When the teams got to Miami a week before Super Bowl III, the Colts came off the plane in Shula-mandated ties and sports jackets, the Jets off theirs in groovy, ’60s-chic leisure attire, Joe Namath in his customary bell-bottom slacks, white belt and white Gucci loafers. While Shula banned any unplanned contact with the media, the shambling, ample-nosed Namath—an odd sort of sex symbol (it must have been the blue eyes)—was soon inviting writers and photographers to join him one hot afternoon as he draped himself, clad in a bathing suit, on a lounge chair by the Galt Ocean Mile Hotel pool, shades over his eyes, glass of something not ginger ale in his hand, reminding Tex Maule of Dean Martin “in his relaxed confidence and the droop of his heavy-lidded eyes.”1
He was openly hostile to what he called “NFL reporters,” repelling questions with his own soliloquies. He spoke of Johnny Unitas as his childhood hero as if he were talking about a dinosaur, citing Unitas’s “crew-cut” and “high-top shoes,” contrasted by Namath’s longish locks and famous low-cut white shoes. He said Earl Morrall would be the “third-string quarterback on the Jets,” and that “there are maybe five or six better quarterbacks than Morrall in the AFL.” The topper: “We’re a better team than Baltimore.” A couple days later, Namath was in a Fort Lauderdale restaurant, Jimmy Fazio’s. Lou Michaels—whose younger brother Walt was the Jets’ defensive backfield coach—and Dan Sullivan came in. Seeing the burly kicker, Namath began a woofing match, shouting, “We’re gonna kick the shit out of you, and I’m gonna do it.” Michaels’s comeback was, “I wish I had one minute with you outside.”2
The spat escalated, with each arguing about who was the better Catholic, and who took better care of his mother—an argument Shula could have joined in if he’d been there.3
Three days before the game, honored by the Miami Touchdown Club at the Playhouse, a downtown banquet hall, Namath made his famous, Ali-like intonation, “Were gonna win the game. I guarantee it,” which was provoked when Michaels, in the back of the room, heckled him with his own guarantee of victory. Namath’s bold bravado got scant notice at first. Shula, like most sportswriters—in a poll of 55 writers covering the game, 49 picked the Colts—snickered. “Joe’s the 837th guy Louis has threatened,” he said, “and if he’d punched him, he’d have been the 30th guy he’d decked.”4
Shula had more on his mind, needing to keep up his team’s intensity with all the disruptive headlines and questions about being such a prohibitive favorite. He held closed-door workouts all week away from the circus, up in Boca Raton, and enforced an 11 p.m. curfew at the Hilton hotel. He avoided giving the Jets any bulletin-board fodder, even saying the Jets had a defense on par with the Lombardi Packers and had the edge at quarterback, Namath being “the best pure passer in the game” and “a tremendous competitor.”5 The only Colt to break rank, Bill Curry, said his team had played “ten or twelve teams” as good as the Jets, which hardly seemed a boast as much as a simple fact. Yet Namath’s takeover of the pregame publicity unnerved the Colts. Morrall was offended at being openly insulted by an opposing quarterback, especially after what he had just accomplished. So was Shula.
“I don’t see how Namath can rap Earl,” he said, holding his temper. “How can he rap a guy who did all the things Earl did for us?”6
It was easy enough for the Colts to pity Namath for the destruction they were sure to wreak on him. Said Volk: “How could you take him seriously? That whole Broadway Joe thing, the wearing pantyhose. [Actually, Namath did that commercial in 1974.] We didn’t wanna kill him, but we really wanted to beat him.”7 But, in a broader view, Namath did what no one else could have for his league: he broadened the scope and context of the game beyond the field, to an arena the Colts were not equipped to compete in. Paul Zimmerman would later recall “the circus atmosphere surrounding Weeb Ewbank’s Jets versus Shula’s buttoned-up and businesslike Colts,” but it went farther than that. To old-guard types, Namath was subversive, a label worn by many simply for expressing different opinions than most.
The Washington Post’s longtime columnist Shirley Povich wrote, tellingly, that Shula “can’t escape the Jets-Joe Namath syndrome.” He noted that Shula stammered when asked how he would handle Namath if he coached him, saying only that he met him once and that he seemed “a nice guy.” Of course, Shula never would have put up with what Weeb did, and was privately critical of Ewbank’s permissiveness—some real irony, given Ewbank’s Colt reign—whose manner of discipline, wrote Povich, “bordered on a musical appeal of ‘Oh, promise me. . . .’ ”8
Adding context to these cultural shadings was that all of this was happening eight days before Richard Nixon would be sworn in and begin compiling an enemies list of imagined subversives, perhaps Namath among them. Though some Colts bridled at the notion they were too square to be hip, Shula only made that image resonate further. The onetime FDR and JFK-worshiping union man turned well-heeled Nixon supporter believed his generation did more than talk; they won, while spoiled Baby Boomers only complained. It had to tickle him that he could shut up the loudest one. Maybe it tickled him a bit too much.
Not that he prepared with any less meticulousness, and with a warning to his team that the Jets weren’t exactly a semi-pro team and needed to be taken very seriously. Mostly, he feared the Namath-Maynard connection. The latter, a prickly former NFL reject who had played for the AFL’s New York franchise since it was the Titans in 1960, had speed and cunning. But he had not caught as many passes in ’68 as the other Jet wideout, George Sauer Jr., the anti-establishment son of a former NFL player who was then the GM of the Boston Patriots. Cerebral and reliable, he was a clone of Ray Berry in running precise patterns and holding on to passes, earning first-team All-Pro in the AFL two straight years. Shula figured his zone defense would blanket Sauer, but Maynard’s speed could beat them. And he was skeptical that Maynard, as the injury report said, had injured a hamstring in the Raider win, believing Ewbank was trying to play with his head.
Ewbank feared little about the Colts. He prepped his defense to ignore the run, swarm Morrall, and clamp down on Richardson, Orr, and Mackey. The Jet defensive backs were an opportunistic lot, intercepting 28 passes. Within the NFL bubble, though, arrogance ruled. Maule, who had worked as a publicist for two NFL teams, typed his verdict of the game in advance, writing, “The pro football championship of the world was rather definitely decided on a mushy field in Cleveland on Dec. 29.”9 Of Namath, Maule sneered that he had signed with the AFL because he was too “scared” to “excel against the best.” His prediction: Colts 43, Jets 0. And the patron saint of the NFL? Vince Lombardi had no doubt. The Jets’ chances were, he said, “infinitesimal.”10
Shula worried what that kind of talk would do to his men. But not too much. One writer found him “in a merry mood” that week. Seeing a magazine with a picture of him clad so nattily in Cleveland, he passed the magazine around and said, “I bet I get some offers for modeling. You’ll have to do something with that nose . . . not imposing enough.”11 Even so, he was every reporter’s worst interview—even those who knew him well. Bob Maisel, comparing Shula’s press conferences to Ewbank’s garrulous ones, wrote: “He injects humor . . . but his answers are much more to the point and businesslike. There is no reminiscing, no bringing up names from the past. . . . Ask a question and he hits you right between the eyes with his answer. It’s concise, orderly, logical.”12 Just like his team.
Carroll Rosenbloom had been praising Shula for the job he’d done that season without his star quarterback, ready to conclude right now that hiring him was an act of genius. Shula, he said, wasn’t just the best current coach, but maybe the best ever. Anticipating such, he had given Shula the title of vice-president, though without stock in the team. As Shula recalled:
He said he hoped that as long as he lived and that as long as he owned the Baltimore Colts, he would never have to look for another coach. There was a lot of warmth in his voice and there wasn’t any reason why I should doubt his sincerity. It was a tremendous moment and I was touched by [it]. At that moment I couldn’t possibly envision the day we wouldn’t be together.13
Hours before the game, he and Rosenbloom strode around the field in the empty Orange Bowl. Ewbank was doing the same thing, and when their paths crossed, Rosenbloom grandly invited him to the Colts’ postgame victory party. Whether this was an intentional dig, or just a too-little-thought-out attempt at collegiality, Weeb, hardly believing what he heard, walked away without a word. Still steaming, Ewbank would send his team out for the game with the exhortation “Let’s have our own victory party!” At that same moment in the other locker room, Shula—this time wearing a blue windbreaker, as if the game was no more important than a scrimmage—had no rousing words.
“He wasn’t a rah-rah guy; he didn’t want us so high we’d forget what we had to,” said Volk. “It was basically, you know, ‘Let’s go get ’em.’ It was supposed to be that easy.”
It was overcast in Miami, a cool, humid 66 degrees. The pro wrestling–style theatrics of the week swelled ticket sales to 75,389, about the same as the year before, when the game was also played in the Orange Bowl. More importantly, TV viewership would also hold, garnering over 41 million viewers and a 36 Nielsen rating, a 30-second ad selling for $55,000. (The 2017 game was seen by 72 million, and the same ads sold for $5 million.) The formalities done, the Colts took the ball first and moved easily to the Jet 19, but Michaels—still unnerved?—shanked a field goal. A few plays later, Namath heaved one long for Maynard, who beat the deep zone. He overthrew him by a few inches, but, according to Namath, it spooked the Colt defense into covering Maynard even more tightly, leaving room for Sauer.
Ewbank and Namath believed they could easily exploit the underside of the Colts’ strong-side rotating zone going to the possession guy, Sauer, which became more doable when Volk, on the second play of the game, collided head on with Snell, nearly knocking Volk cold. He would be given smelling salts and was cleared by the team doctor to return to the game after a few series. Namath and Sauer took note of his wooziness. But none of this would have mattered had the Colts not bumbled early, when they had the Jets on the run. After a scoreless opening quarter, Morrall got them to the Jet four. He aimed one over the middle for Tom Mitchell. The ball caromed high off his shoulder pad, and cornerback Randy Beverly dove and grabbed it at the back of the end zone. That preceded an 80-yard Jet drive that ended when, from the four, Snell rumbled around left end and sliced past Dennis Gaubatz into the end zone. After both teams missed field goals, Matte broke a 58-yard run to get deep into Jet territory. Morrall then aimed one for Richardson on the foot of the end zone, but aging cornerback Johnny Sample—who had been cut by the Colts after their two championship years and blamed Shula and the NFL for allegedly blackballing him—crept in to pick it off at the two.
A pattern was forming. Snell was pounding yardage behind savage blocking by Boozer, ultimately running 30 times, most of his carries against the right side of the Colt defense, where Braase and Miller were decimated. And with the protection of the offensive line, as well as his uncanny recognition of nearly every Colt blitz and stunt, Namath could take a quick drop and throw a daggerlike pass to Sauer—who would snare eight, only one of which, for 39 yards, went deep. He also hit Snell four times out of the backfield for 40 yards, halfback Bill Mathis thrice for 20.
Namath’s command of his own offense, and the Colts’ defense, was such that he called no plays in the huddle; rather, he’d get to the line, see the lay of the land, and call it then. It was surgical, classic old-style football—“one of the most masterful play-calling jobs I’ve ever seen,” wrote Paul Zimmerman years later. It also kept the defense fresh. As the game wore on, Morrall could barely see blue Colt jerseys downfield—not even one that was left so free that he could have walked the ball to it. On the Jet 41, with 25 seconds left in the half, Shula got funky, calling a flea-flicker, with Matte taking the handoff, running a few steps, then tossing it back to Morrall. During the season, this play worked perfectly against the Falcons, with Orr making an easy catch at the goal line. And now, too, the Jet secondary bit on the fake, leaving Orr ridiculously open, frantically waving his arms for Morrall to throw him the ball in the end zone. Calling the game for NBC, Curt Gowdy shouted, “All alone is Jimmy Orr!” However, Morrall inexplicably sailed a pass down the middle for Jerry Hill, but strong safety Jim Hudson cut in front of him and intercepted.
Recalled Volk: “Earl didn’t want to make an excuse, but a marching band was right behind where Jimmy was, getting ready for the halftime show. Earl lost Jimmy in the crowd of blue band uniforms and went for Jerry. Something like that doesn’t happen on a good day.”
Shula, whose grim, tight-jawed slow burns became a constant on the broadcast, knew he was in a dogfight of his own making. At halftime, he upbraided his men for losing their cool and deviating from the game plan. He could have inserted Unitas to give the team a shot of adrenaline, but figured that would be panicking, and insulting to Morrall. Unitas, for his part, believed Morrall didn’t have it and that only he could save the season. On the sideline, he looked highly agitated when Matte fumbled on the first drive of the second half and the Jets kept on churning out long drives. With three minutes left in the third, they held a 13–0 lead. As the poet and longtime Colt fan Ogden Nash penned sadly, the Colts, “like the Florida snow that melts, seemed to have trickled somewhere else.”14
At that point, Morrall was 6-for-17 for 71 yards, with 3 picks. Now Shula motioned to Unitas to warm up, the sight of which titillated the crowd and the press. In he came, wobbling on his gimpy legs. It was a sight that Namath said scared him to death. But, with twilight casting a gloom over the field, Unitas’s first two passes fell incomplete. After a punt, the Jets notched another field goal, making it 16–0 early in the fourth quarter. Unitas next got the Colts to the Jet 25, but a pass for Orr was picked off again by Beverly in the end zone. His weak arm and the Jet defense held him to 11-for-24 for 110 yards. Still, with three and a half minutes left, he led a long drive that was capped by a short Hill TD run to make it 16–7. The Colts recovered the onside kick, but the Jets held and ran out the clock, whereupon many in the crowd, not sure if they were dreaming, just stared as the Jets jumped on each other, though Ewbank begged off being carried on some of his men’s shoulders.
A grim-faced Shula met Ewbank at midfield and put an arm around his old boss, who in his suit and Jets baseball cap came up to his shoulder, but stood tall on this day, the second coach after Paul Brown to win titles in different leagues. Namath, still the center of attention, was briefly congratulated by a gracious Unitas, then jogged off the field, index finger raised in the air. He was the game’s MVP, despite Snell’s then–Super Bowl record 121 yards rushing and Sauer’s 133 yards receiving. His stats—17-for-28 for 206 yards, no interceptions—seemed secondary to the guarantee he had backed up. Inside the locker room, with the Jets bitching that the NFL had not put any champagne in the room for them to celebrate with, Namath felt he had to clarify his criticism of Morrall, not for Morrall’s sake, but for that of the coach he had taken pains not to malign.
“I’m sorry that Don Shula took what I said about Morrall as a rap,” he said. “I only meant it as a statement of fact.”
In the other locker room, the mood was funereal. The Colts sat with their heads bowed, many just staring. Shula, who felt like the blood had been drained from him, mouthed the exact opposite of what he’d said in Cleveland two weeks earlier: “I don’t think we did anything right.” Of Namath, he said, tersely, “He beat us. He beat our blitz three or four times and we beat him only once.” Then, pulling out and dusting off the civil code of his generation, he stared straight ahead and said, “It’s just a shame for us to face the winter after all of the good things that happened to us before today, but we’ve just got to be men.”15 As for holding back on Unitas, he said he felt he “owed it to Earl” to stick with him as long as he did. Of Morrall not seeing Orr? Pause, then, “Bad judgment.” He finished saying what he never imagined he would have to.
“We realized what was at stake. We didn’t represent our league or ourselves.”
The veterans echoed him. Braase said, “We let down the entire National Football League. . . . My pride was bent. They just walked out there and beat us. They didn’t beat us physically. They just beat us.” Billy Ray Smith said, “When you’re No. 1, you’re the best, but when you’re No. 2, you’re nothing.” Not seeing the irony, he seethed, “We played like an AFL team.” Unitas, outwardly, was stoic. “You always hate to lose,” he said. “But a football player can’t feel sorry for himself,” though he couldn’t help but note that “I moved ’em . . . but time ran out on us.” Morrall was pouring all the blame on himself. Someone congratulated him for a great season. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’m sorry I can’t agree with you.”16 Alex Hawkins, having played his last game for Shula, wept as he sat on his stool.
The aftermath of the game was every bit as much Namath’s as the prelude had been. There were 1,290 press credentials issued for the game, a sample size large enough to influence public opinion by shamelessly serenading Namath in the next day’s papers, many splattering headlines of the “stupendous upset” on front pages in type bigger than news such as HANOI REJECTS NEW U.S. BID. Turning on a dime, Maule called the Jets quarterback the “folk hero of the new generation [and] insouciant youth in the Jet Age,” and that “the era of John Unitas ended and the day of Broadway Joe and the mod quarterback began.” The New York Times’s Robert Lipsyte, elevating him to the level of the heavyweight champ still in exile for refusing to fight in that jungle war, reminded readers that the then Cassius Clay had beaten Sonny Liston only a few miles away.17 Namath was far less significant than Ali, but profound in the arc of team sports. St. Vince knew how lucky he was to escape Shula’s pitfall. It felt unmistakable that something new had officially arrived. Tom Wicker, the astute New York Times political columnist, wrote that the Jets upset gave comfort to all challengers to the status quo, “their tattered faith [in change] preserved [and saved] from imminent extinction.”18
Namath’s rebel status, and relevance, would last only until the Jets went south and he quit in ’77, his body ravaged. By then, he was jejune within his own generation, and many rungs below Don Shula on the distinction ladder. But even decades later, in his 70s, he was still riffing, “If we had played 10 times the Colts might’ve won one.”19 But Shula, too, would be forever synonymous with January 12, 1969, as the foil. No one seemed to know this more than he as he exited the Orange Bowl, wearing a hunted look and probably hoping never to see that house of horrors again.
Shula’s longest day held more horrors in store. He had just gotten back to the Hilton when he heard a woman screaming in panic in the corridor outside his room. He opened the door and saw Rick Volk’s wife, Charlene, calling for help. Shula ran into the room, saw Volk lying in the bathtub, his body wracked by seizures, and summoned Dr. McDonnell. Volk had been knocked out of the game late in the fourth quarter, barely conscious and dragged off the field by teammates. He had made it back to the hotel, but soon fell ill. With Shula holding him down, the doctor reached into Volk’s mouth, keeping him from swallowing his tongue. An ambulance was called, and when Volk was taken to a hospital emergency room, Shula rode with him. Volk was taken to the intensive care unit, and when word got back to the team, they milled around the lobby, waiting for some good news from the hospital, where Shula would stay with Charlene through the night. It was determined that Volk had actually suffered two concussions during the game, and blood was seeping into his brain. “For a while,” Shula said, “it was touch and go.”20
The next morning, Volk was still in the ICU when a shaken Shula returned to the hotel for a final press conference, saying he was thinking more of his cornerback than the game, which he would later write made him feel “sick” and was “the darkest day of my coaching career.” Happily, Volk, who received flowers from Namath, was soon released, though he would not fully recover for six weeks. But for Shula, the malaise about letting down the NFL never eased. And in the short term, the most important immediate consequence was that he had an entirely different relationship with Carroll Rosenbloom.
The owner, in a snit about becoming the first NFL owner to lose to the AFL, sounded an apocalyptic tone days after the game. “It’s still like a bad dream to me,” he mourned. “I can’t sleep. If we don’t get together and get our vindication we don’t deserve to have a club. I am 60 years old. When will I ever get close enough for a Super Bowl again? We just must start right now to be better, in every aspect.”21 Only days after swearing allegiance to Shula, he said that he was not “big on coaches,” who he insisted had less effect on teams than the players. His obligatory, throw-in paean that Shula “is as fine a coach as there is in football” seemed canceled out by his whine that “something happens every year, so we must be doing something wrong.”
With this tension suddenly between them, they spent a fleeting few minutes at Rosenbloom’s forlorn “victory” party consoling each other. But after reading the owner’s turgid comments in the paper, Shula rang him up to ascertain whether he still supported him, and was stunned that the flighty owner was angered at being put on the spot. As he recalled: “He snapped at me that he had a right to say or think whatever he wanted to and was bitterly disappointed by the loss. . . . It was obvious to me that our relationship was beginning to deteriorate.”22
Though no one other than Dorothy knew it, Shula had begun preparing himself to break free if the right opportunity came along. For now, he kept his feelings hidden, but they were percolating. Looking back 40 years later, long after C.R. was gone and Shula was out of football, he said:
I loved Baltimore—the people, the fans and everything that Colts football stood for. But Rosenbloom’s New York buddies never let him forget [the loss], and he never let me forget it. If we had won that game, and continued to win, I certainly wouldn’t have gone. I’d still be in Baltimore, eating crab cakes.23
That was a case of Shula “going there,” to areas most football people avoided out of respect to Rosenbloom. His sly phrase “New York buddies” was fraught with dark meaning, a veiled reference to Rosenbloom’s gambling cronies who had bet heavily on the Colts to cover the engorged spread. Art Donovan helped fill in the blanks when he once breezily ventured that Ordell Braase told him that the Super Bowl game was the day when “the Sicilian frogmen finally got to Rosey.” If so, it meant “Rosey” had violated the pledge he’d given Rozelle, by doing the exact same thing that had gotten him into trouble back in ’58. And perhaps this had something to do with Rosenbloom holding his full fire against Shula, knowing the coach was hip to it all and could create big trouble for him.
In truth, Shula’s moral code, which made allowances for the conduct of an owner like this—and, over time, that of some of his players—would have precluded him from ratting out Rosenbloom, as he did for decades. But the implied threat otherwise might have served him well, at least in the short run. To be certain, winning the NFL title as the Colts did was no small matter, and firing “the best coach in football” for one clinker, as enormous as it was, would have been exceedingly petty. Thus, Shula was insulated for the time being from the avalanche of off-season criticism, during which one Maryland state senator grumbled, “I’m disgusted . . . The Colts let me down so hard.” Another pontificating pol, a House delegate, added, “Shula has the best winning record in football—and the worst record in big games.” A sign in a downtown office building read, “Due to unforeseen circumstances, the start of the Colt dynasty has been delayed.” On an ad on a bus that featured Morrall saying, “How to be number one—you’ve got to hang in there,” someone crossed out “in there.” Callers to sports talk radio shows yammered about the game being fixed by New York mob types. Some Colts chose to lay low in Miami for a while rather than coming home.24
The most peeved, though, was Unitas, who beneath his stoic posing was sure he would have avoided Morrall’s blunders and pulled it out had he been sent in earlier. He was livid that his brief cameo had made him look not heroic, but pitiful. For that, he held Shula in contempt. The coach was never far from his mind. Late in his life, Unitas let out the epitaph of Shula he had long chosen to use in private.
“I wouldn’t walk across the street,” he said, “to piss down Don Shula’s throat if he was on fire.”25