On the bus ride back from the Orange Bowl Rick Volk, the defensive back who was knocked out cold twice in Super Bowl III, began to vomit into a cardboard box. Volk’s wife, alarmed, alerted the team doctor. The good doctor’s diagnosis: “We all feel sick to our stomach after that game,” he said. Back in his hotel room Volk’s condition worsened, and he went into seizures. Don Shula, who had put Volk’s life at risk by reinserting him into the game after the first head trauma, came racing into the room and prevented the convulsing man from swallowing his own tongue. Rick was taken to the hospital, where he sat in a tub and vomited the night away under the supervision of both a doctor and his coach. So on the night of the day when his heavily favored team lost the Super Bowl to a supposedly inferior team in a lesser league, Don Shula kept at least one of his players from choking.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Orr, the sprightly receiver, was back at the hotel, lingering, hoping to avoid Carroll Rosenbloom’s stillborn “victory party” for as long as possible.
“I said, ‘Listen, let’s not be the first ones there,’” Jimmy said. “I didn’t want to catch his wrath. Turns out I’m the first [player] there. And I waited about an hour [before going]. Rosenbloom’s there, [Senator] Teddy Kennedy’s there, and a few other [celebrities].”
Jimmy’s worst nightmares were realized. The boss was extremely unhappy and looking for answers. “Rosenbloom takes me out back and asks me, ‘What the hell’s going on?’” Orr said. “I soft-balled as best I could, but he didn’t like getting beat. He thought we should have won. ‘Did we come down here too early? What have we done wrong?’ Hell, at that point I was still in shock. I was trying to get out of there. I was the only guy there! If I’d known that, I would have been later.”
As time wore on the owner’s frustration anger and embarrassment at the Jets’ loss came out in passive-aggressive ways. For instance, instead of giving his Colts a ring, the traditional gift from an owner for a team that won the NFL Championship, Rosenbloom gave them each a defective timepiece.
“He had given us these watches after Super Bowl III, and [they] promptly fell apart,” Bill Curry said. “I thought that was interesting.”
Unitas’s feelings after the terrible loss were more complicated. While he typically put on a controlled public face that echoed team messaging, he was seething beneath the surface. John Steadman, a longtime Baltimore sports columnist and editor, asked the quarterback in private the one question that was on everyone’s mind.
“Why didn’t you get in the game earlier?”
Unitas answered candidly: “I would have if Shula’s big ego hadn’t gotten in the way.”
According to Steadman, Johnny U believed Shula wanted to “win with Morrall to show he didn’t need Unitas.” Of course, if anyone in the organization should have been paranoid, it was Shula himself. His relationship with Unitas had been bad for years, and now his ties to the owner were also crumbling. Carroll Rosenbloom was furious with his coach for losing the Super Bowl.
Like a man who regretted his bad second marriage, C.R. pined for his first spouse. He sought out Weeb Ewbank to come clean about the past.
“Carroll told Weeb the whole story of his firing,” Charley Winner remembered. “[Carroll] said, ‘Weeb, it was the biggest mistake I ever made.’”
“Carroll Rosenbloom said later that he realized it was a huge mistake” to fire Weeb Ewbank, Raymond Berry acknowledged.
C.R.’s nephew Rick Rosenbloom also knew about the struggles between his uncle and Shula. “It was common knowledge that [Rosenbloom’s] relationship with Shula completely changed after they lost the Super Bowl,” Rick Rosenbloom said. “That was the most shocking and humiliating loss in the NFL. It was a complete disappointment, okay, and a complete failure. It was also tremendously embarrassing.”
Shula had a big ego, but he knew he was now under a negative microscope. He could see that his relationship with Rosenbloom was destroyed beyond repair. “Before Super Bowl III it was all laughs and respect,” Shula remembered. “Afterwards it was something else.”
Despite C.R.’s frustrations, there were no easy solutions. Firing Shula would have made sense to no one. Whatever his failures in the big games, Don Shula was widely hailed as the best coach this side of Vince Lombardi. His overall winning percentage was higher than Lombardi’s. In just six seasons leading the Colts, Shula had been named the Coach of the Year three times. He had lost only two games since 1966. He had already been to two championship games, and his team had just won the NFL title. Letting him go would be ludicrous. Yet with so many relationships in Baltimore at the point of mutual embarrassment (the owner wasn’t even speaking to the coach), keeping Shula didn’t seem quite right either.
With nothing but bad choices, Rosenbloom held his nose and retained his coach. Meanwhile, Chuck Noll, a man who might have ably replaced Shula, resigned to take the head coach’s job in Pittsburgh.
Though Shula remained, his status and prestige within the organization were waning. “What I heard was that after we lost to the Jets, Don went in looking for a raise,” Dan Sullivan said. “And [Rosenbloom] says, ‘A raise? I ought to cut your salary after you embarrassed me, losing to a coach that I fired.’ To me that was the death knell for Don Shula.”
Shula admitted it was true. “My relationship with Rosenbloom was never quite the same after that,” he said. “He was very upset. You could just sense the tension.”
Rosenbloom didn’t even make a pretense about hiding his disdain for Shula from the players. At the start of the 1969 season, when he made his annual address to the team, he picked at some painful scabs.
“Mr. Rosenbloom walked into the team meeting,” Bill Curry remembered. “He had Shula standing right next to him. He said something like, ‘Men, you know I already fired one world championship coach. I didn’t come here to be humiliated like I was last January in Miami. I didn’t come here to be second place.’ He made it very clear, and Shula stood right there and took it.”
It was all very humiliating for a proud man like Shula, but he knew how to deal with it. “I had to move on with my life,” Shula remembered. “One thing I learned a long time ago was you can’t change the score. When the game is over, you have to live with what that score says.”
With so much negative baggage hanging over them, the Colts were under a cloud.
One positive omen was the return of Unitas. Presumably, he was healthy and ready to go, though even he acknowledged that Earl Morrall deserved to be the number-one man to start camp. Don Shula wholeheartedly agreed with him. By the time the season started, however, Unitas was back in the saddle and Morrall was back on the bench.
The Colts faced the Rams in the first game of the 1969 season. Unitas threw for almost 300 yards, but he also gave away three interceptions in a Colts defeat. After only one game Baltimore had already matched its loss total for all of 1968.
In week two the Colts traveled to Minnesota. Vikings quarterback Joe Kapp, a rough-and-tough Mexican American with a Canadian Football League pedigree, put on a clinic. He threw for almost 450 yards and seven touchdowns against the Colts. Baltimore’s defense was powerless to stop him, though it employed every tactic in the toolbox—zones, man coverages, and blitzes. Nothing worked. The inartistic Kapp put up 52 points on the Colts’ defense. In the entire 1968 season Baltimore had given up only 144 points.
Despite the total collapse of his defense, Shula saw something wrong with his quarterback. He benched a healthy Unitas in the second quarter and went with Morrall the rest of the way. Earl heaved up two interceptions of his own to add to the Vikings’ rout of the Colts.
“It is the first defeat since I came here from Detroit that I’m ashamed of myself and the football team,” Shula angrily admitted to reporters.
After that the Colts were never quite right. They ripped off three victories in a row against lesser teams, but then lost to winless San Francisco. Young Steve Spurrier threw a touchdown against the Colts, while Unitas gave up a 57-yard interception for a touchdown to the 49ers.
Interestingly, the Colts then beat the Redskins and Packers in successive weeks. As Washington’s new head coach, Vince Lombardi cast a long shadow over both franchises. In what would prove to be the last-ever head-to-head matchup in the hot rivalry between the great coach and Shula and Unitas, Baltimore destroyed the Redskins, 41–17. It was an odd game in that the Colts and Lombardi seemed to switch roles. Lombardi’s Redskins took a page out of Unitas’s book and attempted to win with the pass, while the Colts controlled the clock and the ball. Redskins quarterback Sonny Jurgensen put up more than 300 yards in the air, while Baltimore’s Tom Matte ran for 117 yards and three touchdowns. It was the worst loss Lombardi had suffered in almost a decade.
That game brought the curtain down on one of the most intriguing, intense, and long-lasting rivalries in the history of the league. Only about ten months later Lombardi was dead at age fifty-seven, colon cancer defeating his indomitable will as no man could. His passing was a mournful sign that the ’60s were truly over.
After the victories over Washington and Green Bay, things spun out of control for Baltimore. In the second game against San Francisco Unitas got off to a slow, ineffective start. He had completed only two of eight passes when Shula pulled him and inserted Morrall. The Colts lost anyway, and San Francisco’s only two victories of the entire season so far were both against Baltimore. The Colts’ record stood at 5-4, while their division rivals, the Rams, were still undefeated at 9-0. Even Shula admitted the Colts were out of the race for the postseason.
Though his team was eliminated, Shula made it clear he still expected to win on Sundays. His strategy for doing so was to put John Unitas on the bench. Morrall was listed as the Colts’ starter for the upcoming Chicago game, marking the first time since his rookie season of 1956 that a healthy Unitas was not the Colts’ starter. Johnny U didn’t take it well.
In Baltimore he gave a terse “No comment” to the local press, making his displeasure evident without actually stepping out of line. But one small-town sports editor scooped everyone and created a minor stir when he scored an interview with the disgruntled quarterback. Dean Eagle, of the Louisville Courier-Journal, the newspaper in Unitas’s old college town, quoted Johnny in a near rage.
“[Shula] hasn’t told me why he benched me,” Unitas said. “I didn’t have a good first half last Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers but I don’t think I was that bad. This is the last year of my playing contract. I might consider playing for another club. I thought I could play about three more years of pro football, but I won’t play under these circumstances.”
It appeared as though Unitas was threatening to demand a trade or retirement. But when asked about the remarks back in Baltimore, he denied everything. Speaking to a more familiar reporter from the Sun, he slammed the Louisville newspaperman and the press in general. “I never told the man I was going to retire or that I would play somewhere else. I don’t know where you guys get these things. This is one of the reasons I am reluctant to talk to you [the press].”
Unitas admitted he didn’t like sitting on the bench, but denied he harbored any special resentment. So what did he really say to Shula about being shelved?
“Okay, you’re the boss,” Unitas claimed he said. “I might not like it, but I’m not bitter about it.”
Shula corroborated that Unitas took it well. Yet the tumult and the losses both hinted at big problems. The Bears game would only intensify the embarrassment that was brewing between the two men. Morrall, rusty from a lack of use, threw two interceptions that both led to Bears scores. With only about seven minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, and the Colts losing 14–7, Shula called on Unitas.
Johnny U baffled the Bears, who expected him to light up the skies. But when Unitas noticed that Chicago’s tackles were cheating wide, probably to bring a more forceful pass rush from the outside on him, he crossed up Chicago and pounded the ball inside. Utilizing running backs Tom Matte and Terry Cole over and over, his only pass of note was a 21-yarder to Matte, a dagger that moved the Colts into scoring position. The tying touchdown came on a 16-yard trap play, right up the gut, where center Bill Curry took out Dick Butkus to enable the score.
After the game reporters stirred the pot. They wanted to know if Unitas felt any special motivation to succeed, given that Shula had benched him.
“All I did was my job,” Unitas said.
Unlike Johnny U, Dick Butkus, the Bears’ All-Pro linebacker, had no reason to be circumspect. He was effusive in praising Unitas. “He sure moved the ball when he got in there,” Butkus said. “Just as he always does, John called the right plays. We didn’t do it when we had to, but Unitas did.”
Benching Johnny U, only to have him come off the bench and save the day, made Shula look indecisive, or worse.
As it turned out, the most notable absence from the game wasn’t the superstar, Unitas, it was the Bears’ backup halfback Brian Piccolo. Piccolo had recently lost energy on the field and asked to be removed from a game. He was also suffering from a mysterious cough. All these factors led him to the hospital where he was under observation.
Doctors eventually diagnosed the cause of Piccolo’s distress. The halfback was suffering from testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs. Less than a year later, in June 1970, he died from the disease and its complications. He was only twenty-six, and he left behind a wife and three young daughters.
Piccolo was a fine college player at Wake Forest, where he led the nation in rushing and touchdowns his senior year, but he was considered too small for the professional game at six feet and 200 pounds, and he went undrafted. George Halas saw something in him and signed him to the Bears. But Piccolo, unlucky, came to Chicago the same year they selected Gayle Sayers. Piccolo managed to stick with the team and made the roster, but he mostly rode the bench and stayed in the shadow of the great superstar. Piccolo would get his chance to play when Sayers was felled by a serious knee injury, and he performed admirably.
Though he was, in truth, an inconsequential player on a bad team, Piccolo played an enormously important role in the unfolding epic of professional football. His impact on the game was long lasting anyway, as the circumstances of his life and death were later dramatized in a made-for-television movie that detailed his special friendship with Sayers.
One out of every two television sets in the United States tuned in for the film that vividly brought to life the game’s virtues. Both Piccolo and Sayers were depicted as clean-cut and moral young men. Though they competed with each other for roster spots and playing time, they selflessly helped each other succeed. They became roommates, highly unusual for a black and a white player in the era. Piccolo was presented as a martyred, almost Christlike figure who pushed Sayers to overcome a catastrophic knee injury, even though Gayle’s return would be a career setback for Piccolo.
Sayers and Piccolo were depicted as courageous and generous. These traits seemed endemic to their involvement in football. The positive aspects of the relationship were magnified by their racial differences. Broadcast just a few years after the nation’s cities were aflame in race riots, Brian’s Song, in its own melodramatic way, returned Americans back to Huckleberry Finn’s raft, where black and white were set adrift together on the very same quest for freedom.
In Baltimore, it seemed, there was no harmony on the field. Despite his heroics in the Chicago game, Unitas seemed a shell of his former self, throwing only twelve touchdown passes on the year and a whopping twenty interceptions.
Sam Havrilak, a fine rookie who had emerged from Bucknell with superlative and diverse skills as a runner, passer, receiver, and even defender, saw Unitas and Shula grating on each other.
“There seemed to be a lot of friction between Shula and Unitas, more than normal,” Havrilak said. “You would see them . . . kind of discussing things in a more animated way than you would normally see. I think that had an effect on the team.”
Unitas wasn’t the only one losing his tolerance for the head coach.
“I think everyone was kind of fed up with Shula,” Havrilak said. “And for a couple of reasons. Number one, he liked to take credit for everything. Number two, he would jump on you for no apparent reason at all in front of everybody else. You don’t do that. You don’t belittle someone in front of everybody else. Take them in your office and do it in private. [The players] kind of got fed up with his ego.”
According to Havrilak, the Colts also noticed lingering bad feelings between the owner and the coach. “This was never proven, but Rosenbloom was an inveterate gambler, and supposedly he lost millions of dollars on the Super Bowl. He didn’t take too kindly to Shula because he thought Shula’s coaching could have been better during the game.”
The Colts finished 1969 with an 8-5-1 record, respectable in many cities but a disaster in Baltimore, where “dominance” was the expectation by both the owner and the fans. The Colts were one of the most stable organizations in the game, but it was clear that big changes were coming.
After the season Rosenbloom left for an overseas vacation. While he was away Shula was approached, through a Miami newspaperman, about a potential opening in the Dolphins’ head-coaching position. Shula expressed his interest, and members of the Miami organization reached out to the Colts for permission to speak with him. With Rosenbloom away the owner’s son Steve, a young Colts executive, supposedly granted that permission.
The Dolphins were primed for a man of Shula’s skills. Much like Green Bay when Lombardi arrived, the Miami organization was overflowing with excellent but undeveloped talent. The Dolphins, who had not yet been winners on the field or at the box office, were eager to change their fortunes and believed that Shula could do the job, and owner Joe Robbie personally handled the negotiations with the coach. Robbie was known as a skinflint, but he pulled out all the stops for Shula. He offered the coach a dream position in which he would be far more powerful than just about any other head coach in the game. His titles would include general manager and minority owner. He got a raise from $60,000 per year to $75,000. The real money was in the ownership stake, which was said to be 3 percent of the team’s worth, which at that time equaled $450,000. He didn’t go to Miami for a raise or a better job. He went for life-changing money. Beyond the cash, the accord was also a show of extreme respect, a deal similar to the one bestowed upon Vince Lombardi in Washington. It was guaranteed to stoke the envy of every other coach in the league.
Needless to say, Shula jumped.
In an era when coaches and players were welded to their cities unless terminated, Shula stood apart. He exhibited the boldness to grab the reins of his own future, but still felt the need to answer charges of disloyalty or naked greed, so he explained his motivations for breaking his Colts contract and abandoning his city.
“Immediate and substantial interest in the Dolphins caused me to leave the Colts,” Shula told the New York Times. And who could blame him? In truth, the Dolphins contract was a coup. It was a masterful career stroke, negotiating unprecedented rewards from a new team, even while he was teetering on the brink of being fired by his old team. It was a death-cheating comeback that could only be described as Unitas-like.
In a moment of perfect karmic justice, Rosenbloom, who had sent Weeb Ewbank on vacation seven years earlier to secretly interview and hire Shula, was enraged to learn that Shula had signed elsewhere while he was away on vacation. C.R. cried foul. With Shula still under contract to him, he wasn’t about to give the coach away without some sort of compensation. The league, as always, saw things his way. Without reversing or nullifying the deal, Commissioner Rozelle ordered Miami to compensate the Colts with its number-one draft pick as restitution for the crime.
Meanwhile, the players who had played so hard and so well for Shula over the years lined up to bad-mouth him in the pages of Sports Illustrated.
Bubba Smith said, “Shula went crazy. He had this thing about Vince Lombardi. He wanted to be better than Lombardi. So he did a lot of screaming.”
John Mackey agreed. “[Shula] became more and more of a dictator,” the star tight end said.
Even Mike Curtis, who respected the chain of command and appreciated a strong sense of authority, said, “Maybe everybody hated Shula and maybe that’s what he wanted. Maybe he felt it would translate into making a close team, pulling us together because we hated him. It was a bad situation.”
Shula’s oldest and most bitter antagonist, of course, was Unitas. Yet the quarterback was curiously more evenhanded than his teammates were in assessing the old boss. “Don made a lot of enemies among the players. He was a good coach, always a good coach. But the way he handled some players left a lot of bad taste around here,” Johnny U said.
And then, for good measure, Unitas added a little fiction to his story: “I never let [Shula] bother me,” he said.
The new sun-drenched Shula was cool behind his shades. Basking in the rewards and wealth of his new job on the beach, he didn’t say a word in his own defense. He had no reason to respond.
It took the Colts a little while to move on. Rosenbloom and his new general manager, Don Klosterman, interviewed twenty-eight applicants for their open coaching job. Unitas eventually joined the owner and the GM in Hawaii, where they met to discuss their various options. But in the end they didn’t reach far for their man, as they chose their own longtime offensive coordinator, Don McCafferty. “Mac” was a man whom Unitas knew well and liked very much. The players called McCafferty “the Easy Rider,” due to his calm and demeanor, and Mac knew the Colts as well as any man, since he had been an offensive assistant under both Ewbank and Shula going all the way back to the ’50s.
As head coach McCafferty ran essentially the same offense that the Colts had worked since 1954, the year Ewbank emerged from the Midwest with Paul Brown’s playbook. It was an incredibly long run of consistency, and McCafferty made but two key changes. First, he restored Unitas’s autonomy, allowing the quarterback to call his own plays without interference from the bench, and, second, he simplified the playbook and pared down the nomenclature that was so incredibly ponderous under Shula. In other words, the names of the plays and formations were greatly shortened, much to the relief of the huddle.
Other than that most things stayed the same. The New York Times reported that McCafferty would retain most of Shula’s staff but that he would also need to hire as many as three new coaches. “At least one,” the paper of record reported, “might be a Negro.”
Even without Shula, the mystique of the Colts continued unabated. Unitas was no longer at his physical best, and he had to deal with the presence of the capable Morrall behind him. But he was still Johnny U, which is to say that he still had that incomparable football mind that could solve inscrutable problems in the split seconds before he was clubbed, slammed, or throttled by huge and menacing men.
In their first year without Shula, Unitas and the Colts lost only two games. One of those defeats was to the Dolphins, which Shula had improved from a three-win club the year before he got there to ten victories in 1970. But in the end Baltimore had the last laugh. In the first round of the playoffs, Unitas completed six passes, two of them for touchdowns, as the Colts beat Paul Brown and his Cincinnati Bengals assistant Bill Walsh, 17–0. In the first-ever AFC Championship Game, Unitas turned in yet another masterful performance in a historic contest. Johnny U defeated future Hall of Famer George Blanda in that one. Blanda entered the game after Oakland starter Darryl Lamonica was injured. Blanda had started his NFL career while Johnny U was still at St. Justin’s High School in Pittsburgh. Unitas was spry by comparison. He also still had his uncanny accuracy; he completed a 63-yard touchdown pass to Ray Perkins to ice the game and send the Colts back to the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, Blanda and his teammates, so sure they were going to the Super Bowl, had already packed trunks for Miami. Instead, they went limping back to Northern California.
The Colts were slated to play the Dallas Cowboys in the big game. Dallas coach Tom Landry, a notorious micromanager, called all of the offensive plays from the sideline. Unitas was asked his take on that system, and he embraced the opportunity to take a direct shot at Shula.
“They wouldn’t be getting the best out of me [if they called the plays],” Unitas said. “They could just use a mechanical man, a dummy.”
Unitas followed that up with a blatant lie when he said, “I have never refused to run a play any coach has sent in. Don Shula used to send in several in a series, but I guess he didn’t think I was getting the job done.”
That point was mostly moot in the Super Bowl, where Unitas had only three completions against the Doomsday Defense before leaving the game for good in the second quarter after a brutal shot to his rib cage. One of his completions, however, was a 75-yard touchdown pass to John Mackey. It was the Colts’ only touchdown in the air all day, and a crucial score, as Baltimore squeaked past the Cowboys, 16–13, in a mistake-laden game.
In his first year without Shula, Unitas accomplished something he couldn’t do in seven years under the famously brilliant Shula: he won the Super Bowl.
If Shula felt envy or bitterness at seeing the team he’d built finally win it all without him, he took it out on his opponents. In 1971 Miami went 10-3-1 against the league, but one of those losses was to the Colts. Unitas began the year convalescing an off-season Achilles tendon tear, but his first start of the season was against Shula’s Dolphins. Johnny U was in the saddle, but McCafferty warned him that if he was rusty or couldn’t get the job done, he would be yanked in favor of Morrall. And that is what happened.
Unitas could put up only 78 yards against the Dolphins. He threw two interceptions. Morrall tried to rescue the Colts in the second half. He threw for more yards than Unitas did, but failed where Johnny U typically excelled, in the clutch. Down by only three, Earl threw an interception in the end zone with three minutes left in the game.
Enjoying the 17–14 victory, Shula told the press it was the “best win ever” for his ascending franchise. But the coach didn’t have long to revel in the glory of it. The next match between the two teams was only three weeks later, and Unitas was back on his game. He outplayed young Bob Griese, the AFC’s leading passer, by utilizing the Colts’ running backs and pounding the Dolphins into submission. Unitas hogged the ball so effectively in the first half that Miami had run only six total plays with four minutes remaining in the first half.
Overall, Unitas was superb. He completed sixteen of nineteen passes, for 142 yards. The Colts skated past the Dolphins 14–3.
“They just kicked the heck out of us,” Shula admitted after the game.
But there would be a third meeting between the two star-crossed franchises. In the AFC Championship Game, just a few weeks later, it was a far different story. Shula had a plan for Johnny U’s wizardry. He adjusted his defense and shut down Baltimore’s running game. The Dolphins limited the Colts to just 89 yards on the ground. On the game’s climactic play, fourth and 2 from the Dolphins 9-yard line with only six minutes left before the half, McCafferty decided to go for it instead of kicking a field goal. Unitas handed off to powerful fullback Don Nottingham, but the great Nick Buoniconti, the Dolphins’ undersize but tenacious middle linebacker, met Nottingham in the hole and squelched the drive. Without an effective running game to aid him, Unitas threw three interceptions on the day.
The Dolphins and Colts were so similar, shared so many common connections, were so focused on one another, it was inevitable that a loss of composure would eventually emerge. “Mad Dog” Mike Curtis, a star linebacker drafted and developed by Shula, was penalized 15 yards when he slammed Bob Griese to the ground. Later in the game Curtis made another tackle, this time near the Miami sideline, and got an earful from his old coach.
“He called me a [bleeping] cheap-shot artist,” Mad Dog said.
When it was all said and done the Colts were the crucible for the emerging Dolphins dynasty. Miami and Shula shut out Johnny and shut up Rosenbloom with a 21–0 victory to go to the Super Bowl. For Shula it was an incredibly satisfying victory, but it still did not exorcise his demons. The Dolphins lost the Super Bowl in embarrassing fashion to Dallas, 24–3. It was Shula’s third loss in a row in a world championship game.
But in 1972 everything changed. It started in April when the Colts waived Earl Morrall. McCafferty felt so bad about releasing a player of such sentimental importance to the franchise, he flew all the way to Earl’s home in Michigan to tell him in person. In his four seasons with Baltimore the so-called journeyman quarterback had a 22-3-1 record as a starter and appeared in two Super Bowls.
That was far from the most stunning news, however. In July, right near the beginning of training camp, Carroll Rosenbloom announced that he had traded the Colts franchise to Robert Irsay, an air-conditioning magnate from the Midwest, in exchange for the Los Angeles Rams. Irsay had only just acquired the Rams for $19 million, then the largest sum ever dished out for any professional sports franchise.
The transaction was vintage C.R. It was complex, brilliant, and, of course, calculated for Rosenbloom to come out on top. It allowed him to divest his holdings in Baltimore and acquire a far more valuable property, in a much larger market, without paying a penny in capital gains taxes. Irsay, the dupe in the scheme, came across as a rube, fleeced by a more sophisticated man.
Rosenbloom enjoyed many benefits from the deal, but perhaps the biggest one was shedding himself of Baltimore without looking like a latter-day Walter O’Malley, the demonized owner of the Dodgers who bolted Brooklyn for Los Angeles a generation earlier. Though Baltimore had offered Rosenbloom’s immigrant family safe harbor and succor, though it played a key role in building his considerable fortunes, he was eager to leave it behind. For many years he had spent most of his time in New York anyway, returning home on weekends for Colts games.
Rosenbloom found his provincial hometown confining to his expansive ambitions. He had been a critic of Memorial Stadium for many years and regarded it as a charming dump, which in fact it was. The Thirty-Third Street structure was built in haste in just six months in 1922 and had significant structural issues. He offered to build a new stadium and finance it with $15–$20 million of his own money. But local politicians propounded Memorial Stadium to him as though it were a sacred site. They rebuffed him at every turn and offered public funds only to refurbish the old structure on Thirty-Third Street.
Rosenbloom complained loudly. No stranger to exerting leverage, he threatened to move the Colts, first to Columbia, Maryland, a planned community about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, and then to Tampa, Florida. He conducted several training camps in Tampa just to drive the point home. C.R. quickly got fed up with these cat-and-mouse games.
Rosenbloom wasn’t only disenchanted with Baltimore’s politicians; his relationship with the fans was also deteriorating. Though Baltimoreans of the ’50s and ’60s were celebrated in books and movies for their intense love of the Colts, they drew the line with Rosenbloom in a way that fiercely irked him. C.R. expected the fans to pay full price for preseason-game tickets. Baltimoreans were adamant that it was an unfair practice. It became a hot point of contention between the team and town, and in 1971 the defending world champions averaged only about sixteen thousand fans per preseason game. Rosenbloom, justifiably proud of the product he had given Baltimore, took it as a slap in the face.
With C.R. in Los Angeles and Shula in Miami, it was clear that the Colts’ changes were affecting the entire league. Shula employed the old Colts playbook in Miami, and the Dolphins were quickly recognized as the best-run franchise in football. In Los Angeles the Rams’ front office operated with the same efficiency and excellence that had once characterized the Colts’ operation. With Rosenbloom running the show, the Rams instantly became Super Bowl contenders. C.R. hired Weeb Ewbank’s old assistant coach Chuck Knox, and LA posted a 12-2 record in only his second year of ownership. The Rams won six consecutive division titles in the 1970s, though they never won the Super Bowl.
In Baltimore a horror show set in. Unitas had his last big day as a pro in a September shoot-out with Joe Namath and the Jets. Unitas threw for almost 400 yards and two touchdowns, but he was outdueled by Namath, who had almost 500 yards in the air and six touchdown passes in the Jets’ 44–34 victory. Just two weeks after that thrilling and masterful performance, the Colts’ front office pressured coach McCafferty to bench Johnny U and start the young backup Marty Domres. McCafferty refused. The following week, before the Dallas game, owner Robert Irsay personally demanded McCafferty sit Unitas. Again the coach refused to comply.
So before the second Jets game McCafferty was summarily fired.
In his two full years as head coach Mac had the best winning percentage in football. He guided the Colts to the championship his first season (the only rookie coach to ever win the Super Bowl) and the AFC title game the next. Despite his many years of loyal and excellent service to the Baltimore franchise, he was, to put it delicately, out on his can.
Mac was replaced by his best friend, Colts defensive coordinator John Sandusky. Sandusky did what McCafferty refused to do and benched Unitas, even though Johnny U was leading the league with eighty-five pass completions at the time.
Unitas accepted the decision but let everyone know he wouldn’t be available for mop-up duty. Speaking to Dave Anderson of the New York Times, he said, “I’m not a clock runner outer.”
The game against the Jets at the end of the long and bizarre week was incidental to the farcical show going on in Baltimore, but it had its own twists and turns. Namath produced an important but unlikely score late in the game when one of his passes was deflected into the hands of a Jets receiver for an 83-yard touchdown.
After the game one of the Jets attempted to honor the legend on the other bench when he said that he was “glad Domres was in there, not Johnny Unitas.”
“They better be glad I wasn’t in there,” Unitas said, laughing. “I might’ve gotten lucky like Joe did.”
Despite the show of humor, it was apparent that Unitas was more and more out of step, not only with the team and its ownership but also with the new breed of players around him. The young men in the helmets weren’t fighting for respect and a paycheck anymore, like he and Raymond Berry and Shula were back in the ’50s. For the young generation it was strictly about la dolce vita, the sweet life. Johnny U asked one young Colts quarterback what the kid was hoping to get out of professional football.
“A Corvette and a German shepherd,” the aspiring player said.
Of course, the impertinent remarks of a veritable child were just a symptom of Baltimore’s problem. The Colts’ new owner was the disease. Robert Irsay clearly did not know how to run a team. Worse than that, he revealed himself as a man with serious emotional issues. His apparent substance abuse was a point of derision among the players and, eventually, found its way into the news media. The owner’s lack of sobriety was evident to all and resulted in impulsive firings, calling plays from the owner’s box, and public tantrums. When he traded for the team Irsay cited his admiration for Unitas as the key reason. But now, with Johnny U clearly on his way out the door, Irsay’s regime refused to honor a ten-year, $300,000 personal-services contract Unitas had signed under Rosenbloom. After an ugly and public spectacle, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle summoned the Colts’ lawyers and Unitas to New York and attempted to broker a settlement of the unseemly dispute.
Rozelle asked Unitas what he would take to walk away. “I’ll take $200,000 and you’ll never hear from me again,” Johnny U said. The team offered him only $50,000, and he had no real choice but to accept it. The Colts eventually unloaded Unitas on San Diego, forcing the venerable old player to uproot himself and relocate across the country. It was a terrible way to treat a man who, it could be rightly said, did more than any other to advance the entire enterprise of professional football. In a similarly crude manner, the team soon parted ways with many of its other stars. Tom Matte, Bill Curry, Mike Curtis, Bubba Smith, and Dan Sullivan, among others, were all soon Colts casualties.
It was unnecessary and debilitating to the franchise. In 1972 the Colts won just five games. It was their first losing season since 1956, the year before Unitas was the full-time starting quarterback. The next year was even worse: Baltimore won only four games. Sandusky and his entire coaching staff were fired days before Christmas. One of Shula’s assistants in Miami, Howard Schnellenberger, took the job next. It was, however, a short and unhappy marriage. Colts GM Joe Thomas fired Schnellenberger’s assistants at will. Irsay ultimately had an altercation with Schnellenberger during a game. After shouting at his coach behind a closed door, but within the hearing distance of both the players and the press, Irsay fired him on the spot and replaced him with Thomas, a man who’d spent the past fifteen years in front offices. Before Robert Irsay came on the scene, the Colts had four coaches in their entire history. In roughly two years under Irsay’s control, the Colts also had four head coaches.
But it was the departure of Unitas, of course, that caused the most stir. When he involuntarily left the Colts, it was treated as momentous news. The Sun’s fine editorial writer Theo Lippman Jr., usually preoccupied by politics, turned his pen to the tawdry spectacle and sad ending of the great quarterback in a signed editorial entitled “Sic Transit Unitas.”
Before Johnny U, “[Baltimore] was not well known in the nation at large and was, in fact, the butt of jokes where it was known,” Lippman wrote. “In the 1950s Baltimore was the Colts, and the Colts were Unitas.”
Earl Morrall resurfaced in Miami. Shula claimed him on waivers for the Dolphins and gladly paid the $100 waiver fee for him. The ancient Morrall contrasted sharply with his youthful teammates, yet he was a perfect fit for the team. When Bob Griese, the Dolphins’ brilliant young starting quarterback, suffered a serious knee injury in the season’s fifth game against the Chargers, Morrall trotted in from the sidelines, finished the victory, and then started the rest of Miami’s remaining nine games. The Dolphins won every single one of those, too. Morrall quarterbacked the team all the way to the AFC Championship Game against Chuck Noll’s Pittsburgh Steelers. Morrall started the game, while a completely healthy Griese sat on the bench and watched. The Dolphins looked listless in the first half, leaving Shula with an agonizing decision. He pulled Morrall at halftime of the 7–7 game and reinserted Griese. The future Hall of Fame quarterback sparked his teammates to a close 21–17 victory. The quarterback drama and the presence of Shula and Morrall made it all reminiscent of Super Bowl III, only this time with a happy ending. The key was that Griese was brought in early enough to make a difference and, of course, Griese was healthy.
Two weeks later Shula kept Morrall on the bench and started Griese in the Super Bowl against the Redskins. The Dolphins won that historic game and capped off the only “perfect season” in NFL history. Morrall, a striking contrast to how Unitas once handled a similar situation, demonstrated perfect comportment. He put the team ahead of his own legitimate claims and never made a stir.
Joe Namath once ticked off the names of several quarterbacks he said were better than Morrall. But when it was all said and done, and all the careers were over, Earl was statistically equal or superior to Namath in many respects. Although Joe threw more career touchdown passes, Earl threw seventy-two less career interceptions and outdistanced Joe in yards per attempt. Earl was a bigger winner, too. Morrall was 33-4-1 as a starting quarterback for Baltimore and Miami after he was “washed up.” He went to four Super Bowls and was on the winning team three times. In ’68 and ’72 Morrall was the key man on two of the most memorable and important teams the league has ever seen.
Joe Namath, for all his star power, never returned to the big game again after his scintillating performance in Super Bowl III.
As Johnny U waned in Baltimore, Shula ascended in Miami. His achievement of a perfect 17-0 season has never been matched. The singular accomplishment made Shula a media rock star, and the newspapers couldn’t attach enough superlatives to his name. None of this was lost on Unitas, who couldn’t believe all of the hype. Every time he heard the name of his old nemesis, he’d say, “Oh, you mean the geeeeniussss.” He’d play out the key word for an impossibly long time to enhance the comedic effect.
While the Colts franchise collapsed, its executives, coaches, and players from the 1960s dominated the NFL for many years to come. In the 1970s Shula, McCafferty, or Noll was the head coach in eight of the ten Super Bowls. They won seven of them. Red Miller, a line coach under McCafferty and Sandusky, was the losing coach in Super Bowl XII when the Cowboys defeated his “Orange Crush” Broncos. Later on the New York Giants named George Young general manager. Young, once a Colts assistant hired by Shula, hired former Colts receiver Ray Perkins to be his head coach in New York. Perkins’s staff included future head coaches Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick, and Romeo Crennel. When Perkins left to take the head-coaching position at the University of Alabama, Young promoted Parcells to his first head-coaching job, drafted Lawrence Taylor, and assembled a squad that won two Super Bowls. In 1985 Johnny U’s favorite target and his best friend, Raymond Berry, coached the New England Patriots to a victory over Shula’s Dolphins in the AFC Championship Game before losing to the Bears in the Super Bowl. Colts center Bill Curry became a head coach at his alma mater, Georgia Tech; later on he succeeded Perkins at Alabama and then took the top job in Kentucky. Curry finally ended his career back in Atlanta as the inaugural coach at Georgia State.
The Colts’ talent diaspora was incredibly long lasting and influential. It brought success to corners of the league where it had never existed before, even as it drained and depleted Baltimore’s terminal franchise.
In 1979 Carroll Rosenbloom drowned while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean near his home in Florida. C.R. was by all accounts an excellent swimmer, and he was known to prefer the surf to a pool for exercise and relaxation. The official story was that he was caught in the undertow on a day when the water was unusually choppy and rough. There was, of course, speculation that his drowning was not an accident. The life he led made the nefarious plausible. He gambled on football and associated with underworld figures. He abandoned Baltimore and the Colts to a lout. He threatened to move the Rams’ franchise in search of a better stadium. He used women. He bullied adversaries. He was said to have stolen the Colts’ Super Bowl trophy, requesting to borrow it for an event and then never returning it. He left behind a fortune and a complicated estate. His primary heir, his wife, Georgia, remarried only a little more than a year after his death. Her next husband, Dominic Frontierre, went to jail for selling the Rams’ allotment of Super Bowl tickets and then pocketing the cash. Soon after Georgia assumed control of the team, she fired C.R.’s son Steven Rosenbloom, who had long been his father’s right hand in the football business.
Had C.R.’s death been a crime, there certainly could have been a long line of suspects and motivations. Carroll died with a lot of money, but he couldn’t take any of it with him where he was going.
Whatever wealth Unitas and Shula amassed out of football, the greater assets were the legacies they earned. The excellence with which they practiced the craft, the innovation that they brought to the field, their work ethic, and the red-hot competitiveness raised the game to an impossibly high level of play. What they created was so compelling, it quickly disappeared, giving way to something that was more processed and manufactured. The game soon went from grass to “synthetic turf.” It went from crumbling old baseball stadiums to publicly financed football palaces. It went from being a longed-for treat every Sunday to a Monday- and Thursday-night TV show. It went from a championship game played in front of real fans in the snow and the rain and the mud and the blood to a Super Bowl, a neutral-field warm-weather extravaganza wrapped around a sometimes obscene halftime show. The football players and owners of the ’60s created plebeian theater, a stage where the ending was never scripted. But so much interest, power, and, especially, money came spilling into that theater, it soon became a toy for oligarchs.
Professional football in the 1960s took a short, unsentimental journey from authentic to decadent. The players became rich even as the game broke their perfect bodies and its skull-cracking intensity robbed them of their souls. “Our helmets,” Browns receiver Gary Collins lamented many years later, “were nothing more than tomato cans with chinstraps.” Earl Morrall, who survived twenty years in the league, was returned to an almost childlike state in his old age. At the end of his life the magnificent athlete could barely walk, shuffling along with the aid of his loving wife. His thoughts and memories were much quicker than his legs, but only as they flew away from his mind.
“My recall button don’t work too well,” Earl would say over and over as a pat reply to any question about his life.
Carroll Rosenbloom’s disturbing legacy is swept out of sight in Baltimore and in the rest of the NFL. He is the owner with the highest winning percentage in league history, but he is not in the Hall of Fame. His many brilliant business maneuvers on behalf of the league go unnoticed.
Unitas and Shula built legacies that were bigger and stronger than any of the wealth they generated. One went on to recognition among the elite coaches of the game; the other sits atop most lists of the greatest players ever. Unitas and Shula gave football a facade of grim importance. During their watch the NFL became a potent force in entertainment, fashion, and even serious political discourse. Shula’s inability to win the big game in Baltimore, his hasty departure, and his huge success at his next destination all buried his name in the city that first brought him to national attention. There are no Baltimore memorials to his incredible legacy, no tangible signs of the extraordinarily driven young man who achieved so many great and unprecedented things.
Unitas is entirely different. Johnny U was a national hero before anyone even knew Shula’s name. In Baltimore he is accorded more civic respect and name recognition than the heroes of Fort McHenry who saved America from foreign invasion. The football stadium at Towson University in North Baltimore bears his name. At the NFL stadium, downtown, there is a statue of Johnny U that greets football fans at the main entrance. A few years ago the Ravens, Baltimore’s successor team, removed Unitas from his pedestal and pushed him aside to make room for a likeness of Ray Lewis, the Ravens’ great linebacker. It stands side by side with Unitas. Lewis, a mixed bag of a man, was once the subject of a murder investigation. The contrasts between Unitas and Lewis and the way they are depicted are striking. Unitas is frozen in the throes of battle, his helmet snuggly on his head, the ball cocked behind his ear. His eyes peer downfield, searching for the open man. In Lewis’s sculpture the linebacker does not wear his helmet. He is not in a ballplayer’s stance. He isn’t tackling anyone. He is instead memorialized in game introductions, doing a dance. His impossibly muscled body is contorted as he thrusts his hips and pelvis toward the sky. Lewis isn’t playing; he’s posturing.
The contrast is a reminder of ever-changing tastes and mores, but it also says a lot about where the game went, and went wrong, in the half century since Unitas walked away from it.
When Baltimore lost its team, the Irsay family stealing it away to Indianapolis one freezing and sleeting night in 1984, it was apparent just how unsparing and unsentimental the league was. The city clung to the belief that its passion for the Colts and its place in the history of the league were enough to sustain it. It was an incredibly naive, almost laughable notion. In the twenty-first century the league regularly chooses stadium deals over its fans. For years it has considered strategic relocations from stalwart cities like Oakland, Buffalo, and Minneapolis to glitzy international venues like Toronto, London, Las Vegas, and Mexico City.
Eventually, almost everyone and everything connected to the Colts’ great legacy packed up and took off. Weeb retired to Ohio. Charley Winner and Earl Morrall both settled in Florida. Chuck Noll went to Pittsburgh. Raymond Berry, after coaching around the league, relocated to Tennessee. Jimmy Orr golfs every day in St. Simons, Georgia, the beautiful southern hamlet where Jim Brown was born into segregation.
Carroll Rosenbloom, an individualist to the end, flouted Jewish proscriptions and was cremated and then scattered to the winds like a thousand unanswered questions.
Only Johnny U regarded the compact between city and team as inviolable. “He never wanted to leave Baltimore,” his daughter Jan said. And he never did. After his short, embarrassing stint in San Diego, he quickly returned to Maryland and lived out the remainder of his life. He died on September 11, 2002, the victim of a heart attack. Today the man so associated with the air mingles with the soil in the town he loved so deeply.
Baltimore has moved on in every conceivable way since Unitas’s era. It’s a different place than the segregationist “Charm City” where the old Colts played, but it’s still on the cutting edge of American racial mistrust. The people root for a new team in a different stadium. There isn’t a lot of recognition for the old Colts in the new venue.
In his decision to permanently settle in Baltimore, Unitas bequeathed the city an eternal connection with his indomitable spirit. Even Shula, sitting in his gilded manse in Miami, could peer through the gauze of time and clearly see just how much that meant.
“Unitas was the toughest guy mentally and physically I ever coached,” Shula said. “Griese was a great field general, and Marino was the best pure passer I think who’s ever played the game. But Unitas was just so tough. They’d knock him down, and he’d get up bloodied and battered and throw the next pass for a touchdown.
“He was that kind of a competitor,” Coach Shula said. “He was that kind of a warrior.”