Finding Unitas and Shula’s Colts was like going back to the Creation. These men played in the 1960s when the game came of age. At the start of their decade pro football was a highly risky business proposition and a distant second to baseball as America’s favorite sport. By the close of the ’60s pro football was big business and a national obsession.
To a large extent Unitas and Shula were at the center of this transition. Despite their inability to take the title, they were excessive in the cause of victory and together created an organization that was the very hardest one to beat.
When I traveled the country to find and converse with their colleagues and cronies, it wasn’t only to unlock the mysteries of their tense, maybe hateful, relationship. It was also to understand the forces of their era and the professional football phenomenon that they certainly created and that continues to this day.
One thing I found out is that old football players all have two things in common. One is an unusually large and strong pair of hands. The other is that they all have wives who may have a few accumulated years but who still pack a glamorous wallop.
Just about every Colt I spoke to expressed an affection and loyalty for both Shula and Unitas. But their personal effects told a different story. Every single player or former coach I visited had a picture displayed somewhere in his home or office of himself with number 19. It was clear that even these men, each one an idol to countless others, felt a certain amount of veneration for Johnny U, and him alone.
It’s not too often in any line of work that men revere one of their own contemporaries. But all of the Colts I spoke to felt that way about Unitas. He gave even them the aura or mystique of being connected to someone or something transcendent.
I went to New England, where I found the magnificent old guard Dan Sullivan. Sully, as his teammates called him, lives a happy life not far from Walden Pond. He spends his days with his wife, and the two of them care for their daughter, a very sweet young lady who happens to be mentally challenged.
After his playing days Dan was an executive with Mrs. Filbert’s Margarine, a Baltimore-based business. He did well in that career, and today he enjoys a comfortable retirement. Belying the stereotype of the big, brutish lineman, Sully is an extremely thoughtful and articulate man. He speaks with a New England accent. Among his memorabilia are two photos of Unitas. One, a large print, shows Johnny U’s last great moment as a Colt. The quarterback had just thrown his final touchdown pass for Baltimore, and he and Sullivan are shaking hands.
Sully also has a snapshot of Unitas on a tractor cutting his grass.
“He came here for a visit once and got bored, so he went out and cut my grass,” Sullivan remembered. With a great deal of affection he also recalled the quarterback’s rapport and kindness with his disabled daughter.
When I met Bill Curry in his downtown Atlanta office, he was getting ready for his last season at Georgia State. Curry was the Panthers’ founding head coach. In his playing days Curry had been a magnificent and technically sound football player. He was also unusually connected to football history. He played for both Vince Lombardi and Don Shula. He played in the first-ever Super Bowl with the Packers and the most famous Super Bowl, the one against Joe Namath and the Jets. He protected Bart Starr and Johnny Unitas. He went head-to-head with guys like Ray Nitschke and Dick Butkus. He seemed too gentle, too refined, to tangle with those kinds of animals. But he did, and he usually came out on the winning side to boot. When he was a Packer he beat the Colts every single time he played them. And when he was a Colt he beat the Packers every time.
The best and happiest years of Curry’s career were undoubtedly in Baltimore. He liked and admired Shula but had only a grudging respect for Lombardi. Nevertheless, when I saw him, he wore his Green Bay ring from Super Bowl I.
As a boy Curry decided he didn’t even want to be a football player, but his father made him play and the game somehow became his life. He played and succeeded at the highest levels. He coached it. He talked about it on TV as an analyst. And he even wrote about football in two books. Curry was a mature man the day I saw him, but he still had a youthful and trim appearance and was still excited as ever by his own memories.
In many respects the most fascinating man I met with was coach Charley Winner. In an earlier age Winner could only be described as a “dear person.” He was extraordinarily polite, likable, funny, and intelligent. As a coach and front-office man for so many decades, he was connected to just about everyone and everything from football’s golden age. He worked for Paul Brown, Weeb Ewbank, and Don Shula. He was professionally connected to Otto Graham, Johnny Unitas, and Joe Namath. He personally coached Don Shula. He was also the mastermind behind some legendary defenses. In the ’60s he had an easy job. All he had to do was shut down the Packers’ sweep, contain Jim Brown, solve Bobby Layne and Y. A. Tittle, and outthink George Halas. If he could do all of that, he could survive.
He must have accomplished all that because when I met him, he was relaxed and happy and near the age of ninety. He was still possessed of a keen mind and a body so trim and athletic that he still played tennis every day in the broiling Florida sun.
Winner told me quite a bit about how the great Colts teams of the ’50s were formed and what it was like the day Johnny U showed up on the scene. He told me all about the forces that sunk his father-in-law, Weeb Ewbank, and the transition to Shula’s bellicose reign.
Tom Matte, the great Colts running back, offered me more candor than any man I met. He inveterately told the truth, no matter how painful, and did everything he could to get you to a deeper understanding of personalities and root causes. He was also extremely profane and funny.
Matte was so dedicated to film study as a player, his old projector and reels of game film were still sitting at the ready in his library.
Tom and I conversed out back on the patio of his rustic home. He was under no illusions; nevertheless, he was somewhat distressed about his reputation as a player. He felt it was unfairly fading away with time, as evidenced by the fact that the Baltimore Sun had just written a series about the “175 greatest Baltimore-area athletes” and Matte was left off the list.
It was, in fact, a terrible injustice and a sign more about how the city had moved on from the old Colts than it was about Matte’s ability. Tom was, in fact, a superb football player who was probably the Colts’ best offensive weapon in the late ’60s. His performance as the emergency quarterback who almost defeated Lombardi with barely any preparation time still stands as one of the gutsiest and most compelling performances in all of football history. There is simply nothing else to compare to it. His team failed in Super Bowl III, but had Matte been on the winning side, he could have easily been considered the MVP of the game.
The wide receivers I spoke to were an interesting contrast in styles and personalities. The first one was Raymond Berry, the great Hall of Famer and my own father’s idol. Raymond agreed to speak to me only because Jan Unitas, Johnny U’s daughter, implored him to do it. Our interview was on the phone, not in person, and my subject matter irritated him. He was a best friend with Unitas, and he admired and respected Shula. He felt that exploring their relationship was an inherently negative exercise, and he didn’t want any part of it.
“Don’t ask me questions about that,” he said, “because I don’t want to be on your tape recorder saying ‘No comment’ twenty times.” With that rule in place we carried on and had a cordial and educational conversation. I learned a lot about Don Shula, the athlete and teammate, from Berry. And I learned a lot about what made the old Colts tick as a brilliant team.
I went all the way to Jimmy Orr’s house in St. Simons, Georgia, to interview him. St. Simons is a beautiful part of the United States, and it seems to sit on a shelf that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, where it is kissed by the salty waves. Jimmy played golf every single day in that beautiful setting. When he wasn’t playing golf, he watched it on TV. Fun and friendliness and manly companionship come naturally to Orr, and he invited me to sleep over at his house. I accepted.
The Orrs and I went out for dinner and drinks at two different country clubs. Jimmy lived with his wife, a beautiful woman, in their magnificent home. Mrs. Orr was sweet, and, like Jimmy, she spoke in a thick southern vernacular.
Going out for drinks with Jimmy was cool. In the opulent settings he frequented, it was like going out with the Great Gatsby. Because he was a famous and old-school carouser, I enjoyed the feeling of being out with Mickey Mantle or Joe Namath in their prime. Jimmy hadn’t played ball in forty or so years, but he still had the swagger of a big timer.
When I visited Gary Collins, the Cleveland pass catcher who ate up the Colts in the ’64 championship game, it was as opposite to the Orr experience as it could be. I met up with Gary in his ordinary middle-class home in suburban Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Jimmy golfed his days away, while Collins cut grass every day for his son’s landscaping business. If that seems undignified for a former championship-game MVP, Collins doesn’t care. He loves to stay in shape, and he enjoys hard work. He still loves sports and watches football, basketball, and baseball obsessively in the rare moments he is relaxing in his plush easy chair.
Collins is an utterly unsentimental man and doesn’t dwell on his football accomplishments. He sees them as part of a distant past. “Am I pissed off that nobody knows anyone from the Browns but Jim Brown? No,” he said.
As a former Cleveland Brown living on the outskirts of Steelers country, he takes some abuse but doesn’t care. “My neighbor who lives down the street, who is a Steelers fan, every time the Steelers beat the Browns, which is all the time, he puts Steelers shit all over my mailbox. I don’t follow the Browns. I don’t give a shit about the Browns. It’s something I did, it’s gone, and I have no loyalties. It was ten years’ quick bullshit.”
The most famous men I spoke to, of course, were Joe Namath and Don Shula. Namath, as you can imagine, was fun to talk to. He is witty and feisty. He’s a modern man, but also a relic from the ’60s. He kept saying to me, “Jack, Jack, Jack, you have to remember I’m a Gemini.” That was his way of explaining a particular behavior or point of view. Throughout our conversation I got on his nerves a few times, but it quickly passed. Incredibly, he still held an old AFL grudge for the NFL. In recounting the stories of Super Bowl III, and especially explaining his criticisms of Earl Morrall, he pointed to the fact that the two leagues were hot rivals. I told him I knew that and that some of the Colts I spoke to still held a grudge for him. His answer: “Yeah, I still kind of hate all the guys who beat me, too.”
Coach Shula was extremely kind to me. He immediately took my call and set up a face-to-face interview in his home. I was surprised when I saw him. He had aged, obviously, and had white hair and used a walker. His memory alternated from excellent to a little forgetful. He could remember with perfect clarity a catch his son made for the Colts in a preseason game thirty years earlier, but had a little trouble recalling Bubba Smith and whether drafting Smith had been a success or failure.
In his long career Shula matched wits with Vince Lombardi, Paul Brown, George Halas, Chuck Noll, Bill Walsh, George Allen, Tom Landry, Bill Parcells, and Bill Belichick. In all he went to seven NFL Championship or Super Bowl games. He developed three Hall of Fame quarterbacks—Unitas, Griese, and Marino. The list of historic games he coached in is almost unbelievable: the ’64 championship game, the ’65 playoff game against Lombardi in which Matte played quarterback, Super Bowl III, the “Sea of Hands” game, the “Snow Plow” game against New England, and on and on. His work with Earl Morrall (“All he did was win for me”), elevating a journeyman to a four–Super Bowl quarterback, is one of the great accomplishments in the history of the game by any coach.
My visit with Earl Morrall was the most poignant I made. He passed away not long after I interviewed him. His infirmities were evident, as the once magnificent athlete walked and spoke slowly. He could have been a poster child for the damage an NFL career does to the mind and the body. Robbed of many of his faculties, he was still abundant in character. It was obvious how much love he had for his wife and also what a good-natured and decent man he was. Imagine that. Earl Morrall was the toughest of men and he played the most violent of games, but as the memories of it had all faded away, the one thing he retained was love.