Understandably, much of the chatter in the newspapers leading up to the big game centered around Jim Brown and Johnny Unitas. It was as though Superman and Batman were about to go into a dark alley and settle a score. Both players were recognized, even in their own time, as among the best in the game’s history. Certainly, both engendered enormous respect from fans, teammates, and players all over the league. Their fame reached far beyond the provincial towns where they played to every city and hamlet in the country.
In addition to their superlative skills, Unitas and Brown brought the title game an engrossing contrast of styles and abilities. Unitas was all finesse and cunning. Jim Brown was a mighty hammer with the power to run through even the biggest and toughest players and the speed to leave anyone behind. Unitas represented America idealized: virtuous, pious, masculine, indomitable, deadly, and, of course, white. As a player who had been dumped and reclaimed, a man who rose from the ravines of failure to the high summits of professional success, he was a breathing demonstration of American meritocracy.
Jim Brown, on the other hand, was an aching tooth, a constant reminder of how unfair America was. In 1956 he led Syracuse University to a 7-1 record, rushing for 986 yards and fourteen touchdowns. Nevertheless, Heisman Trophy voters scorned him. Brown didn’t win the award, and he didn’t finish second or even third. Somehow, when all the votes were tallied, he was way back in fifth place. The man who actually won the trophy was Paul Hornung, the snow-white Notre Dame quarterback whose qualifications for the high honor were three touchdown passes and thirteen interceptions. The only thing that distinguished Hornung, and in a bad way, was the fact that he presided over a 2-8 season, a rare torturous autumn in South Bend, Indiana, where the victories typically blew in like the inevitable cold midwestern winds.
The feeling by many was that Jim Brown was snubbed for only one reason, his black skin. The great sportswriter Dick Schaap, a Heisman voter, was so disgusted by the outcome of the award, and the implicit racism, he vowed never to participate in the Heisman again. In the NFL draft five teams passed Jim Brown by before Cleveland finally stepped up and selected him. But it was no sign of racial progressiveness by either the organization or its boss.
“I was baffled as a rookie,” Gary Collins, one of the Browns players remembered. “On road trips the coaches, rookies, and the black guys rode in the first bus at the airport. And the veterans rode on the second bus. [That policy] was changed in 1963 only when Blanton [Collier] took over.” It said something that Collins was shocked by the policy. By his own admission he grew up in working-class Pennsylvania among “prejudiced Protestants and Catholics.” Collins never played with or against a black player in his entire life until he was chosen for the same college all-star team with Syracuse’s famous running back Ernie Davis.
The irony in all of this is that the Cleveland organization was considered among the most racially liberal in professional sports. The Browns integrated before the Brooklyn Dodgers did. When Marion Motley joined Cleveland in 1946, he beat Jackie Robinson to the Majors by a year. The Browns reaped the rewards on the field for that decision. Motley spent seven years in Cleveland, averaging 5.7 yards per carry, the highest total for a running back in the history of professional football. Yet they weren’t convinced that a black man would be the equal of a white when it came to the intellectual aspects of the business. After Motley’s stellar playing career was over, he sought a position as a coach. The first place he turned, of course, was the Browns, but despite his many accomplishments for their organization, Cleveland turned him down flat. So did every other team in the league. Motley felt that racial discrimination played a part in his failure to land work in a game he once dominated. And Motley wasn’t even considered a “race man,” then a euphemism for an “uppity” black who insisted on talking about the obvious inequities of society. He was viewed by the white power structure as quiet and accepting of the status quo.
Jim Brown was a whole other story. “Paul [Brown] was afraid of Jim,” Collins remembered. “He didn’t know how to deal with a black man.”
Jim Brown wasn’t old-timey. He didn’t accept slights and indignities with a good nature. And he didn’t view mistreatment as an inevitability, as Motley did.
Just the opposite, in fact.
Jim Brown radiated and asserted power. He not only proved a black man could have leverage against a white but also showed that a workingman could prevail over a manager. To the surprise of no one he had a stormy relationship with Paul Brown, and he ultimately led a player revolt against his coach. It all resulted in the termination of the star coach, something that was once unthinkable.
Not everyone saw Coach Brown as the problem. In fact, some white players in the league considered Jim hostile, and they tagged him with the “racist” label. Nevertheless, Jim Brown made it clear that he didn’t care. The running back intertwined his game and his rage so effectively that even some of his many detractors viewed him as the greatest football player in the world, the same title Vince Lombardi admiringly bestowed upon Unitas.
So each team had their man, but each man did not have an equal team. Baltimore had finished 12-2, while the Browns were only 10-3-1. The Colts were fearsome on both sides of the ball. The Browns were second in offense, but their defense was the worst in league and the Achilles’ heel of that disrespected unit was its backfield. The maligned cornerbacks and safeties were the very men who were expected to be the team’s shield against the nuclear threat of Unitas. It didn’t bode well.
Yet Cleveland had its strengths. Number one was Coach Blanton Collier. Like so many other great coaches and players, Collier came into football under Paul Brown’s tutelage. The two met during World War II at Naval Station Great Lakes, the only boot camp in the U.S. Navy. Brown, who left his job leading Ohio State’s football program to join the service, was named head coach for the installation team. As always he ran an efficient operation, and Great Lakes played and prevailed against some of the top collegiate teams in the country. Great Lakes was an important part of Brown’s career because it was there where he first met and worked with many of the coaches and players who would later help him elevate the Browns from a start-up club, in a start-up league, to the very best team in professional football. Among the people he met there, in addition to Collier, were Marion Motley and Bud Grant. Collier later became a trusted and important member of Brown’s machinelike Cleveland operation. The organization won seven professional championships, the first four in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), an early NFL rival league.
After the franchise’s initial owner, Arthur McBride, sold the team to New York advertising man Arthur Modell, Brown’s standing slowly began to erode. First, it was obvious that the rest of the league had caught up to him. By 1962 he hadn’t won a division title or league championship in five years. But success, or the lack of it, wasn’t his only problem. He was didactic and grated on his players, none more than the quarterbacks. Brown still insisted on calling all the plays from the sidelines, sending his instructions to the huddle with rotating “messenger” guards. His play calls were considered sacrosanct (at least by him), and the quarterback, either in the huddle or at the line of scrimmage, could not change them. But where Brown was once the unassailable and eponymous czar of the franchise, his moves were now openly questioned. That was especially true of a trade he had made with Washington that sent the spectacular halfback Bobby Mitchell to the Redskins. Mitchell, shifty and fast, was the counterpunch to Jim Brown’s power. He once rushed for 232 yards in a single game. The fans found the trade ludicrous, though it netted the Browns the rights to the sensational Syracuse running back Ernie Davis.
Davis broke many of Jim Brown’s records at Syracuse, and he achieved the signature honor that had once been denied Brown when he became the first-ever African American to win the Heisman Trophy. But unknown to all, Davis was tragically suffering from leukemia even as the Browns selected him in 1962. He died before starting his pro career. So for the Browns, in addition to the horrible personal tragedy was the fact that they had just given away Mitchell, a future Hall of Famer, for literally nothing.
The mere attempt to acquire Ernie Davis, however, helped Coach Brown make a point: anyone could be replaced, even Jim Brown.
Tensions between Jim Brown and Paul Brown eventually led to rumors that the great fullback was on the verge of being traded to Baltimore, in return for Unitas. Paul Brown denied the veracity of that rumor, and in fact it seems unlikely that Ewbank would have traded Unitas for any player. Nevertheless, Browns owner Arthur Modell felt alienated by Paul Brown’s personnel machinations. The threat that Jim Brown might be moved without the owner’s knowledge or consent was the last straw. He quickly wrested control of his team. One day after Ewbank was terminated in Baltimore Modell fired Paul Brown, the man who gave his very name to the franchise. When the press asked for an explanation as to how it was possible, all Modell could manage to do was shrug his shoulders and say, “When I bought this club, I idolized Paul Brown.”
Now Modell had canned his idol. In replacing him he wanted someone who knew what Paul Brown knew, someone who understood Brown’s theories of personnel and strategy, but who didn’t come with the unfortunate quality of actually being Paul Brown.
Blanton Collier fulfilled all of those requirements.
Collier accepted Modell’s offer but only after a week of handwringing and only after receiving Paul Brown’s own reluctant blessing. Though Collier spent most of his career as a self-effacing assistant, he had replaced a fiery legend before when he filled the head-coaching position vacated by Bear Bryant at Kentucky.
When the Bear left Kentucky for Texas A&M and his famous rendezvous with the Junction Boys, Collier stepped in and proved to be a mostly mediocre college head coach with a reputation as a poor recruiter. His teams never approached the upper echelons of the Southeastern Conference except for his very first season when, coaching Bryant’s leftover talent, he finished third. Sixth place was Collier’s high-water mark for his remaining seven years at the school, and he never took the Wildcats to a big-time bowl. He did, however, exhibit the one skill endemic to almost all great head coaches: he found and mentored coaching talent. Over the years his staff included sensational future coaches such as Chuck Knox, Howard Schnellenberger, and Bill Arnsparger. All would make their own indelible marks on the profession in both the NFL and college. But Collier’s star pupil was Don Shula. The two spent only one season together, in 1959, before Shula bolted Kentucky to reenter the NFL as defensive coordinator in Detroit.
Though Collier had never really been a successful head coach, let alone on the professional level, he had one thing going for him when he replaced Paul Brown: he had the universal respect of both the Browns players and their ownership. His bespectacled and professorial approach appealed to everyone. He was seen as a tonic bottle for a variety of Brown-borne ills, everything from pomposity to racial disharmony.
Collier, of course, inherited an enviable operation from Brown that included a wealth of playing talent and excellent assistant coaches. But Collier accomplished one thing on his own that hadn’t really been done in Cleveland in many years, and that was to develop a fine quarterback.
In 1955 Johnny Unitas, freshly released from the Steelers, approached Brown and asked him for a tryout. The famous coach knew all about Unitas’s professional potential. He was encouraging and told the young quarterback that Cleveland was interested in him but couldn’t give him a look until the following year, when Otto Graham was expected to retire. In the interim Unitas was “discovered” by Ewbank, who signed him to the Colts. So while the single greatest quarterbacking talent of the next two generations went to Baltimore, the Browns began an era of mostly mediocre play behind center.
None thrived under Brown, and, in fact, some were outspoken in their complaints against him. Less than immortal passers like George Ratterman, Milt Plum, and Jim Ninowski all shuffled through Cleveland. Len Dawson was there, too, but Brown didn’t see much in him. Len eventually left the team to seek opportunity in the AFL with his old college coach, Hank Stram.
Although Stram had his own impressions of Dawson, he hadn’t seen the quarterback in years. He picked up the phone and called Paul Brown to get his impressions of Dawson. Brown responded negatively and tried to warn Stram off.
“Leonard Dawson will cost you your job,” Brown told him.
Stram signed Dawson in spite of that dismal evaluation from one of the most respected men in the profession. Ignoring Paul Brown turned out to be a wise decision, since Stram and Dawson would eventually win three AFL Championships and the Super Bowl together. In essence, they assisted each other to the Hall of Fame. Far from costing Stram his job, as Brown predicted, Dawson ensured his coach a place in history.
Paul Brown, meanwhile, may have lost out on Unitas and Dawson, but he hadn’t completely lost his touch for spotting and developing quarterback talent. He eventually acquired a quirky castoff from the Rams named Frank Ryan.
Ryan held a PhD in mathematics, but his intellectualism wasn’t considered an asset by anyone. In fact, it was something of a liability. Sportswriters groping for adjectives to describe him latched on to the word genius. Ryan bristled at that meaningless label, but the writers never let it go. Instead, they conjured images of him calculating distances and angles in his head as the game swirled around him. Ryan rejected those descriptions as silly, but he was so self-effacing about his own athleticism, he may have encouraged the view that his elevated mental faculties were the only explanation for his presence in the world of professional athletes.
To hear Ryan tell it, he was physically the furthest thing in the world from a starting quarterback in the National Football League. “I was never very fast or well coordinated,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I never played any sport well. I couldn’t hit in baseball. I couldn’t dribble in basketball or play tennis or golf.”
His NFL coaches before Brown might have agreed with that assessment. Before Cleveland, Ryan had spent four hapless seasons with the Los Angeles Rams, where he played under two men with huge quarterback reputations. The first was Sid Gilman, often hailed as the father of the modern passing game. Ryan admired and respected Gilman but developed little under his tutelage. His second coach, Bob Waterfield, was himself a former NFL quarterback, and a great one. A huge star in his day, Waterfield led the Cleveland Rams to the NFL title. When the franchise relocated to Los Angeles, he was the star attraction. He led Los Angeles to three straight title games, though he split time there with tough-talking Norm Van Brocklin. When the newly minted LA Rams won it all in 1951, it was the only title they would ever win in Southern California. Waterfield was the first rookie to ever win the MVP Award, and he was the lucky groom of Jane Russell, a bosomy beauty who looked like the brunette Marilyn Monroe.
None of this had any effect on the math whiz under center. Ryan thought Waterfield was a “terrible coach,” and Waterfield thought little of Ryan’s potential. With just the slightest mistake the coach would pull Ryan from the game and stick him on the bench. After four years in Los Angeles the mathematician had started only eleven games for his franchise.
The Rams’ leadership, believing they had seen everything there was to see in Ryan, traded him to Cleveland. The move afforded the quarterback an opportunity for a new beginning, but many of his new teammates didn’t quite take to him, either.
“He was not a good athlete, smarter than hell, though,” Gary Collins remembered. “But I don’t know if he had the football smarts, like, say, a Joe Namath. He had a powerful arm, but it wasn’t that accurate.”
Collins echoed a common sentiment when he said, “[Ryan] was too smart for the game of football. He didn’t fit. He tried to be one of the guys, but for Frank to be one of the guys he had to step down to these prehistoric monsters ’cause his IQ is Einstein. He had gray hair when he was twenty-seven. You only have gray hair when you’re young if you’re smart.”
Paul Brown also respected Ryan’s intelligence. The coach saw how effective his young quarterback could be when the Browns’ starter, Jim Ninowski, was injured midway through the 1962 season. Brown summoned Ryan and handed him the reins for Cleveland’s remaining seven games.
Given the first real chance he ever got in the league, Ryan proved that he was a player. He connected on almost 58 percent of his throws and hit the end zone ten times, numbers that projected out to a sensational full season—good enough, anyway, to establish his worthiness as the Browns’ starter. From then on he would lead Cleveland, and Ninowski would be his backup.
Although Ryan had learned a lot under Brown’s tutelage, he felt, much like the other Cleveland quarterbacks had, that the coach’s run-first offense was confining. He also had to live with Brown calling plays from the bench that he couldn’t change. But Brown was fired at the end of the year, and when Collier took over Ryan’s career took off in earnest. In fact, Collier and Ryan seemed to enjoy a couple of things that even Unitas and Shula did not. One was a personal chemistry, and the other was an understanding.
“Blanton Collier gave me the opportunity to call any play I wanted,” Ryan said. “I didn’t even have to run the plays that he sent in if, in my judgment, I thought I should do something else. We really got along pretty well that way.”
With Ryan coming of age and calling the plays, the Browns’ offense fulfilled a vast potential. Theirs was an incredibly diverse and balanced attack, rich in talent. Obviously, many focused on Jim Brown and the superb running game he created. But a couple of young players teamed with Ryan to give Cleveland an enviable passing game, too.
On one side of the line was the future Hall of Famer Paul Warfield. The rookie split end was a sprinter with great hands. On the other side was Gary Collins, a player of subtler talents. Collins, an emerging star from the University of Maryland, wasn’t fast in the conventional sense, but he had something called “burst,” the ability to pull away from a defender at the key moment. Colts ends Raymond Berry and Jimmy Orr both had the same quality. Like them, Collins had terrific moves and reliable hands, but he brought something to the field that they never could. At six feet four he had a huge, muscular body that towered above most defensive backs. At 215 rock-solid pounds Collins also had the strength to hold his own against even the roughest linebacker.
In 1963, Gary’s first full year as a starter, he led the league in touchdown catches. In ’64, in a more balanced attack, with the sensational rookie Warfield also in the lineup, his touchdowns and yards receiving were both down, but the team was rising.
Collins was a rugged individualist who spoke a kind of profane truth. He was unheralded and overshadowed by the other great stars on his own offense. Nevertheless, he lacked nothing in confidence. When Frank Ryan said he felt good about his chances against the Colts because “I had better receivers than Johnny Unitas,” Gary Collins was quick to agree. “[Ryan was] right,” Gary Collins said. “He had Gary Collins.”
Bravado aside, outside of the die-hard Browns fans, very few people thought Cleveland had much of a chance. The Colts had five players on the All-Pro first team: Johnny Unitas, Jim Parker, Gino Marchetti, Lenny Moore, and Bobby Boyd. Unitas, of course, was the league MVP. Shula beat out Collier as Coach of the Year. And Lenny Moore was the Comeback Player of the Year and, in at least one poll, Most Valuable Player of the league.
In predicting the outcome of the game Sports Illustrated saw Baltimore’s many virtues. Specifically, the magazine cited two factors in Baltimore’s favor, the Colts’ crushing defense and Unitas. “There is no great difference between the teams,” SI wrote, “but in the two most important areas of the game Baltimore has a clear edge: quarterback and overall defense.”
As it turned out, the writers couldn’t have been more wrong. The so-called football experts typically disdain fans and their reliance on hype, emotion, and mythology in predicting victory. Like scientists peering down their noses at religionists, the experts strain to uncover demonstrable facts as the basis for their superior opinions. They break down film, plays, and tendencies in their quest to bring concrete reasons for why games will resolve the way they do.
The fans, on the other hand, are true believers. They are fascinated by the intangibles that make every underdog a potential David. Scientists see empirical evidence. Religionists propound God. Football experts stick to the numbers and “facts”; the fans are intrigued by stories.
Somehow overlooked in the rush to read the tea leaves, however, was the fact that the game would be played in Cleveland. The Browns’ Municipal Stadium held more spectators than almost any other venue in pro football. More than eighty thousand rabid Clevelanders were expected to jam through the turnstiles for the game. In addition to that, the field and weather conditions promised to be challenging, especially for the visiting team.
In Baltimore NFL football was played in a brick-and-concrete fortress. Memorial Stadium was like an ugly cousin to Yankee Stadium. It had a similar shape and dimensions to the Bronx venue, but none of the fine architectural details that made Yankee Stadium so iconic, historic, and memorable. Yankee Stadium’s magisterial frieze draped from the upper deck and lent a solemn importance to the events on the field. Its monument park thickened the atmosphere with history and deep meaning, much as the battlefield statues did at Gettysburg.
Memorial Stadium’s best features were all on its exterior. The entrance behind home plate was a huge war memorial that featured distinctive, handcrafted aluminum lettering expertly shaped into an Art Deco font by skilled artisans. This facade poetically declared that the sacrifices of American soldiers were ageless and never to be forgotten. “Time will not dim the glory of their deeds,” it said, a quotation from General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, a genuine American hero. The stadium bowels protected an impressive urn that contained sacred soil from every American military graveyard in the world.
Memorial Stadium was charmingly tucked into a working-class neighborhood. Picturesque houses were visible from its open end. The stadium’s boundaries were rimmed with two stately high school edifices. One of them, City College, was a magnificent stone castle, a medieval temple of learning such as the type where Merlin might have taught the young Arthur metaphysics. City College produced some of the finest men in the state, including multiple Baltimore mayors and Maryland governors, respected journalists, and glorious athletes. Weather impacted Memorial Stadium, of course, as it did all outdoor venues. It could be ice cold for football. Blinding fogs might roll in and enshroud the action, making ghosts of the players, like the Angel of Death did to the Egyptians in The Ten Commandments. A late-season contest in Baltimore could also feature a light dusting or even a heavy snowfall. But overall Memorial Stadium was like Baltimore Harbor: it was deep inland, cozy, and safe from the extremes.
Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, by contrast, was huge and cavernous. Built on the shores of Lake Erie, it was often victim to an angry nature, especially the cruel winds and crippling lake-effect snows that descended on the town as if from a great, godlike machine. The experts were as sanguine about Baltimore’s ability to adapt and thrive in those conditions as Napoléon and his troops ever were storming across the Russian border.