As the championship game approached, the writers followed many story lines. One narrative was about Blanton Collier, the old mentor squaring off against Don Shula, his former protégé. When Collier was a Browns assistant in the ’50s, Shula was one of his players. And, of course, Shula had only recently been one of Collier’s assistant coaches at the University of Kentucky.
The way the writers saw it, though, Shula might’ve taught Collier everything. To them Shula was a star, self-possessed, with a youthful charm and a kind of cranky charisma. He was still young and handsome and had the sheen of a John F. Kennedy with a whistle. Like the martyred former president, Shula had wrested control of a sacred institution, one usually entrusted only to an older and wiser head, yet delivered masterful results.
Collier, on the other hand, was flat and unexciting. To a large extent he still lived in the cold, dark shadow of his dour and exiled predecessor. No one, it seemed, had noticed that in Collier’s two years in Cleveland, the Browns had won more games than anyone in football, including Shula’s Colts and Vince Lombardi’s Packers.
There was one crucial story line that bizarrely received little notice or analysis. On Christmas Day, the Friday before the championship game, the Washington Post reported that Unitas had been suffering from a sore throwing arm. Shula scoffed at the very idea. “You saw him pass against the Redskins, didn’t you?” the coach rhetorically scolded an inquiring reporter. “His arm looked all right, didn’t it?”
But even as Shula energetically insisted there was no problem, Unitas bluntly confirmed that there was one.
“I hurt my arm about five games ago,” the quarterback admitted. “It gets sore but treatments take care of it and I have no trouble whatever with it when I pass.”
Interestingly, the revelation provoked no panic in Baltimore and no elation in Cleveland. Such was the faith that friends and foes alike had in the indestructibility of Johnny U. Like so much else about Unitas, this aspect of his legend was born in 1958. That’s when, in midseason, the Packers broke two of his ribs and punctured one of his lungs. The very serious injury forced him out of the lineup for two, crucial, midseason games. But it couldn’t keep him down for long. As soon as his lung reinflated he returned to action with the help of a crude aluminum cast. Despite his frightening injury, Unitas never missed a beat. He quickly regained his superb form and led the team to its first title.
That incredible display of toughness convinced the Colts of Unitas’s immortality. After the season they traded their well-regarded backup, George Shaw, still in his prime, to the New York Giants, and they never even bothered to replace him. In case of emergency defensive back Andy Nelson was expected to step in behind center. That meant Unitas was the only full-time quarterback listed on the Colts’ roster for 1959. If he felt any pressure from that fact, it didn’t show in his performance. He enjoyed one of the greatest seasons a quarterback ever had, throwing thirty-two touchdown passes for the year. No one else in the history of the game had ever thrown thirty before. Meanwhile, he coughed up the ball only fourteen times. Unitas won the MVP Award and led the Colts to their second straight title. But that sensational performance only obscured the fact that Johnny U played the entire year with broken vertebrae, cracked in the preseason. In both 1961 and 1963 he suffered jammed and swollen fingers but played admirably through that pain, too. To the extent that the public was aware of these insults to his body and health, they looked at his magnificent performances and concluded that he simply wasn’t vulnerable to the same dangers, fears, and threats as other men.
Unitas’s peers in the NFL might have been even more impressed with his ruggedness than the fans were. His greatest admirers, it seemed, were the very best defensive linemen.
Bill Curry, the Colts’ starting center in the late 1960s, recalled a game against the Rams in which Hall of Fame tackle Merlin Olsen broke free for a direct shot on the Colts’ quarterback.
“I hit him with all my might,” Olsen told Curry. “I drove my shoulder pad into his sternum, picked him up, and drove him into the dirt.”
After such a hit Olsen liked to look into a quarterback’s eyes to see the pain and especially the fear. Unitas not only disappointed Olsen but turned the spell of foreboding back on the lineman. “I got nothing,” Olsen said. “Just those cold eyes glaring into mine. It was unnerving. I knew—we knew—he was going to get us sooner or later.”
Detroit’s Alex Karras, another one of the era’s best defensive linemen, didn’t even bother trying to intimidate Unitas. Dan Sullivan, a mainstay on the Colts’ line throughout the decade, noticed something unusual about the way the usually violent Karras let up on Johnny U.
“Karras would come free a lot of times, you know, and when he could’ve really creamed Unitas, he just kind of put his arms around him,” Sullivan said. “So I said to Karras one day after the game, ‘How come you don’t try and put Unitas out of the game?’ Karras said, ‘Because he’s as tough as any guy playing up front, and I admire him for that.’ Unitas had the admiration of all the opponents that we played against,” Sullivan said. “He was one tough SOB.”
A little more than a decade later, acknowledging the marquee value of the quarterback, as well as the damage inflicted on the position by the game, the league changed its rules both to protect quarterbacks and to increase their influence on the contest. Ironically, the mythology and allure of the quarterback would only decrease, as he was transformed from the most fearless and feared man on the field to the most privileged. His courage had once been defined by his vulnerability. He was, after all, willing to stand almost still while acts of savagery played out all around him. On most passing plays he was ferociously hit in the legs, back, chest, or knees, though it wasn’t unusual for him to also take direct blows to the head and face. Many of the most painful clouts were delivered well after the ball had already been flung toward its target. Even in those brutish days that kind of play was technically illegal but an accepted custom of the game. If a team played an exceptionally good quarterback, it wasn’t unusual for the opposing defense to take a collection before the game and give the proceeds to any player who could knock the signal caller out. The successful quarterbacks were cerebral in the face of these dangers. They seemed to ignore the very real threats to their own well-being while simultaneously outthinking their attackers. It was as though they were asked to play chess on an exploding board. The quarterbacks who could do it well were revered even among their enemies.
Quarterback pain was detailed in monochrome photographs and reproduced in newsprint. It was also evident in television slow-motion replays, just then coming into vogue. The newspaper image of New York’s Y. A. Tittle on his knees, blood streaming down his face from the crown of his bald head, elicited admiration and pathos in other men. Because of its raw emotion the photo became one of the twentieth century’s most iconic sports images. It perfectly captured the peril and indomitability of the effective quarterback who had to display grace under fire, just as Ernest Hemingway explained a true man would. The quarterback had become a metaphor for the modern American male who also felt besieged by dangers—in his career, his military obligations, and even his marriage. It was an era of increasingly sinister city streets, domestic gunfire, drug lords, and political assassinations. Authors such as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer explored a new American literature that captured the drifting loners who would kill for no reason at all. Country singer Johnny Cash emerged from the “Bible Belt” but went far beyond its narrow limits to cultivate an outlaw image. His songs were about jailbirds and brawlers, pill poppers and cocaine shooters, wife beaters and murderers. Many of his protagonists were spinning their sad tales from behind bars. The most popular album he ever recorded was taped live at Folsom Prison, where inmates could be heard on the tracks cheering and shouting their felonious approval of Cash, a man who had done a little time himself. In that era even Uncle Sam was sometimes derided as a “murderer,” responsible for blasting and bombing the indigenous peoples of both Korea and Vietnam, not to mention wasting the lives of American boys in uniform, who fought for what? Nobody knew.
The world offered the modern American man many choices, but obscured and endangered the winning one. Every Sunday the pro quarterback personified all of that.
After the rules changed, however, the old “field generals” became something different. Jack Lambert, the toothless and pitiless Steelers linebacker of the 1970s, summed it up best when he snarled, “Quarterbacks should be wearing dresses.” His criticism was leveled through the atomic megaphone of Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football, where tens of millions of Americans were tuned in to Lambert and his taunts.
Ironically, Lambert attacked an admirable group of signal callers who were then still active in the league. These men included Lambert’s own teammate Terry Bradshaw, as well as Oakland’s Kenny “the Snake” Stabler, Roger Staubach of the Cowboys, Miami’s Bob Griese, and also Unitas’s worthy successors in Baltimore and San Diego, Bert Jones and Dan Fouts. Lambert may well have been wrong about this rugged generation, but with time, as the rules evolved to further separate quarterbacks from football players, his cranky observation would make him seem like a prophet.
By the 1980s sensational talents like John Elway and Dan Marino had entered the league and put up statistics that guys like Bobby Layne and Bart Starr could only imagine. Elway’s and Marino’s powerful throwing arms were assisted by rule changes that shifted football’s paradigm. Offensive tackles, for instance, were finally free to work with their arms extended into a defensive end in order to hold him at bay. This was a stark contrast to the blockers of the ’60s, who were required to face the Deacon Joneses of the world with their hands tight to their own chests. Meanwhile, Deacon was unencumbered by the rules and could deliver solid cracks to any opposing lineman’s skull. Dubbed the “head slap” by Deacon, this tactic was meant to stun the tackle while Deacon galloped to the quarterback’s ear hole. The new rules also afforded the next generation of quarterbacks another extravagant advantage: their receivers were allowed to run the field, unmolested, after the first 5 yards from scrimmage. Previously, linebackers and defensive backs could harass receivers all the way down the field.
By the mid-1970s the quarterback no longer enjoyed the status of bravest man on the turf. It was as if he were now part of an aristocracy, where his community was gated and his kids attended private schools. His health and interests, once most at risk on the field, were suddenly in a protective cocoon, closely guarded by the men who made the rules and collected the receipts. As a result, passing statistics rose across the board. Quarterbacks threw more often, for more yards, and for a higher completion percentage than ever before. Passing touchdowns were on the rise, and interceptions were down. The very best quarterbacks were topping the 4,000-yard marker, and the scoreboards were lighting up like pinball machines.
Almost fifty years after tough guys like Norm Van Brocklin and Y. A. Tittle had defined the position, the transformation from the tough to the entitled would reach its apex with Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. Brady entered professional football much as Unitas did, rising from the ignominy of a late-round draft pick. In a way Brady was as emblematic of his generation as Unitas was of his. The world had moved from the authentic to things that were touted as authentic. In Brady’s America there were virtual reality and reality shows. In the world Unitas knew, there was only reality.
The quarterbacks of Unitas’s era threw fewer times for fewer yards and less touchdowns. They threw far more interceptions. Their accomplishments appear much less impressive than their successors over the decades. But in the 1960s playing quarterback in the NFL was dangerous and difficult. It really was.