It couldn’t have helped Shula’s disposition that a previous iteration of the Baltimore Colts had already failed, in the AAFC and then for one awful season in the NFL, going 1–11 in 1950. That the name got another chance was the doing of NFL commissioner Bert Bell. The former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, Bell had a fondness for the Baltimore–Philly corridor and the Colt fan base, which had supported the soon-defunct team with fan clubs, marching bands, and cheerleaders. When the Dallas Texans went under in 1952, Bell sought out clothing millionaire Carroll Rosenbloom, a former teammate at Penn, to take over that team and move it to Baltimore. He did, for a mere $15,000. Needing warm bodies, Rosenbloom made the mass trade with the Browns—the biggest ever in terms of the number of players moved (the famous 18-player deal in 1989 that sent Herschel Walker from Dallas to Minnesota involved mainly draft picks). Paul Brown leapt at the chance to unload ten players and get five good ones back, including tackle Mike McCormack, meaning that two future Hall of Famers were involved in the swap. McCormack, a former star at Kansas, would become a Hall of Fame lineman for Brown, and then turn to coaching. The other: Don Shula.
Brown said he was loath to part with Shula. As the Columbus Dispatch reported, he relented because he had drafted Ohio State’s All-Big Ten defensive back Fred Bruney. “I sincerely believe Fred Bruney can make our team and be a help to us,” he explained.1 In the end, Bruney washed out after a few weeks before he, too, was traded, to the 49ers (later to become a longtime NFL assistant coach). Shula, was who nearing completion of his graduate degree, didn’t want to make a decision about his future until he could speak with the Colts’ general manager. He picked up the phone and called Don Kellett, who had been given the job by Rosenbloom even though his only experience in sports was as an infielder with the Boston Red Sox, after which he was a sportscaster. When Shula got through to him, he concluded that the affable, low-key Kellett was “quite impressive.” Kellett gave Shula a $6,500 salary, a $1,000 raise.
When Shula arrived at the Colts’ summer camp in Westminster, Maryland, he had gone from the top to the bottom. While Brown had paid his men $40 a week during the preseason—teams weren’t obligated to pay players anything before the season began—all Kellett could manage was $15. Most Colts felt like mercenaries in a profession that, despite the highly professional methods of Brown, Halas, Parker, et al., was still often a freak show. One of Shula’s most memorable teammates, defensive tackle Art Donovan, was a Bronx native and the son of a boxing referee of the same name. Portly and with voluminous appetites, he wore the nickname “Fatso,” yet his proud gluttony did nothing to stem him from terrorizing offenses, an attribute that would get him into the Hall of Fame. Others with his dimensions usually had less ability, and waddled about, mostly looking for a fight.
That sort of chain-gang mentality was not frowned upon by most owners, or by Bell. The professorial Brown notwithstanding, the league was marketed similarly to pro wrestling—which was winning enormous ratings on early TV. The biggest names in football were often talented players like Donovan, but with near-homicidal instincts and appropriate nicknames. Hardy “Hatchet Man” Brown used his shoulder to clock guys in the head. Ed Sprinkle was called “The Claw.” The Eagles’ defensive line and linebackers were called the “Suicide Seven.” Shula, of course, was well aware of offensive players who were also headhunters. All that just came with the sport. Increasing sophistication was welcome, but sportsmanship was meaningless once the kickoff went into the air. Within this framework, pro football was the alter ego of baseball, which was historically resonant, well manicured, and undeniably the country’s main leisure-time attraction, the New York Yankees drawing comparisons to IBM and General Motors for their machinelike perfection in a culture of courtly manners fending off loud, unruly new norms. This was an effective con, inasmuch as the beau ideal of impressionable Baby Boomer children, Mickey Mantle, lived off the field inside a whiskey bottle. Still, while the national pastime was rising to its apogee, the muddy-faced, bloody-nosed identity of pro football was more in line with the changing of the culture than most thought. And what Don Shula didn’t know was that his ragtag team was going to be his ticket to places he couldn’t have imagined in 1953.
The Colts’ rookie coach, 47-year-old Keith Molesworth, had played quarterback for Papa Bear Halas’s Chicago Bears in the same backfield as Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski. Seeing what he had now, he grimaced. He had no serviceable quarterback; the starter was the journeyman Fred Enke. Molesworth did have some solid pieces, like Donovan, Gino Marchetti, and Bill Pellington. The son of Italian immigrants, Marchetti had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and had been a star defensive end on the undefeated 1951 University of San Francisco team. Pellington, a willowy outside linebacker, was a tough Jersey boy, throwing his forearm around like a billy club and making horse-collar tackles that would eventually be banned. When Pellington tried out with the Browns in ’52, Paul Brown was so aghast at his violence, he cut him the first week. Molesworth believed he needed such feral men to compete.
Shula fit the bill, and he gained attention early. The Colts’ defensive secondary coach, Russ Murphy, wanted to play a Paul Brown–style defense but had no idea how, so Shula found himself tutoring his coach. In late August, the Associated Press ran a photo of Shula in a preseason game, reaching way up to deflect a pass, the caption reading, SHULA SPOILS IT.2 On opening day, he was the starter at right cornerback against Halas’s declining Bears, in the Colts’ horseshoe-shaped Memorial Stadium. Erected a few years earlier on 33rd Street, near Johns Hopkins University, the stadium’s capacity was in the process of being increased to 47,000, mainly in a bid to lure baseball’s St. Louis Browns to Baltimore for the ’54 season. (They would be renamed the Orioles.) But even the bottom-feeding Colts had no trouble filling ther still-under-construction stands. On September 27, they drew an impressive 23,715, who celebrated when the Colts won 13–9.
After they split the next four games, bringing in a full house of 34,031 against Washington, and seeing several inspired performances, people were starting to take notice. The secondary, anchored by Shula, had dubbed itself the “Radar Corps,” for the way it closed in on passes. At 3–2, the team was a Western Conference contender, briefly. With a paltry offense, however, they lost their last seven games. As Shula recalled, “The Radar Corps cracked.”3 At 3–9, the Colts finished the year as a doormat, last in the league in both offense and defense. But they did lead the league with 56 fumble recoveries and interceptions, and Donovan, safety Tom Keane, and guard Dick Barwegen went to the Pro Bowl. Shula made strides of his own. He reeled in three interceptions, as did Carl Taseff. It was enough to convince Shula he needed to stick with it. And as his life came into focus, a woman came into the picture for the first time.
Back in Painesville for the off-season, he supplemented his income by selling cars at the Stanton Motors dealership, the kind of thing most professional athletes in that era had to do. He was at a bowling alley in his off time when he struck up a conversation with a swarthy, spunky 20-year-old woman on the next lane. Her name was Dorothy Bartish. For many years, he would say he met her for the first time that night. However, in 1987, he admitted they’d actually met in Catholic school. As he related it, “I was in the eighth grade at St. Mary’s School, and she was in the fourth, and we boys did something we shouldn’t [have]. This little gal squealed to the nuns.”4 He said this in a lighthearted manner, and never went any further about what it was he had done, and neither did Dorothy. Whatever it was, she was forgiving. That night at the bowling alley, they had a drink in the lounge, though she was under drinking age, and then began dating. The first date was at a dance club—her idea. “I was very reluctant to dance,” he recalled. “But when she got me on the dance floor, she made things easy, made me feel comfortable. We hit it off.”5
She had led a hardscrabble life similar to his. Her mother died giving birth to her, and her Hungarian father worked on the railroad and was rarely home, so she was entrusted to her maternal grandmother, a stern woman who watched her every move. When Dorothy introduced him to her grandmother, Shula said, “she was a bit cold toward me,”6 because she regarded Hungarians as layabouts. This caused a clash between her and Dorothy, who vowed that if her granny didn’t give permission to marry him, they should elope. Shula would never have done that, given that, for him, marriage was a sacred covenant, blessed by a priest and Dan and Mary Shula. For now, they carried on their careers, she as a music teacher at a Cleveland high school, and he spending the entire autumn away from her, but telling friends he had found the girl he would marry.
That winter, Molesworth was out as coach, kicked upstairs to be personnel director when Carroll Rosenbloom hired Paul Brown’s 46-year-old defensive line coach, Wilbur “Weeb” Ewbank. A tiny man with a pug nose, Ewbank, who had also been Brown’s assistant at Great Lakes, was the rare coach who could teach Brown’s complex defense, which relied on reading “keys,” the subtle moves or body language of offensive players that tipped off plays. He had also been Brown’s personnel director, so integral to the team that when the Colt job came up, Brown warned him not to take it. He did let Ewbank go, but not before the draft, during which Ewbank stealthily passed notes to Baltimore sportswriter John Steadman to relay to Don Kellett about who the Colts should pick. When Ewbank finally got to Baltimore, he brought with him another Ohio native and student of the Paul Brown method, Joe Thomas, who’d been coaching at Indiana, as his defensive coach.
Most of the Colts could barely stand Ewbank. Like Brown, he was dour, repetitious, demanding of absolute perfection. He could scream himself red-faced at players who screwed up and was accused of playing favorites with the stars. He was also a bit ditzy. One early game in Baltimore, he insisted the team needed a field goal to tie—when the Colts actually led. Bill Pellington had to scream at him, “Weeb, for God’s sake, we’re fucking winning by three points!”7 Still, if you mastered his tedious playbook, good things happened. And the Colts’ draft picks that year, secretly made by Ewbank, were inspired. He chose Baylor quarterback Cotton Davidson first, who didn’t do much that year, but down the list were some amazing stock futures: defensive end Ordell Braase, guard Alex Sandusky, and—at number 232, in the 20th round—SMU receiver Raymond Berry, whose glue-like hands and balletic feet would take him to the Hall of Fame and a long coaching career. Neither Berry nor Braase could play right away in the NFL because their college eligibility wasn’t done. But Ewbank knew that Paul Brown was high on both, and he secured them to keep them out of Brown’s clutches—Berry until 1955, Braase until 1957. They, and Sandusky, would play 38 years, every single one with the Baltimore Colts.
Ewbank also made a trade for Don Joyce, a behemoth defensive end who also was a pro wrestler. Art Donovan called him a “madman,” one who solidified the line. But Fatso had less than good vibes about the new coach, saying years later, “Weeb was a screwball who held insane grudges. [He] thought he was smarter than God, and deep down inside was one mean sonofabitch . . . a tremendous coaching talent and a rat bastard.” That first exhibition season, he said, Ewbank intentionally put an injured rookie lineman in a game just so he could say the kid wasn’t playing hard and could cut him. Ewbank only encouraged the wild-man tendencies of his toughest guys, who blew off steam in endless excursions to the local bars, with no hedging for the curfew. Shula fell in with that hard-core group. In 1995, Paul Zimmerman wrote of that lesson in manly education:
[Shula] hung around with the rougher elements on the team—Gino Marchetti, Artie Donovan, Don Joyce, Bill Pellington—and choirboys didn’t survive in that company. “We’d be drinking in Baltimore, and we’d have to drive back to camp, in Westminster, Maryland, to beat the curfew,” Shula says. “One night I said, ‘C’mon, I’ll drive us back,’ because I was the one who was sober. One guy grabbed the keys out of my hand and said, ‘We ain’t going anywhere.’ And we weren’t—until they were good and ready. When I finally got us back, we’d missed bed check by five minutes, and the whole bunch of us got fined.
“Some rough guys there, but you know, you could learn a lot from some of those old players. . . . Gino Marchetti revolutionized defensive-end play. Most of them were bull rushers in those days, but Gino was a grabber and thrower, a guy with moves who’d blow by the tackle so fast sometimes that he’d never touch him. There were guys who’d play against Gino and say, ‘Joyce is much tougher. Look, my uniform isn’t even dirty.’ But Gino got a lot of quarterbacks and running backs dirty.”8
Tough as they were, the ’54 campaign was no more rewarding for the Colts than the year before. In the opener against the Rams, Shula learned on the very first play what it felt like to be publicly razzed by Ewbank. The Rams tried an old trick—the hideout play, which was soon to be banned. They huddled with 10 men while an 11th, receiver Skeets Quinlan, seemed to be jogging off the field. But he dallied and, at the snap, took off down the sideline. Ewbank, seeing Quinlan going and Van Brocklin loading up to throw to him, yelled to Shula, who was slow to see the fake-out. Quinlan caught the pass and ran 80 yards for a touchdown. Four decades later, Shula was still livid. “Damn right I remember it,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Where the hell is the Dutchman throwing the ball?’ ” But he believed it wasn’t Quinlan who beat him. “It was Bobby Boyd who caught that pass. The track guy they used to bring in as third wideout. Not Quinlan.” No matter that official league stats disagree, or that Boyd had four catches that day, the longest for 45 yards. Shula would never budge on what his memory told him. And neither would Ewbank let him off the hook for getting suckered, which built static between them.
Shula was always publicly kind to Ewbank; in his memoir, he wrote that Weeb was “a very meticulous person who put in a great deal of time in planning and actually was the coach that the Colts needed at the time.”9 Not that it seemed so clear at the time. They won the rematch with the Rams, 22–21, but finished 3–9 again. Shula turned in another fine year, intercepting five passes. But the confusion of trying to play the Paul Brown short-pass attack was a disaster, the team coming in last in offense.
Around the game, the sense was that the Colts were a dangerous-but-erratic, semi-psychotic bunch. Shula was leavening as a player of importance, never to make the Pro Bowl but gaining a reputation among hard-core fans as a hard hitter smart enough to be an adjunct coach, a lowercase analog of Tom Landry’s role with the Giants in the defensive backfield. Shula was actually one up on Landry; as Zimmerman wrote in hindsight, Shula was “the only defensive halfback (they didn’t call them cornerbacks then) in the league to call defensive signals.” John Steadman, who began covering the Colts in 1952 and then witnessed every pro game in Baltimore until his death in 2001, moonlighted as the Colts’ publicist for much of the ’50s. He recalled Shula as “one of the finest tacklers in the game. If you wanted to run a clinic on how to tackle, you’d get Don Shula.”10 Donovan had his own coda. Shula, he said, “would throw an elbow into a receiver’s eye as soon as look at him.”11
In ’55, when Shula was re-signed, with another $500 raise, the Colts had the first and third picks in the first round and drafted Oregon’s All-American quarterback, George Shaw, and Wisconsin’s Heisman Trophy winner, fullback Alan Ameche, the latter dubbed “The Horse.” He would gallop for a league-high 961 yards and nine touchdowns, and make first-team All-Pro for the first of four straight seasons. The Colts won their first three games, but Shaw never got the hang of the T formation in the pros. And Shula, who had five early interceptions, went down for the season on November 20 after breaking his iron jaw against the Rams. The Colts finished 5–6–1, improvement enough to be considered progress and for Shula to become quite comfortable within the gallery of talented goofballs on the team. Tales would be told at future banquets about how Shula, Taseff, and Pellington, on the street after a sudsy dinner in Green Bay, saw a taxi, its motor running, but no driver. Freezing in the cold, they decided to hijack the cab, Pellington putting on the driver’s cap he found on the front seat. Shula’s winking skew of the theft was that “we really didn’t steal it. We just borrowed it,” but he added, “In the early years, there wasn’t anything we didn’t do.”12 Soon, Shula, Donovan and Pellington rented a townhouse in the Campus Hill section; when Pellington honed his wrestling holds on the other two, it left expensive furniture in pieces all over the living room.
Even during those “Animal House” escapades, he was still Shula, the autocrat, the almost-priest, the blue-nosed scold with a semblance of propriety between shots of gin. Donovan told of a postgame party at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel where Shula, who was nicknamed “Shoes” by the team for the alliteration and the spiffy spit shine on his loafers, came bounding in with a woman he had picked up and was “strutting around the room” with her. Then the woman lit up a cigar, causing Shula, a believer that women had clear, submissive roles—and that a man with a fiancée could step out on her if he chose—blew his top. As Donovan recalled, “Jesus, he kicked her right in the ass and threw her out of the hotel. I thought he was going to kill her.”13
Watching him in those years in Baltimore was enough to convince Fatso that Shula would make a great general. If so, it was more like Patton than Eisenhower—sharp and mindful of rules, but not overly concerned if he bent them. And he wasn’t the only young man on the rise with that MO. During the ’53 season, a Brooklyn-born sharpie who had talked himself into coaching the cadets at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, did some scouting work for Ewbank and began to hang around the team, bragging on himself as a pigskin seer. That guy was Al Davis.
Shula immediately distrusted Davis, whose loyalties could shift on a dime, but he wasn’t the only one Shula had his misgivings about. He never quite melded with Carroll Rosenbloom. “C.R.,” as he was called, had the cauliflower ears and nose of a boxer and the daring of a riverboat gambler. When his father died, he took over the old man’s clothing business in Baltimore and sold it to invest in more profitable businesses. After buying the Colts, he put together local TV and radio deals that would be the model for league-wide advances in coverage and sat on the owners’ committee that made the rules. His teams never had a money-losing season, and, feeding on power, he was tight with Joe Kennedy, father of the senator who would soon become president. Yet he could be vindictive, and years later, a fellow owner described him as “an odd person,” another as “one complex individual. Very smart, very tough, often very nasty. He always gave you the impression that, if you crossed him, he was capable of slitting your throat, then donating your blood to the Red Cross blood drive.”14
Yet most of his players loved him. Many of them were set up in off-season jobs in his or friends’ companies, and he kicked in bonuses for big plays; after the ’54 season, he gave each player $500. He would also be instrumental in getting the league to accept a players’ union. Indeed, parlaying his closeness with Commissioner Bell, C.R. moved up rapidly within the league power structure, even as he waded into deeper waters—an apt metaphor, as it would turn out—by falling in with gamblers.15 Shula, who generally clashed with men who had oversized egos—witness Paul Brown—at best tolerated Rosenbloom, and certainly didn’t fawn over him, something C.R. craved. The owner, for his part, liked Shula’s fearless instincts and leadership, but, like Brown, found him abrasive, distant, too calculating for his station. Mutual respect was about the best they could muster, for better or worse.
Adapting to the TV age, uniforms were becoming sleeker and players encouraged to look less like genital-scratching gorillas, so that they, too, could be seen in cigarette and shaving cream commercials. In ’55, the leatherhead era gave way to the era of most players wearing fiberglass and plastic helmets. That year, Paul Brown hired the Riddell company to develop padded headgear specifically for the Browns, including one or two metal bars protecting players’ faces. Within months, every team wore the masks, though a handful of rebels like Bobby Layne refused. Not that a helmet, with or without a mask, could keep a guy from getting his face smashed. In one Colts game, George Shaw’s ankles were held by Ed Sprinkle while another guy caved in Shaw’s mouth with his elbow, knocking out all of his teeth and leaving him bloodied. Shula, who gave as good as he got, was covering Tom Fears in a 1956 game when Fears barked at him, “Shoes, goddammit, keep your mitts off me!” The next time down, Donovan recalled, Fears “coldcocked” him “with an elbow that turned his lights out. Smashed [Shula’s] jaw.”16
That night in Campus Hill, Shula asked his roommates to cook him up something soft to eat, like eggs. But, said Donovan, “the choosy prick didn’t like the way we cooked them. So Pellington said, ‘Screw you, cook your own eggs,’ and threw the whole plate at him. So much for being a nice guy.”
However, owners needed to protect their investments, and Bert Bell moderated his appetite for savagery, handing down new regulations against such transgressions as fighting, punching, kicking, and gouging. Not that these rules were strictly enforced. Carl Taseff, in fact, nearly bled to death after John Henry Johnson broke his nose so badly, he began to hemorrhage. And the helmets themselves could be useful weapons—Don Joyce, after being kneed in the groin, ripped off his helmet and crashed it into his opponent’s, cracking it open like one of Shula’s eggs. This was still the essential nature of the game, and few shied away from it; even quarterbacks, the matinee idols like Graham and Van Brocklin, fearlessly ran with the ball, none of them sliding on their knees to avoid taking a hit. As middle linebackers became the stars of the defense, one could hear the soothing voice of Walter Cronkite narrate a classic CBS documentary about the Giants’ star middle linebacker called The Violent World of Sam Huff.
Back there in the secondary, Shula—“a wild man,” as Donovan affectionately defined him—played every down like a caged animal, wearing his scars like war ribbons. He played hurt throughout the 1956 season with a badly sprained ankle that necessitated injections of painkillers before games. But he was breaking down. Again, the parallel with Landry is striking; the latter was also nearing the end of one football career and the start of another. Made the Giants’ defensive player/coach in ’54, he’d retired after the ’55 season, at the age of just 31, to become the team’s defensive coordinator. He and his offensive counterpart, Vince Lombardi, were regarded as the Giants’ real coaches when they won the title that year. Still, Shula hung in there with the Colts, who were on the cusp of a breakthrough.
With rookie halfback Lenny Moore’s speed and Ameche’s bull-like rushes and pulverizing blocking, the Colts now had arguably the best backfield in the NFL. But, viewed through the looking glass of history, ’56 was notable for another find—the find, and one that came in through the back door. Before the season, the bowlegged, buzz-cut Johnny Unitas was working as a pile driver in Pittsburgh. A throwaway ninth-round pick of the Steelers out of Louisville the prior year, he was cut in training camp by Buddy Parker. However, here again, Ewbank heard that Paul Brown was about to offer Unitas a tryout and signed him first. Ewbank noticed a quirk in Unitas’s throwing motion: on his follow-through, his arm came so far down that it turned over, “like a pitcher throwing a screwball.”17 That quirk seemed to guide the ball on a precise journey. At first, Unitas sat behind Shaw, but in the fourth game of the season, against the Bears, Shaw tore a ligament in his knee and the Unitas era began—unsteadily, his first pass picked off and run back for a touchdown. The Colts lost four of their last six to finish another disappointing season at 5–7. Yet Ewbank knew what he had in Unitas, which was no less than the catalyst of pro football’s growth spurt.
Shula would see what Unitas could do when his tight spirals whizzed past his head in Colts practices and landed softly in Ray Berry’s prehensile hands. To give Unitas as many weapons as possible, Ewbank junked the T formation’s normal three-man backfield, taking one out for an extra receiver, and continued to broaden the role of the tight end as a pass catcher, using ex-Notre Dame star Jim Mutscheller to great advantage. Shula could see these revisions becoming football law. His only recourse as his skills diminished was to open his mouth, trying to unnerve receivers in practice. Nor did he spare the new QB, who took a fast disliking to the mouthy, fist-faced cornerback.
Shula and Unitas had similar backgrounds, the latter’s surname also modified, from the Lithuanian Joanaitis when he was a child in Pittsburgh steel country. Like Shula, he had to constantly prove himself; rejected by Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy for being too skinny, he played at Louisville, though he was often injured. A good many coaches and scouts thought Unitas was too soft, and prissy. A highly insular man, he had no affection for the coterie of Colt carousers, rarely joining in their night crawling. He kept a distance from Shula, whose brashness he found irritating, to work for hours almost exclusively with the receivers on patterns, to the point where they read each other’s minds. Ewbank gave him the slack to go his own way. The irony was that “Johnny U” had so little self-awareness that he couldn’t see how irritating he was. And how little it took for him to get all over players who messed up, while never taking any blame.
Like all the Colts, Shula lauded Unitas to the sportswriters, and in later years delighted in recalling how Unitas would carve him up in practice. “John was just starting to time up with those [receivers], and I wasn’t good enough when Unitas had the ball,” he said. George Shaw, he noted, “was just a good athlete trying to play quarterback. John was a quarterback.” Shula could play that public game. Unitas, by contrast, had almost nothing to say about Shula. They rarely spoke. Unitas, who seemed to resent even having a backup, no doubt disliked Shula even more when Ewbank, seeing how Unitas responded when he thought he had competition, dropped hints that he might even try Shula, who was listed as the third QB on the depth chart, at the position. It never happened, though it could have stuck in Unitas’s craw that Shula might be after his job. Shula wanted to have a chummy relationship with Unitas, but wouldn’t beg for it. And that rule held when history would unite them, with Shula the boss, at the highest level.
Shula’s ego didn’t get in the way of reality. Never did he think of himself as more than an “average player,” as he put it later, and that was perhaps too kind in ’56, when he intercepted a single pass and the Colts’ defense sank to 11th in the 12-team league. His leverage sank, too, just as the league was coalescing. The Colts had a growing fan base, attendance at Memorial Stadium swelling at times to over 50,000. Shula would have liked a place amid this mounting swell. In mid-July 1957, the papers reported that he had signed a Colts contract for the upcoming season. But then, in an August exhibition game, he broke two ribs. On September 24, days before the season opened, he was given his release by Ewbank. This, he said, came as “a tremendous disappointment . . . I had contributed quite a bit to them.”18 His release, reported one story, “came as something of a surprise and disappointment to the Colts.” His boy Taseff remained a Colt, something of a Ewbank pet, until 1961.
Not immediately picked up by another team, on opening day Shula sat forlorn in the stands in Memorial Stadium, watching the Colts beat the Lions. He took some comfort in the fact that, as he recalled, “The guy who replaced me—Henry Moore, I think—got beat for a touchdown.” When he walked into the home locker room after the game, he was stunned when his old teammates presented him with the game ball. That, he said, “meant a great deal to me.”19 Then, four days later, he was signed by the Redskins, who anted up the highest salary of his playing career, $9,750—about the best he could do in a sport where even Otto Graham never made more than 30 grand. He had at least a little more time to stick his nose into tackles, but reality now meant he needed to start gearing himself up for what many thought was his real calling.