By the time summer training camps convened in 1968, the year had already been distinguished as one of the most agonizing and antagonizing in the history of the country. What wasn’t causing dissension or dispute merely seemed adrift and wrong. He who was once on the bottom was on top.
In January North Vietnamese forces, once considered a ragtag army of rice farmers and carpenters, began a series of highly effective attacks against the United States and its allies in the South. This push, called the “Tet Offensive” (Tet being the Vietnamese word for “New Year”), resulted in huge casualties. Among the many dead were civilians executed by the North. There were casualties of a different sort back in the United States. American political and military leaders were losing their credibility with the American people. The Tet Offensive, with its flowing currents of blood, was proof that even years into the war, the North was still a potent fighting force.
Vietnam polarized the United States. Peace-minded Democrats sought to draft Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the slain president, to enter the presidential race as an antiwar candidate. Kennedy was an interesting choice, since it was his brother’s administration that had started and sustained the war. In any event, RFK demurred. So the peace contingency turned to a little-known senator, Eugene McCarthy, instead. In his youth McCarthy considered becoming a Benedictine monk. He didn’t seem to have the killer instincts to stand up to a combative alpha dog like President Johnson or even to make a credible run against him. But McCarthy’s antiwar stance instantaneously made him bona fide and viable. Good fortune also smiled on him. Just prior to the New Hampshire primary, the first of the election season, the New York Times reported that army commander General William Westmoreland had just requested an additional two hundred thousand–plus American troops. That news was not accepted well by the country, and McCarthy came within a whisker, 7 percentage points, of upsetting Johnson in New Hampshire. Though the long shot didn’t win, he had nevertheless exposed Vietnam as a festering Achilles’ heel for the president. The lesson certainly wasn’t lost on Kennedy, who suddenly had a change of heart about both running and the war itself. He too entered the race as an antiwar candidate. McCarthy was infuriated; he didn’t like Kennedy riding his coattails.
Part of the Kennedy family’s legendary toughness was the stories of the supposedly brutal touch-football games the competitive and athletic brothers had on the lawn of their father’s home. McCarthy sneered at that.
“[Kennedy] plays touch football,” McCarthy told the nation. “I play football.”
Mainstream voters knew exactly what he meant. With war out of fashion, football had become the measure of a man.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, on the other hand, had suddenly lost his taste for rough games. He told the American people on national television, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” He had been one of the strongest executives in presidential history, with an irrepressible will and a knack for getting things done. He passed great and groundbreaking legislation, especially the Civil Rights Act that propelled the United States out of the shame of Jim Crow. But his political lungs took on fluid, and he and all his many accomplishments were drowned like rats in the swelling waters of Vietnam. He made many poor decisions regarding the war, starting with retaining many of President Kennedy’s advisers, the very men who had conceived and advocated for the war for many years, even as it swallowed American lives.
Johnson expanded the war and sent more troops and firepower, though secret audiotapes from the Oval Office later proved that he was skeptical himself about American prospects for victory. In 1964, before all of this was evident, Johnson won the presidency with the highest-ever share of the popular vote. But in 1968 it was a different ball game. Lyndon plainly saw what everyone else did. He had almost lost to a loser of a candidate in New Hampshire, and with the opportunistic yet formidable Kennedy jumping into the Democratic race, he knew he probably couldn’t even win his own party’s nomination for another term.
So the dominoes started to tumble, setting in motion the inexorable rise of the bottom feeders all over the country. Johnson quit the race in March. In the first week of June Kennedy, like Martin Luther King Jr. and his own brother, was shot down by an assassin with murky goals. In August the Democrats convened for their national convention in Chicago. With no clear front-runner established, the scene was chaotic. Antiwar protesters descended on the city amid rumors that they intended to taint the water supply with hallucinogenic drugs. The demonstrators took up residence in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, where they were unprotected. City police and Illinois National Guard troops physically attacked them on the premise that they did not have the proper permits to sleep there.
Passions were just as hot inside the auditorium, as delegates wrestled with whether to include a peace plank for their platform. In the end the notion was defeated. This elevated tensions to a fever pitch. Security guards started to rough up television reporters. CBS correspondent Dan Rather was assaulted in front of the entire country, prompting his respected colleague Walter Cronkite to tell the disbelieving nation, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here.” In the end it was Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who was nominated for president. Humphrey hadn’t even participated in the primaries. He was seen as the candidate most likely to continue Johnson’s war policies.
And that led to the ultimate upset. In November Humphrey lost the general election to Richard Nixon. Though a relatively young man, in his early forties, Nixon had already weathered many career scandals and controversies. He had also already lost two big elections—defeated by John F. Kennedy for president in 1960 and by Pat Brown in the race for California governor in 1962.
By 1968 Nixon was washed up and left for dead. Yet he had somehow bounced back to ascend to the very throne of the nation.
Interestingly, in 1968 both major parties had considered football coaches for the top of their tickets. At the Democratic National Convention, University of Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant received nominating votes for both president and vice president. On the Republican side, Richard Nixon had contemplated asking Vince Lombardi to be his running mate. Lombardi, in fact, was a liberal and a John F. Kennedy man.
African American athletes were also finding an elevated level of respect and status in the late 1960s. By 1968 black athletes had participated in professional team sports for only about twenty years. For most of that time unwritten quotas and the silent racism of team owners and executives deliberately minimized their involvement. Yet even with those impediments, many black players became stars. They revolutionized the games and raised the level of play, shifting the balance of power to those leagues and organizations that had accepted them. At the back end of the decade not only had black athletes entered the mainstream on the field, but their intellectual gifts and moral courage had elevated some of them to the role of societal leaders.
The year 1968 was an extraordinarily tense time for race relations in the United States. In April Martin Luther King Jr., the young, eloquent, and charismatic civil rights leader, was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s violent death was especially egregious because he had led the country through revolutionary change utilizing extraordinary rhetoric and the tactics of peace.
King had once preached peace from the marble steps of America’s temple of freedom, the Lincoln Memorial. But in 1968 his voice was stilled as he was shot on the balcony of a Memphis motel.
King’s ugly death lit a match under America’s cities. Robert F. Kennedy tried to calm this storm. He delivered the news of King’s death at a political rally in Indianapolis and then speaking directly to black Americans urged them to reject bitterness. Though he was a rich and privileged white man, he addressed them as a brother in tragedy.
“I had a member of my family killed,” Kennedy said, referring to JFK’s murder by Lee Harvey Oswald. “He was killed by a white man.”
Despite his eloquence and personal revelations, the nation erupted into urban riots anyway, and many American cities went up in flames.
The Summer Olympics held in Mexico City a few months later were hardly a diversion from this combustibility. First, South Africa, with apartheid policies that extended to its athletic teams, had been invited to compete. That invitation was eventually rescinded, however, under the threat that other nations would boycott. Even after the Games were under way, things did not calm down. Two African American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, became big news when they won medals in the 200-meter race and then scandalously used the victory platform as a stage for political commentary. As “The Star-Spangled Banner” played, the athletes dramatically lowered their heads and refused to look at the American flag; instead, they each raised a black-gloved fist as a potent symbol of “black power.”
The International Olympic Committee deemed their statement inappropriate and antithetical to the Olympic spirit; the U.S. Olympic Committee, however, sitting on a tinderbox back home, took a gentle approach to dealing with the young protesters. It issued apologies to the IOC and to Mexico, hoping that would suffice in ending the matter.
It didn’t.
The IOC, headed by Avery Brundage, an American, was not mollified. It demanded censure for Smith and Carlos.
“The discourtesy displayed [by Smith and Carlos] violated the standards of sportsmanship and good manners,” the IOC wrote. And then they added: anyone else attempting to follow in Smith’s and Carlos’s footsteps “would be met with the severest of penalties.”
The IOC’s pious pronouncements about the Olympics and politics were all the more hypocritical considering that thirty years earlier, the organization had no trouble participating in Hitler’s 1936 Summer Games in Berlin. Those Olympics were hotly debated, even in their own time, because many saw them as a massive propaganda tool for the aggressive and anti-Semitic Nazi Party.
Brundage himself was then the head of the American Olympic Committee and was a leading advocate for U.S. participation in Hitler’s Olympics. When German athletes gave the Nazi salute from the victory podium, Brundage voiced no outrage, saw no scandal, and made no statement. Neither did the IOC.
Ancient Red Smith, an eminence among sportswriters, paraphrased Shakespeare when he wrote about the old men of the IOC.
“They are, as Mark Antony observed on another occasion, all honorable men who consider children’s games more sacred than human decency,” Red wrote.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos had their credentials revoked, and they were evicted from the Olympic Village. They were sent back to the United States in disgrace.
Dr. Harry Edwards, a young sociologist just beginning his long career focused on sports and athletes, counseled Carlos and Smith before the Games. He encouraged their public statement and assisted them in crafting it. All three of them—Carlos, Smith, and Edwards—were products of the San Jose State University athletic program.
Edwards had a point to make, and he knew that the time had come when successful athletes, international celebrities in the television age, had the platform and, more important, the credibility to speak to the world.
Edwards grabbed the moment. He linked the plight of black Americans with all oppressed people of any color. “I think that demonstration proved to all athletes that there is more to being a nigger than the color of a man’s skin,” he said. “If Smith and Carlos could be treated like that by Olympic officials, so could any athlete.”
It was uncertain whether Smith’s and Carlos’s gesture could convince some Americans about the inequities in their society. But those black fists, waving in the air, were a poignant and undeniable statement of the deep dissatisfactions that might yet rip the country apart.
If the grapes of wrath were indeed being sown, it wasn’t politicians or preachers delivering that blunt and important message, nor was it poets or artists. The messenger was a man who until recently had no place at the national table, and no voice at all. It was the black athlete who was leading the way to equity and freedom.
The loudest voice of all wasn’t even at the Olympics. It belonged to Muhammad Ali, a professional prizefighter who was losing his standing, his considerable fortune, and potentially his freedom because he had refused induction into the armed forces.
When the decade started his name was Cassius Marcellus Clay, and he was seen as more of a clown than a contender. Although he had won the gold medal in the light-heavyweight division at 1960’s Rome Olympics, Clay was looked upon merely as a brash kid from Kentucky. He was so loud and overbearing, the conservative writers of the day referred to him as “Gaseous Cassius” or “the Louisville Lip.” He wasn’t deemed suitable or ready to meet the felonious heavyweight champion, Sonny Liston.
In their book Blood Brothers, about Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, authors Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith showed that Liston was a menacing man, even among fistfighters. Many feared that Sonny might kill Clay in the ring, and with good reason. Liston heartily agreed. After Cassius outpointed Doug Jones in a controversial decision that ended in a hailstorm of calls of “fix” and “fake” by the fans in attendance at Madison Square Garden, someone asked Sonny what he saw in the brash young fighter.
“Clay showed me I’ll get locked up for murder if we’re ever matched,” Liston said.
That seemed reasonable.
After the two had signed to face off for the heavyweight championship, Clay and Sonny ran into each other in a Las Vegas casino. When Cassius saw Sonny at a craps table, he immediately started shouting wildly and insulting the champion’s appearance and intelligence. “Look at that big ugly bear! He can’t do nothin’ right,” Clay screamed.
That was a bad idea. Liston was soon crowding the loudmouth and offering back his own brand of crude but effective banter.
“Listen, you nigger faggot,” Sonny began. “If you don’t get out of here in ten seconds, I’m going to pull that big tongue out of your mouth and stick it up your ass.”
By 1968 Ali was still quick and witty, but he was no longer anyone’s clown. He’d already beaten Liston in two straight title fights, both laced with controversy, and then defeated eight more men. He’d shown the world his intellectual complexity, too, when he announced that he had changed his name to Muhammad Ali and joined the Nation of Islam. The Nation had its own perception problems, as many Americans considered it a cult or hate group. Nevertheless, his involvement with the group led him into deep philosophical terrain and difficult public stances that moved him from the sports pages to the front pages.
Ali had not yet lost a single professional bout and was still in his prime, but he was defrocked of his title for defying the U.S. government and refusing induction into the armed forces. He publicly declared that he would not fight in Vietnam. The government counterpunched. His boxing license was suspended in every state, and he was sentenced to five years in prison. But the Department of Defense was about to find out something that Ali’s opponents already knew—he had a granite jaw. Manhandling would not sway him. In fact, he was capable of doing more damage to them than they were to him. He desecrated the war effort when he angrily declared, “I got nothing against no Vietcong. No Vietnamese ever called me nigger.”
That small statement, in its simplicity, represented a blunt truth that no one could refute. What sense did it make for a man like Ali to go to Vietnam and lose his tremendous earning potential, his liberty, and perhaps his health or life? Why would he fight for “freedom” in a country that still forced him to the back door of the diner if he was hungry?
In his simple words, Ali framed Vietnam as a war that exported that racism. He showed it to be an act of aggression perpetrated by white colonialists against dark-skinned people. In doing so he painted Americans as something they could not have even fathomed at the start of the decade. In his words the United States was no longer that righteous fighting force that had beaten Hitler’s bloodthirsty Nazi murder machine or the brave Cold Warriors who confronted Stalin’s naked aggression. Thanks to Ali, Americans were forced to confront a disturbing self-image, one in which they were the murderous racists and their country was the ruthless and barbaric invader. A Black Muslim, an athlete, made it clear that in Vietnam, the Americans weren’t John Wayne charging westward on the back of a colt; Americans were the bushwhackers shooting at him.
Ali showed them that.
Ali’s defiance and crude eloquence made him a hero to the counterculture populated by the huge “baby-boomer” generation. Their values were peace and love. They rejected materialism as they rejected war. They viewed their parents as bigoted, archaic, and sexually repressed, while they embraced civil rights, gender equality, ecology, and free love.
Ali was a symbol—to them—of their values, yet he was opposed to virtually everything they stood for. As a Nation of Islam member, Muhammad believed that an evil, bigheaded scientist named Yacub created whites from the germs of blacks to be devils. He believed a mother ship in space orbited the earth, waiting for the right moment to release bombers to kill white people. Ali didn’t believe in racial inclusiveness; he approved of segregation. He wasn’t in on the equality of the sexes; he believed in the subordination of women. Despite his stand against the Vietnam War, he was far from a pacifist. He was a gladiator who made a fortune by pounding other men senseless. He charmingly predicted the outcome of his fights in doggerel, but his rhetoric could also be despicable, as when he compared his formidable rival Joe Frazier, a courageous pugilist with dark skin, to a gorilla. This he did over and over again on national television and thus provided a truly noble opponent a deep and unwarranted humiliation. Ali was also hypocritical, rejecting the war on religious grounds even as he openly conducted sexual affairs that were extracurricular to his marriage.
Ali did and said things, deeply believed things, that would have doomed the careers and stained the reputations of almost any American man, black or white. But he dominated popular culture in a way that no other athlete ever had. He was handsome, funny, and talented. He was successful. For many Americans, that was simply enough.
The fighter who began the decade as an oddity without a chance for the title, who started as a clown who could not be taken seriously, was one of the most serious, famous, and admired men in the world in 1968.
White athletes, enjoying every privilege that the society had to offer, didn’t have quite the same fervor for social change. They didn’t use their celebrity for grand causes or to take an intellectual stand. Unitas recognized that football players could be an influence on American youth, however. Shilling for a summer camp he owned that featured NFL players teaching young people the game, he told William Wallace of the New York Times, “[Football players] can do a lot of good to combat the influence of the hippies and long hairs.”
Like the society, professional football was also in a topsy-turvy state. In 1960 Weeb Ewbank was on top of the world. He had just won two straight titles with the franchise that he had built from scratch. That same year Don Shula was a former journeyman player and an obscure assistant coach. But by 1968 Ewbank was on the verge of getting fired from his second team, in an inferior league, and Shula was the most celebrated young coach in the NFL. And for Shula, things were only getting brighter.
At the end of 1967 Vince Lombardi had handed over the reins of his Packers to his longtime assistant Phil Bengston. After dominating the championship game and the Western Division of the NFL for the better part of the ’60s, Lombardi was retiring from coaching. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, Shula was deftly handling some difficult transitions. Lenny Moore, Raymond Berry, and Jim Parker had all retired. Though each one had declined significantly, it was nevertheless a sweeping loss and a significant drain of talent. All three players were bound for the Hall of Fame.
There was an even more significant player loss coming. Shula went into the preseason with private concerns about Johnny Unitas. In 1965 Johnny U’s leg injury proved that he was just as vulnerable to damage as any other mortal man. The quarterback had complained about soreness in his throwing arm, shoulder, or elbow since 1963. These issues were never the cause of too much concern, since Unitas rarely missed games and his level of play was consistently high. In 1968 Unitas was the reigning MVP coming off a 3,500-yard season. Fans across the country looked at him and saw the same old star, a player who was always prepared and almost impossible to stop. But in Shula’s trained and unsentimental eyes, Johnny U was a thirty-five-year-old who had absorbed a decade of wicked beatings. Like the fans, he knew that Unitas was still the Colts’ greatest asset, but as a professional he also knew that Unitas was the team’s most vulnerable area of exposure. What’s more, the previous season’s blockbuster trade that brought Bubba Smith and Bill Curry had cost the team Gary Cuozzo, Unitas’s capable protégé and backup. It left the Colts stronger across the board but with a susceptible Achilles’ heel. As matters stood, if anything happened to the aging and brittle Johnny U, Shula’s hopes for reaching the Super Bowl would reside in the hands of Jim Ward, a former fourteenth-round draft pick from tiny Gettysburg College.
Handing the roaring Colts offense over to Ward was like tossing the keys of a Porsche to the family’s pimply driver’s-ed student. It wasn’t going to happen. Shula had already felt the frustration of assembling championship-worthy teams, only to see the opportunities squandered by one or another unforeseen quarterback catastrophe. The memory of the ’65 season was still fresh. The Colts lost the West to the Packers because Unitas was on the sideline in a cast and the team could barely move the ball without him.
So with the preseason already under way, the coach set his sights on obtaining a quarterback with the maturity and the know-how for the job should the worst come to pass. He found one, rotting away, on the end of the New York Giants’ bench.
The man Shula obtained was a good-natured, self-effacing man named Earl Morrall. Earl was the type of player that Unitas had put to shame his whole career. Johnny U attended an unheralded school and was an anonymous late-round draft pick. Morrall went to a football powerhouse, was the second pick in the draft, and came into the league with a great deal of fanfare. Yet while Unitas was a superstar of the highest magnitude, Morrall and many other former “prospects” struggled or fell into irrelevance.
Earl Morrall had been a schoolboy hero on the athletic fields of Muskegon, Michigan, his hometown. That’s where he first displayed the prototypical size and booming arm of a big-time passer. When his high school career came to a close, he was at the center of a hotly contested recruiting battle that split the entire state in half. The University of Michigan and Michigan State both coveted his services, so the offers and accusations flew with equal velocity in a civil war between Wolverines and Spartans.
Morrall’s father was a machinist at the Continental Motors plant. Earl turned to him for advice about where to go, but the old man had little to give. “I can’t tell you what to do,” he said. “I never went to college. I don’t know which ones are right for you and which ones aren’t.”
Many in Morrall’s circle derided Michigan State as a “cow college” and referred to it as “Moo U.” In the end, however, guileless Earl chose State primarily because the coaches had been friendlier to him during his campus visit. At Michigan Earl was put off by coach Bennie Oosterban’s demeanor. When the leader of the Wolverines called Earl into his office, he was reclining in his swivel chair, chomping on a cigar, and showing Morrall the filthy soles of his shoes.
In East Lansing the Michigan State coaches were not only friendlier toward Morrall but also more affable to each other and the players. That amiable environment was more or less the reason Earl chose State.
In addition to football, Morrall played baseball for the Spartans and was good enough to help the team to the College World Series his sophomore year. In football things didn’t go as anticipated. When Earl finally became the full-time starter his junior year, it wasn’t exactly the fulfillment of a dream. The Spartans slogged through their worst season since 1919 and finished 3-6. Even Earl knew that the fans associated him with that failure.
It was a foregone conclusion that Morrall would be benched for his senior year, but he surprised everyone and rewon the starting job in summer practice. But nothing came easy. In the Spartans’ first game they barely squeaked by Indiana, 20–13. The following week they fell to archrival Michigan, the number-two-ranked team in the country, 14–7. The Spartans rebounded against Stanford, and Morrall scored his first-ever collegiate touchdown in the victory.
And then came number one, Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish rolled into East Lansing on an eleven-game winning streak behind star quarterback Paul Hornung. Another loss, though understandable, would have left Michigan State with a .500 record and on the brink. But playing in front of about fifty million network television viewers, Morrall was the hero, scoring a touchdown and leading his Spartans to the upset, 21–7.
Notre Dame was the turning point for both Michigan State and Earl. After that the Spartans disposed of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Purdue in quick succession. Their successful tour of the Big Ten ended with an unexpected trip to the Rose Bowl, where State defeated UCLA by a field goal at the gun. Morrall was chosen for a spate of All-American teams, beating out two future pro football Hall of Famers in Paul Hornung and Len Dawson.
After Earl’s sensational senior year San Francisco selected him second overall in the NFL draft, or about 198 picks ahead of Bart Starr. The bad news was (and there was always bad news for Earl), the 49ers already had Y. A. Tittle on their roster. Tittle was an enduring presence in San Francisco, the team icon, and already recognized as one of the best quarterbacks of the century. Nevertheless, Y.A. was coming off a weird season in which he led the league in touchdown passes, with seventeen, but also heaved up a staggering twenty-eight interceptions, which placed him atop the NFL in that dubious category, too.
Morrall signed his contract for about $12,000, plus a $2,000 bonus if he could supplant Tittle as the starter. Morrall was apprehensive about competing against the illustrious Tittle, but upon arriving for summer practice his wife, Jane, got an extended glimpse of Y.A. and urged her husband not to worry. Examining Tittle’s bald head, she decided that he was the oldest-looking man she had ever seen.
“He looks over the hill,” Jane told Earl, though Y.A. was only then about twenty-nine years old.
If Tittle wasn’t aging well, it might have had something to do with his poor relationship with 49ers head coach Frankie Albert. The two didn’t see eye-to-eye, primarily because Albert wanted to call the team’s plays from the bench and Tittle wanted to call the plays in the huddle. This irritation eventually erupted into an open warfare that everyone on the team could see. As a result, Morrall started four games his rookie season, while his highly capable mentor was taught a lesson on the bench. Earl wasn’t really ready to start; he threw six interceptions and only one touchdown pass. Meanwhile, the 49ers dropped three of the four games.
In the next draft the 49ers selected quarterback John Brodie with their first pick in round one. They went to great lengths to assure Earl they intended to retain him, and then they quickly traded him to Pittsburgh.
Earl entered Steelertown in high esteem. Coach Buddy Parker had been a Morrall fan for a long time. Buddy also carved out his legend in Michigan, where he and his drinking pal Bobby Layne led Detroit to successive NFL Championships while Earl was performing miracles in East Lansing. Morrall was still on Parker’s mind when the coach abruptly resigned from the Lions and accepted the Steelers’ job. Even though Pittsburgh already had two promising quarterbacks, Len Dawson and Jack Kemp, Parker gave up a linebacker and two number-one draft picks to acquire Earl.
“You’re my man,” Buddy told Morrall the moment he arrived. The coach ignored Kemp and Dawson, before releasing them both. Earl considered them lucky. They both went on to huge careers in the AFL, where they won league championships and were named All-Stars. Meanwhile, Earl was stuck with Parker, which he said was akin to a misery. The coach’s raging temper made every flight after a loss an aviation tragedy. Parker profanely harangued and insulted his players so badly, they’d hide in the tiny airplane bathrooms to avoid his wrath. There was no other means of escape.
Though Morrall began his tenure in Pittsburgh as this angry man’s favorite, it didn’t take long for their relationship to sour. In a game against the Cardinals Earl was given a quick shove from a defensive end that snapped his head sharply back like a whiplash in a car accident. He immediately noticed a burning sensation, and numbness crept down his throwing arm and into his hand. After that he had trouble gripping the ball or lifting his arm over his head, and his ability to throw was compromised. He courageously played through the disabling injury, but had to take periodic rest breaks from play. Parker had no pity or patience. Seeing only damaged goods, he traded Earl to Detroit for Bobby Layne, the quarterback Parker really wanted anyway. Even with the matter decided, the coach’s mean-spiritedness shone through. “Morrall will never make it in this league,” Parker told the press.
In Detroit Morrall was glad to be in his home state, but bad luck continued to plague him. Just prior to the start of the 1962 season he accidentally cut off his big toe while mowing his lawn. He eventually came back from that gruesome injury, but in 1964 the Bears’ Doug Atkins, Unitas’s old nemesis, hit Earl so violently, he felt like he had been stabbed with a knife. Earl wanted to continue playing, but the team doctor insisted on examining him. Putting a hand beneath the quarterback’s shoulder pad, the doctor felt the jagged edge of a broken collarbone piercing through the skin.
Earl also suffered an ambivalent relationship with Lions coach George Wilson. The amiable Wilson was considered the ultimate player’s coach, a man who provided his men every comfort. Wilson’s quarterbacks, however, were always on edge. Every year he started training camp by declaring the competition for passers “open.” And it never closed. The quarterbacks were yanked for the slightest infraction. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to Wilson’s decisions. Once he even flipped a coin just before game time to determine whether his starter would be Morrall or Milt Plum. Milt called heads; Earl rode the bench.
In 1963 Earl had a huge year. Though he started only ten games, he threw twenty-four touchdown passes and broke some of Bobby Layne’s team passing records and at the end of the season was voted Most Valuable Lion. But the next season Morrall was declared the loser of the “open” quarterback competition and was planted back on the bench.
In the end Detroit grew tired of both the coach and the quarterback. In 1965 Wilson was let go, and Morrall was traded to the Giants. Earl had lasted for all or parts of seven seasons in Detroit, a highly respectable stay. Yet few of those campaigns were satisfying. Morrall started a majority of Detroit’s games only once. Though he left town ignominiously, Morrall had caught the eye of the Lions’ talented young defensive coordinator, Don Shula, and with time that would prove to be significant.
In New York Morrall was afforded a fresh start but found many of the same stale problems. Allie Sherman, his new coach, was an ethnic man and native New Yorker who was Lombardi’s successor as Giants offensive coordinator. He and Vince were very good friends, but Lombardi’s ghost cast a long shadow at Yankee Stadium and haunted Sherman many years into his tenure.
Giants fans had hoped that Lombardi would be the one to replace the unlovable Jim Lee Howell as their head coach, a fantasy they entertained long after Vince left for Green Bay. The Giants once made a bid to bring Lombardi back, but the commissioner demanded that Vince’s Packers contract be honored, and Lombardi stayed in Wisconsin. All of these Lombardi longings and machinations poisoned the well for Allie, even though Sherman initially displayed something of the Lombardi touch. As head coach Sherman quickly made a deal with San Francisco and obtained Tittle. With Y.A. playing the best ball of his long career, Sherman took New York to three straight championship games, and Allie became the first man to ever win Coach of the Year honors two years in a row. But those bona fides couldn’t quell the fans’ disappointment at missing out on Lombardi, especially since the Giants lost all three of those championship games, two of them to Vince and his Packers.
By the time Morrall arrived on the scene, Sherman had run into hard times. The Giants were rapidly aging, and their stable of stars was declining, retiring, or departing in unwise trades engineered by Allie himself. Ferocious Sam Huff was shipped off to Washington, where he became the capital’s biggest football star in a generation. Defensive lineman Rosey Grier went to LA and anchored the Rams’ fabled Fearsome Foursome. Dick Modzelewski went to Cleveland and played a key role in the Browns’ championship victory over the Colts. And Giants kicker Don Chandler joined Lombardi in Green Bay, where he replaced Paul Hornung as the team’s primary field goal kicker. Sherman traded draft picks for veterans who didn’t pan out. Perhaps worst of all, Sherman had a hard time getting along with his own assistants. “He’s an intelligent man,” an anonymous Giants official told the New York Times, “but he can’t relate his intelligence to football.”
In 1964 New York bottomed out and won only two games. The outraged fans serenaded Sherman from the stands, crooning “Good Night, Allie,” to the tune of “Good Night, Ladies.” The only thing Allie did right, it seemed, was acquire Morrall. Earl immediately ameliorated all of the Giants’ negative outcomes. In 1965, with Morrall under center, the Giants dramatically improved to seven victories. Earl’s twenty-two touchdown passes were only one less than Johnny Unitas’s and eight more than Bart Starr’s sixteen. In fact, Morrall crossed the goal line more times in the air than Jim Brown did on the ground (twenty-one). For his efforts, Earl was voted Most Valuable Giant by his teammates.
It was a big season for any individual, worthy of the best players in the game. “You can’t give enough credit to Morrall,” Sherman said.
But apparently you could give his job away.
Sherman came to summer practice tightly wound in 1966. The glow of the previous year’s upswing had already worn off for him. Fearing complacency in mediocrity, Sherman was openly contemptuous of the previous season’s 7-7 record, and, in turn, Morrall resented his coach.
The bad feelings between the two eventually surfaced on the practice field. In one chaotic episode, different assistants simultaneously screamed contradictory instructions at Morrall. When the quarterback just stood there, flat-footed, unsure of what to call, Sherman lashed out at him with a profane shout. Morrall lost his composure and screamed a few impertinent but clean words back, but Allie was enraged. The coach quickly moved from across the field to the huddle, where he gave Earl a refresher course on who was in charge. He did this in front of the entire team. Later on Morrall wrote that it was at this exact moment that he felt his relationship with his coach begin to decline.
Later in the season Earl fractured his wrist, necessitating four weeks in a cast that stretched from his elbow all the way down to the base of his fingers. The bone eventually healed, but his relationship with Allie remained fractured.
After the season Sherman and team owner Wellington Mara openly hunted for a new quarterback. They found one in Minnesota, where Fran Tarkenton, one of the best and most compelling players of the era, had just taken the unusual step of handing in his resignation.
The Giants paid the Vikings a ransom in draft picks for “the scrambler” from Georgia. Tarkenton electrified professional football with his original and unpredictable approach to the game. He dramatically extended plays with his nimble feet, looping around in the backfield and escaping the rush like Houdini cheating death. Tarkenton’s athleticism was something to behold, and it was the source of endless fan fascination. It was also effective. He delivered touchdowns and victories. But his own coach, Norm Van Brocklin, didn’t care for Tarkenton’s style. Van Brocklin had been a great pocket passer, like Unitas. He believed in crisp timing and precise choreography between a quarterback and his receivers. Tarkenton was an improvisational artist whose receivers had to read his every twist and turn and adjust on the fly, like school-yard players.
In 1967 Tarkenton started all of the Giants’ games, while Morrall had a free ticket to watch his antics from the bench. When Morrall reported to training camp in 1968, he was just one of four quarterbacks vying to back up Tarkenton. What’s more, he knew he was the least wanted. He sat, while the younger passers played. Having been unwanted many times before, Earl had an occult ability to see the future. All the signs pointed to yet another trade or even an outright release.
When Sherman finally called Morrall into his office late in training camp, Earl thought he knew what was coming, but it was actually worse than he thought. The Giants had dealt him to Baltimore, the last place on earth he wanted to go. Sitting on the bench behind Johnny Unitas held no more appeal for him than sitting behind Tarkenton. At thirty-four, with a long, frustrating career already behind him, Earl was inclined to simply retire. But Sherman put Morrall on the phone with Shula, who tried to convince him to complete the trade.
“What about Unitas?” Earl asked.
“We’re a little concerned about him,” Shula earnestly said. “He’s been having some problems with his arm.”
In fact, Unitas left a preseason game in Detroit earlier in the week complaining of a sore elbow, though the press had reported it only as a “slight injury.” Shula also told Morrall that Jim Ward, the Colts’ young backup quarterback, had twisted his knee and would be out indefinitely.
After discussing the situation with his wife, Jane, Morrall agreed to report. He was willing to give the game that had been so bad to him one last shot. Nevertheless, both husband and wife dreaded the brutal reality of another relocation. Though the Morralls were practically NFL gypsies who had loaded the caravan many times, they had just settled into a comfortable rented home in Connecticut for the year. Now they had to find a place in Baltimore for their six-person, two-dog family, and they had to do it quickly.
Jane distributed the children with a variety of neighbors in Connecticut and went to Baltimore herself in search of a suitable home for her family. She didn’t have any luck. On such short notice the type of nice rented house she had always found in the past simply wasn’t available. She hoped to end their refugee status by taking to the newspapers and radio stations to ask fans if they knew of an available dwelling. She actually received a few propositions, but none of them were about housing.
“A couple of perverts called,” Earl said.
With few decent options, the Morralls shoehorned their large family into a two-bedroom apartment in the suburb of Towson. It was a roof, but it wasn’t exactly conducive to their comfort or their needs. Earl had a lot of hard work ahead of him, studying the Colts’ offense at night, and the apartment offered him no privacy or respite from the kids.
Whatever disadvantages Morrall had to deal with, Shula threw him right into the fray. In the very next preseason game against Miami, Earl quarterbacked the Colts for the entire second half.
After the game Unitas’s arm swelled and he complained of pain, though no one was too concerned. But in Dallas the following week, everything changed. Unitas played the first quarter and sat out the second. By the time Shula brought Johnny U back to start the third quarter, the quarterback’s arm was cold. On the first play of the second half he faded back and found a defensive end between himself and John Mackey. In order to get the ball around the defender, Unitas flung it from a sidearm motion. Then he felt a violent pop in his elbow.
He remained in the game, but his teammates noticed his pain and his dramatic loss of arm strength.
“You could see it on his face; the narrow eyes, the tight lips,” Morrall remembered in his memoir. “Whenever he threw, the ball kind of floated. It had no zip.”
“I ran an out pattern,” Jimmy Orr said, “and he threw me a change-up.”
On the sidelines Unitas’s close friend Bobby Boyd pleaded with the team doctor. “Get him out of there,” Bobby yelled at the physician. “He’s going to ruin his arm.”
Indeed, after the game the golden arm swelled and turned black and blue near the elbow. At that time there was still no way to see under the skin for a more precise examination. Traditional X-ray was useless for the task. Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, the tool that could have provided clarity and helped doctors properly assess the damage, had not yet been invented. In the nomenclature of the times he had “tennis elbow,” or “tendonitis.” In fact, based on his symptoms, it’s likely that he suffered a “Tommy John injury.” Tommy John was a left-handed pitcher for the New York Yankees in the 1970s who had an issue similar to Unitas’s. John had his arm successfully treated with a surgical procedure that later informally bore his name. In fact, the issue they both suffered was a serious condition: a looseness of the ulnar collateral ligament. It’s a painful medical condition that is common in baseball among pitchers. Prior to the advent of the surgery, it was typically considered a career-ending injury.
Repetitive throwing and violent contact were the probable causes of Unitas’s specific issue. The catastrophic portion of the injury that resulted in his failure to throw with precision or velocity probably occurred in Dallas when he attempted his “sidearm” throw. Based on the problems he had reported in previous years, it is likely that his elbow was chronically unstable, his ulnar collateral ligament was loose, and his flexor-pronator mass was acting as the elbow’s stabilizer. With the sidearm throw he placed excessive stress on that area and caused the flexor-pronator mass to tear.
The plainspoken Unitas didn’t know or understand any of that, but, for once, he was up front about his agony. “My arm hurts more now than it ever has,” he said. “I couldn’t hit a pop pass now if I had to.”
Even if Johnny U could face the truth, the coaches and the fans were in abject denial. Everyone in Baltimore wondered, unrealistically, if he could return for the opener. Yet the public, the media, and even the medical community seemed to have a limited, if not medieval, understanding of his issues. The newspaper reported that Unitas was treating his extraordinarily complex elbow injury with “ice and rest therapy.” The affected area was referred to as a “soup bone” by the Colts’ beat reporter.
For all of the upset in Baltimore about Unitas’s health status, there were many evident silver linings. For one thing, Morrall was already being hailed as the best backup quarterback the Colts had ever had. Despite his checkered past, Earl was a former starter who had enjoyed some big victories and successful seasons throughout his long career. He was clearly hardened for battle.
In fact, if Morrall resembled anyone in football, it was probably Unitas himself. The two men were only about a year apart in age. Their dimensions and body types were almost identical. They even favored the same old-fashioned flattop haircut. On the field neither was particularly mobile, and both featured accurate arms that could hit the short passes and the long bombs with great precision. Not surprisingly, Unitas and Morrall were close friends. They spent so much time together in practice and at meetings, their teammates saw them as slightly unidentical twins and gave them rhyming nicknames. Stoop-shouldered Unitas was called “Hump”; big-assed Morrall was “Rump.”
Shula took a shine to Morrall. Earl may not have been as talented as Johnny U or enjoyed the same reputation around the league, but in many ways he was much more suited to working with the coach. Morrall, like Shula, devoutly believed in a run-first offense. Where Unitas had bristled about the coach sending in plays from the sideline, Morrall had no problem with it. In fact, Earl came to Baltimore so late in the preseason, he barely knew the plays and was having serious trouble learning them. It wasn’t as if he was dumb or slow. He’d successfully called plays for many years and for many different teams. But the Colts’ numbering system vexed him. From the Pop Warner leagues on up, the backs and the gaps between blockers are assigned numbers for the purpose of play calling. On all of Earl’s previous teams the numbers were odd to the right and even to the left. The Colts were the opposite. After so many years of thinking of the offense in one way, Earl simply could not wrap his head around doing it the other.
On top of that, Shula’s offensive system was considered one of the most complex in professional football. Though he had inherited Weeb Ewbank’s playbook and offensive coordinator, everything changed and grew under Shula.
“Weeb was a master of a system that was totally sound but totally simple,” Raymond Berry remembered. Shula “had a far different approach to the game.” He vastly expanded the playbook and instituted a ponderous nomenclature for calling plays.
The tension between simplicity and complexity was a major focus in the game of the 1960s. Lombardi was the vanguard coach of the era, but his guileless offense was based on the most basic principles. Vince told his men over and over, “We’re not trying to fool anyone.” He had a dogmatic faith in the game’s verities—running the football, blocking, and footwork—as though the proper execution of these fundamentals was a good work on the road to redemption. But some of the era’s other coaches, especially Tom Landry in Dallas, Sid Gilman in San Diego, and Hank Stram in Kansas City, added layers of complexity to their playbooks in order to slow the fast and deceive the intelligent. The tension between the fundamental and the futuristic was endlessly debated.
“If I had to make a choice [between the simple and the complex],” Berry said, “I would go with not trying to do too much.”
Bill Curry, who actually played for both Lombardi and Shula, saw the difference firsthand. “The Packers system was so incredibly simple,” Curry said. “I went to Baltimore, and it took me months to learn how to respond quickly and in the right way.”
This problem struck Morrall especially hard. “We opened with the 49ers,” Curry said. “We’re in Memorial Stadium, in the huddle, and Earl was saying, ‘Hey, Matte, what’s that formation where it’s split backs with the wide receiver?’”
“Out Right, Flank Right, Split” was the name of that play in the Colts’ playbook, Bill Curry said. “In Green Bay we would call that exact same formation ‘Red Right.’”
The upshot was that Morrall never did get a solid handle on calling the plays. With Earl perplexed, Tom Matte took charge in the huddle. “I probably called about half the plays for the entire year,” Matte said. “Earl was confused; I felt sorry for him. I’d played quarterback, too, and I knew what he was trying to do.”
Incredibly, none of this slowed down the Colts. They pounced on the league as though they had a vendetta. And, in a way, they did. They took out their rage for all of the bad breaks and years of frustration they’d suffered in the 1960s, for the terrible officials’ calls that went against them, for the teams they simply couldn’t beat when it mattered, and even for their own self-inflicted wounds.
Morrall had only been a Colt for a few days, yet Baltimore’s enemies were already his own. The schedule featured all four of his former teams, the organizations that had misused, embarrassed, and dropped him.
The revenge tour began with the 49ers, the team that had drafted Morrall. Earl torched San Francisco’s defense for about 200 yards and two touchdown passes—one to tight end Tom Mitchell and the other to Jimmy Orr—for an easy Colts victory, 27–10. A couple of games later Morrall gave the Steelers, his second team, the same treatment. The Colts pounded Pittsburgh, 41–7. In the second 49ers game the Colts ran up the score, 42–14. In the most pleasing victory of all to Morrall, the Colts shut out Allie Sherman, Fran Tarkenton, and the Giants, 26–0. Finally, Earl led the Colts to almost triple the score against Detroit, 27–10. By the time the season ended, he had not only beaten all of his former employers but humiliated them.
For the rest of the Colts there was still plenty of unresolved business. They mauled the Chicago Bears, 28–7, paying back that rowdy franchise for its sadistic treatment of Unitas over the years. The Rams were the only team in football that could defeat the Colts in 1967, but they lost to them twice in 1968. And, finally, Baltimore punished the one team that had tortured them the most, the team that had stood in their way every year, the team that got the breaks and cashed the checks. That team, of course, was the three-time defending-champion Packers. Green Bay couldn’t even score a single touchdown against Baltimore’s mighty defense, as the Colts prevailed over the Packers, 16–3.
As each game unfolded it was clear that Baltimore was much more than just another good team having a big year. They were a team for the ages. The only old nemesis with whom they could not settle the score in the regular season was the Cleveland Browns, the same franchise that improbably defeated them in the ’64 championship game. The Colts’ only loss in 1968 was a 30–20 defeat in week six to the Browns. Cleveland still had Baltimore’s number, even without Jim Brown.
Baltimore had a potent offense, but it was the defense that made the team truly great. Bubba Smith, Mike Curtis, and Bobby Boyd anchored Chuck Noll’s progressive schemes. In fact, Noll’s defense eclipsed any Baltimore had ever had before, and it dominated the league. The Colts gave up only 144 points in their fourteen-game season, an incredible 10.3 per game against the best players in the world.
But the season’s real marvel was Shula. The prescient young coach was on top of everything. He had anticipated Unitas’s infirmity, and he had the acumen to acquire a player who could not only stand in for Johnny U but actually perform like Johnny U. It wasn’t remarkable that Shula saw potential in Morrall. Other professional coaches had seen Earl’s assets for more than a decade. Yet Shula was the first one who gave him the supporting cast and the confidence to flourish. Under Shula’s tutelage, with Shula’s players all around him, Morrall was no longer the quintessential expendable quarterback; he was the league’s Most Valuable Player—Earl-goddamned-Morrall. Draft bust, second teamer, well traveled. Whatever you could call him, he had thrown twenty-six touchdown passes and was the linchpin, the very best player, on maybe the very best team ever assembled. If Earl always had it in him, no one had brought it out until Shula.
As for the man who defined the Colts for a generation, the 1968 season was painful, tedious, and frustrating. With his big reputation and aching arm, Unitas was reminiscent of Joe DiMaggio, another American athlete who had once suffered greatly while his team succeeded without him. In 1949 Joltin’ Joe played in only 76 games of the 154-game season and missed significant parts of the Yankees’ thrilling pennant race against the Red Sox because he was suffering from sharp bone spurs in his heel.
The Yankee Clipper’s emotional struggles and pain were captured as a redemptive force in Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel The Old Man and the Sea.
“But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel,” the suffering and ancient fisherman says to himself as he strives for his own inner greatness.
The book itself was the last hurrah of the aging writer who was once celebrated for his athletic prose. Hemingway shaped Joltin’ Joe into a symbol of deep dignity and tremendous courage in the face of aging and declining skills. DiMaggio’s persistence, even elegance in suffering, made him an example for all men who were no longer at the top of their game.
And so it was that Unitas, who had almost single-handedly catapulted football past baseball in the nation’s affections, was DiMaggio-like in his struggle. There was no magnificent tragedian like Hemingway to immortalize Johnny U’s pain. Nevertheless, the great comic poet Ogden Nash, an enthusiastic Colts fan who lived in the shadow of Johns Hopkins University, wrote a series of poems for Life that conjured up Johnny U in his salad days of 1958 when his partnership with Raymond Berry represented the game’s vanguard. It was a flattering portrait to be sure, but a premature rendezvous with the past, as though the great man was already history and his career a corpse.
In 1968 Unitas was a fixture on the sidelines. Johnny U sat and watched a man with a long-shot story to match his own commandeer his team and lead it to even greater heights than he ever had. Unitas remained a presence. He watched the action, noted the opportunities, and offered advice to Morrall. But even as Earl’s victories and great performances piled up, there was still hope among the fans that Johnny U would stride onto that field and be his old gargantuan self.
The messianic longings for Unitas’s return were neither practical nor reasonable, given the nature of his injury. It was as if Baltimoreans were praying to an unseen God for a savior when, in fact, none was required. Morrall’s Colts weren’t the besieged Israelites; they were the conquering Romans. Even so, Johnny U was no different from the fans or coaches. He held out hope, too, and he believed he could take a team that was already just about perfect and improve it. All season long he tested his arm. The status reports of these trial runs were dispatched like war news from the front. It seemed that every practice throw was numbered and noted in the newspapers for its length, accuracy, velocity, and, of course, the amount of pain it caused him.
Unitas managed to play in four regular-season games, but with results that were unworthy of him. He threw few passes and completed fewer still. His longest stint of the year was in the Cleveland loss. He played for about a quarter and completed only a single pass in eleven attempts. Three of his passes landed in the waiting arms of grateful Cleveland defenders.
Mostly, though, Unitas just watched his teammates thrive without him. Although his patience was tried, his sense of humor remained intact. When someone asked him how it felt to stand and watch an entire Colts game, his reply was vintage Johnny U.
“I’m tired,” he said, feigning exhaustion.