Unitas was a devout Catholic who regularly attended Mass as a congregant at Immaculate Conception in Towson. One Sunday he took his young daughter Jan with him. They left at the conclusion of the early service and were making their way through the parking lot when they ran into another worshipper who was heading inside for the morning’s second Mass. They were about to pass him when Unitas suddenly stopped to greet him.
“Hey, Shoes. How you doing?” Unitas said.
After that the other congregant disappeared into the building, and Jan asked her father, “Who was that man?”
“That’s Coach Shula,” Unitas told his eight-year-old little girl. “He’s an asshole.”
Johnny Unitas and Don Shula did not get along. There is no question about that. In their day the strain between them was carefully hidden from the fans by the Colts’ incomparable PR machine, but it was a plainly visible fact to members of the team, to the two antagonists, and to their families and friends.
In the stress of battle the secret would occasionally leak out to the press as well. When Shula blatantly criticized his team’s offense in his comments after the 1964 championship game, the New York Times read between the lines and divined a broadside aimed at Johnny Unitas.
Shula and Unitas should have appreciated each other. Each one had done a great deal to enhance the other’s career. In 1963, Unitas’s first year under Shula’s tutelage, the quarterback enjoyed a renaissance and posted his best statistics in four seasons. In his second season with Shula he was named league MVP, and he returned to the championship game.
On the other hand, Unitas’s performances were the key factor in Shula’s success. The Colts had the top-ranked defense in the NFL, but Unitas was Shula’s marquee player and the team’s touchdown maker. Unitas was the propellant that took the young coach from obscurity to fame. A few years earlier Shula was a failed player and then an anonymous assistant coach. Now, with number 19 at the controls of his offense, Shula was surpassing Vince Lombardi and dominating the league. All that despite the fact that he was almost a generation younger than Lombardi and many of the other head coaches he faced.
If the friction between Unitas and Shula was hidden from the fans, it was in plain view of the many camera lenses that were aimed in their direction. When the shutters clicked they accurately captured the emotional distance and the irritation between the two men. In those shots Shula’s face is inevitably grim and concerned. His intensity and determination are conspicuous. There were few smiles in his Baltimore photos and few lighthearted moments, especially in his snapshots with Unitas.
There is a pronounced difference between the photographs of Unitas with his first mentor, Weeb Ewbank, and the later shots with Shula. With Weeb there is visible and obvious warmth as Unitas and Ewbank squarely face each other. The coach sometimes drapes a fatherly arm around his protégé’s shoulder.
Unitas’s and Shula’s body language is oppositional. They rarely stand face-to-face or look each other in the eye. There is no evidence of camaraderie or emotional partnership. There is only a cold, hard business between them, and judging by their faces it appears to be as dreary and joyless as the partnership of Scrooge and Cratchit.
One shot, in particular, sums it all up. In a photo from training camp Shula leans over Unitas’s shoulder right into the offensive huddle, his head craning as he eavesdrops on the play call. Unitas looks pained and irritated by the intrusion, his flattop bristling like the hair on a provoked dog’s back.
Charley Winner saw the contrasts in the two men and their approaches to dealing with others. Unitas was humble and in touch with who he was and where he came from, he said. In Shula Winner saw a self-promoter.
“Unitas’s disposition was always the same, always positive,” Winner said. “When John Unitas looked at you and said something, you believed it. A lot of the players told me when he called the play in the huddle, you knew it was going to work.”
But Winner felt that Shula’s approach was less about “we” and more about “he.” “When you sit down and talk with Shula, he is it and that’s it,” Winner said. “Every speech he makes, he talks about the perfect season.
“Shula is the kind of a guy who won’t take any bullshit,” Winner said. “If he sees something, he is going to call a spade a spade. Heck, he would get on me. Boy, I’d be the defensive coach, and it would be a third and short and I’d tell him I wanted a certain defense, and they would make the first down and he would say, ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ I’d say, ‘Don, it was third and 1,’ or something like that. He’d get on me, and I’d known him ever since he was in college. But that’s the way he was.”
Initially, Unitas wasn’t the only player who didn’t care for Shula’s brusque manner. The coach rubbed many of the Colts the wrong way.
“He took to the title of head coach instantly,” running back Lenny Moore later wrote. “At times it seemed as if [Shula] went too far. . . . I knew many guys on the team wanted to take a shot at him.”
“Don Shula was the kind of guy who could look you square in the eye and call you an asshole,” tackle Jim Parker said.
These initial reactions faded for most players, and as time passed Shula gained the respect of the team. Bobby Boyd actually felt a sense of kinship with his coach since, as a cornerback, he played the same position on the field that his coach once had. Boyd was also Unitas’s close intimate and, later, his business partner in two restaurant ventures. He described Shula as a highly aggressive coach and Unitas as a player who simply wouldn’t tolerate overt criticism.
“Shula was a great coach. He knew what he was doing. I didn’t always agree with him, but I had a lot of respect for him,” Boyd said. “But he would get on you if you didn’t do it the way he thought you should. Shula was very consistent. He treated everybody pretty much the same. He would jump on anybody, and he would give a little praise to everybody.
“Shula would yell at [Unitas] just like he would any of the players. . . . [T]hat was his nature. He would correct you and sometimes put you in a situation in which you got embarrassed. John didn’t go for that, didn’t go for that at all.”
According to Boyd, the tensions between Shula and Unitas didn’t lead to dramatic displays in front of the other players, but it would cause the men to square off in private.
“I never did see [Unitas] lash back at [Shula],” Boyd said. “But I know they would have some private conversations about John and how he reacted. Shula treated all of us that way; that’s the way he coached. It didn’t bother me that much, but I think John really resented it. They just didn’t get along.”
Jan Unitas knew it wasn’t in her father’s nature to tolerate disrespect. “My father told me he never liked the type of coach who screamed and yelled. He didn’t respond well to that,” she said. But she also knew better than anyone that beneath her father’s impenetrable public facade was a fragile ego. “He felt like, ‘I’m John Unitas. What is somebody going to tell me about playing quarterback?’”
Shula had to contend with that ego and rein it in to be successful. But he was also self-aware and knew that his own personality was, at times, an issue. Others perceived him as tightly wound and volatile, and he knew it.
“I never would mask my emotions,” Shula said. “What you see is what you get. I was so intense in what I was doing, sometimes I didn’t handle it as well as I should have.”
While the mysteries of personality and chemistry dogged the two men, they also had disputes about tangible things: they vehemently disagreed about how to run an offense.
Dan Sullivan, a talented young guard on the offensive line, believed that the problems between coach and quarterback were based on diverging offensive philosophies. Unitas’s style of play foreshadowed NFL offenses of the twenty-first century. He had a pass-first mentality that resonated with the fans. In Baltimore they joyfully paraphrased United Airlines’ famous advertising tag line of the ’60s and urged everyone to “fly the friendly skies of Unitas.”
Shula still liked to travel by stagecoach.
“John played a different game than Don Shula wanted to play,” Dan Sullivan said. “John Unitas was a pure passing quarterback. John, left to his own devices, would like to throw the ball three-quarters of the time and run the ball as a ‘waste’ play, if you will.
“When Don Shula came to coach the Baltimore Colts, his desire was to have a 50-50 offense—50 percent running and 50 percent throwing,” Sullivan said. “[Shula] was a strong advocate of ‘win first down,’” which was defined as getting four yards or more.
“Once you get four yards or better on first down, you’ve put the defense in a very defensive position,” Sullivan said. “Now it’s open for a pass. It’s open for another run. And, if you get another 4 yards, it’s third and 2, and it makes it a lot easier. If you don’t win the first-down battle, and it becomes third and 9 or third and 10 or longer, then you’re stuck in that zone where you have to pass the football. John Unitas thrived in that zone.”
Sullivan knew Shula would have a tough time getting Unitas to see the wisdom of his approach. Johnny U had made his fame by defying easy-to-read tendencies. In 1958 Tom Landry, then defensive coordinator of the Giants, easily shut down Paul Brown’s offense in a special playoff game against Cleveland. By examining the famous coach’s inclinations, Landry and the Giants read his offense like it was a schoolboy’s primer. But the next week Landry and his disciplined players were befuddled by Unitas and were utterly unsure of what he would do next. In essence New York’s top-ranked defense was powerless against Johnny U, who carved them up to tie the score in the waning moments of the game and then sliced through them again in overtime.
Unitas unapologetically passed when the prevailing wisdom would have him run, and that’s the way he liked to play the game.
Sullivan saw the seeds of conflict in these divergent views.
“I knew Don thought the world of John and thought he was a great quarterback,” Sullivan said, “but I think if he had any desire, he would have loved to have turned him a little bit more to his way of thinking. I don’t know how you could’ve done that. I don’t know of any coach in professional football that could’ve done that with John.”
This struggle for control of the play calling was a key issue for both men. Nancy Winner, Weeb Ewbank’s daughter and Charley Winner’s wife, understood the problem.
“John called all the plays [under my father],” she said. “That’s what he loved, and that’s why he hated Shula.”
Under Ewbank Unitas had been empowered to steer the ship on Sunday. That was Weeb’s method, and the team thrived under it.
“When [Unitas] said something in the huddle, that was it,” Charley Winner said. “[The players] all respected him. They knew that he was going to produce. He could see things. We [the coaches] didn’t call the plays.
“Weeb would more or less go over the game plan as far as the quarterback is concerned,” Winner said, “and he gave John a lot of freedom. We had a group of plays. These are good for first and 10. These are good for second and long, second and short, third and long, third and short.”
Winner said that under Ewbank the coaching staff offered its thoughts to Unitas about what would work in the game, but those suggestions were proposed in the spirit of collaboration only. On Sunday, though, the ball and the fate of the team were both in Johnny U’s hands.
During games Ewbank’s coaching staff reserved the right to converse with Unitas and remind him of things they felt were important. “The [assistant coach] on the telephone or the head coach would talk to him and say, ‘Now, we haven’t tried this yet,’ or, ‘No, try this,’” Winner said. But it was left up to Unitas to make the calls in the huddle based on what he was seeing in the game. “John and Raymond came up with a lot of suggestions because they looked at those films,” Winner said. “Weeb trusted John, and they had a real good relationship.”
Collegiality wasn’t in Shula’s repertoire with Unitas, and he wasn’t about to give away control of the game.
Jimmy Orr knew that the heavy hand of Shula wasn’t in concert with the way Unitas operated. “John didn’t like Shula sending in the plays,” he said. “John liked to look to Raymond or me and say, ‘Where do you want to go?’ If you took that away from him, he didn’t like it. It wasn’t his game anymore. He was just a stool pigeon.”
That didn’t stop Shula from using running back Tom Matte as his messenger to the huddle, sending Tom in with the play he wanted to see. But this served only to put the young player on the cutting edge of the dispute. Like a child in a divorce, he was used as a pawn by both power figures.
When Matte arrived with Shula’s play Unitas would listen closely and then say, “I don’t want to call that.”
When Matte got back to the sideline the coach was seething.
“Why didn’t you call that play?” Shula would ask him.
“John didn’t want to call that one,” Matte replied.
“Well, I told you to tell him to call it.”
“I did tell him,” the weary Matte would say over and over again.
Matte felt that the problems between Unitas and Shula were bigger than the play calls.
“John thought that Shula was defensive minded and John was offensive minded,” Matte said. “And I really think that’s where the rubber hit the road. [John’s feeling was], ‘You take care of the defense, and I’ll take care of the offense.’”
Shula was under the impression that he was the head coach of the entire team.
Not surprisingly, then, Shula felt a certain discomfort in dealing with Unitas. While he didn’t mind taking command of the many other great players on the team, men with whom he had played or who were close in age to him or who were far better players than he was, Unitas was different. It was as if the two couldn’t get past their old pecking order as teammates who were going in opposite directions.
“In the beginning it was tough,” Shula said. “[Unitas] thought about me as a defensive back that was just fighting to stay in the league, and he was a superstar. I just felt that I really had to prove myself [to him], every meeting, every practice, every point. I had to make sure that he understood that [what I was doing] was the right thing to do to get ready to play.”
Shula made other decisions that also may have exacerbated his problems with Unitas. For one thing he added active players to his coaching staff. Gino Marchetti and Bill Pellington, the two defensive stars who had recommended Shula to Rosenbloom, were named player coaches. So, too, was offensive end Jim Mutscheller, who had only recently retired. All were Roman Catholics, giving credence, perhaps, to Weeb Ewbank’s old conspiracy theory that papists had wrested control of the team. John Constantine Unitas, for all his on-field wizardry and Roman Catholicism, remained strictly a player. It was an arrangement almost guaranteed to provoke resentment.
While these issues explain a lot, they don’t really delve too deeply into the one factor that makes marriages and workplaces alike work or fail—personal chemistry.
Colts center Bill Curry was, literally, the closest player on the field to Unitas and the great man’s henchman. He got an up-close view of the quarterback Shula found so hard to get along with.
Curry said that the players “all worshipped” Unitas, and so did the fans, who erupted in decibels “louder than a jet engine” when Johnny U was introduced before games in Baltimore. He remembered how oddly the pressures of game time affected Unitas. As kickoff neared Johnny U’s eyes began to blink with great rapidity. His teammates recognized this quirk as a sign that Unitas was in deep focus.
Curry said the one trait that really drew the Colts around their leader was his ability to remain serene in the face of disaster.
“We’re playing the Bears one day,” Curry said, “and after five minutes in the game it’s 17 to nothing. He’s thrown three interceptions, and they’ve picked him off in the end zone. Butkus is out there kicking everybody, knocking everybody’s teeth out, and John jogs off the field after each interception, and there is no change of expression, none.
“Someone said to me, ‘Doesn’t this bother him?’ He shows no emotion. He doesn’t say, ‘You guys block for me.’ He might come by the O line and ask, ‘Do you need a screen, Billy, something to slow down the pressure?’ No change of expression. No pain in his face.
“The last play of the game was [a 54-yard pass] to John Mackey to win, 21–20. And I swear he comes off the field, and there is still no change of expression. Nothing.”
That portrait of Unitas as stoic hero was the one that everyone knew. Hidden behind the iron facade, however, Curry saw another side of his nature, a man deeply burdened by both his past and his lonely, pressure-filled career.
He remembered one game against the Browns that offered another chance for Unitas’s last-second heroics. Instead, it ended in a bitter disappointment and a terrible misunderstanding among friends.
“We’re playing Cleveland one day, and it’s fourth down,” Curry said. “It’s our last chance to win the game. It’s like fourth and 4, I think. Unitas threw the deep ball, trying to win the game, and they intercepted it. The guy who intercepted it, the defensive back, made a terrible mistake. He caught it at his 4, somewhere around there, and so our defense went back on the field. We had such a great defense, there was a real good chance we could knock the ball loose or intercept or get it back with a chance to win. It was a big mistake. He should’ve batted the ball down.
“So [offensive guard] Glenn Ressler came over to me and said, ‘Can you believe that guy caught that ball?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I hope he lives to regret it.’ Well, we didn’t win the game. I think they made a first down or something and ended up running the clock out.
“We go in the locker room, and I’m standing in the shower. You’re always beat up, and you’re finding your wounds and cuts in the shower. Finally, it’s just John and me in there, buck-naked.
“He said, ‘I heard what you said about me.’
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’
“‘“You’ll live to regret it.” Yeah, I know I threw the damn interception, but for you to be talking like that about me.’
“I said, ‘I wasn’t talking about you. I don’t ever talk negatively about you.’
“‘Don’t give me that shit, Bill. You talk too much, and I heard you this time, and I know exactly what you said.’
“I followed him in, and while he shaved I stood there and harangued him, but he never budged. ‘I know what you were doing. You were talking trash about me.’
“I said, ‘That’s the one thing I won’t do if I live to be a thousand, and I’m horrified that you would even insinuate that.’
“‘I’m not insinuating a damn thing. I know what you were doing.’
“He was convinced that I was capable of talking down about him. So there was that kid who grew up expecting to work in the coal mines, and he got out of there thinking, ‘People were going to look down their nose at me if I make a mistake, even my best friend, even my guardian and protector.’”
Curry never convinced Unitas that he was referring to Cleveland’s defensive back and not the man he revered. In the end it all passed without further incident.
“By Tuesday everything was fine,” Curry said. “He was out there slapping me on the butt, and that was his way, I presumed, of saying, ‘Let’s drop it.’ It bothered me. It bothers me to this day that there was an element, a place in his heart, that would even think I would say that. It really hurt my feelings. But I’ll tell you what, I never said another word about him that wasn’t in his presence.”
Shula’s psychology wasn’t quite as complex, but he had his own problems and pressures to deal with. Dan Sullivan knew how hard it must have been to be the head coach of the Colts with a gunslinger who chucked interceptions without remorse and then hoped to pull off miracles at the last second. That kind of thing wasn’t good for a young coach’s job security, especially if he worked for Carroll Rosenbloom.
“You had to win under Carroll Rosenbloom. The buck didn’t stop anyplace other than there,” Sullivan said. “All he cared about were wins and losses. He didn’t care how you got there or how you did it. So I think to say that Shula was under the gun . . . would be a true story.”
So were Unitas’s and Shula’s tight windings the source of their mutual contempt, or was there something else?
Bill Curry came close to finding out one night when he was drinking with Johnny U at the Golden Arm, the quarterback’s restaurant. Unitas himself brought up the subject.
“Friday night was beer-drinking time at John Unitas’s place,” Curry said. John would come over, and he would start in on Shula. I would say, ‘Hey, don’t even do that. Don’t do that, John.’ And he’d say, ‘Man, you don’t understand.’ And I’d say, ‘I do understand. He’s our head coach, and let’s just leave it there.’
“As time went on John, who was a very private person, came to confide in me,” Curry said. “A lot of the things we talked about are nobody else’s business and never will be. But when he tried to talk about Don Shula, I would not let him. I said, ‘Look, I will not go there. You talk about my coach, and I owe him everything and so do you.’ He said, ‘I don’t owe him a damn thing.’ But I didn’t want to get into it with Johnny Unitas. I loved and admired him, and all I wanted to do was take care of him, keep someone from hitting him. I didn’t want him creating divisions or talking about my coach, our coach, like that. And so he said, ‘Okay, okay . . .’”
The spritely wide receiver Jimmy Orr had enormous chemistry with Unitas on the field.
“I asked him one time what was the thing between [him] and Shula,” Orr said. “He didn’t really want to talk about it. All he said was, ‘Shula lied to me.’”
Did Unitas tell Orr what Shula had lied about?
“I asked him,” Orr said, “but he never really answered.”