach, Baltimore fell to the Giants. A few weeks later, after a 31–20 loss to the Packers, the team was struggling at just 1-2. Next up was a date with the Bears at Wrigley Field, and more frustration. Unitas threw an interception, and the Colts failed to score a touchdown all day as they lost 10–3.
The Bears game was noteworthy for the fact that Unitas and Bears quarterback Billy Wade seemed to make the same gaffe: they both fumbled while attempting to pass. Early in the game Wade’s misstep turned out to be harmless; the officials ruled it was an incomplete pass. But in the fourth quarter, with the Colts desperately trying to rally the steam to win, Bears defensive end Doug Atkins tapped Unitas’s arm as he attempted to pass, and the ball popped out. This time the referees decided it was a fumble, and the Bears recovered the ball.
On the Colts’ last offensive play of the game, with desperation setting in, Unitas passed to tight end John Mackey. The play gained only 2 yards instead of the 4 that were needed for the first down. Shula admitted that the play call had come from the bench. That was a curious development, since Unitas was long considered the best play caller in football and the most clutch. The fact that Shula and the coaches disregarded him with the game on the line and made the call themselves was smoke signaling fire. But while the young coach took credit for choosing the play, the blame for its failure was left a little more ambiguous.
“John had two receivers,” Shula told the Sun after the game. “The longer one got into a jam and Unitas threw to the short man hoping he could get in the needed yardage.”
Whether the play was inadvisable or the execution was poor, the fact was thirty-three-year-old Don Shula took the ball, metaphorically at least, out of the hands of the most outstanding field general in the game. Was this a point of contention between the two men? At the very least it seemed to be an inefficacy. Incredibly, nobody in the press raised the pertinent questions to the principal players.
The Colts regained their footing a little, won the next two games, and were 3-3 when the Packers came to Memorial Stadium for a late October rematch. The Pack had already defeated the Colts in Wisconsin back in September. Still, nothing prepared Baltimore for the miserable first half they were about to play. Unitas completed just three of eight passes to his receivers. He was almost as accurate in connecting with the Packers, throwing two interceptions to them, in addition to fumbling the ball. Despite a vast improvement by Unitas and the offense in the second half, the Colts lost 34–20. They had turned the ball over six times, literally handing the game away.
Worst yet, Baltimore’s record under its new coach was now a miserable 3-4. After the contest Shula sat on a table and met the press with a clenched jaw and an uncomfortable truth on his lips. When Cameron Snyder, the Sun’s longtime Colts reporter, asked Shula if he “had entertained any notions about replacing Unitas,” the young coach bluntly replied.
“Yes,” Shula said, “if things had continued to go bad in the third period, I would have taken him out. He had a bad first half. There’s no use denying it.”
It was a stunning admission. Worse than that, it was a show of disunity even as the Colts’ most bitter rivals sat just a few feet away in the visitors’ locker room. Nothing seemed to sum it all up like the wry observation of the Colts’ reserve halfback Alex Hawkins.
“When we win, we win as a team,” Hawkins said. “But when we lose, it’s Unitas’ fault.”
And life wasn’t about to get any easier for Unitas and Shula. Next up was a rematch with the Chicago Bears. Halas’s men had marched their way to a 6-1 record, and they were in first place in the West, tied with the Packers. Chicago was as tough and hard-nosed as their coach’s cranky old visage. The Colts lost to them, too, and Unitas was again in the crosshairs. He personally gave the Bears the ball three times, fumbling twice and throwing an interception. When the miserable day was over Green Bay and Chicago both stood at 7-1, and the Colts were all but done at 3-5.
The Colts finally found their footing after the second Bears game. Even without Moore Shula developed an effective running attack that finally opened the passing lanes for his great quarterback and talented trio of primary receivers. Baltimore went 5-1 in its last six games.
That hot finish proved that the Colts had responded to Shula’s methods. They didn’t win the title, as Rosenbloom had all but demanded, but at 8-6 there were a game better than they had been with Ewbank the year before. The Colts scored more points and gave up fewer points than they did under the old coach’s direction in 1962. And they jumped from fourth place to third in the Western Division.
Shula achieved all this while, to a certain extent, putting Johnny U in his place. The coach had been unsparing in his approach to the star player, yelling at him, usurping his play-calling ability, and even publicly admitting that he had considered benching him. By season’s end, however, the vicissitudes of Unitas had been reversed. Johnny U had his best year since 1959, leading the league in both completions and yards. His interceptions plummeted, from twenty-three to merely twelve.
Shula’s prospects brightened right along with Unitas’s. By finishing strong the young coach took on the appearance of a prodigy. At just thirty-three years of age he had replaced Ewbank, a bona fide legend, and improved upon him. Rosenbloom didn’t get his third title, but he saw what he had wanted to see. He had confirmation that in callously firing Ewbank, a man who had won two world championships for him, he had made a plausible decision. Despite the Colts’ progress, or perhaps because of it, 1963 was looked upon as a mulligan.
But in the long term no one in Baltimore would settle for third place. Not the fans, not the coaching staff, and, most assuredly, not Carroll Rosenbloom.