The ’62 season began while a very nervous America tried to somehow carry on as the Cuban Missile Crisis intensified, raising the nightmare scenario of Russian nukes being launched 90 miles away from Florida. As schoolkids were taught how to duck and cover under their desks, that’s what many NFL teams were doing that fall against the Lions. Shula’s defensive backfield was stifling, second-best in the NFL, garnering 24 interceptions. The day President John F. Kennedy declared the crisis over, Sunday, October 28, the Lions choked the Bears 11–3. That sparked a seven-game winning streak, including a 26–14 win over the Packers (to whom they lost the first warlike meeting, 9–7) on Thanksgiving, and finished at 11–3.
The offense was smoothly led by quarterback Milt Plum, acquired from the Browns, with a strong running game and All-Pro receiver Gail Cogdill. But the win over Green Bay was Lombardi’s only defeat that season. With playoff rounds still years away, the Pack’s 13–1 record put them back in the title game, while the Lions went back to Miami to win their third straight Runner-Up Bowl, over the Steelers. For Wilson and Shula, this foxtrot had become too familiar. And, ominously, the defense was spent. While Night Train Lane made All-Pro again at 34, he was breaking down. He was also about to divorce his first wife and marry jazz singer Dinah Washington. Late in 1963, he would find her dead from a drug overdose in their home.
Shula could see diminishing returns. He admired Wilson, but could not see himself in that mold as a laissez-faire coach, though he said he took from Wilson the desire to be “a man-to-man type coach,” able to relate to players on a human level. As he put it, “My own personality had to emerge.” He always would borrow from Paul Brown’s methods, but would be open to “sitting down and rationalizing, talking and joking a little.”1 Very little, to that point. As Howard Schnellenberger recalled, “You couldn’t really joke around with him.” Indeed, as the clock was running out in one of those Runner-Up Bowls, a Lion player, thinking of the bread, told a teammate, “It’s a hundred bucks a minute.” Overhearing that, Shula blinked hard and got in his face. “Cut that out!” he barked. “That’s a heckuva thing to say.”2 Joe Schmidt said life with Shula was no day at the beach, but no one could claim he wasn’t head coaching material.
Shula had begun to put feelers out before the end of the season, not bothered by the fact that no NFL head coach had ever been as young as he was at 33. He set his sights on his old team, the Colts, well aware that Weeb Ewbank’s job was in trouble. Ewbank’s lack of feeling for players he railed at did not wear well in defeat; the Colts were rumored to be in open revolt over him. Shula, not minding a bit that he was aiming a knife between Weeb’s shoulder blades, made it his business to call up Carroll Rosenbloom in his hotel room when the Colts came to Detroit in late October and tell the man who had traded him he wanted to coach his old team. It was a hell of a ballsy request—one that, if it became public knowledge, could have gotten Rosenbloom in dutch for tampering. Shula didn’t leave it there, either; he asked his old confreres Gino Marchetti and Bill Pellington to pimp him to C.R., coyly recalling in his memoirs that the owner “had a great deal of respect for their recommendations.”3 Especially that of Marchetti, to whom Rosenbloom had loaned a hundred grand years before so he could buy a chain of burger joints with Alan Ameche that now was earning $8 million a year. Shula would say years later, “Gino was the one who got me the job” by advising the owner, “There’s only one guy [for the job]. Shula.”
Ewbank, who was still youngish at 55, had two years left on his contract. If he was fired, he would have to be paid $60,000 for those remaining years. When the season ended, he said, “As far as I’m concerned, I’m all right.”4 But he wasn’t. He had been embroiled in feuds with Rosenbloom and Johnny Unitas, who steamed when he constantly pricked him for deviating from the conservative game plan. When the battered Ameche quit in 1960 after just six seasons, the running game sputtered, leaving Unitas to have to pass more, amassing lots of yardage but also lots of interceptions. Although he made All-Pro by rote, in ’62 he threw 23 touchdowns and 23 interceptions—a microcosm of the Colts’ 7–7 season, which included a 53–0 shellacking by the Bears. Shula had experienced great schadenfreude by kicking the Colts’ tails twice in ’62, deepening Ewbank’s slide.
Shula met with C.R. during the Runner-Up Bowl in Miami’s Golden Strand Hotel. The owner asked him if he thought he was ready to be a head coach. Shula replied, with his usual smugness, that the only way to tell would be to hire him. On January 8, John Steadman reported that Shula was “far out front” as the choice. Only hours later, Rosenbloom fired Ewbank, saying it was “the most difficult task I’ve ever faced,” and that he had signed Shula to a two-year deal, $15,000 a year. Ewbank was offered a paper job with the team, but refused, instead signing a three-year, $100,000 deal to coach the AFL’s New York Titans. That team’s new ownership, a syndicate headed by showbiz agent Sonny Werblin, had bailed the bankrupt team out of a million-dollar debt and in March 1963 changed their name to the Jets, a year ahead of their move to Shea Stadium, adjacent to LaGuardia Airport.
Weeb still had loyalists on the team; even Marchetti ventured that Ewbank got the gate because he was, in fact, “too nice”—far from a unanimous opinion. Ewbank, who would be paid by teams in both leagues for two years, was in an enviable position, and could be believed when he said coaching “is in my blood.”5 But so, too, was it in Shula’s, and he and his old coach would have a future rendezvous with destiny.
Shula’s task was not easy, but there were still nine players left from his Colts days, and they still had a quality roster. Defensive tackle Billy Ray Smith had been acquired in a trade to replace the retired Art Donovan. Also coming in a trade was a new target for Unitas: the small, light-footed Jimmy Orr, a onetime rookie of the year with Pittsburgh. Five Colts made All-Pro in ’62, including left guard Jim Parker and center Dick Szymanski. Still, they needed a coach to make them whole again. Rosenbloom clearly had doubts that Shula would be that coach, but whatever Gino wanted, Gino got. George Wilson, meanwhile, could be big-hearted about Shula climbing higher, wishing him the best and taking pride in grooming him, but, like Ewbank, confrontation with Shula waited down the road.
Shula came back to his old team with a swagger, and with no intention of kissing C.R.’s posterior. He began with a modest declaration of optimism: “I’m real happy to have the opportunity and for the faith Baltimore is showing in me”—perhaps pointedly substituting the town for the owner.6
Across the football divide, meanwhile, Al Davis had demanded and bluffed his way into being hired by the AFL’s Oakland Raiders as their coach and general manager, given three years at $20,000 per year and unlimited power over all on-field decisions, including recasting the team colors to the sinister-looking black and silver. Rosenbloom made no such offer to Shula. But Shula had his footing, rooted not in a league built on flash and dreams, but on history and economic stability. Still, in retrospect, 1963 was the nexus when he, Lombardi, Landry, and Davis were all in place—and Paul Brown was old news, fired by the Browns’ owner, Art Modell, who had finally determined, “This is a game of emotions. I am convinced Paul Brown is incapable or unwilling to become emotional.”7 Once, that had seemed a plus. But football was proving that America was a different place, its still-youthful members of the Greatest Generation given the levers of power. The future was theirs.
Having lived like a gypsy for a decade, Shula resettled his family, hopefully for the long haul. Dorothy was pregnant again, and they found a large townhouse near where he had bunked with his old Colt comrades. The first thing he did was to hire assistants. He flirted with Blanton Collier before he took the coveted Browns job. But Shula needed look no farther than Ewbank’s staff: defensive line coach John Sandusky, an old teammate on the Browns, and offensive coordinator Don McCafferty, who had played for Paul Brown at Ohio State. Only line coach Herman Ball was let go.
Shula’s deference to veteran Colt players raised questions about his ability to pull rank. A UPI story, headed NEW COLTS’ COACH MAY FACE FRICTION, asked, “How will these veterans accept taking orders from a former teammate, one who was cut in fact while many of them remained with the club?” That was when Shula realized there was a price for pushing out a championship coach with allies in the press. Writers referred to him, with condescension, as “youthful Don Shula,” “a former student of Ewbank,” and noted that three Colts were older than their coach. Marchetti defended Shula, saying, “No one will walk over him.” And Rosenbloom defended his choice, saying, “If it were just a case moving up to second place, I would not have made the change,” he said. “I think we will win the title; that is why I hired Shula.”
Introduced to the press by Don Kellett, Shula entered in a spiffy dark suit, smiling, engaging in easy banter, leading one of the scribes to write, “I liked the way he answered questions. Not once did he say, ‘I have to look at the movies before commenting on that.’ ”8 Still, to some, he would need further introduction. The AP ran a photo identifying the new coach as “John Shula.”
At early spring camp at McDaniel College in Westminster, he eyeballed the squad. The NFL, trying to get the jump on the AFL, had moved its draft up to early December, and Kellett chose wisely, taking in the first round the massive Ohio State offensive tackle Bob Vogel; in the second, Syracuse tight end John Mackey; and in later rounds, defensive back Jerry Logan, linebacker Lee Roy Caffey, and receiver Willie Richardson. Among the holdovers were quality role players like the feathery Jimmy Orr, who was heir to the aging Berry. Shula asked Artie Donovan to come out of retirement, but Fatso was not about to start over with a coach he used to rag as a teammate and who would now want him to lose weight and subject him to sterner rules.
Of course, Shula had what no one else did: the owl-faced, bowlegged Unitas, whose immense stature matched his ego. He hadn’t particularly liked or spoken much with Shula during their sole overlapping year with the Colts, but knew enough about him to recognize that the new boss was not a passing kind of coach but a pound-it-out type. Unitas had had enough tension with Ewbank, and Shula was hardly laid-back. Early on, Unitas reacted with impatience as Shula re-created Paul Brown’s grueling classroom dissertations, calling on players for answers and growling at them when they didn’t know the answers. Shula could only hope winning would be the salve that might melt things between them.
He barely took time off when Dorothy gave birth in June to their second daughter, Sharon. By then, he was in his regular routine, flitting from church to his office, implementing his “scientific approach,” as the military newspaper Stars and Stripes called it. Shula was fortunate, as Ewbank had been, to have as his conduit to Unitas the likable McCafferty, an old softie the other players called “Easy Rider.” He may have been the only coach Unitas had any use for. Perhaps as a slap at Shula, he once said of McCafferty, “He doesn’t shout and scream. He’s able to look at football objectively without getting carried away emotionally.” Not that Shula cared, as long as Unitas followed orders. Like Ewbank, he would need to bend to Unitas’s will, but never let him forget who the boss was.
Rosenbloom, meanwhile, had other matters to worry about. Over the summer of ’63, Commissioner Pete Rozelle suspended two top-line NFL players, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, for a year after it was revealed they had bet on NFL games, though not involving their own teams. The investigation turned up evidence that C.R. was an even worse gambler, even betting against his team at times, and that he had won $1 million when the Colts beat the five-point spread in the ’58 title game—when the Colts spurned a sure field goal in OT for the six-point touchdown.9 That day, Unitas jokingly said he bypassed the field goal because he’d “placed a bet,” for which Bert Bell called and, as Unitas said, “I got my ass handed to me.”10 But Bell apparently did not do the same with his old college roommate, even after a gambler came out and said he had given the Colts $25,000 to split after that game.11
Rozelle, though, made Rosenbloom twist in the wind, finally clearing him when one of his accusers recanted, grandly claiming “the Irish Mafia”—meaning the Kennedy family—was after him. Although C.R. dodged a cannonball, he was required to admit he had bet “substantial sums on activities other than professional football,” but had stopped. Though it could have been much worse, he felt humiliated, but at least he could get back to work with his new coach. Observing Shula’s no-nonsense ways, he predicted, “He’s going to do all right.”12
Shula added some Landry-style movement on offense, sending players in motion and changing backfield alignments from play to play. He returned 30-year-old Lenny Moore, who had been used by Ewbank as a pass catcher, back to halfback. With the hole left by Ameche still unfilled, Shula mused about using rookie tight end John Mackey at fullback—he was not sold on him as a receiver, and nor was Unitas, who said Mackey’s hands were stiff as “a toilet seat.” But a quality blocker/receiver at tight end was now a must, and Shula left him alone. In camp, most of the Colts sucked up to Shula. Backup running back Alex Hawkins gushed, “Everybody likes Shula. This is the best training camp I’ve been to. . . . All the old animosity is gone.” The flattery worked. By opening day, Shula was so impressed with Hawkins’s breakneck play on special teams that he made him special teams captain; for years, the Colts would have the league’s best special teams, and Hawkins enjoyed the role of being a captain, even if he was otherwise generally anonymous, giving himself the nickname “Captain Who.”
Trying to get his new role of benevolent despot right, Shula picked spots to joke around and make small talk. He hoped that doing so would earn him the goodwill to get away with blaming players for mistakes and not overlooking even the slightest breach. He lowered the hammer for the first time when a low-level rookie fullback, Roy Walker, walked out of camp; when he crawled back, he found he had been cut, his locker already emptied. The fines began in camp, and continued whenever anyone was late for a meeting or missed a curfew, even by a minute. Once locked into a room, or so it seemed, they would be bombarded with game film.
Shula was merciless. He had even veteran players stand and dissect why they had misread a play. Unlike Ewbank’s meetings, nobody dared catnap in the darkened film room, too great the fear of sending him into a sputtering rage. When the Colts streaked to a 26–0 halftime lead against the Eagles in the first preseason game, then hung on and won 28–21, Shula was livid. He then faced Collier in Cleveland, a match that drew 83,000 fans to Municipal Stadium, and, preseason or not, he wasn’t relieved and sweat-free until he walked off and shook Collier’s hand, a 21–7 winner. He won four out of five of those meaningless games, but Unitas came away from the last with a sore arm. Then, two days before the opener, Lenny Moore had an emergency appendectomy, putting him on the shelf for a month.
Shula had to go with a pair of kids in the backfield. One, the first-round pick in ’61, Tom Matte, had played quarterback at Ohio State, but in Woody Hayes’s prehistoric system he mostly blocked and ran, using his talent for scrounging yardage from nothing. The other, freckle-faced Jerry Hill, carried the ball once as a rookie the year before and had little speed, but he could smell out holes to run through. They were both Shula’s kind of guys, overachievers with abundant smarts and toughness. Matte especially seemed to fit the coach’s mold. He could get so wound up for games that he had already developed ulcers. Still, both were unproven, as was Shula when he made his official debut as a head coach at Memorial Stadium on September 15 in front of the first of three home crowds of over 60,000 that season. The opponent was the Giants, whose aging team made the Colts seem like Romper Room. That year would be the Giants’ last among the elite, as Y. A. Tittle, who was 37 going on a hundred, threw a then-record 36 touchdown passes. Against Shula’s tough but unsure defense, Tittle diddled for a while as Marchetti, whom Shula had made a player/quasi-coach along with Pellington, returned a fumble for a touchdown. Meanwhile, Unitas threw TD passes to Orr and Mackey for a 21–10 lead. Then Tittle toyed with them, hitting on three scoring passes in the second quarter and running in another in the third for a 30–28 lead. It ended 37–28—a “terrific letdown,” said Shula, who bemoaned “mental mistakes,” though he did say he was “really proud of these guys.”
To be sure, the game wasn’t a total loss. The offense showed its stuff, and while a still-sore Johnny U—whose left index finger was dislocated in the game—was picked off twice, he could put up points in bunches. The next week, in San Francisco, the Colts came from behind in the last quarter on a Unitas pass to Orr, beating the 49ers 20–14 for Shula’s first win as a head coach. But here the schedule slapped him down. The Colts had three straight road games—the next of them in Green Bay, where Lombardi’s Packers trampled them 31–20. Then he had to go to Chicago and suck up a 10–3 loss to the Bears, grimacing as Unitas was picked off twice and Moore was lost with an injury. However, Shula’s work ethic had convinced the team he had the right answers. In Moore’s absence, Matte teamed with Hill to keep the ground game alive, aiding Unitas, who began to lean on the amazing Mackey, a rolling cannonball on mid-depth pass routes, splitting zone defenses to reel in perfect passes. He would catch a modest 35 balls that year, but average over 20 yards a catch, unheard of for a tight end in those days, with a team-high seven touchdowns. With defenses needing to cover Mackey, six other Colts caught at least 20 passes and had at least one touchdown. And being freed to throw more, Unitas was, if not happy, at least not brooding.
Shula won two in a row for the first time in October. With Moore back, he won two more in November, putting him at 5–5. Then, late in the morning of Friday, November 22, the team was midway through its charter flight to LA to play the Rams. Some players were asleep. Marchetti and Unitas were playing poker in the back of the plane. Shula, who had recorded his weekly radio show in the morning, was up front with the coaches, going over scouting reports. It seemed routine when the pilot began to make an announcement, but this was no weather or turbulence update. He said that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. As guard Dan Sullivan recalled, “I wondered, is this an isolated incident or an attack on the U.S. We didn’t know what kind of a world we were coming back to, until we landed.”13
Marchetti, who had campaigned for Kennedy, felt the wind go out of him. “I’d just won a big pot and was bragging about it when the announcement came on,” he said. “I was really shaken.” Shula, a Catholic and the son of a blue-collar union man, admired Kennedy and led the team in prayer. When they got off the plane, they scrambled to get in front of TV sets in the airport lounge, where they learned that the president had died. A distraught Rosenbloom, a Kennedy family intimate, asked the league office to cancel Sunday’s games. The AFL did so immediately, as did the National Basketball Association. The NCAA called off its Saturday football and basketball games. Players across the NFL said they had no desire to play, but what mattered to most owners were gate and TV/radio revenues. When Rozelle buckled to them, it only worsened his rift with Rosenbloom. The compromise was that there would be no TV coverage during the funeral and burial in D.C., and there would be no bands and no player introductions. Years later, Rozelle called it the worst decision he ever made.
The Colts would awake that Sunday to more shock and bloodshed. Said Sullivan, “I was in my hotel room watching TV when I saw Ruby shoot Oswald. I just about fell off of the bed. You tried to get the thoughts of all that had transpired out of your mind by game time, but it was difficult to do that.” Like zombies, they were bused to the LA Memorial Coliseum and they were silent as they changed into their uniforms. Shula, still in a daze, gave no pep talk before sending them out. To the surprise of many around the league, crowds showed up in large numbers, and after a two-minute standing silence and the playing of taps by a single trumpeter, the crowd of around 49,000 watched in near silence. The game proceeded in an atmosphere that was called “surreal,” but once the players warmed to the contest, it actually turned into the most exciting of the season, a seesaw affair won by the Rams, 17–16, clinched only when the Colts’ kicker missed a desperate 62-yard field goal attempt at the gun.
With the Bears losing only one game that year, the Colts were already out of the money—as were the Packers, who only lost two—but Shula had salvaged the season. Despite the loss of the hard-luck Moore again—with a head injury—and Orr being hobbled by knee trouble, the Colts routed the Redskins and Minnesota Vikings, and got even with the Rams, nipping them 19–16 in the finale. That let Shula go out at 8–6, just one win better than Ewbank the year before, but with the team on the rise. Unitas had 237 completions, then a league record, amassing 3,481 yards with just 12 picks. For Shula, who often gave in to Unitas’s passing rather than fighting it, the late surge corrected an early flaw—the inability to cash in within the opponents’ 20, which caused an anomaly in the stats: though the Colts had the most air yardage, they only rang up 20 passing touchdowns, eighth-best in the league.
Shula never did become more than a martinet to many of the Colts, but Dorothy Shula did her best to change that. Hearing him sound stiff and distant on the half-hour radio show he was given on WMAR on Friday nights, she worked to humanize him. Interviewed by the Sun, she said her husband “has a wonderful outlook on life and a good sense of humor . . . he’ll come home and tell me something wild with a completely straight face. And I won’t know whether to believe him or not.” She spoke of relaxing afternoons at Art Donovan’s home and around his pool.14 And in time, when he also began hosting a pregame TV show in 1966, which moved to Saturday afternoons in 1967, he did become looser, and more of a players’ coach—albeit not enough to suit Unitas and others, whose ears hurt from his wallpaper-peeling harangues.
The press soon began to junk the trope of the young coach and carve an image of the “square-jawed” Shula as a man of iron will, but also a mensch. “I don’t like to lose,” he said in one story, “but I don’t go out and commit suicide when I do. Instead, I try to diagnose why we were beaten to be sure it doesn’t happen the same way again.”15 Unspoken was: it had better not happen the same way again.
As many of the Colts of the 1950s neared their last hurrah, the ’60s Colts were forming their own identity under Shula—not as rollicking ballbusters but smart, clawing overachievers. Outside of Unitas, Berry, Moore, and Mackey, no skill-position player seemed destined for stardom. Shula, despite his own growing status, wore the hunted look of a man with something to prove—as did Tom Landry in Dallas, who had to deal with coaching in an unapologetically segregated city. Shula had it easier on that count, but only by degree. Baltimore was technically a Southern city, and racial tensions quietly simmered, stirred by a white working class that stewed about black workers taking their factory jobs. Suburban flight was already underway in the city, where the population would decline by 200,000 between 1960 and 1990.
Shula could recognize this trend all through the industrial belt, and could look for confirmation to Painesville, where Dan Shula and his other sons were working harder but earning less than they had been. Working his way up the coaching ladder, and thinking of how much he could keep of his income, the romance of labor unions had given way in Shula’s view to more narrow interests as his affluence grew along with his family—with Dorothy giving birth to yet another daughter, Anne, on May 7, 1964, and another son, Mike, on June 3, 1965. But Shula was a good Christian, a good son, one who was still sending money back to his parents, and he could not possibly pander to racial resentments that arose when blue-collar white men lost jobs to black men. He was colorblind about his team, with no hedging about drafting two African Americans with his first picks in ’64: defensive back Marv Woodson and running back Tony Lorick (though Woodson would quickly be traded to the Steelers).
Beyond race, Shula could also see inklings that in 1964, with the Beatles’ invasion and rumblings about the war in the Vietnamese jungles being escalated, society and culture were turning a new page, the nation less innocent and predictable after the murder of a president. Given his own, now-fading antiheroic youth, he could sense the angst in younger players, who were mostly less willing to believe what they were told—even by their coaches. And he was young enough to stitch himself into both his own and the younger generation, as the face of a blue-collar team framed by Baltimore’s row houses and smoke-belching factories.16
To those who went back with Shula, it was as if he could see himself in the good, but problematic, foot soldiers on the team, but he also saw himself in the mulish Unitas, whose respect he craved. Johnny U was making almost as much as Shula, and he retained the authority to call the plays, but not to ignore Shula’s when he sent one in. Still, more than a few times, he went as far as to reject a Shula call, announcing in the huddle, “We’re not running that play,” then imperiously brushing off the coach when he came to the sideline. Unitas seemed to revel in those moments, and Shula wouldn’t begrudge him; Unitas, like all great quarterbacks, could see the game two, even three plays ahead. Fortunate to have such a leader, Shula tolerated a lot of intransigence from him, snapping only when Unitas waved the field goal team off the field in a 1964 game, an act of defiance in plain view of the whole stadium. Shula waited until after the game, then summoned Unitas to his office and laid down the law, as calmly as he could.
“Look, John,” he said, “if you’re going to show me up like that, I can’t be the coach of this team.”
Marchetti, who was in the coach’s office at the time, punctuated the directive: “He’s right, John.”
Unitas went into his petulant shtick. “If that’s what you want,” he said with a condescending shrug, “that’s what you’ll get.”
He kept his word, but with a snide comment for Shula whenever he could get one in. When questioned about a specific failed play, he would tell reporters, “Don’t ask me. Ask Shula. It’s his team.” Never would he admit what Otto Graham, now coaching at the Coast Guard Academy, ventured after watching the Colts during the ’64 season, that Unitas “seems to be calling a better game under the direction of Shula.”17
That 1964 season was almost too easy for Shula, even though the opener made Colts fans nervous. On the road, they lost 34–24 to the Vikings, but any worries evaporated the next week, when they went to Lambeau Field and ravaged Bart Starr, intercepting him three times to win 21–20, the winning score a 40-yard Unitas-to-Mackey pass. The next week, in the home opener, the champion Bears strutted in—and limped out, losing 52–0, Papa Bear’s worst defeat ever. Shula was feeling so invincible that day that he sat Unitas in the fourth quarter, seemingly so as not to run up the score—but backup Gary Cuozzo then threw a touchdown, which might have been intentional and not beyond Shula’s selective notions of sportsmanship, and which no doubt prickled Halas.
It would be December 6 before the Colts lost again, breaking an 11-game winning streak, two shy of Halas’s single-season record, during which they swept the Pack. All season, opposing players and coaches vouched for the Shula effect on the team, which he defined after one typical rout when he giddily told the press, “Did you notice how the gang was hitting out there?” Which he said was “hard and quick.” Shula had taken Paul Brown’s methodology to a higher level. He had hired his staffmate at Kentucky, Bill Arnsparger, as his defensive line coach, and both Arnsparger and McCafferty would be up in the press box, as Shula had been with the Lions, peering through binoculars and relaying information by phone for Shula and his sideline coaches to assimilate. In time, they were able to review plays on a rudimentary videotape machine, which the TV people were using to show replays during the broadcasts.18
Shula captured his first title as a head coach, taking the Western Conference at 12–2, leaving Lombardi out in the cold again. The Colts scored the most points—including 40 or more in four games—and gave up the fewest. With Shula using him in and out of the backfield, Moore had over 1,000 yards of total offense, 16 rushing touchdowns—three receiving—and was named the league’s comeback player of the year and a first-team All-Pro selection. Unitas, who was ahead so often and by so much that he barely needed to throw, racked up fewer than 3,000 yards, his lowest total since ’58, yet won his second MVP—proof that Shula knew what he was doing. In fact, Unitas would only throw for more yardage once over the rest of his career.
The last roadblock to the NFL title was the Browns, whom the Colts faced on December 27 in the well of a packed Municipal Stadium, the wind whipping like a hawk’s claw off Lake Erie. Had Shula had to stand opposite Paul Brown that day, his knees might have knocked. As it was, Blanton Collier posed similar qualms, but Shula believed the Browns were easy meat. The two teams hadn’t met during the season, in which the Browns went 10–3–1, but Collier’s defense had given up the most points in the league. The Colts were a seven-point favorite.
But the Browns—in their last hurrah, and that of Cleveland sports teams in general for 52 years—played the underdog role to perfection. When Shula remarked that Browns quarterback Frank Ryan, a PhD candidate in quantum physics, was the “best protected” QB in the league, Collier took this not as a compliment to his offensive line, but as a jab at Ryan. Collier also saw something intriguing in the film: when Unitas set himself to throw, he unconsciously shuffled his feet in the direction he would throw, a tell that had somehow escaped even Shula’s sights. Collier also saw that teams usually played deep against the Colt receivers, conceding a lot of yardage. Instead, he put his deep backs up close to the line, right in their faces. Moreover, Collier had seven All-Pros, led by Jim Brown, in his penultimate season. And Ryan had big targets like Gary Collins and an antelope of a rookie from Ohio State, Paul Warfield, who had caught nine touchdown passes and made All-Pro.
Collier naturally wanted to keep Unitas off the field. Johnny U seemed primed, and not the least bit intimidated by the gaping dimensions of the stadium he had seen many times; younger Colts, who hadn’t been to Cleveland, were awed by it, only to have Unitas bark, “Hey, haven’t any of you seen a football field before?”19 But he was harried that day, only able to throw 20 passes, many of them cut down by the wind, completing 12 for 95 yards with two interceptions. The first half ended scoreless, a perceived win for the underdogs. The Browns then made the killer plays, and Brown was on his way to rushing for 114 yards. In the third quarter, up by a field goal, Ryan fired two touchdowns to the acrobatic Collins for a 17–0 lead. Yet another, for 51 yards, made the final 27–0, a mortifying loss for Shula, and not for the last time.
While remaining classy in the face of national humiliation, profusely congratulating his old boss, Shula seethed. Decades later, he looked back in anger at that torturous day, saying “we messed up on our defense” and that he was “disgusted” by the offense, bemoaning “a fine season down the drain.”20 He also intimated that Collier had run up the score with that late TD pass—exactly what Shula seemed to do so easily to George Halas—and criticized Unitas, saying that he had “killed our own drives” because of fumbles and interceptions. On the flight home, he was stone-faced in his front-row seat. Unitas sat in the back, also steaming. The mood was foul. When they landed, someone called out, “Touchdown.” From the back came the retort, “First one we made today.”
Shula’s mood improved when he coached the Western Conference team in the Pro Bowl—another symbolic step up—and beat Collier’s Eastern team, 34–14. In fact, when Marchetti joined in on a gang sack of Frank Ryan, knocking him out of the game with a broken shoulder, some wondered if it had been ordered up by Shula in retribution. There was also satisfaction in winning his first Coach of the Year award, beating out Collier. Rosenbloom didn’t sour on him for losing the big one. The free-spending owner re-signed him for five years starting at $40,000, close to Landry’s salary on his 10-year mega-deal in Dallas. Lombardi had them both beat, also owning stock in the Packers, and his income and éclat were soon to skyrocket further.
Having come so close to winning it all, Shula mainly stood pat with his roster. He had a successful formula, respect, awards; defeat didn’t cause him to second-guess himself. But losing the big game had taught him that he didn’t have all the answers. And while patience wasn’t his strong suit, he would need to develop a whole lot of it.