Running parallel to Don Shula’s upward thrust was that of Richard Nixon, whose own tunnel-vision ambition seemed to have been thwarted numerous times until he got off the canvas in 1968, when the political and cultural terrain was more fertile for his malignant pretensions. Shula and Nixon were two opposite sides of the Greatest Generation coin, Shula not built for deceit or exploitation of fear. But both were melding into a culture of post-’50s turmoil and confusion that threatened to consume the country more and more with each passing day. Shula began his training camp in Westminster just days after Bobby Kennedy was gunned down in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, weeks after Martin Luther King was murdered on a motel landing in Memphis. What’s more, the Baltimore streets that had stayed calm in the past detonated, as urban centers nationwide erupted in protest after the King slaying, followed by looting and violence in the D.C.–Baltimore corridor and 5,500 arrests. Governor Spiro Agnew called in the national guard and spouted off that black leaders were “circuit riding, Hanoi visiting, caterwauling, riot inciting, burn American down type of leaders”1—the kind of run-on bile that elevated Agnew to the vice-presidency in Nixon’s administration, at least until 1973, when evidence that he took bribes as governor did him in, presaging Nixon’s own fall.
In Baltimore, the migration of white residents to the suburbs was about to begin, leaving the city blacker and poorer. The mood across the country was volatile. As training camp stretched through the summer, cops in Chicago rioted at the Democratic Convention, beating and stomping protesters. Meanwhile, the war in the jungle was grinding on with no end in sight. But the football world remained shielded, a sanctuary of militaristic pretensions. “It’s funny,” said Rick Volk, “the year before, at Michigan, they had the worst rioting they ever saw in Detroit, and I never even thought about it, because in Ann Arbor we were so shielded. Then I came to Baltimore and it was the same. Even in Baltimore, we could’ve been a thousand miles away.”2
Shula, to be certain, had moved away from his days as a Kennedy Democrat, the working-class, union-man roots of Dan Shula supplanted by greater wealth, more conservative beliefs, and reflexive dismissal of antiwar protests. His Colts had, not coincidentally, kept up with Lombardi’s Packers as the bedrock of the old-guard NFL, the polar opposite of the looser, swingier tintypes of the AFL epitomized by the image of Joe Namath. Shula had some rebels, too, though to see the Baltimore Colts on the road, in an airport or a hotel, in their suits and ties and crewcuts, they might as well have been playing for the Chamber of Commerce. Shula clearly had his favorites—like Tom Matte and Mike Curtis, men much like him—and while race never meant a thing to his player transactions, some of the black men under his rule did not feel the same bond with him that white players did. John Mackey, for example, revered him as a coach, but like Lenny Moore before him, could feel a separation—not out of enmity or even anything specific to Shula, but because the coaching brethren seemingly lacked the sensibility to understand why African-Americans had rioted in the streets, or why Muhammad Ali had refused to join the military the year before, or why John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised black-gloved fists at the Olympics that October.
In Shula’s eyes, culturally, the world still turned as it had in 1960. He was as contemptuous of the AFL as Lombardi had been, and that attitude carried over to many old-line football writers. During summer camp, syndicated sports columnist Louis Chestnut noted that Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath were expected to be the MVPs of their respective leagues, writing, “Unitas, maybe. I ain’t too sure about Namath. I have this strange, weird feeling that old Shaggy Hair might fall on his mod fat face this year.”3 Weeb Ewbank had had to lose his old-world bent as the price to pay for tolerating Namath’s excesses. And Shula knew he would need to make similar exceptions; though, if he had to coach Namath, Lord knows how he would deal with it. For now, there was no such dilemma, and he was just fine with the Colts’ drab, machinelike regimentation that kept them winning.
And why not? They were loaded in ’68. When Ray Berry retired and Ray Perkins blew out a knee, Shula could plug in Jimmy Orr, who himself was getting over a shoulder separation, to ease the load on Mackey and Willie Richardson. He also now plugged in Curtis at outside linebacker, where he would ravage offenses and earn first-team All-Pro honors. However, Shula would have to make a critical move to avoid being derailed before the season even began. Johnny Unitas, a time bomb at 35, immediately had problems with his right elbow. Shula planned to go with his backup, Jim Ward, for the exhibition games, but Ward hurt his leg in the second one. With Matte the only fallback, Shula started scouring rosters around the league for a quarterback. One stood out: Earl Morrall. Now 34 and all but stationary, he had become expendable in Detroit after injuring his shoulder in ’65. Cleaning house, the Lions sent him to the New York Giants, where he fractured his wrist during a 1–12–1 season. The next year, with Fran Tarkenton’s arrival, he was a mop-up man.
But Morrall had value to people who kept tabs on serviceable players, and Shula had hired one of them that year: George Young, an extremely bright man with degrees from Johns Hopkins and Loyola College. Scouting the league for Shula, Young signed off on Morrall, and Shula offered the Giants a fourth-round draft pick to get him. The Giants countered by also asking for backup tight end Butch Wilson. Shula thought about it, then made the deal, one that a thousand years later he would be able to call “the best trade I’ve ever made.”4 Morrall came to his fifth team with the purpose of spelling Unitas in preseason, then taking a seat. And then, in the penultimate preseason game, Unitas came off the field with his arm hanging limp. “I think I’ve torn something,” he told center Bill Curry.5 It turned out to be worse. Two tendons in his elbow that soldered bones in the joint were, he said later, “torn off at the bone.” However, team doctors either misdiagnosed it or went along with the team’s—perhaps Shula’s—wishes to downplay the injury; the reporters obediently parroted the doctor and Shula’s descriptions as no more than “tennis elbow” or “black-and-blue elbow.” Shula even insisted that it was “the same old sore elbow. It’s a chronic condition that John lives with and we can just hope it doesn’t act up too much.”
Unitas, though, knew this was no tennis elbow. Not playing along, he said he couldn’t raise or straighten his arm, that the elbow was “real sore, puffed up, black and blue.”6 During drills the week before the opener, at home against the 49ers, he walked off the field, unable to do much of anything. Even this didn’t seem to faze Shula. As Cameron Snyder wrote in the Sun, “Optimistic concern is the best way to explain coach Don Shula’s attitude” toward his meal ticket.7 Shula went only as far as to have Unitas sit out the game, naming Morrall as the starter. Fortunately, the defense did the heavy lifting, and with Morrall throwing two TDs, the Colts eased in, 27–10.
Unitas’s arm was still limp for the next game, against the Atlanta Falcons, and Morrall threw three interceptions, but also three touchdowns and racked up 279 yards. As snaillike as he was, he could anticipate a rush and step out of the pocket, then thread a needle with a pass. Shula trusted him to change plays at the line of scrimmage, and he seemed to mesh perfectly with the powerhouse machine all around him that broke games open with brute efficiency, rolling up massive yardage and choking the life out of enemy offenses. The Colts won their first five, four of them by blowout. By then, Unitas was able to move his arm more freely and was begging to get in. Down 14–7 at the half against the Browns in week six, Shula started him to begin the second half. “I thought it would give us a lift,” he said. But Unitas only lifted Cleveland. He went one for 11, was intercepted thrice, and heard boos in Memorial Stadium for what was arguably his worst game ever, a 30–20 loss. The Colts righted the ship the next week, beating the Rams 27–10, Morrall throwing two touchdowns, though also three interceptions. They would not lose again.
Over the next five games, they turned in three shutouts, surrendering only 19 points in total. Morrall became the story of the season, a scrub at the helm of a team people were already calling the best ever. Games were over early, with only two victories by fewer than 17 points. Entering the next-to-last game of the regular season with an 11–1 record, the division clinched, they had the distinct pleasure of storming into Lambeau Field on a 19-degree day, knowing the worm had turned. As Lombardi had reckoned when he stepped aside, the Pack could not compete with the Colts any longer. Worse, Bart Starr was out.
Shula relished every minute of a game that was essentially over when Morrall hit Willie Richardson with an early 26-yard touchdown pass. The defense limited the Packers to 163 total yards, and three field goals put it away, 16–3. However, a complication had now arisen, one that seemed an embarrassment of riches, but was in reality a monkey wrench thrown into the subtle mechanics of winning.
All through the season, Unitas had been a good soldier, helping Morrall get the hang of the system. But at times, he seemed a broken man, slumped on the bench, a Colts parka draped over him like a shroud. For years, he had taken a profound beating, without complaint. In his younger days, when a hit broke his nose, blood spurting, he jammed a wad of mud into his nostrils and went about his business. No quarterback ever stood in the pocket longer, waiting for a receiver to get open, seemingly daring linemen to bury him. But now he could do nothing but watch the Colts have their best season ever. The perennial All-Pro was a spare wheel. For Shula, the situation called for a delicate balancing act, between managing Unitas’s massive ego and allowing a near-perfect season to congeal. He regularly soothed Unitas by saying he hoped for his return. But the Browns disaster chastened him into keeping Unitas benched until the playoffs were in the bag. Not until the 12th game, against the Falcons, did he give the iconic QB any playing time—and even then, only to mop up.
Unitas may have held it against Shula that he had been turned into a backup. When reporters would ask him why he wasn’t playing, he would respond, snarkily, “Why don’t you ask The Man?” Shula later described such comments as “cold,” and to be sure, that season marked the nadir of their relationship. In practice, when Unitas could throw, he’d come off the field staring at Shula, who would stare right back. “Boy, I could feel the electricity between them,” said the third quarterback, Jim Ward.8 Still, while Shula personally liked Morrall better, he would subject him to the same bullying that he did the rest of the team. When Morrall deviated from a play Shula sent in, improvising a pass to Perkins that resulted in a touchdown, he was glad-handed by teammates. But when he got to Shula, the coach ragged him for throwing to the wrong guy, screaming, “Read the fucking defense!”
Shula would have been insane not to want Unitas back. And as the season wound down, the veteran showed flashes of Johnny U in a few mop-up appearances, throwing a touchdown to Mackey in one game. By the last two games, having made an amazing recovery, he was throwing easily in practice and was game-ready. He was also his old ornery self. In one game, he came off the field glaring at Shula after the coach called a play based on what he thought was a stolen signal for a blitz that never happened. “Unless you’re sure of what you’re doing, don’t interrupt my play calling,” Unitas snapped, the kind of insolence only he could get away with.9 In the finale, their division clinched, the Colts played George Allen’s Rams—who, in a delightful irony, had won 10 games but were frozen out of the postseason. When Morrall played badly, in came Unitas to throw a fourth-quarter touchdown and lead a drive that scored another, sealing a 28–24 win. That left the Colts at 13–1, tying Halas for the most victories in a season in NFL history. It also left the greatest quarterback in history believing he had made his case, and that with the playoffs about to determine whether all that goodness during the season prefaced a championship, or was just a giant tease, Johnny U had to be where he belonged, running the Colts offense.
Earl Morrall, the unassuming Walter Mitty who helped Shula step into the void left by Lombardi, won the MVP award by racking up Unitas-like numbers, compiling league highs with 26 touchdowns, 9.2 yards per pass attempt, and 16 yards per completion. Along the way, the fans seemed to transfer their allegiance from the old general to the slightly less old guy with a crewcut. During Unitas’s disastrous midseason game against the Browns, they began booing him. The thorny Unitas merely said, “I could care less.” Amazingly, Shula also took some booing for it. As one scribe wrote, “Fans [had] Shula on the pan . . . for going so quickly to Johnny Unitas,” quoting a cab driver who said, “Shula blew that one.”10
Unitas had continued to play the role of good company man, saying Morrall deserved to start in the playoffs. And indeed, there was a certain egalitarian aspect to the team. Tom Matte, whose nickname was “Garbage Can” for his less-than-artistic running form, piled up 662 rushing yards and nine touchdowns, making All-Pro. A rookie fullback, Terry Cole, added over 400 yards. In all, 13 players scored at least one touchdown, and the Colts scored the second-most points in the NFL. Mackey even lined up in the backfield to run the ball 10 times, for 103 yards. The defense gave up a meager 144 points, equaling George Halas’s 1963 Bears. Bobby Boyd pulled down eight interceptions and went first-team All-Pro. Shula, without objection, won his second AP Coach of the Year award. It seemed they were all living in a dream state.
Morrall did get the nod to start in the playoffs. Against the Vikings, he tossed touchdowns of three yards to tight end Tom Mitchell and 49 to Mackey to take a 14–0 lead in the third quarter. Curtis then recovered a fumble and ran 60 yards to make it 21–0. It ended 24–14. But the next round would be harder, and the stakes higher. Cameron Snyder averred that the Colts were “no longer playing for wages,” but rather immortality.11 It almost seemed too much of a contrived fable that Shula would now face the Browns in Cleveland, he and his veteran Colts still scarred by the 27–0 carnage in the ’64 title game and the October loss that prompted all the booing in the only game between them since. They now would need to win in Municipal Stadium, stuffed with 80,000 fans.
On Saturday, a nervous Shula held a practice there and complained that the turf was in poor condition, soft and patchy, unfriendly to the Colts’ running attack. As it turned out, the next day would be much colder, the wind chill around 12 degrees, the field iced up. This was actually a help to him, given that Jim Brown’s successor at fullback, Leroy Kelly, the league’s top rusher, was a mudder, but less stable on a slick surface. Another help was that Shula had noticed from the game film that the way tight end Milt Morin got into his three-point stance tipped off when the Browns would run. And so it was that Kelly, skating on turf he normally pounded, was dogged and gang-tackled. He would carry 13 times for only 28 yards. By contrast, Shula confused Blanton Collier by using a formation he called “wing left opposite,” with Richardson and Orr lined up on one side, Mackey on the other. As Bob Matheson, the Browns outside linebacker, recalled, “We hadn’t seen anything like that since high school. It’s all we talked about at halftime, but we didn’t see it the rest of the game. And while we were looking for it, they ran all over us.”12
Matte, who was built for primitive conditions, ate up turf, dragging Browns with him, scoring three times. He ran 17 times for 88 yards, Jerry Hill adding 60 on 11 carries. They rolled up 184 yards rushing, 353 overall, holding the Browns to 173. With Kelly nullified, quarterback Bill Nelsen had to throw, ineffectively—two of his hurried passes were grabbed by Colts. Bubba Smith blocked a field goal and recovered a fumble. On the sideline, dressed to kill in a sartorially splendid two-tone, fur-collared brown topcoat and matching fedora with a feathered snap-brim, Shula seemed over-caffeinated, leaping up and down, exhorting his men to “come on!” and letting out whoops of pleasure on each score.
He had to calm himself down when, the 34–0 win in the bank, he met with Collier at midfield for the handshake he had been awaiting for four years, the one that marked an NFL title. For Collier, it could not have been a more bitter end, against the former assistant who had quit on him and whose team, Collier later said, “gave us a good sound whipping” in one of the most one-sided title games in NFL history. Lenny Lyles’s postmortem was simple: “We hit, we hurt, we won.” Tex Maule’s take in Sports Illustrated was that, “seldom in the long history of NFL championship games has one team so thoroughly dominated the other. . . . It was a prodigious display of almost flawless football [achieved by] executing Don Shula’s stratagems with precision and flair.”13 Not to mention maniacal intensity. In the fourth quarter, the game long over, Matte was still plugging away. On his final carry, he was kneed in the back. He went down as if nearly broken in half, and had to be helped off the field. Examined by the team doctor, E. J. McDonnell, he kept repeating, “When am I going back in?” Afterward, he felt faint, telling the writers, “Back up, I’m starting to get weak.” He was rushed to a hospital; his kidney was punctured.
Shula, relief all over his face in the afterglow of victory, sat in his office, draining a champagne bottle, uttering words a coach can only dream about. “We ran well and were almost perfect with our pass defense,” he said. “I can’t think of anything we didn’t do.”14 That may have been a first for him: not a complaint anywhere. He needed to convince no one that the win was “specially sweet,” but hardly surprising. “The things we accomplished this year,” he said, “there was no way we could be denied this.”
He went on sipping, hogging the only bottle of the stuff that the Colts had brought with them for the occasion. Someone wanted to know about the field he had worried about.
“It was perfect,” he said.15
Having lifted the Browns monkey off his back, Shula was convinced that he had turned the corner for good, that he had coached, as the title of Sports Illustrated’s game story put it, THE GAME THAT GOT RID OF THE FRUSTRATION. Further underlining the trope of the Colts as blue-collar leviathans, the story called them “The Irresistible Ones,” a quality few had seen in Don Shula. Which might explain why he was practically giddy during the two-week interval before the NFL-AFL Championship Game, which many still preferred to call it rather than the seemingly nonprofound Super Bowl. By any name, it was sure to be the cherry on top of a season already defined and crowned. When the team arrived back in Baltimore, 10,000 fans were waiting on the tarmac at Friendship Airport, where some broke down fences to get close to them. No one in the crowd, or on the plane, gave much thought to the assumed formality of the next game and the team they would meet.
That, of course, was Weeb Ewbank’s New York Jets—who, despite “Broadway” Joe Namath’s gifted arm and the sybaritic theatrics that endeared him to his generation and Madison Avenue mad men, were regarded more lightly than the AFL’s first two sacrificial lambs, the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders. As Rick Volk remembered, with the contest in Miami, the Colts all but substituted this game for the usual Runner-Up Bowl, a semi-official vacation in the sun. Aside from maniacs like Curtis and Matte—the latter of whom, asked if he would play in the game, said he would play even with a broken leg—Volk said, “It felt like an exhibition game with a $15,000 paycheck [for each winning player]. Shula tried to tell us not to let up, that the NFL was depending on us, and he worked us hard. But he couldn’t really sell it. Shit, I can recall that week the biggest issue for some of those guys was where to go to dinner and get some drinks. The mental preparation wasn’t there,” despite Shula’s usual hectoring.
The point spread opened at 18 and pretty much stayed there. Word was that NFL elders now regretted the merger plan, and that it might be better to do some tinkering, maybe sprinkle AFL teams into the unified league rather than maintaining the identity of the junior league as the American Football Conference. That way, two old-guard NFL teams could still play for the title—which seemed a good possibility in any case, since, to balance the new league, the NFL would soon pay Carroll Rosenbloom $3 million to place the Colts in the AFC’s East Division, while the Browns and Steelers were to move into the AFC Central.
All this overlooked, or ignored, that, aside from Shula, there were arguably better coaches in the AFL, with the likes of Ewbank, Sid Gillman, Lou Saban, Hank Stram—and Paul Brown, who, as a way back into the game, paid $10 million for the AFL’s expansion Cincinnati Bengals. Then, too, Namath was no simple party boy, but a wily, ferocious competitor who had endured a broken jaw the previous season and not missed a game of that or the Jets’ 11–3 season of ’68. With a more conservative game plan instituted by Ewbank, he threw 100 fewer passes than in ’67, when he had over 4,000 passing yards but 28 interceptions. Gutsy indeed was how Namath led his team from behind in a savage AFL title game, firing a 65-yard bomb to old dog Don Maynard, then a short bullet to Maynard in the end zone to beat Al Davis’s Raiders 27–23. The Jets also had a smallish but smart defense that gave up the fewest yards in the league.
Shula respected Ewbank, but the press now billed this game as a grudge match that would surely end badly for Weeb. Shula would say no such thing, but if that was to be the theme, so be it. Yet he had no real context for fully evaluating the Jets. Playing in Namath’s glittery shadow, fullback Matt Snell and halfback Emerson Boozer could be overlooked, though their roles were vital. Similarly, it was impossible to gauge how strong the offensive and defensive lines were by their success against other AFL teams. The Jets had 11 AFL Pro Bowlers, but beyond Namath, few NFL fans knew much about defensive ends Gerry Philbin and Verlon Biggs, defensive tackle John Elliott, or offensive tackle Winston Hill and guard Dave Herman.
Said Volk: “They had talent, we could see that. But when you’ve put in a tremendous amount of work, you’ve just run the Cleveland Browns out of their own stadium, and you’re reading that you’re the greatest team of all the time, how seriously are you going to be working that hard against a team from a league the Packers treated like amateurs?”
In their hubris, the Colts told themselves that watching the films was counterproductive, because it made them too confident—the exact same thing the Jets were telling themselves about watching the Colt films. To them, Shula’s men were the perfect avatars of the old, sclerotic league, led by a quarterback even less mobile than Namath and who was never pressured. Ewbank told his boys the majesty of the NFL was bullshit, a Potemkin village propped up by the ghostly pillars of Vince Lombardi. He wanted the Jets to keep that to themselves, to let the Colts believe they were too good to care about the game. But one player wasn’t willing to keep his lip zipped.