Art Donovan reported for training camp in 1956 as one of the old guys on the Baltimore Colts. Before practice one day, he went into the training room to get his feet rubbed when he noticed a skinny guy with buckteeth coming toward him.
“This guy, he had a humpback on his shoulder. I said to the trainer, ‘Who is that guy, and what is he doing?’ ” Donovan recalled in a phone interview. “The trainer said, ‘He’s a quarterback named Unitas.’ I said to myself, ‘How in the hell can a quarterback with a bad shoulder make the team?’
“How wrong was I, huh?”
Nobody gave the kid with the flat-top haircut, steely eyes and black high-top shoes much of a chance to do anything in the NFL. But 50 years ago this weekend, John Unitas replaced injured starting quarterback George Shaw in a game against the Bears. Nobody knew then that Unitas would change football. Not after his first pass of the game was intercepted and returned for a touchdown.
He put those initial mistakes behind him and ended up playing for 18 seasons, throwing for 40,239 yards and 290 touchdowns, winning two NFL championships and Super Bowl V. His streak of 47 consecutive games with a touchdown pass from 1956-60 never has been seriously challenged.
When Unitas died in 2002 at the age of 69, it seemed nearly everyone in Baltimore wept. Because Unitas was Baltimore.
“You didn’t get that sense to begin with,” said Don Shula, who played with Unitas and later coached him from 1963-69. “He had no background. He didn’t come in as a heralded player that was going to be the savior. He came in as a discard from somewhere else and fought his way through everything to get to the pinnacle.”
From out of nowhere
Perhaps that is what is so amazing about Unitas. The Pittsburgh Steelers drafted him in 1955 in the ninth round, but cut him. He spent that year playing sandlot football with the Bloomfield Rams on the east side of Pittsburgh before he got his shot with the Colts.
Teammates and fans were skeptical at first, because everyone was excited about Shaw. Giants General Manager Ernie Accorsi remembers going to the first exhibition game of the year in Hershey, Pa. Only 14 at the time, he went to the game to see Shaw. After a few drives, Shaw came out. In went Unitas.
“My buddy and I were complaining: ‘We paid to see Shaw,’ ” Accorsi said. “But the guy next to us said, ‘Look, Unitas threw seven touchdown passes in the intrasquad game. Calm down, this guy is going to be pretty good.’ “
Colts Coach Weeb Ewbank saw something special, too.
“I can think back to being in training camp that year, and how many times Coach Ewbank said to me, keep working on that Unitas after practice, keep working on him,” Hall of Fame receiver Raymond Berry said. “I think he had a clue as to what type of player he had here. If he didn’t have that, it would have all ended there in 1956, because Weeb saw something in us no one had any way of understanding.”
Good thing he did. Though Unitas played sparingly in the first two games of 1956, he got his big chance when Shaw was injured in Week 4. Things got worse after that first interception. He fumbled handoffs. He crashed into his own running backs. The Colts ended up losing 58-27, and Unitas was 9-for-19 for 131 yards, with one touchdown and one interception.
But Unitas put that Bears game behind him as soon as it ended. That was perhaps one of his greatest strengths. “It took years to fully appreciate what happened that day. It says it all about why I think John was who he was,” Berry said.
Though he had barely any NFL experience, Unitas’ teammates believed in him when he got into that huddle. “He was always the calculating field general,” said Accorsi, who idolized Unitas and later worked with him on the Colts.
The field general
Unitas freelanced in every game, calling nearly every play and asking his teammates, “Who can get open?” When someone answered he could, Unitas would say, “OK, I’ll get you the ball.” He usually did.
“John was always prepared,” Hall of Fame teammate Gino Marchetti said. “He’d always go home with the films and study. During the course of a game, he used to pull these plays out of his hat at the right time.”
Ewbank relied on him, too. On crucial downs, he had Unitas make the play call. Everyone trusted him to do the right thing.
“Have you ever been to the zoo and gone up to the cage where there’s a lion laying down there?” Berry said. “Have you looked into the face of the lion? When you look in the face of the lion, he is sending you a message. It was that way with John. His basic natural demeanor, his approach, I don’t know if I’ve ever been around anyone as confident in their ability or mentally tough. He was a natural leader and competitor.”
But his stubbornness and desire to call all the plays caused him to bump heads with Shula. Author Tom Callahan, who knew Unitas for 30 years, details the relationship between coach and player in his new book, Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas.
Callahan described one short fourth-down situation, when Shula sent in the field-goal team. Unitas waved them off and got the first down. Afterward, Shula told him, “Listen, John, if you’re going to show me up like that, I can’t be coach of this team.”
Callahan said: “I didn’t feel the need to make [John] perfect. Because he was good enough. He had his quarrels with Shula. I’m sure he wasn’t always right. He had a code and he always lived by it. He never changed.”
Shula said he and Unitas had “rocky times” but wouldn’t describe theirs as a rocky relationship.
“There were times we didn’t agree,” Shula said. “Over a period of time, we got a lot done together. It’s such a volatile game. There’s so much emotion that goes on. There are highs and the lows. There are good things and negative things that happen. The reactions you have over that period of time aren’t always positive, great relations or reactions.”
Indeed, Unitas was a tough guy to get to know. He said little, and it took time to earn his trust. As Callahan said, “He wasn’t very knowable. Most of the guys would tell me he was a little standoffish. He thought part of being a pro was not being too close to his teammates.”
The Greatest Game
But he sure knew how to lead them — without being flamboyant, without bragging, without calling attention to himself. He wanted to win so badly, he sometimes willed the team to win. He is the reason why the Colts won the NFL championship in 1958 against the Giants, in a game that changed professional football.
After Unitas led the Colts to the tying field goal, the game went into overtime. The Giants got the ball first and went three-and-out. Unitas then marched the Colts down the field, converting a third-and-14 from their own 37 with a 21-yard pass to Berry. The Colts kept driving, and Alan Ameche scored on third-and-goal from the 1 to win the title.
“Johnny, he did a magical thing that day,” said Hall of Famer Frank Gifford, a member of the Giants that day. “But if I hadn’t fumbled twice, you wouldn’t have heard of him.”
Everybody had now heard of Unitas. It was the only sudden-death overtime game in the history of the NFL championship. Nearly 45 million people, the largest television audience in league history, saw his heroics at Yankee Stadium. People were hooked, and football slowly started gaining in popularity. The contest eventually came to be known as The Greatest Game Ever Played.
After the momentous victory, the players filed out of the stadium and onto the sidewalk in front of the team bus. Berry looked over at Commissioner Bert Bell.
“I noticed he had tears in his eyes,” Berry said. “I got to thinking later on about that, and I thought, ‘Bert Bell understood what happened. He had been nursing this baby along, and it finally got born.’ He grasped the fact that it would never be the same.”
How could it be the same? At that time, football was a passion for everyone who played, not a career. Nearly every single player had a second job. Unitas’ first contract paid him $5,000. By the 1958 game, he was making $17,500.
Players got to know the fans, who were there to greet them at the airport when they returned home, win or lose.
“Now you go to Baltimore and talk to people, and it’s hard to run into anybody who had ever met one of the Ravens,” Marchetti said. “They just don’t come around as compared to when we were there. I’ve always said out of 60,000 fans every Sunday, I probably shook hands with every one of them.”
Baltimore’s favorite son
Unitas always was a favorite son of Baltimore and ended up staying there when his career ended after a short stint in San Diego in 1973. But he never was the genius he was on the football field. Many business ventures failed. So did his career as a television analyst.
“He didn’t succeed in anything but football, which was sad and I’m sure was an embarrassment to him,” Callahan said.
Though he never saw himself as a pioneer, Unitas was an inspiration to generations of quarterbacks. Dan Marino’s father watched Unitas play with the Bloomfield Rams and told Marino story after story about the quarterback. Now it is up to the Unitas family to keep the tales going. One of Unitas’ sons, Chad — a spitting image of the old man — lives in Baltimore now and constantly is asked about the great Johnny U.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Do you get sick and tired of it?’ ” Chad Unitas said. “No. The only time that it will start to bother me is when they stop asking about him, because that’s when they’ve forgotten him.”
