If Johnny Unitas had a sore arm heading into the championship game, no one believed it would make any difference. A madman could have broken into his hotel room the night before the game and severed his right wing at the shoulder with a Black and Decker saw, and still everyone in Baltimore, everyone in the country, would have fervently believed three things: Johnny U would show, he would play, and he would find a way to win.
On Christmas Eve, just a couple of days before the game, another critical injury might have occurred. As the Colts practiced a fight broke out between two seemingly inconsequential players: defensive tackle John Diehl and fullback and punter Joe Don Looney.
“John and Joe rammed into each other and they grabbed hold of each other with both hands,” Shula told the Baltimore News American. “Others jumped in to pull them apart. And that was the end of it. No punches were thrown so I guess it won’t qualify as a fight at all.”
Over the next few days Shula would point to that episode several times as evidence that the Colts’ practices were “spirited” and engaged leading up to the championship contest. But fisticuffs were nothing new for Joe Don. As many teammates and coaches already knew, Looney wasn’t only a name; it was a perfect description.
Before sojourning to Baltimore, the peripatetic Joe Don had brief stays with four colleges and the New York Giants. The son of former NFL player Don Looney, a Steeler and an Eagle in the 1940s, Joe Don seemed bred to football stardom the way others are to a throne. He had a tousle of black hair, a handsome if coarse face, and a body that was large but well proportioned and improbably built for speed.
Among his many contradictions, he managed to be both a magnificent football player yet quickly unwanted by virtually every coach and teammate with whom he had ever come into contact. The first program to fall victim to his siren was the University of Texas. He lasted only a single semester there, as his academic achievement was found somewhat lacking. He took five classes and received four Fs and a D. Naturally, that performance sent him packing. He landed at his father’s alma mater, Texas Christian University, but things didn’t go well for him there, either. That left him busted down to junior college, and in 1961 he enrolled at Cameron, where he led the Aggies to the Junior Rose Bowl title and the National Junior College Championship.
That success propelled Joe Don back to the big time. The next season he played for Oklahoma and was a weapon of mass destruction. With his speed and size he was a threat to score from anywhere on the field. He sprinted 60 yards for a touchdown against Syracuse. Against Kansas his touchdown came after a 61-yard run. He really pummeled Iowa State. The Cyclones were nothing more than a cool breeze to Joe Don. He raced into the end zone three times against them and passed for another touchdown. Joe Don also led the nation in punting.
Thanks in large part to Looney’s performance, the Sooners won the Big Eight Championship and went to the Orange Bowl. But that was about the high point of Looney’s entire football career.
In the spring Joe Don said he was quitting football to run track. The coaches on that squad clocked him at 9.5 in the 100-yard dash. It was a lightning time, especially for a 230-pounder.
In the fall he was back on the football team, but not for long. After just three games he had a dispute with an assistant coach in which he supposedly slugged a young graduate assistant in the face. Coach Bud Wilkinson, at the request of the Sooners players, dismissed him from the team.
Despite this checkered history and a lack of playing time in Looney’s senior year, the New York Giants chose Joe Don with their very first pick in the 1964 draft, number twelve overall. They instantly regretted it.
Looney reported to training camp sullen and difficult. He created a minor furor and embarrassed the organization when he declined to speak to reporters. After that he frustrated and defied his coaches by refusing to have his ankles taped, a standard precaution taken by all players. After that he simply refused to attend team meetings.
Not knowing what else to do, the Giants asked their highly respected veteran quarterback Y. A. Tittle to talk some sense into Looney. They hoped that a benign father figure might persuade him to calm down. But even the great quarterback had no luck: “I’ve been in pro football for 16 years, and I’ve seen a lot of rookies come and go,” Tittle said, “but I have never met one like him before.”
After several more weeks of late arrivals and skipped practices, the Giants had had enough. They traded him to Baltimore, eager to acquire another part for its still rebuilding running game, while the Giants got two players who had seen better days. One was creaky, old R. C. Owens, a ballplayer with virtually nothing left in the tank. The other was the once magnificent defensive back Andy Nelson, who was also at the end of his career.
Meanwhile, Looney, the number-one draft pick, had been a Giant for all of twenty-eight days.
In Baltimore Shula gave Looney a clean slate, and two jobs. On offense he was a backup fullback, and on special teams he was the starting punter. The Colts seemed to succeed with Looney where the Giants had failed. Baltimore trainers protected his now infamous ankles by taping them outside of his socks. Generally, they babied him in that way, making meaningless concessions to which he seemed to respond. He came to practice and attended team meetings, and he was prompt to both. On special teams he was a true asset. He ranked among the league leaders in punting, with an average 42.4 yards per punt. He boomed one for 64 yards.
The Colts had the magic touch, it seemed. They were the Looney whisperers.
But then one night in November that all changed.
On this particular evening Looney and his roommate, Preston Ray Smith, an old high school friend, were drinking beer at their apartment. Smith later testified that they were “intoxicated.” Like many young men in that state, they decided to go hunting for women, specifically three nurses who lived in their building. The only problem with their plan was they were too drunk to find the correct apartment. Instead, they happened on the residence of Robert Schu, a neighbor who was at home with his young wife, baby son, and their friends Mr. and Mrs. Richard Smith from Philadelphia.
Convinced that the nurses were inside Schu’s apartment, Looney started banging on the door. Mr. Schu pleaded with Looney, through the locked doorway, telling him that the girls he sought were not in the apartment. That disappointing news only enraged Looney, who insisted that Schu was lying to him. Joe Don commenced to smashing at the door so violently that the wives retreated to a bedroom and locked that door while they screamed in horror.
Eventually, Looney knocked the front door completely down and entered the apartment. Preston desperately tried to keep Joe Don from attacking anyone, but to no avail. Looney continued to exchange words with Schu before finally striking and spitting on Richard Smith, Schu’s out-of-town guest.
Meanwhile, as this violent and maniacal scene played out, the two wives and the baby slipped out of the bedroom window and ran to alert the police about the home invasion. Looney and his buddy Preston were both arrested.
In Baltimore Municipal Court the two malefactors faced Judge I. Sewell Lamdin. Their cases were heard separately. In the morning Preston Ray Smith told Judge Lamdin how he had tried in vain to calm Looney down and talk him out of harming the men in the apartment. Nevertheless, Smith was found guilty and given a suspended six-month jail sentence by the judge, thus ensuring a criminal record for the young man.
In the afternoon Looney was at the mercy of the very same judge but got a different brand of justice. At first, Judge Lamdin talked tough. “Had you broken down my door,” the distinguished jurist told Looney, “I would have shot you.”
Despite those mean and manly words, jurisprudence in Baltimore went only so far. Judge Lamdin was clearly unwilling to punish a Colt in the midst of the team’s best season since ’58. So Looney—the culprit who bashed the door down, punched and spit on the victim, terrorized the women, and traumatized the child—received probation before verdict. No criminal record.
The man in the robes who had only moments ago said he would have summarily executed Looney for knocking his door down wasn’t willing to incarcerate him for even a single minute. He meekly ordered the ball player to pay $150 in fines and make restitution for half the door (Preston Ray Smith would pay the other half).
It wasn’t hard to tell which defendant played in the NFL. Later in the day, perhaps ashamed of his own flagrant hypocrisy, the judge softened Preston Ray Smith’s verdict to match Looney’s.
To add insult to the victims’ injuries, Looney’s lawyer praised the outrageous verdict. He told the Baltimore Sun it would keep his client from developing “a persecution complex” and further menacing the Schus and Smiths. Of course, sending Looney to jail would have provided the victims an even greater sense of security, but the lawyer failed to mention that.
To their discredit the Colts treated the assault as though it was a fraternity-house prank. They fined Joe Don an undisclosed amount and downplayed the seriousness of his crime.
“We do not condone such action, but the boy shouldn’t be castigated where this has happened just once,” general manager Don Kellett said. Cameron Snyder, the Sun’s Colts beat reporter, perhaps too close to the team and its interests, referred to Looney’s crime as a “minor breach of conduct episode.” Shula “joked” about it and said, “Maybe the Colts should be housed in a motel on Tuesday nights [the evening of the incident] instead of Saturday [as was the custom].”
The donnybrook at Colts practice on Christmas Eve clearly wasn’t a sign of “spirit,” as Shula had called it. It was the further acting out of a mollycoddled child with a demented mind. It seemed that Looney was intent on drinking, fighting, and screwing his way out of the league.
What was worse, it was very likely that Looney was injured in his fracas with his teammate Diehl, just two days before the game, and now his gaudy punting foot would not be available for the Colts’ most important day in five years.
Rather than being chastened by Looney’s antics, others on the team seemed to catch the bad-behavior bug from him. The night before the game the Browns had a chance encounter with the Colts in a movie theater. Going to a film on the eve of a game was an old Paul Brown tactic devised to keep the players calm (that is, sober) and occupied until curfew. Collier and Shula, both Brown disciples, had picked up that practice. The only problem was that the coaches, unbeknownst to each other, had selected the same theater, for the same feature. The Browns arrived second and ended up seated right in front of the Colts. While James Bond, secret agent 007, fought a Cold War terrorist named Goldfinger on the screen, in the seats the Colts behaved like punks.
“Our game plan was to go to the movies and then go back to the hotel and get a good night’s sleep,” Cleveland quarterback Frank Ryan remembered. “But there was spitting and things like this raining down on us. I got up and left early. I cleared out.”
Baltimore fans overlapped bad manners with overconfidence, though they were more humorous than boorish. The celebrated Colts Marching Band encountered the Browns eating breakfast in the hotel lobby and serenaded them with an impromptu rendition of “Taps.” The impudence of that funereal performance seemed to reflect the attitude of everyone in Maryland. The day before the game, state, city, and airport officials sent out the word that they were hoping for calm in the wake of the team’s victory. Under the headline “Please, No Reception,” the Evening Sun published a small blurb urging Baltimoreans toward “something resembling sanity . . . when the Colts return from Cleveland.” The game was still two days away, but in Baltimore they were already quelling the rowdy victory riots.
In Cleveland a vastly different story was unfolding. Dawn rose over a cold and damp city on game day. By kickoff temperatures had dipped to thirty-three chilling degrees, and winds were gusting off the lake at twenty knots. Municipal Stadium was foreboding. After a full season its turf was heavily scarred, and the real estate between the hash marks was reduced to a foul quagmire. It all added up to less than ideal conditions for a precision passer, and Unitas, of course, was the prototype of that breed.
The first half was brutal and defense oriented, with both teams running right at each other. The offenses were so archaic and unimaginative, the New York Times described it as “antediluvian” football.
Neither team threw very much. When they tried they didn’t enjoy much success. Ryan was intercepted early, and Unitas, stymied, took off with the ball more than he tossed it. In the first thirty inartistic minutes of the game, there were four turnovers and not a single point was scored.
The Colts had a chance to crack the scoreboard first early in the second quarter when they lined up to kick from the Cleveland 22. But when the ball was snapped back to the holder, Bobby Boyd, the hand of fate intervened. A gust of swirling stadium wind grabbed the ball and pushed it from Boyd’s grasp. Lou Michaels, the Colts’ kicker, never got a toe on it.
The first half might have been dull, but it told two interesting stories. Number one, Cleveland’s defense wasn’t the same terrible unit that had statistically been the worst in the league. During the regular season the Browns defenders, compensating for their deficiencies, played conservatively. The Cleveland defensive backs customarily put plenty of cushion between themselves and their opponents’ receivers. But in the championship game they gave Unitas something different to see than what he had surely watched on film.
“We’ve been known as a team that plays pass receivers very loose, giving them short yardage,” Browns cornerback Bernie Parrish said. “I felt the Colts expected us to back off. I thought we would do better by playing their receivers closer.”
Browns safety Ross Fichtner agreed. “We moved up and forced their receivers to cut before they wanted to,” he said.
The idea was to disrupt Unitas and force him to hold the ball longer than he would like. “We decided,” Coach Collier told journalists after the game, “that we wanted to have everybody covered when Unitas took his first look at his primary receiver. That way, he’d have to look for a second receiver. And if he still didn’t see anyone open, maybe he’d wait some more. By then our pass rush should be on him.”
Six times in the game that strategy forced Johnny U to lower his arm and take off with the ball himself. That suited the Browns just fine. “I’d rather see him run than pass,” Bill Glass, Cleveland’s defensive end, said.
The Browns were delighted to see Unitas running, but the Colts were paranoid about Jim Brown doing the very same thing. Baltimore’s mighty defense, number one in the league, was hyperaggressive and focused on not allowing Brown to be the one to beat them.
“We weren’t overly awed by their defense,” Frank Ryan said about the Colts, who had allowed only about sixteen points per game for the season. Baltimore “leaned towards a man-to-man coverage. [That] brought the defensive secondary up a little closer, and they could participate in stopping the running game. And they were also very adventurous on blitzing.”
The Colts’ tendencies were only magnified for the championship. They were sure that the Browns’ only hope resided in Jim Brown’s legs, and Baltimore’s coaches took that threat seriously. Knowing from long experience that no one man could stop Brown, they vowed to swarm him. If Ryan was forced to throw, the Colts would limit what they thought was his best option and double-team the speedy rookie Paul Warfield.
All of this left Gary Collins in single coverage on the outside. The Colts weren’t overly concerned about that, since the man who would cover Collins, Bobby Boyd, was one of the most competent defenders in the business. The bald cornerback had picked off nine enemy passes in 1964. In his eight years in pro football he had twenty-eight interceptions. Boyd played a key role in fueling the Colts’ success, since every pickoff of an inaccurate passer (as Frank Ryan supposedly was) put the ball in Unitas’s incomparable hands. But Boyd had a tall order in front of him. Gary Collins was six feet five and Boyd only five feet eleven. Literally half a foot separated them. Collins was also a pretty tough customer.
Gary Collins was born in coal country, Williamstown, Pennsylvania, in 1940. The town was in decline, even then, with fewer than three thousand residents. In 2010, after decades of steady erosion, there were only about a thousand souls still left there to keep the lights on. The Collins family was poor, and in that they had a lot in common with their neighbors. Collins’s father worked several jobs to make ends meet. He descended down into the dark world of the coal mines for twelve years. Later on he fixed the fuel tanks on airplanes. Eventually, he owned his own small bar, and that brought him the only taste of success he would ever know. When he died at age fifty-eight with lungs full of coal dust, gas fumes, and cigarette smoke, he was both old and young.
Gary Collins was becoming a ray of hope in his decrepit hometown, even while his unlucky father was fading away. In his junior year of high school, only two weeks before the start of football season, Williamstown’s starting running back broke his ankle. With no viable option apparent, the coach pulled the team together, looked around, and asked his boys a key question.
“Does anyone know the runner’s plays?”
Collins was the only one who raised his hand. So he won the position by default. In the season opener, with almost no time to prepare for a completely new position, all he did was score five touchdowns.
And that was just the beginning.
In nineteen games during the Collins era, Williamstown High went 18-1. Gary’s athleticism seemed to know no bounds. In addition to his versatility on the football field, he could dunk a basketball. In baseball he was both a pitcher and a shortstop with a rocket arm and a booming bat. Collins was so adept on the diamond, he attracted offers from the Cincinnati Reds and the Baltimore Orioles, two shrewd organizations that were both gearing up to win multiple World Series championships.
Nevertheless, Collins had decided that football would be his ticket out of Williamstown. Though he was swimming in offers, he chose Maryland for reasons he could never quite remember. It certainly didn’t hurt the Terps’ chances that they sent veteran assistant John Idzik to recruit him. Idzik had also gone to Maryland and was just gaining his footing in a coaching career that would last from the early ’50s to the 1980s. Idzik’s odyssey through the game led him from the college ranks to the Canadian Football League to the NFL. Idzik told Collins’s mother that Gary would be an All-American before his junior season. That lavish assessment must have created some sort of advantage for Maryland because Collins ultimately chose the Terps.
Gary excelled at College Park, but only after he got off to a slow, unhappy start.
“I had a separated shoulder, and I wasn’t doing well,” he said many years later. “My first wife was pregnant when I was eighteen or nineteen, and I had trouble with the books. It was awful.”
For the first time in his life, even his athletic career wasn’t going well. At two-a-day practices in July and August Collins was relegated to the fourth string. This could have been a result of his separated shoulder or, more likely, due to his poor relationship with his head coach.
Tom Nugent came to Maryland to follow in the footsteps of legends like Bear Bryant and Jim Tatum, but he had already made something of a name for himself at the Virginia Military Institute and Florida State. It was at VMI, his first job, that Nugent earned his lifelong reputation as an innovator who influenced coaches far more successful and famous than he was.
In his first season Nugent’s “Keydets” lost in a humiliating defeat to in-state rival William and Mary. “Bill and the Bitch,” as the school from Williamsburg was crudely called, dished out a beating to VMI, 54–6. That loss haunted Nugent, and in the off-season he struggled to find a way to counter W&M’s strong defensive line and linebackers. The solution he eventually developed was the “I formation,” a variation on the T, in which the fullback and halfback line up in a straight line directly behind the quarterback. The virtues of the formation were many: it offered power and deception, a platform to run inside the tackles with a fullback either carrying the ball in a quick burst or escorting the halfback through the hole as an additional blocker. The formation was also effective for running outside, especially sweeps. If the preference was to pass “the I’s,” running backs provided either extra pocket protection or low-risk “flare” receiver options for the quarterback.
The next season, with Nugent’s innovation at the ready, VMI upset William and Mary in the rematch. They also knocked off Georgia Tech, which was favored by twenty-eight points. VMI racked up more than 400 yards of offense in both games. In the two years after Nugent developed and implemented the I, VMI went 13-7 overall and 10-1 in its own Southern Conference. In the highly imitative world of football, it didn’t take long for Nugent’s ideas to catch the eye of coaches at the country’s most prestigious programs. Soon John McKay at Southern Cal and Frank Leahy at Notre Dame were both running the offense. They did so with such sensational results that the I formation came to be more highly associated with them than Nugent, the man who invented it.
In 1953 Nugent moved to Florida State, where he coached Lee Corso and Burt Reynolds, among other luminaries. He took over a Seminole program that was fewer than ten years old and had won only a single game in 1952. But in just two seasons Nugent’s Seminole tribe had an eight-win season and was invited to the Sun Bowl.
Nugent moved on again in 1959, this time to Maryland, where his direct predecessor was Jim Tatum. Tatum’s Terps had only recently gone undefeated and won the national championship. The year 1959 was also Collins’s first full season at Maryland. Though the convergence of two such seminal men at the same school, at the same time, should have foretold great things, the coupling of Nugent and Collins was never easy. Collins’s personal problems depressed him and compounded the physical pain he felt from his separated shoulder. Though he started summer practice on the fourth string, by the beginning of the season he was not only a starter but a virtual sixty-minute man. On offense he was the Terps’ number-one receiver. On defense he played a hybrid of end and safety, a kind of stand-up linebacker who sacked quarterbacks and intercepted their passes, too. On special teams he both boomed and blocked punts.
Nugent called Collins “the finest player I ever coached,” but Collins said, “Nugent was just a jerk.” Collins insisted that his coach’s compliments were “just for the press.” Man-to-man Collins never felt any warmth from Nugent and felt no attachment to him. “Some guys would come up and say, ‘How’re you feeling today?’ or put an arm around you. Nugent didn’t even know guys’ names,” Collins said.
Despite the lack of personal chemistry with his coach, Collins’s accomplishments at Maryland were larger than life. On defense he stuffed Syracuse’s great Heisman-winning running back, Ernie Davis, twice at the goal line. That led the Terps to an upset of the Orangemen. Collins picked off passes from future professional standouts such as Roman Gabriel and Norm Snead, then both playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference. On special teams he punted into the corners and blocked punts to win games.
As an offensive player he was simply spectacular, diving and darting, showing off the hands and moves that would distinguish him for most of the next decade, even among the finest pros. With Collins leading the way, in 1961, the Terps beat Penn State 21–17. That would be the only time Maryland would defeat the Nittany Lions in thirty-seven games, close to forty years.
Although Collins could seemingly do it all on a football field, his passion was reserved for catching the ball. Since early childhood it was all he wanted to do. He grew up an Eagles fan, but at Maryland he chose number 82, the same number as his hero, Raymond Berry. Collins admired Berry’s preparation and meticulous attention to detail. He studied the Colts’ receiver’s game, and he sought to emulate him in every way.
From watching Berry he learned that a receiver’s speed should be measured not vertically but by point of break. “Everybody thought I was a slow son of a bitch. I was faster than Raymond Berry. A guy doesn’t necessarily have to be a 9.4 sprinter to get out there 15 yards quicker than [even a great runner],” Collins said.
Bob Hayes was a case in point. Known as “Bullet Bob,” the sprinter went to the Tokyo Olympics and came home with two gold medals, each one representing a new world record. If Collins lacked speed, Hayes dripped with it. But when Collins met Hayes at his first Pro Bowl, he noticed something interesting.
“Running outs at 15 yards,” Collins said, “I was getting to the sideline faster than Hayes. Don Meredith couldn’t understand that.”
The physics of it may have befuddled Meredith, but Collins was practically a professor on the subject. He summed up the phenomenon thusly: “If you can’t break left and right as a pass receiver,” he said, “you ain’t worth shit.”
Collins had one receiver’s virtue that the nearsighted Berry lacked, and that was great vision. In that respect Gary was like Ted Williams, the Red Sox star whose magnificent hitting was often explained in terms of superhuman visual faculties. “The Thumper,” it was said, could see the individual laces on the baseball as it approached his bat. Collins claimed, “With the proper break [he] could see the ball leaving the [quarterback’s] hand. If I could pick up the ball at that point, I could adjust and catch [even] a bad pass,” he said.
Eyesight, footwork, and great size and strength took Collins a long way. He left Maryland in style, selected number four by Cleveland in the 1962 NFL draft and also number four by Boston in the AFL draft. When he chose to sign with the Browns, he became the first player ever selected during owner Art Modell’s long reign over the franchise.
So this was the man across from Bobby Boyd, the one Boyd was left out on an island to cover. The Colts’ cornerback might have been overmatched on paper, but he wasn’t overly concerned. He had successfully covered tall receivers before.
In ’62 and ’63 Boyd had to face R. C. Owens in practice every day. Before coming to Baltimore from San Francisco, the six-foot-three end with kangaroo legs famously teamed with the magnificent quarterback Y. A. Tittle. Owens and Tittle had invented a pass pattern known throughout the NFL as the “Alley Oop.” The name was a phrase French acrobats screamed just before they leaped into the air. In the parlance of the NFL, it became code for an unsophisticated yet devastatingly effective pattern in which Owens ran to a spot in the end zone where Tittle would heave the ball high into the air in his general direction. Owens would simply outleap defenders to pluck the ball from the fluffy clouds as if it were a piece of fruit. R.C. was basically a modern-day NBA player in a helmet and chinstrap; nevertheless, Boyd covered him, and pretty much everyone else in the league, with great efficiency. The Colts’ cornerback had no concerns about Collins, but perhaps he should have. Cleveland’s end was taller, stronger, and a great deal younger than Owens.
In the Colts’ zeal to cover Warfield and contain Jim Brown, Frank Ryan saw his moment. “When you’re playing a man-to-man defense and particularly a blitzing defense, you get just gargantuan opportunities,” he said.
Those opportunities didn’t come until the second half, but they came. Early in the third quarter Tom Gilburg, the replacement for the injured Joe Don Looney, trotted in to punt. Gilburg was primarily an offensive tackle, though he was considered an excellent punter as a collegiate player at Syracuse. Kicking into the teeth of the bitter wind, Gilburg could muster only a 25-yard punt. That gave the Browns the ball on Baltimore’s own 47-yard line. With that advantage Ryan called on Jim Brown, not as a runner but as a receiver. Ryan threw a flare pass to the punishing fullback, who gained 11 yards with it.
That was all the offense the Browns needed. After two more Ryan passes fell incomplete, ancient Lou “the Toe” Groza lumbered in to attempt a 43-yard field goal. An offensive tackle as well as a kicker, Lou was well acquainted with championship-game pressure. His career stretched so far back, he had been an original member of the Browns, starting when they were still in the old All-America Football Conference. The Toe was a henchman of Otto Graham’s and had already won seven professional football championships (AAFC and NFL) in his long career before he faced the Colts in ’64. He was a straight-ahead kicker, in the inefficient style of that era, but he was the greatest of them, unusually accurate and reliable. Unlike the Colts who had botched their field goal attempt earlier in the game, the Toe effortlessly stepped into the ball with his squared-off boot, and it twirled flawlessly through the parallel beams, painted brown and orange.
Though Unitas stood on the other sideline with the most potent offense in the game all around him, the Browns’ unimpressive drive, culminating in Groza’s field goal and the paltry three points it put on the board, somehow created a fissure in the supposedly impenetrable Colts.
In the Browns’ next possession the game’s true heroes would emerge. The Colts’ worst fear was realized when Jim Brown took a quick pitch from Ryan and rumbled down the field with it. With a guard and tackle leading his way and even Warfield blocking Baltimore’s defensive end, Brown rumbled for 46 hard-won yards before Baltimore’s Lenny Lyles frantically grabbed him in a last-ditch effort and brought him down.
Frank Ryan knew that something pivotal had happened. The score was still only 3–0, but Brown’s escape and mad dash played into Colts paranoia. Dr. Ryan might not have been a genius, as the sportswriters kept insisting, but he knew that the Colts’ haunting fears of Jim Brown and a Browns running game out of their control suddenly made them more vulnerable than ever to the pass. With horseshoes surrounding Warfield on every snap, Ryan turned to the least covered man on the field, Gary Collins.
“On the very next play,” Ryan said, “I called Collins on what we called ‘a shake.’” In that play Collins was supposed to fake to the post and then break back out, going deep to the right. But the Colts’ exertions caused a change in plans.
Ryan said that “Collins got down there, and he got bumped around by Boyd. In the meantime, I was being rushed by their defensive line, and I had to sort of scramble up into the pocket.”
As Ryan maneuvered he noticed that Collins was not where he expected him. “I saw Gary changing the course of things in the end zone,” the quarterback said, “and instead of going for the far-right corner, he was coming back across the middle of the goal.”
With the Colts’ two great defensive ends Gino Marchetti and Ordell Braase bearing down in a sort of pincer movement from either side, the only place Ryan had to go was forward. He sprinted toward the line of scrimmage, and as he did so he saw Collins coming back across the end zone and flung the ball in his direction.
“Boyd was all over him in his initial route,” Ryan said. “But both [Collins] and I adapted ourselves to the circumstances of the play.”
In addition to his improvisation, Ryan’s play call had also outfoxed the Colts. After Brown’s long run, and with the ball now residing just 20 yards from the goal line, he knew the defense had to fear the threat of Brown more than ever. So coming out of the huddle, he had the Browns line up in a formation from which they traditionally ran. The Colts, who had seen it all on film, called the setup a double wing, because it had two tight ends lining up next to two receivers, one pair on the left side of the line and one pair on the right. The Colts braced themselves for another attack by Jim Brown, but Ryan crossed them up and passed. It was a call worthy of Unitas, who often summed up successful play calling by claiming it was as simple as this: “Well, you run when they think you’re going to pass, and you pass when they think you are going to run.”
And, indeed, the formation Ryan showed caused some confusion on the Colts’ defense.
“Our safety misread the way we were supposed to rotate,” Bobby Boyd said. “I was the deep outside, and our safety was supposed to be in the middle of the field and misread the play.” In other words, the Colts’ cornerback had expected help in the middle that never arrived.
“They had a tight end, and we were to rotate to him when they came out in those formations,” Boyd said. Instead, “The safety went the wrong way. I had the deep outside, and [Collins] went right down the middle. I’m sure people thought I was to blame, but I wasn’t.”
No matter whose fault it was, the Colts’ defenders were so confused, they were less of an impediment to the play’s success than the goalpost.
“It hit me in my mind as I was throwing the ball that I might hit the goalpost with it,” Frank Ryan said.
In those days the goalpost was set on the goal line, it had not yet been moved to the back of the end zone. This fact had thwarted Ryan and Collins’s touchdown ambitions several times throughout the year. “At least twice, maybe three times that season, I threw passes to Gary Collins wide open in the end zone, and it would hit the crossbar or one of the other stands holding the goals up there,” Ryan said.
Collins had the same fear as his quarterback. He wasn’t sure whether the ball would reach him. “It was a broken pattern, and I almost missed it. I thought it was going to hit the goalpost, and I juggled it,” he admitted.
But Collins’s sure hands put an end to those worries; he ultimately embraced the ball. More important, by the time Lou the Toe put the extra point through the uprights, the Browns already had nine more points than they would need all day.
Now the sluice was wide open, and the Browns’ attack was careening down the chute.
Ryan preyed upon the Colts at the intersection of their fears and strengths. As the game was slipping from their grasp, the Colts seemed to learn nothing from the success of Jim Brown on the ground or the openings that were created for Collins. Instead of adapting and perhaps loosening up their coverages a little so that they might confuse Ryan, where intimidation had not yet worked, the Colts’ defense seemed to bear down even more.
Ryan was determined to use that against them.
“When you play man-to-man,” Ryan said, “it is really hard-nosed football. You’re right on top of the situation, and you’re gonna stomp them and kick their butts. But it opens up just remarkable opportunities for doing a little finesse.”
One of those opportunities came in Cleveland’s next possession. A close observer could almost see Ryan’s brilliant mind at work as he tried to make the desperate Baltimore defense collapse on the weight of its own aggressiveness.
When the Browns got the ball around midfield, Ryan wasted a play on a simple run that went nowhere. But the second play tipped his hand a little and revealed his desire to deceive. He called a reverse to Paul Warfield, putting the ball in the great receiver’s hands as a runner instead of a pass catcher. But the play did worse than nothing and lost 3 yards.
Ryan had one more play left and one more small deception. “It was about third and 13,” he remembered. “We’re about on the 45-yard line going in, and I called a hook and go to Gary Collins, who was, I think, on the weak side. So he went down and did his little dip in and I faked the ball at him, and the defensive back just about fell out of his pants trying to get in front of Gary on the hook. But Gary was going south on the post pattern by the time he figured that out, and [Collins] was just extraordinarily wide open and there wasn’t anybody within 20 yards of him when he caught the ball.
“That play selection was very unexpected to [the Colts], I’m sure. They had a very tight coverage out there, trying to prevent us from getting a first down, and I just made up my mind, ‘Let’s go for it.’ There was nobody on our team [who] expected me to call that play.”
The Colts clearly weren’t expecting it, either. The result was another touchdown from Ryan to Collins, and the game was effectively over.
The Colt who bit on the fake was Bobby Boyd. Again he appeared to be victimized by Collins, but again he expected help from safety Jim Welch that never came. Boyd simply, sadly, said, “Our safety went the wrong way twice.”
Gary Collins, of all people, agreed: “[Boyd] was supposed to get post help. I ran like a curl, then took off, and the safety, Welch, fell. It wasn’t Bobby’s fault, but the corner’s gonna look bad.”
When he reflected on his good fortune that day, Ryan was kind to all the Colts’ defenders whom he had humbled. “The issue was the coverage and not the individual,” he said. “Anytime we played against man-to-man coverage, we felt we could eat it up. If you’ve got good receivers, as we had, they’re going to get away from those tightly covered situations.”
All in all, Cleveland put up seventeen points in the third quarter, but the Colts’ torturous day was far from complete.
The fourth quarter featured another Groza field goal, this one from just 10 yards, and then the third and final act of the Boyd-Collins duel unfolded.
Collins took off on a straight “fly pattern” that saw him streaking for the goal line. Boyd tightly shadowed him step for step in perfect coverage. But Ryan and Collins’s day of perfection continued. Collins maneuvered his huge body between Boyd and the ball and boxed out his opponent, much like a well-coached basketball player would. As the pigskin approached, Boyd leaped to intercept it, but it was Collins who came down with Ryan’s meticulously placed pass. Boyd almost seemed to have a finger on the ball before Collins snatched it away. After the catch Boyd bounced off Collins and just slid to the ground. Meanwhile, Collins dashed to the end zone with his third touchdown.
“It was just a big guy versus a little guy,” Collins said. “I brushed him off, and he fell.”
After the game the Colts were stunned, but, to their credit, they met the press. For Shula, young and emotional, that may not have been a great idea. Although the Colts had performed poorly in virtually every football category—they botched a field goal, shanked a punt, gave up seventeen points in the third quarter alone and twenty-seven points in the second half, and got shut out—he singled out just one aspect of the team.
“We sure found out about the Cleveland defense, didn’t we?” he rhetorically asked reporters. “You have to, however, talk about our lack of offense with their defense. Our offense never gave our defense any break. We sure didn’t execute our offense very well. You can’t give up the ball as many times as we did and come in here a winner.”
The New York Times noted Shula’s words and then decoded them for anyone who didn’t get his point. “Without mentioning names Shula expressed disappointment at the performance of his offense, led by Unitas,” they wrote.
There was no rejoinder from Johnny U, but a rival NFL coach who was anonymous was probably not alone when he expressed this sentiment: “Shula ‘did a lousy job’ in preparing his team for the game,” he said.
Gary Collins, who played the biggest part in defeating Baltimore, said there was really no one to blame on the other sideline. The secret to beating the indomitable Colts was simple. “It was just our day,” he said. “It was all aligned. We made only five to seven mistakes—the entire team! We’re gonna be hard to beat.”
The searchlight of defeat found Unitas and Shula and revealed aspects of their characters that the public had never seen before.
Unitas, the most famous, admired, and respected player in football, was photographed on the field in an unusual pose. His arms were cross-folded on his chest in dejection, obscuring his number, 19. His head hung low. His eyes faced the ground.
Unitas had thrown for fewer than 100 yards; he was intercepted twice. His passer rating for the game was only 32.3. He had been badly outplayed by his unheralded Cleveland counterpart. The sting of embarrassment must have been great for a man who had already been MVP of two previous title games and was defined by his clutch performances. Yet Unitas swallowed hard. His demeanor in defeat, whatever his private humiliation, was as gracious as it ever was in his many victories. “When you go over to the Cleveland dressing room,” Johnny U said to reporters, “tell Frank Ryan congratulations for me. He was great.”
Just twenty-four hours before, Shula was distinguished among his peers for his precocious brilliance and tell-it-like-it-is toughness. But in the aftermath of such an unexpected and shameful defeat, those qualities had lost their charm. In lashing out and attaching so much veiled blame to his own quarterback, his star, his city’s idol, he lost something of his own status as a miraculous prodigy and, for the day anyway, suddenly appeared callow. He too was caught in an unguarded moment by a photojournalist. Under a headline that read “We Know Just How You Feel,” Shula was presented with his chin up and his eyes forward but his lower lip sticking far out in the manner of a petulant boy who is caught by his father misbehaving and is about to cry.
There was an odd and somewhat sad postscript to the saga of the ’64 championship game. In the waning moments of the contest, as time ticked off the official clock, jubilation built on the Browns’ bench, while bitterness crept its way through the Colts.
Enjoying the moment of his own redemption, Ryan sought to reward a hardworking but unheralded teammate with a little of the glory.
“We had the ball in the last minute down close to their end zone,” he remembered. “I did call a play, which would have been a touchdown play if the pass had been caught, to John Brewer, who was our tight end. He hadn’t caught a ball all day, and he had a great year that year blocking for the team. He was not a great receiver, and I just felt, well, jeez, maybe he can be a part of this thing, too. That’s why I called the play. It wasn’t really to run the score up on the Colts. It was intended to reach out to John Brewer.
“The Colts were understandably upset about it,” Ryan said.
They let him know it by crowding around him after the play and filling his ears with profanities.
Ryan took the responsibility on himself: “I’ve come to the conclusion that I probably should have had a little more maturity than I exhibited,” he said.
Gary Collins couldn’t agree more, but he didn’t think Ryan was the only Brown at fault. “Frank shouldn’t have done it,” the game MVP said. “’Course that was also Dub Jones’s fault,” Collins said, referring to the Browns’ offensive coordinator. “Jim [Brown] should have said something. Somebody should have said something [to prevent the play call].”
In that one ill-advised pass, Ryan awoke a magnificent anger in Gino Marchetti, a man most people would hope never to cross in their lifetimes.
The legend that emerged was that an enraged Gino followed Ryan back into the Cleveland huddle and shouted, “I’m going to get you for this.”
“I don’t remember Marchetti saying anything like that,” Ryan said. “But when we flew into Los Angeles for the Pro Bowl game a week or two later, the headlines of the paper that very day said: ‘All I Want Is One More Shot at Ryan.’ That quote was attributed to Marchetti.”
Any sane man would have found that pronouncement a cause for alarm. Gino “the Giant,” as he was called, was a notorious thumper, the last guy you wanted as your enemy.
Gino played in an era when quarterback sacks were not yet an official statistic. Nevertheless, the Colts’ coaching staff examined game film after one season and informally counted the number of times Gino the Giant had brought down enemy quarterbacks. That number was forty.
Gino was not big by the standards of future generations of behemoth defensive linemen. He was only about six feet four and 245 pounds. Nevertheless, he had catlike reflexes, tremendous speed, and an arsenal of moves. He was also the unquestioned leader of the Colts.
Ryan was the Eastern Division’s starting Pro Bowl quarterback that day. “In the first play of the second half, it wasn’t just Marchetti. Four guys hit me simultaneously and sort of ground me into the ground,” he remembered. “I was knocked out as well as having my shoulder separated. [Marchetti] must have had a delicious feeling about that.”
“It was obvious Marchetti tried to hurt him,” Gary Collins said. “He slammed him, chicken-winged him.”
The league reported that Ryan had suffered a “slight muscle separation.” The fact that he was knocked out cold and probably suffered a severe concussion didn’t even rate a mention.
For Ryan that terrible moment of Marchetti’s revenge and that “slight muscle separation” were only the beginning of a long, painful journey. He claimed that his injury might not have been as serious as it became had not the Pro Bowl physician treated him improperly, causing even worse damage.
“I realized my right shoulder hurt a little bit, and I’m a right-handed thrower,” he said. “They had a team physician who was more or less a society doctor. What he did was counterproductive to the proper way to care for this injury. He bound it up in the wrong way or something like that. He had put a heavy bandage on my shoulder to sort of hold my shoulder bone down into my socket.”
The rest of the story tells a gruesome tale of the primitive sports medicine that existed in the 1960s.
“The next day, when they took that [bandage] off to make a more thorough assessment of what had happened,” Ryan said, “they could not get the adhesive off my skin without lacerating my skin. Because my skin was lacerated where they were going to operate, they refused to operate. Instead, they put me in a body cast—a cast around my body that I couldn’t take off! They put a belt that went up from that cast over my right shoulder and down to my back that could be [cinched] up really tight and hold that bone down in place.
“So for the next six weeks I had this body cast on, trying to get this trauma to correct itself in a natural way since they couldn’t operate. Eventually, I got out of the cast and started throwing the football again,” he said.
Ryan was given an exercise regimen to help him regain his arm strength. Instead, it created even more unnecessary damage, this time to his elbow.
“It was a determining feature of my career,” he said, “because as soon as I got into a program to restrengthen that shoulder, I began inadvertently to tear a tendon in my right elbow. In doing the exercises that were imposed upon me to get my shoulder better, they ended up pulling the big muscle that is on the inside of your right arm away from that little point in your elbow. Inside of your elbow has a little point to which a lot of tendons are attached, and this thing was tearing that tendon away.”
He played the next two seasons with terrible pain in his throwing arm. This was possible only because the Browns’ physician, a man Ryan secretly suspected was a chiropractor, was always ready with a syringe.
“He kept injecting a painkiller in my elbow so that I could practice on Wednesday. And it was injected on Sunday so I could play. That went on for two seasons,” he said.
After scouring the country, flying both east and west, looking for the right medical solution, Ryan finally found a surgeon in Oklahoma City who could repair the damaged tendon.
So in his moment of vindication and redemption, just as he emerged as one of the best quarterbacks in the league, one bad decision on the greatest day of his life changed everything.
“If I hadn’t had that injury in that Pro Bowl game, my career might have been very different,” he said.
Unsentimental as ever, Gary Collins agreed that Ryan’s career had taken a disastrous turn.
“Ryan wasn’t effective after that,” he said. “He couldn’t throw. He was inaccurate to begin with, and [the injury] really made him inaccurate.”
Despite his lost career, Ryan never let bitterness cloud his thinking about what happened, or who was responsible.
“[Marchetti] was a great player, and I had no malicious feelings toward him whatsoever, and I don’t to this day,” the quarterback said. “He was right and correct in having the reaction that he had. I was improper and a little bit on a cloud about calling that play.”
All things considered, the ’64 title game was almost as painful for the victors as it was for the Baltimoreans. Whatever Ryan’s faults and limitations, however he had offended Marchetti and the gods, the curse or cost was that the Browns would never again develop another quarterback of championship caliber.
A half century has passed, and in northern Ohio, the very cradle of professional football, they are still waiting for another Frank Ryan.