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Calling the Signals
Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas
by Tom Callahan
Crown. 292 pp. $24.95
The National Football League (NFL) is the most successful professional sports operation in history, a money-making machine that seems never to sleep. But is the game as sound as the balance sheet, or has the corporate and bureaucratic ethos that keeps the NFL purring in profitability trickled down to the playing field, with unhappy results?
Consider an offhand comment by Al Saunders, a Washington Redskins coach, in late August. The Redskins had just lost their third straight pre-season contest with another torpid performance by Mark Brunell, the team’s multi-million-dollar-per-year quarterback. Saunders, however, who pulls down a healthy $2 million per annum himself, was unworried: “The good news is that in our system, we’re not asking Mark to win the game for us. . . . We’re asking him to manage the game . . . not to try to do too much and [to] let the offense work for him.”
During the NFL’s golden age in the late 50’s and 60’s, one could no more have imagined a coach telling the great quarterback John Unitas to “manage the game” than one could have imagined Pope Julius II asking Michelangelo to manage the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. (“Just follow my plan and let the paint work for you.”) But over the past two decades, pro football on the field has become a game in which, time and again, “system” trumps personal initiative and, even more importantly, personal responsibility. Tom Callahan’s Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas explains why this should be a matter of regret, and not only for football fans.
According to no less an authority than Sports Illustrated, John Constantine Unitas, who died in 2002 at the age of sixty-nine, was the greatest quarterback in NFL history. To mark his death, the magazine created a statistical matrix, the “U-ratings,” to prove its point mathematically. But those of us who watched him, and idolized him, for the seventeen years during which he quarterbacked the Baltimore Colts had no need of statistics to tell us what we knew. As the sportswriter Frank Deford put it shortly after Unitas’s funeral in 2002, “If there were one game scheduled, Earth versus the Klingons, with the fate of the universe on the line, any person with his wits about him would have Johnny U calling the signals in the huddle, up under the center, back in the pocket.”
Calling the signals and playing to win—not managing a “system.” “Systems” are for Klingons. Talent, imagination, physical courage, leadership, and coolness under fire are for men.
You do not have to be born in western Pennsylvania to be a great quarterback, but it helps—or so names like George Blanda, Jim Kelly, Johnny Lujack, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Joe Namath, and Babe Parilli suggest. Kelly, one of the two best quarterbacks (with Marino) never to win an NFL championship, has attributed the region’s disproportionate record to the local work ethic—an ethic, he told Callahan, “that says, ‘What you get out of something depends on what you put into it.’” The theologian Michael Novak, who grew up in those parts, cites as well the region’s east-central European heritage: “You’re down 19-7 with only seven minutes to play? Big deal. It’s been that way for a thousand years.”
That was John Unitas’s world: the ethnic (in his case, Lithuanian) and family-centered universe of Depression-era steel mills, mines, and coal-delivery trucks. Unitas’s father, who operated one of those trucks, died at thirty-eight, technically of kidney failure and pneumonia but more likely of sheer exhaustion. His son evinced football promise early on, though it took a while for the world to notice. After an impressive high-school career, the skinny, 135-pound player was turned down by Notre Dame and settled for a scholarship to the University of Louisville. There, throughout his undergraduate career, he pretty much was the football team, showing enough form—and enough of his laser-like arm—to attract some professional attention.
In 1955, the Pittsburgh Steelers drafted Unitas in the ninth round, but then cut him at the end of the pre-season. Unitas, who had married in college, went to work on a Pittsburgh construction gang to support his young family, and played $6-per-game sandlot football on a local semi-pro team. Then along came the Baltimore Colts.
The Colts of the early 1950’s had been a monument to ineptitude. But by mid-decade, some shrewd drafting—crucial in the days before free agency made for virtually unlimited player movement—was laying the foundations of a winner. At quarterback, the team thought it had the answer in an All-American college player named George Shaw. When Shaw tore up his knee in 1956, his replacement was Unitas, whom the Colts’ general manager had signed for the price of an eighty-cent phone call and who had made an impression during training camp and pre-season. Rushed into the game as Shaw’s back-up, Unitas threw his first NFL pass—promptly intercepted by the Chicago Bears and returned for a touchdown.
It was an inauspicious beginning, but some on the team already liked what they had seen in Unitas during the brief months they had known him. These players included Gino Marchetti, a defensive end who had enlisted in the army after a high-school scrape (“I figured I could either face the Germans or I could face my father”) and had then played collegiate football on an undefeated University of San Francisco team; the defensive tackle Art Donovan, who prepared for NFL combat by taping old issues of Time and Newsweek to his shins; Raymond Berry, the myopic wide receiver with one leg shorter than the other; Alan “the Horse” Ameche, a Heisman Trophy winner from Wisconsin who looked more like a tenor in a Verdi opera than a fullback; and Jim Mutscheller, a tight end from Notre Dame who had fought as a marine in Korea and, Callahan writes, “had a look in his eye that could bore a hole in a vault.”
They would all become friends on a team that, in its ethnic and racial diversity (and tension)—the Colts showcased such prototype black football greats as the halfback Lenny Moore, the offensive tackle Jim Parker, and the defensive tackle Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb—was a kind of NFL analogy to the Brooklyn Dodgers depicted in Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer. Berry would become Unitas’s other half; the two worked for hours after practice, refining their timing, devising plays that Unitas would store on the hard drive of his fine football brain, ready for access at the right moment.
That moment would be one of Unitas’s own choosing. After becoming the Colts’ starting quarterback midway through the 1956 season, he was both the team’s on-field leader and what in today’s bureaucratized NFL would be called the offensive coordinator. True, he would talk over the game plan with head coach Weeb Ewbank and others on Ewbank’s staff; but when, for example, he was asked in 1959 by Don McCafferty, a new offensive assistant coach, whether he needed any help, he replied: “Mac, if you’re positive they’re going to blitz, let me know. Otherwise, sit back, relax, and enjoy the game.”
Johnny U by Tom Callahan
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