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There were football players and there was Johnny Unitas. He looked like a skinny Pennsylvannia plumber who snuck into a badly fitting uniform and somehow managed to take a beating long enough to get rid of a rope to win and win and win. Many books have been written about him, and a new one, “Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas” by Tom Callahan, is particularly good. Johnny U’s life was custom-made for a story.
Here was a guy who showed up and played like a blue-collar worker after he sat his lunch pail down. Nobody wanted him. Notre Dame snubbed him, the Pittsburgh Steelers cut him. He played semi-pro scrub ball for $3 a game against guys who were indeed plumbers and elevator repairmen.
Then the Baltimore Colts brought the hunched QB in for $7,000 a year and he was happy to get it. He stayed 17 years and led a 1958 title game victory over the New York Giants that a lot of people consider the greatest football game ever played. When he was finished, John Unitas had won a Super Bowl and set so many NFL records that it took nearly 20 years for anyone to break them.
Unitas was a player’s player, a man who stood in the pocket and took his punishment and never left the field if he still had more blood in him than he had on him. And that was often. Johnny U left the game almost a cripple from the abuse he took in a time when the rules didn’t protect the QB and the 19 on his jersey was more a target than a number. His magnificent hands that threw for all those yards and TD’s were reduced to claws by arthritis. He never complained. He broached no sympathy. And he would never put up with being called a hero for playing a game.
In his prime when he was carving an exploding phenomenon called the NFL out of part-time men who just wanted to make a half-living hitting somebody, he was never arrogant, never a hotdog, never sought the limelight and never changed from the hard-working guy who just wanted to play ball, even when he was the biggest star on the field. This was a job and he did it like a welder or a dockworker or any of the millions of other guys who worshipped the man because he was not like them, he was them.
He played with men named Ameche, Marchetti, Mutscheller, Mackey, Morrall, Moore, Rechichar, Berry, Parker, Donovan, Big Daddy Lipscomb, Matte and Bubba. He played for a man named Weeb Ewbank. And he played against men named Huff, Brown, Butkus, Rote, Hornung and Gifford. There is not enough room here for all the legendary names, but these were the men who created the NFL back when those three letters meant more to little kids than millionaires playing a game everyone would play for free. It didn’t cost $500 for a family of four to see Johnny Unitas throw himself into the Hall of Fame.
“He was the football player,” said Sam Huff when Unitas died. Everybody was bigger physically, but nobody played bigger than Johnny U.
Saturdays were ABC Sports and Keith Jackson and college football. Sundays were Pat Summerall and Johnny U and Joe Willie and Jim Brown. I watched every single NFL Films replay and went down to the old field with my ratty-rubber-bladder-protruding- through-the-hole-in-the-worn-pigskin football and played with friends into the dark, humming that familiar NFL music in my head and wishing I could be Otis Taylor.
As I type this, I hear a bizarrely elevated sentence forming in the dramatic cadence of John Facenda: “Once there roamed on the Sunday fields of athletic competition, a breed of man who ignored his pain and the violence; a man who though bent and bloodied, stood tall when he had to and faced the vicious rush and unleashed winning itself and for that effort was rewarded as a hero.”
That sounds like something the “Voice of God” would say as a battered Johnny U threw another touchdown to Raymond Berry in the dirt corner of a stadium at sunset. It sounds like something I would like to hear today as I watch rich men play half as well as John Unitas.
