Johnny Unitas signed his tenth contract with the Colts in June 1965. In his decade of professional football he had enjoyed an unprecedented rise, from an obscure long shot rejected by his first team to the most famous and celebrated player in the game. He didn’t go to the top alone; he took Baltimore, the Colts franchise, and the entire enterprise of professional football with him. After a decade of brutal beatings on the field and even bounties issued against him, he had enough game left to be the reigning MVP, and he had just led Baltimore to its third championship appearance of his tenure. Since the day Johnny U came walking into the Colts’ starting lineup, Baltimore had never known a single losing season.
In New York Unitas’s old coach and mentor Weeb Ewbank, now the leader of the AFL’s Jets, had also just signed a quarterback to a new contract. His soon-to-be protégé was a rookie with a bum knee who had not yet played a single down of professional football. Nevertheless, at the press conference announcing the deal, Ewbank gushed profusely about his new gem and applied the word Unitas to him like a superlative.
“I see in this young man the same qualities that are found in Unitas,” Weeb told the scribes. “He has size, quickness, a wonderful arm, a quick delivery, courage, and the ability to make the big play.”
The subject of all that adulation was Joe Namath. Even if he shared all the similarities with Johnny U that Ewbank saw, there was one key difference between the two quarterbacks: Namath, a former shoe-shine boy, had just affixed his signature to a three-year deal worth $400,000. Unitas’s new agreement with the Colts, according to the Baltimore Sun, was a one-year deal for about $65,000.
Unitas couldn’t help but take notice. Namath had done nothing in professional football yet, but he had already financially eclipsed the game’s biggest star.
At home, perhaps with envy, Johnny U referred to the Hungarian-derived Namath as “the green-eyed Gypsy.” It wouldn’t be long before the press and fans across the country were reverentially referring to him by another name, “Broadway Joe.”
If Namath’s contract supremacy wasn’t a reflection of ability, it said a lot about old-fashioned business leverage. Namath was the beneficiary of the war for players between the established NFL and the upstart AFL. The two leagues were fighting to sign draft picks. But veterans like Unitas were victims of an interleague détente in which the two sides agreed to refrain from going after each other’s established players. So guys like Unitas, no matter how skilled, had no cards to play.
As the 1965 season dawned that humiliation wasn’t Unitas’s only problem. Soon after reporting to camp he complained of soreness in his arm. He had also done so just prior to last winter’s championship game. Though his elbow constantly pained him, like a “toothache,” he was still making every throw on the field with as much power, touch, and accuracy as he ever had.
The Colts were a transitioning team, trying to recover from the sting and stain of their inglorious loss to the Browns. They had no choice but to do so with two potential massive holes in their defense.
Gino Marchetti and Bill Pellington had both announced their retirements. The Colts felt relatively sure they could replace the irreplaceable Marchetti, since they had two excellent football players in Ordell Braase and Lou Michaels to man the defensive-end spots. The linebacker position, on the other hand, presented Shula with some problems.
Pellington had a reputation as one of the meanest and toughest linebackers in the game. In addition to that he was the “quarterback” on defense, calling all of the Colts’ plays. Shula’s first step in filling the void Pellington’s absence created was to use the team’s number-one draft pick to select Mike Curtis, who was both a linebacker and a fullback at Duke.
The Colts’ coaches quickly determined that Curtis would be more valuable to them on offense, running the ball instead of tackling the runner. (Curtis would later permanently return to defense.) That meant they still needed a linebacker. And in order to attract one, they used Joe Don Looney as the bait.
Joe Don was still in his early twenties and starting only his second season in the league. His potential combined with his evident strength, speed, and size made him a valuable commodity. As the Colts and Giants already knew, Looney was a misery but one you could easily unload on some other sucker. In this case the Detroit Lions, desperate for running help, filled the bill. They proffered Dennis Gaubatz, a ferocious young middle linebacker stuck on the bench behind their beloved All-Pro Joe Schmidt. The Colts gratefully accepted.
When the astonished Joe Don heard what Baltimore had obtained in exchange for him, he commented as only he could. “I think the Colts made a hell of a deal,” Looney said.
He was right about that.
Gaubatz developed into a key piece on the Colts’ defense. Meanwhile, Looney spent less than two seasons with the Lions, despite the fact that Detroit coach Harry Gilmer had hailed Joe Don upon his arrival as the team’s missing piece to a championship. In fact, Looney performed admirably for the Lions, scoring five rushing touchdowns in his first season with them.
But he quickly ran afoul of Gilmer anyway. When the coach ordered him to deliver a message to the huddle in a game, Looney refused and told his boss to call Western Union instead.
Needless to say, Joe Don was soon the property of the Washington Redskins.
Every single coach Joe Don had in college and the pros rejected him, and they all cited the same reasons—his immaturity and mental instability. In the 1960s there was only one place left to turn for a man like that. Too unpredictable for football, he was given guns and grenades and sent to Vietnam.
The experience somehow bestowed a prescience on Looney that was still lacking in America’s great men. While the president, congressmen, and business and military leaders were all still in denial about the war, telling the country it could be won, Looney was speaking a despised truth.
“Guys are dying like flies in Vietnam, a war we couldn’t win if we sent 10 million men over there,” Joe Don told Sports Illustrated. “It’s tragic because it’s such a waste. We’re going to pull out of Vietnam as soon as we can, and what have we accomplished?”
That was the American question of the decade, of course, posited and framed with perfect clarity by a man named Looney.
Meanwhile, the marshal-like Shula seemed to be having better luck than the Pentagon. The Looney-for-Gaubatz deal was just one of his many brilliant moves. Under his direction the Colts became a mighty repository for talent—in the front office, the coaching ranks, the scouts, and the players.
Shula’s machine lifted Baltimore to great heights. For four seasons of his reign (1964, ’65, ’67, and ’68) the Colts averaged little more than one loss per year. His sharp rise and sustained success quickly put him in a league with the greatest coaches of all time. Shula was the peer of successful but grumpy old men like Paul Brown, Lombardi, and Halas—even though he wasn’t even forty yet.
The fans respected, admired, and appreciated Shula. They identified with his working-class roots and felt a kinship with his brusque, take-no-prisoners approach. He was at once one of them and better. He was a winner.
Shula’s populism aside, however, their focal point was Johnny Unitas. He was so associated with the Colts and their long period of sensational play that the horseshoe on the team helmets no longer represented the franchise, horse racing, or even good luck. In a city where the industries were all moving out, where the blue-collar jobs were gasping and the headquarters all fleeing, the horseshoe took on an immense meaning. It was a symbol of town sanctity despite the rejections and humiliations.
But for all intents and purposes, the horseshoe was Unitas’s own initial. The team and the city, the players and the citizens, drew their strength and power, their very identity, from U.
The Colts’ loss in the 1964 championship game, and Unitas’s incredibly poor play against the Browns, all seemed like some strange anomaly that could never be repeated. Unitas was indomitable, and, because of their connection to him, so were his men and his city.
So the falling of the leaves in 1965 came to Baltimore with incredible optimism. In the season’s first game Unitas outplayed Minnesota’s Fran Tarkenton, another future Hall of Famer, and threw two touchdown passes. The Colts torched the Vikings, 35–16.
In week two they traveled to Wisconsin to meet the Packers in Milwaukee. Green Bay seemed to bring out the worst in the Colts. With the game almost over, Baltimore had already fumbled three times and Unitas had thrown two interceptions. Those five turnovers had led to seventeen Packer points. With only about a minute left to play, it should have been a disaster, but, in fact, the Colts were only down by three and in possession of the ball. Unitas knew what to do with it.
Facing the best defense in the NFL, he masterfully advanced his Colts 45 yards in five plays. With fifty-three seconds still left on the clock, and the Colts needing only a field goal to tie, he had Baltimore comfortably perched on the Packer 37.
Green Bay might have reasonably expected him to run, but Johnny U crossed them up and put the ball in the air. He hit Matte, a famously reliable receiver out of the backfield, with a 15-yard bullet. Tom caught the ball, but then he fumbled it away for Baltimore’s sixth, and fatal, turnover.
The Colts lost 20–17, but the circumstances underscored the razor-thin difference between the two teams. The Colts wouldn’t lose again for another two and a half months, ten more games, and the Packers would dog their heels the entire time. The long winning streak was all the more impressive as some of it was accomplished without Unitas, who missed a game and a half due to back spasms. The problem first surfaced in a contest against the Rams, but Johnny U soldiered on through the pain for a couple more games. Finally, at Wrigley Field in Chicago, the Bears advanced his pain to the unendurable stage with blitzes and brutal hits. Unitas left the game for good in the third quarter and missed the next one as well. Those were the first games he missed due to injury in about seven years.
In the meantime, Shula inserted Gary Cuozzo, Unitas’s well-regarded understudy, to take his place. Cuozzo did more than fill in for the famous man; he eclipsed him. The quarterback lit up the Vikings and threw five touchdowns passes against them in a 41–21 Colts victory. Even Unitas had never done that.
The next week Johnny U was well enough to return to action and face the Eagles in Baltimore. The Philadelphians came limping down I-95 with a measly 3-6 record, but they put up a hell of a fight. Just before the half they roughed up Jimmy Orr so badly, he had to be rushed to the hospital for shoulder X-rays.
Since Orr had come to Baltimore in the famous trade that sent Big Daddy Lipscomb to the Steelers, he had been a kind of Colts talisman. By his own admission he was relatively small and slow, but for him that was no liability. He led the league in yards per reception on three different occasions, averaging more than 20 yards all three times.
If Orr’s greatness suggested a sense of purpose, well, that was purely coincidental. Jimmy utterly lacked a serious side. He spoke in an exaggerated southern drawl so deep and gargled as to be almost unintelligible. A listener could tell that he had reached the end of a sentence only because he used laughter like punctuation. His mission, it seemed, was to go through life with a twinkle in his eye and to make joking, drinking, gambling, and romancing his chief occupations. Football just happened to be something he was superb at doing, and it provided him with pretty good money for all the fun he wanted.
Orr was unquestionably among the best players of his era. Nevertheless, he found he could live without certain aspects of the game. He didn’t like to practice, and he didn’t like the contact. Once, in a film session, Shula berated him for missing a downfield block. But Jimmy took the criticism with good humor.
“Why in the world would you send a thoroughbred to do a mule’s work?” he asked.
Baltimore was clinging to a slim three-point lead against the Eagles in the fourth quarter when an ambulance came speeding up to Memorial Stadium. The back door flung open, and Jimmy dramatically hopped out in full uniform. Buckling his chinstrap like a fighter pilot, he ran through the tunnel and incited an eruption of thunderous applause.
Shula, hearing the cheers, looked over and saw Orr’s arrival on the sideline. Without saying so much as a single word, he motioned for Jimmy to join the offense on the playing field. Unitas didn’t waste any time, either. On the second play from scrimmage he heaved a 22-yard pass to Orr, who snatched it out of the air, in the end zone, for a touchdown. After the extra point the Colts were ten points ahead, and the game was all but over. Orr remangled his shoulder making the catch, but the Eagles had lost their wings.
After the game reporters asked Unitas why he waited until the second play to throw Jimmy the ball. Why not the first? “I thought he might be out of breath after running from the hospital,” Johnny U said.
When the euphoria ended, the Colts still had hard issues. Despite the theatrics of their victory, they were an exhausted and hurting team. What was worse, their next game was only four days away, on Thanksgiving, in Detroit.
Behind quarterback Milt Plum, the Lions weren’t much. With the season nearing its end they had managed only a .500 record, and they were trending downward, having lost their last two games.
Yet the Colts were ripe for a trap. The Lions were always tough to beat on Thanksgiving, a holiday that seemed to belong to them. On top of that, eight Colts starters were either playing injured or not playing. Evil omens.
Indeed, it all portended bad things. Unitas had a terrible day, completing only fourteen passes for 188 yards. He was picked off two times. Both of his misfires led to Detroit scores. It might have been Thanksgiving, but the Colts left Motown like a dad on Father’s Day. They came out of it with a tie (24–24), and they felt lucky to have it.
Meanwhile, the Packers were still in hot pursuit. They went to Los Angeles, where the Rams unexpectedly beat them, 21–10. The Colts had dodged the bullet and were still in command of the West, but that feeling of well-being wouldn’t last long.
The very next week a disastrous and thrilling sequence of events unfolded. In Baltimore the Colts faced Chicago, a team that always administered a thunderous beating to Unitas.
“The Bears had bounties on us, there’s no question,” running back Tom Matte said. “Johnny U, they wanted to knock his ass out.”
First, Chicago took away Unitas’s short passing lanes. Then, when he attempted to go long, they blanketed his receivers with double coverages. In the second quarter, with Unitas only three for nine and 24 yards gained, he stubbornly faded back once more. It was a decision, as it turned out, that was hazardous to his health. Just as he flung a long, vain pass in John Mackey’s direction, two Bears slammed into him. One collared him around the head and shoulders, while the other crashed into his legs. The torso of the great Unitas was bent in half, backward. Even if his “ass” wasn’t knocked out, as Matte said, his leg was. He was badly injured and removed from the field.
Cuozzo, who had performed so admirably earlier in the year, was summoned to stand in. But he, too, was powerless against the barbaric Bears. Unable to recapture the magic he’d shown against the Vikings, Gary fired two interceptions, and the Colts lost the game, 13–0.
The worst news of the day was yet to come. Johnny U’s knee ligaments and cartilage were torn. His injuries required immediate surgery, and his season was most likely over. But when Shula spoke to the reporters after the game, it was more about insults than injuries. “It was the worst game I think I’ve ever seen our offense play,” he said.
He also wondered out loud about something that few others had yet to consider. What would happen in the unlikely event that Cuozzo also went down? “We have Tom Matte who can go in,” Shula said, “and a band-squad member, [George] Haffner, we could activate.”
Matte, of course, was a backup halfback, and Haffner was “Mr. Irrelevant,” the very last player chosen in the NFL draft just a few months before. Haffner still hadn’t played a single real down of football in the pros.
By raising the point Shula showed that even in the face of swirling and disappointing events, he was rational and in command; he was already planning ahead. In any event, there was very little time to philosophize about what had happened or what it all meant. Lombardi and the Packers were looming. They would be in Baltimore in a week.
If the Colts could overcome their injuries and beat Green Bay, they would most likely cruise into the postseason. A loss would be all but fatal.
The Packers had their own problems. They didn’t seem to be exactly the same team that went to three straight championship games earlier in the decade. They still had a punishing defense, with middle linebacker Ray Nitschke at its core. But it had been more than two years since Green Bay had last won the West, and in that time their offense had lost a great deal of its swagger. Where once their pounding ground game had put them at the top of the league scoring tables, now they were mired in the lower half.
Looking for a spark in the unlikeliest place, Lombardi announced on Wednesday that Paul Hornung would start at halfback. In years past the Golden Boy was one of the most famous and celebrated of all the Packers, a Heisman Trophy winner and triple threat who could run, pass, and kick. Even in the glory days Lombardi thought Hornung was only an average back in the middle of the field. Inside the opponent’s 20-yard line, however, the coach believed he was a different man, one with an unusual instinct for finding the end zone. Indeed, in 1960 Hornung led the league with thirteen rushing touchdowns.
But in 1963 the Golden Boy was suspended for gambling and didn’t play a single game all year. In ’64 he had a painful nerve problem and couldn’t perform well. In ’65 his steep decline had only continued. The fans looked upon him as a major cause for Green Bay’s offensive miseries, just as they had once seen him as the prime catalyst for Packers domination.
But Lombardi always considered Hornung a big gamer, and he had a hunch that Sunday, with the pressure more intense perhaps than it had ever been, the Golden Boy would finally regain his luster.
In Baltimore they were unconcerned with the Packers’ machinations. They were still grieving the fallen Johnny U, whose damaged knee joint quickly went under the surgeon’s knife. The fans were also evaluating young Cuozzo, wondering whether he might be able to live up to their impossible standards for a quarterback.
The Baltimore Sun indulged this curiosity. They dialed long distance to speak to Cuozzo’s mother and father in New Jersey, as though they held the keys to his character and fitness for duty.
Mrs. Cuozzo kvelled over her suddenly famous son; she bragged about his grades and his membership in the “Ravens Society,” an intellectual group at the University of Virginia, where he went to college. She also noted that he had been accepted to Yale Medical School but chose instead to study dentistry at the University of Tennessee. She said he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, “the doctor,” who was also a dentist.
The fans would have to wait until Sunday to see whether all that maternal love and toothy brilliance would make Cuozzo an effective passer with the terrifying and bald specter of Ray Nitschke chasing him down like a loan collector.
These high stakes and compelling story lines made the second Colts-and-Packers matchup of 1965 an extraordinarily anticipated regular-season game. And that was before one more spellbinding factor wound its way into the picture.
On the morning of the game a thick fog rolled off the bay and enveloped Memorial Stadium in a translucent shroud. The hazy mists lent the festivities a dreamy quality. From the stands the players shimmered in a silvery glow, looking like mere shadows of reality as they emerged from and disappeared into the low-slung clouds. For angst-riddled Baltimoreans, those dreams weren’t wish fulfillments; they were more like fever hallucinations. Looking to the Packers’ sideline, they could see the imperial Lombardi, standing like an obstruction in his fedora and thick black glasses. But on the Colts’ bench there was no sign of the white number 19. Instead, there was only the suddenly small figure of the unadorned Johnny U, leaning on his new crutches, his damaged pin tightly wrapped in a cast, his bristled head bereft of the gleaming white helm. In place of the dramatic cold-weather cape typically slung across his shoulder armor, there was only a long and forlorn London Fog raincoat, barely concealing his business suit and tie. He wasn’t clothed for heroics; he was cloaked in the garb of secret identity.
At first the game seemed to live up to its expectations. The action careened out of the gate. Early on the momentum swung back and forth, with mistakes and great plays. The game didn’t become really interesting, however, until just before the end of the first half. The Colts were behind by only one point, 14–13, when they recovered a Packer fumble at the Green Bay 2. Baltimore had a great chance to go to the lockers at halftime with a six-point lead, but young Cuozzo got greedy. Instead of allowing his line and running backs to do the work with a charge at the goal line, the quarterback ran a play-action pass, faking a handoff to Lenny Moore and then throwing in the flat to fullback Jerry Hill.
The experienced and wily Packer defenders smelled the deception, and one of them, linebacker Dave Robinson, picked off the pass and returned it 88 yards to the Colts’ 10. Starr didn’t waste the opportunity. He quickly hit his flanker, Boyd Dowler, in the end zone, and Green Bay skipped into halftime eight points ahead instead of six behind.
Curiously, Shula, who had endured so much tension for his attempts to send plays into Unitas, left Cuozzo alone to make the call himself. He offered no suggestions from the sidelines to the inexperienced quarterback. The very poor play call was Cuozzo’s, and his alone.
The afternoon belonged instead to Paul Hornung. That was apparent in the first quarter, when he ran for a 2-yard touchdown and caught a 50-yard pass from Starr for another.
In the third quarter Cuozzo’s shoulder was badly injured. He went down to the locker room so that he could be pierced with a needle that injected a painkiller deep into the joint. He missed seven plays.
Paul Hornung, meanwhile, scored two more touchdowns, to give him four on the day with a quarter still remaining.
Cuozzo returned to action in the fourth and gamely led his teammates to two touchdowns. His work pulled the Colts within eight points of the Packers with six minutes left to play.
But then Bart Starr hit Hornung with a 65-yard touchdown pass, and it was all over.
So the story of the game was not the emergence of a sensational new player but the reemergence of a has-been. Vince Lombardi’s hunch had proved prophetic. All told, Paul Hornung scored five touchdowns, three on the ground and two as a receiver. His pair of receptions gained 115 yards.
The humiliations kept coming for the Colts. With the Packers’ victory the two teams flipped places in the standings. Green Bay, at 10-3, was half a game ahead of the 9-3-1 Colts. Even worse, Cuozzo had a badly separated shoulder that would require him to undergo an immediate and gruesome surgery. Steel wires had to be inserted to reattach the prodigal arm to the shoulder. Gary’s football career, which had seemed so promising just twenty-four hours prior, was now in danger.
Although there was still one game left to play, Baltimore appeared doomed.
For their last game of the year the Colts had to travel all the way to Los Angeles to face the surging Rams. LA had had a terrible season, losing eight in a row at one point. Nevertheless, the Rams had turned things around and were moving in the right direction. They were in the midst of a three-game winning streak that included an easy victory over the Packers, 21–10, and a thrashing of the defending-champion Browns, 42–7.
Even if the Colts could beat the Rams on the road, a dubious proposition in their depleted state, the Packers surely wouldn’t stumble in their game against the 49ers. San Francisco had not only been humiliated by the Bears just the week before, losing 61–20, but they had also given up six touchdowns to just one player, the sensational rookie running back Gayle Sayers.
In Baltimore there was only one question worth considering: With Unitas and Cuozzo both injured, who was going to play quarterback for the Colts? George Haffner was added to the active roster, and Shula made a trade with Pittsburgh for the veteran Ed Brown, who was near the end of a long, unremarkable career.
The era’s restrictive rules froze the roster where it was before the next-to-last game of the season. So neither player was eligible for postseason play, even in the unlikely event the Colts should make it to the championship game.
All things considered, Shula made the best decision he could and elected to go with his backup halfback Tom Matte as the signal caller. Matte had already stepped in when Cuozzo went down with his shoulder injury in the Green Bay game, and he had performed well.
Before that all his prior experience at quarterback was in coach Woody Hayes’s Ohio State program. Woody was famous for saying, “There are only three things that can happen when you throw the ball, and two of them are bad.” Needless to say, Matte wasn’t slingin’ it around in a prostyle offense in Columbus, Ohio.
Before handing over the reins of the Colts to Matte, Shula did his due diligence and called Woody for a scouting report on how Tom performed as a quarterback.
“He’s a great kid,” Woody told Shula. “He did everything I asked him to do.”
“Were there any negatives that might help me out so I can be alert for them?” Shula asked.
There was a long silence on the line. Finally, Woody said, “Well, he had trouble taking the snap from center.”
In other words, Shula only had to teach Matte everything about being an NFL quarterback. And he had a week to do it.
Tom Matte came from the type of background that suggested he was ripe for a challenge. He grew up in a tough neighborhood in Cleveland, a place he later described as the “worst crime district in Ohio.” He was raised to be a very tough man, by a very tough man. His father, a Canadian with elements of Iroquois, was a professional hockey player who made very little money.
After his athletic career the old man worked as a union millwright who traveled around the country for his profession. He was well known for his extraordinary balance, a skill he attributed to his Indian blood. “He was one of those wackos who walk on the high beams,” Matte said. “He fell one time about fifty feet and almost killed himself.”
Because Matte’s father was a professional hockey player, Tom was raised on skates. He was an all-star, all-everything, on the ice. His father recognized his son’s obvious potential and wanted him to concentrate on hockey and didn’t want him to play football. But in the ninth grade his mother secretly signed him up anyway, and all his father’s apprehensions came true. On the very first play of his football career, a kickoff, Matte got clipped, and his knee was shattered. His father was so angry, he didn’t speak to him for three months. Meanwhile, the doctor told him his injury was severe enough that he would never play sports again.
It wasn’t true. The tough Matte bounced back from his knee problem and quickly developed into a talented and multifaceted high school athlete. He filled out to 190 solid pounds and combined that power with agility and speed. As a member of the track team he ran the quarter mile in 47 seconds flat; he ran the 100 in 9.9 seconds. He also pole-vaulted and topped out at around thirteen feet. That was impressive for a high school athlete, considering Bob Richards, the best pole-vaulter in the world at that time, was hitting about fifteen feet. Matte also averaged fifteen points a game on the basketball team.
At Ohio State Matte played football, ran track, played ice hockey, and even found time for fraternity basketball. That versatility paid off in professional football. The Colts drafted him as a quarterback, but with Unitas in his way he quickly decided to play running back.
His NFL playing weight was around 220 pounds in an era when the average offensive lineman was only about 245. Nevertheless, he was agile and gained Unitas’s eye with his outstanding ability to catch the ball out of the backfield.
Matte idolized Johnny U. He followed the quarterback’s example of study and hard work. He became a devoted watcher of game film and recruited his wife to help him. The two of them sat on their sofa at night and ran the projector back and forth as they charted plays and tendencies late into the evening. More than forty years after his career had ended, Matte still had reels and an old-fashioned projector in his home.
Matte learned his own assignments and the assignments of every player on the field. He conferred with his offensive linemen and learned how to regulate his speed to use their blocking to his greatest advantage. Like Unitas and Raymond Berry, he stayed long beyond the formal end of practice to continue to work on patterns and timing.
In the hard realities of professional sports, however, Matte’s work ethic didn’t always pay off exactly as he had hoped. His playing time was limited due to the fact that he was stuck behind an athlete who was even far more talented than he was, Lenny Moore. Even Matte conceded that Lenny was “probably the best all-around back-receiver who ever played the game.”
Talent notwithstanding, Matte resented the fact that Lenny got the attention and opportunities without trying as hard as he did. Matte thought Moore used injuries as an excuse to duck practice.
“All week long,” Matte said, “I had run every play in practice. And then on Saturday morning, guess who would come bouncing out of the fucking locker room?”
Moore’s unwillingness to work through pain, if that’s what it was, offended Matte. In the ethos of the day Tom soldiered through a multitude of gruesome injuries. In 1964 he played with bleeding ulcers. After an operation to correct the problem, he had to receive seven and a half pints of blood. The human body holds only about nine.
After another operation at a local hospital, he suffered a staph infection. That caused him to lose about fifty pounds in a month and brought him close to death. His years of playing football in the sun also took their toll. When Matte was being treated for another condition, a physician noticed a growth on his nose. A biopsy determined that it was cancer; what’s more, it was only a sixteenth of an inch away from a tear gland. “If that cancer hits the tear gland,” the specialist told him, “you’ll be dead in about three months.”
Later on Matte’s appendix burst. All told, he endured about eighteen different operations, including one to the heart, during his career.
This man who had endured so much was now going to step into the crucible and hot spotlight of playing quarterback for the Colts, in the biggest of games against the greatest of teams, with almost no preparation. It was a role no one else would relish.
Unitas was a reassuring presence. He and offensive coordinator Don McCafferty devised a whole new offense just for Matte. To aid Matte’s recall, Shula outfitted him with an armband that had the key plays and formations written on it.
“Unitas said, ‘Do what you can do best: roll out; do the quarterback draws. You’ll really screw everybody up,’” Matte remembered. “John was instrumental in helping Shula and McCafferty design plays around what I could do.”
Although it was easy enough to see what the Colts were lacking without Unitas or Cuozzo, the circumstances, in their most optimistic light, also presented Baltimore an unanticipated opportunity. No one knew what to expect from Matte and his new playbook. There was a school of thought that saw it as a strategic advantage for the Colts.
Back in Baltimore, reduced to the role of spectator, Gary Cuozzo sat up in his hospital bed in his pajamas and watched the game on TV. A patient at Children’s Hospital recuperating from his shoulder operation, he looked like a kid home from school with a cold. Sitting next to him, watching the game on the old tube with its rabbit ears, was a twelve-year-old little boy, also a patient.
In Los Angeles, that city of dreams, Matte and his teammates also lived out a fantasy. Although Matte did not complete a single pass in his Unitas-designed offense, he bulled his way to 99 yards on the ground, running from the quarterback position. Lenny Moore, in the midst of a season of decline, scampered 28 yards for a touchdown. And Ed Brown, the quarterback Shula acquired only one day before, who had only one practice with the Colts under his belt, came in intermittently and threw a 68-yard touchdown pass to John Mackey.
While all were obsessed with the Colts’ offense and its problems and possibilities, Baltimore’s extraordinary defense turned in a clutch performance. Bobby Boyd intercepted the Rams’ Roman Gabriel twice. The first one led to a Colts touchdown, and the second one sealed the victory with Los Angeles on the Colts’ 9 and only seconds remaining in the game. Boyd stepped in front of Gabriel’s bold shot at the end zone and ended all Rams hope. The Colts won 20–17.
Despite the great victory, the Colts’ players believed their season was over. Instead of returning to Baltimore to begin preparation for the next week in the unlikely event there was one, Unitas, Dan Sullivan, Matte, Jimmy Orr, and about four or five other players flew to Las Vegas to unwind and have a little fun. The players took time out to watch the Packers-49ers game, and, like the rest of the country, they couldn’t believe their eyes as they watched San Francisco tie Lombardi in a big game.
Baltimore and the Packers were now tied in the standings. Sitting there in Las Vegas, the Colts weren’t even sure of the tie-breaking procedures and didn’t understand the implications of what they had just watched.
But someone back in Baltimore knew exactly what it meant.
About an hour after the game the phone rang in Unitas’s hotel room. “Get those sons of bitches back on the plane and get back to Baltimore,” Don Shula told him. “We’ve got another game to play.”
Some didn’t believe the Colts even deserved to be on the same field with the Packers. They had already lost to them twice in the regular season, and the second meeting was an embarrassing blowout in their own house. And now Baltimore’s once mighty offense was limping into Wisconsin, held together with little more than Scotch tape and moxie. Even creaky Ed Brown, the one-day wonder who threw the big touchdown pass against the Rams, wasn’t eligible to play in this “postseason” game.
Regardless of their relative merits, the Colts and Packers had identical records, and in the tie-breaking rules of the day, that called for a one-game playoff.
The only way Baltimore, with Matte at quarterback, could beat the highly disciplined Packers was to get the lead on them and then hope their own superb Colts defense could shut down the struggling Green Bay offense.
On the very first play from scrimmage it seemed that scenario might actually play out. Bart Starr, Green Bay’s superbly accurate quarterback, faded back to pass and hit tight end Bill Anderson, but so did Leonard Lyles, Baltimore’s cornerback. Anderson fumbled upon Lyles’s impact. Don Schinnick, the Colts’ outside linebacker, scooped up the ball and raced toward the end zone with it. Starr dutifully pursued Schinnick to try to tackle him before he could score a touchdown, but Colts safety Jim Welch drilled Starr. The great quarterback’s ribs were severely bruised, and after only one play he was done for the day. His backup, Zeke Bratkowski, would play quarterback for the Packers the rest of the day. Starr’s only action would be to hold for kicks.
With their 7–0 lead Baltimore would now attempt to hold on for dear life. Matte attempted twelve passes and completed only five of them. He ran for 57 yards against the stout Packers, and he did just enough to give Baltimore a chance to win.
In the second quarter Matte drove the Colts 68 yards so that Lou Michaels could kick an easy 15-yard field goal. At the same time, the Packers were highly frustrated in their own attempts. When they had the ball on the Colts’ 1, the Baltimore defense manhandled the famous Packers line and stuffed attempts by both Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung to cross the goal line. And Baltimore went into halftime with a 10–0 lead.
But in the third quarter the charm left the Colts, and the curse set in. Punter Tom Gilburg took a high snap and had to run instead of kicking the ball. The Packers tackled him and took over on the Colts’ 35. Bratkowski passed the Packers to the 1. Again, Baltimore stopped Jim Taylor on the goal line. But on the next snap Paul Hornung took the ball in. The score was 10–7.
And then the unkindest cut. After an exchange of the ball, Colts lineman Billy Ray Smith zeroed in on a sack of Bratkowski. Instead of merely tackling him, however, he clubbed the Packer quarterback across the head with a forearm, not an unusual play in that brutal age. Ironically, however, after the beating Unitas took against the Bears that left him crippled and on the sidelines, the officials were protecting the quarterbacks more closely. Billy Ray was called for the personal foul, and instead of an 8-yard loss, the Packers had the ball on Baltimore’s 43-yard line as the time continued to tick.
Bratkowski moved the ball to the Baltimore 22. And then one of the great dramas in all of football lore unfolded. Don Chandler, the Green Bay kicker recently acquired from the New York Giants, trotted in to attempt the short tying field goal.
His kick approached the rickety, wooden uprights and at the last moment appeared to sail right. But the official posted beneath the goalpost threw his arms in the air, signaling the kick was good.
But was it?
The Green Bay long snapper, Bill Curry, said he didn’t see the kick, but he had a couple of friends who did. “Don Chandler, who is very good at keeping his head down, looked up, saw the ball after it passed the upright, and it was clearly wide, so he turned around and kicked the ground. However, I have an unimpeachable source, Bart Starr, who simply doesn’t tell lies, who was the holder that day. Bart says it went directly over the upright, and therefore it was good. My face was in the mud at the bottom of the pile. Someone had jumped on my head.”
Fair or foul, the kick was ruled good, and the game went into overtime. It ended only with another short Chandler field goal, this one clearly good.
Baltimore’s one-year reign over the West was over. Photos of Lombardi with an exuberant, jubilant smile filled newspapers from coast to coast. No one loved victory more than he did. Nevertheless, he was old school and poised, and in the locker room after the game he attempted magnanimity.
“Tom Matte is a great athlete,” Lombardi said. “I have great admiration for Shula and all the Colts.”
Carroll Rosenbloom, the man who demanded championship success from his coaches, professed great satisfaction with his men—and irritation with the referees. “I was never more proud of any team I’ve had,” the magnate said. “We didn’t deserve to lose. There was no justice out there today.”
In a sense officials’ mistakes and winners and losers were irrelevant that day after Christmas 1965. The Colts lost, but professional football enjoyed a huge victory. The Colts and Packers represented a high-water mark for the game.
Lombardi and Shula were perfecting what Unitas and Berry had started in the mid-1950s. They were all raising the bar of intensity and competition and unlocking the potential of the game, demonstrating how suspenseful, unexpected, and compelling it could be. Every game all year had crackled with import, culminating in the high-stakes playoff.
It was only football, but it was being played at a higher and far more dramatic level than anyone had ever seen before. It was all spurred on by coaches and players with a manic sense of competition, men who were driven to incredibly long hours of work and to seek every possible edge. The two coaches almost seemed to be from different eras, but there they were on the same field, opposing each other. One, Lombardi, was the greatest champion in history and in the heart of his great run. The other, Shula, was the coach who would one day win more games than any other, but he was only at the beginning. Both sidelines teemed with future Hall of Famers. The game was played in the harsh winter elements, on real grass, in light provided by nature. The uniforms were ruggedly crafted from natural fibers with numbers stitched onto the material. The players were courageous and dedicated to their work. And the referees were participating in the same big-game pressure as the players, making their decisions on the spot, trusting only their eyes. There was no replay yet to review, stopping the action and removing the human element. Officials’ errors and interpretations of the rules only added to the drama of a show in which no one could predict the ending.
Professional football had many great moments ahead of it. It would grow and go in directions its founders never could have foreseen. But it reached its crescendo in Green Bay that day, and it would never be quite as good again.
The Packers, of course, went on to beat the same Cleveland Browns team in the championship game that the Colts had lost to the year before. In the long off-season the officials’ errors, especially the call on the disputed field goal, greatly irritated the Colts and their fans. One newspaper published a photo purporting to unequivocally show the kick was wide.
Matte was rightly enjoying his moment in the spotlight and his well-earned position of respect with the nation’s sports press and fans. At one point he attended an awards banquet at the Minneapolis Touchdown Club. He shared the place of honor at the head table with Vince Lombardi. When Matte got up to speak, he came prepared with a model goalpost he’d made. It had a gimmick that slid out to make the goalposts much wider. To the delight of the Minnesotans in attendance that night, he called it “the Green Bay goalpost.” As usual, however, Lombardi feigned delight at the joke and then had the last word.
“Tom, I don’t know if the field goal was good or bad,” Vince said, “but when I went to the bank on Monday morning my check said we were the champions.”
Lombardi was referring to the winners’ share of the postseason money. One of the Colts had done the math and figured that the disputed field goal cost each Colt about $10,000.
The league didn’t have much to say about the officials’ calls and whether the field goal was actually good. But before the next season started, the NFL mandated that the goalposts be standardized. Among the changes, they were to all be painted yellow, and the uprights were all to be twenty feet above the crossbar. Everyone in football informally referred to these new taller goalposts as the “Baltimore extensions.”
It was a second disappointing ending to a season in a row for Don Shula, but also a rebirth of sorts. After the game he told reporters how much the loss of Unitas had hurt the Colts, how limited they had been without the great man’s ability to move the ball. But the reality was that Shula had just shown the world that he could stand toe-to-toe with the greatest coach who ever lived and perhaps the greatest team ever assembled without Unitas stepping a cleated toe on the field or taking a single snap.
Shula didn’t need Unitas, and, what’s more, he had proved that cold day in Green Bay that he might not even need a quarterback at all.