About the Author
Tom Callahan, a former senior writer at Time magazine and sports columnist at the Washington Post, is a recipient of the National Headliner Award. He has covered three decades of everything in major-league sports, from Sarajevo to Zaire, including hundreds of pro football games and numerous Super Bowls. Among his many Time cover subjects are San Francisco quarterback Joe Montana and Chicago running back Walter Payton. Callahan is the author of three other books, the most recent being The Bases Were Loaded (And So Was I).
From The Washington Post
Tom Callahan's affectionate account of the life and times of Johnny Unitas isn't so much a biography as an informal portrait, and it really is as much about the times as it is about the man, or, as he says, "less about a specific place in the country than a place where the whole country used to be." Unitas joined the Baltimore Colts of the National Football League in 1956, when professional football still existed at the periphery of American sports and when the money was anything except big. Callahan writes: "The time was different. The players lived next door to the fans, literally. There wasn't a financial gulf, a cultural gulf, or any other kind of gulf, between them. Except for a dozen Sundays a year, the Colts were occupied in the usual and normal pursuits of happiness. 'I remember when Alan and I bought our first row house,' Yvonne Ameche said. 'We paid eight thousand dollars for it. John Unitas came over and laid our kitchen floor. Everyone pitched in, painted and helped us get that little row house ready.' . . . In an annual visit to every locker room in the league, the Philadelphia-based commissioner of the NFL, DeBenneville 'Bert' Bell, emphasized the virtue of community. 'He told us,' [one Baltimore player] said, 'that if you're going to play professional football in a town, you have to live in that town, really live there. "Otherwise," he said, "don't play." A lot of us took that to heart.' "
Nobody could have known it at the time, but huge change was only a couple of years away. The decisive moment occurred in December 1958, when Unitas and the Colts defeated the New York Giants for the NFL championship in an overtime game for which the only appropriate adjective was, and remains, thrilling. I remember it as though it had just happened. I was 19 years old, at home from college for Christmas vacation, bored to the point of comatose. The school where my father was headmaster had a black-and-white television set in its recreation room, to which I retreated in desperation the afternoon of Dec. 28. I knew nothing about pro football when the game began and was hooked on it for life when it ended.
So too were millions -- literally, millions -- of other Americans. Callahan quotes the great Baltimore receiver Raymond Berry: "I remember seeing Commissioner Bell standing in the back of our locker room after the game. He was crying. I think he knew what we didn't -- yet. That this was a watershed for the NFL." A former Colt named Don Shula, who by then was an assistant coach at the University of Virginia, said: "That's the game that changed professional football. The popularity of it started right there."
This alone would be reason enough to celebrate Unitas, who was the dominant figure on the field that day: " 'Twelve players from that game went on to the Pro Football Hall of Fame,' said [New York linebacker Sam] Huff, who was one of them. 'Twelve players plus [Vince] Lombardi, [Tom] Landry, and [Weeb] Ewbank. Fifteen Hall of Famers on the same field. And one master. Unitas was the master.' " Indeed he was. Most people who know what they're talking about say he was the greatest quarterback in the history of the game, though partisans of Sammy Baugh, Otto Graham, Joe Montana, John Elway and a few others can muster strong arguments. He wasn't smooth or pretty, but he had remarkable peripheral vision, an (again to quote Berry) "amazingly organized mind, a fabulous memory," bottomless toughness and self-discipline, and a natural capacity for leadership. Lenny Lyles, another teammate, said: "He had character. He wasn't the All-American-looking quarterback like out of a movie. He had it inside."
He was born and raised in Pittsburgh. Callahan is scarcely the first to make the point, but Pittsburgh and Baltimore were mirror images of each other in those days: hard as steel (which both of them manufactured) but surprisingly soft inside, cities made up of discrete and self-contained neighborhoods, proud but modest. Another very good quarterback who came out of western Pennsylvania, Jim Kelly, speaks of the local "work ethic that says, 'What you get out of something depends on what you put into it,' " which could just as easily be said of Baltimore. When Unitas got there he fit in naturally and immediately, and the city embraced him as its favorite son. In all of Baltimore's greatest sporting years, the 1960s and '70s, only one other athlete stood as tall there as Unitas: Brooks Robinson, the Orioles' third baseman from Arkansas, whose down-home character mirrored Unitas's but with a Southern accent.
The story of how Unitas got to Baltimore is well-known. He played football at the University of Louisville -- he was a good Catholic boy who always wanted to play for Notre Dame but was told he was too small (5 feet 11) -- and was drafted, probably rather reluctantly, by his hometown NFL team, the Steelers, who scarcely gave him a chance during the exhibition season and cut him when it was over. He played semi-pro ball for a while, then was invited to try out for Baltimore. The Colts had been mediocre for years, but within little more than a single season Unitas had turned them into one of the most powerful teams of the day.
He had more than a little help from his friends: Art Donovan, Lenny Moore, Raymond Berry, Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, Alex Hawkins, Jim Parker, Alan Ameche, Jim Mutscheller, John Mackey and, above all, Gino Marchetti, the nonpareil defensive end. If Unitas was the heart of the team, Marchetti was its soul; maybe, as Lenny Lyles suggests, he was both. By the standards of the late 1950s and early '60s, the Colts were relatively free of racial tension, but black and white players mostly went their separate ways, united on the field but racially divided off it. Lenny Moore, who is African American, told Callahan about a conversation he had with Ameche, who was known as the Horse, at a gathering after their playing days were over:
"The Horse and I were just standing there. I could tell he wanted to say something, but it took him a while to get it out. 'Lenny,' he said finally, 'the black players on our team were treated very unfairly in the glory years. I want you to know it bothered me then, more than anything in my career, and it has bothered me ever since. And what bothers me the most is, I never did a thing about it.' He said, 'I don't know what it was that held us together, that allowed us to do all those great things on the field.' "
"I don't know either," Moore said to Callahan, "but I think it was something inside Gino Marchetti." True enough, but with more than a bit of John Unitas thrown in.
Unitas played for the Colts for more than a dozen years -- a very long time, by pro-football standards -- but his last seasons were diminished by injuries and age. He wasn't a factor in the second-most-important pro-football game ever played, the Colts' 16-7 loss to the New York Jets of the American Football League in 1969, in the third Super Bowl, the game that left no doubt the young AFL could hold its own against the established NFL and thus opened the way for the successful -- and wildly lucrative -- full merger of the two leagues in the early 1970s. Unitas played out his career in San Diego, but never felt at home in that warm, sun-washed city and beat it back to Baltimore as soon as he could. He stayed there, a beloved civic monument, until his death four years ago.
Callahan, whose long career as a sportswriter includes a stint about a decade and a half ago at The Washington Post -- I have no recollection of crossing his path in its corridors -- graciously and gracefully pays Unitas the tribute due him without lapsing into sentimentality. He does have one odd and, to my taste, unappealing tic: He repeatedly refers to himself not in the first person but as "the sportswriter," as in, "On the way out, the sportswriter encountered . . .," and, "Nicklaus told the sportswriter. . . ." If this mannerism is intended to put the author in the background, it actually emphasizes his presence, which is unnecessary to the telling of Unitas's tale and diminishes what is otherwise a very good book.
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
1933
“Well, I’m going to play professional football.”
Francis Unitas and Helen Superfisky
“My father’s name was Leonard Unitas,” states the autobiography of Johnny Unitas, Pro Quarterback, published in 1965 by Grosset and Dunlap. The funny thing is, his father’s name was not Leonard. His brother’s name was. Reading the book in 1965, Cameron Snyder of the Baltimore Sun noticed how reminiscent many of the passages were of newspaper stories Snyder had written or read. Whole columns by John Steadman of the News-Post and Sunday American appeared to have been redrawn in the first person and incorporated into the narrative. “I always remember how surprised John Steadman, the sportswriter, was the morning of the championship game. . . .”
When next he saw Unitas, Snyder said dryly, “I got your book and I have only one question. Did you write it?”
“Hell,” Unitas said, “I didn’t even read it.”
His father’s name was Francis Joseph Unitas. Always Francis, never Frank (just as John was never Jack or even, as a boy, Johnny). When his mother died and his father could not cope, Francis was dispatched with two brothers, twins, to a Pittsburgh orphanage called the Toner Institute and Seraphic Home for Boys. (Two sisters and another brother were scattered elsewhere.) Both twins died in the orphanage, leaving Francis alone. The name of the one who died of influenza has been forgotten in time. The little boy who was run over by a train while trying to escape was named Adam.
At sixteen, the maximum age, Francis was sprung from the Toner Institute. Wrapping two shirts around an old baseball glove and waving good-bye to the Sisters of Divine Providence and the Capuchin Franciscan Fathers, he made for the coal country of West Virginia, hoping to pick up the trail of his lost siblings in a large Lithuanian community of miners. No relatives turned up then (one would, years later), but in an Old World enclave known as Century, Francis did make a significant find. She was a Lithuanian immigrant who worked in the company store and therefore, by necessity, could speak not only Lithuanian and English but also Russian and Polish. A self-taught piano player—a self-taught everything—she was the organist for Sunday Mass at the Catholic church. It seemed to Francis that there was nothing Helen Superfisky couldn’t do.
To Helen, Francis was equally remarkable. He was tall—right around six feet—gangly, but amazingly powerful, almost in the manner of a circus strongman. He had huge hands, bigger than Lennie’s in Of Mice and Men, busier than Wing Biddlebaum’s in Winesburg, Ohio. Francis liked to lift things just to prove he could do it, roadside boulders and even the back wheels of coal trucks. Despite a comically improper technique, he out-tossed all of the local shot-putters (a regional specialty) and could fling a rock practically out of sight. Combing his brown hair in a confident wave, he was a showy character in every way, an all-around performer who boxed like a lighter man and could be plugged into any position on the town baseball team. They married.
Not quickly but by hard increments, over ten sweaty years, Francis and Helen Unitas worked their way up to owning a small coal truck and establishing their own delivery business back in the Brookline section of Pittsburgh. Though coal furnaces abounded, it was the 1930s; profits were meager. But the entire country was toiling for the minimum. To be working at all was the main thing. They lived more than modestly in a one-bathroom house that was rather like a hive, buzzing as it did with a swarm of Superfiskys that included Helen’s parents, several layers of cousins and in-laws, and a great-uncle, Tony, who was stricken with silicosis (“miner’s asthma”). Hanging bedsheets for privacy, Francis, Helen, and all four of their children—Leonard, Millicent, John, and Shirley—slept together in the dining room.
Stood up by his helpers in the bitter September of 1938, Francis put in a long day doing his own job, dropping the black piles here and there all over town, and then a longer night doing theirs, assembling the chutes and shoveling the coal into basement bins. Working at breakneck speed, he took on the task as another exhibition of superhuman strength—an impossible race against daybreak—and won. But he caught pneumonia and died, technically of uremia, kidney failure. Francis Joseph Unitas wasn’t quite thirty-eight years old. John Constantine Unitas, born on the seventh of May 1933, was five.
“John was the apple of his dad’s eye,” said big brother Leonard without resentment. The unread autobiography wasn’t so wrong at that. In a way, Leonard was John’s father. Eleven years old when Francis died, Leonard was already as averse to melodrama and immune to sentimentality as John would grow up to be. For instance, Leonard could believe that one of his orphaned uncles was killed hopping a freight train, but he always wondered if the “escape” part of Adam’s story wasn’t embroidery. “There weren’t any railroad tracks,” Leonard said with twinkling eyes, “anywhere near the Toner Institute.” Sister Millie, three years younger than Leonard, three years older than John, didn’t care one way or the other. But the “children,” John and Shirley, never questioned the family’s heroic tragedy. It thrilled them and broke their hearts.
“I have pictures of us with Dad and the truck,” Shirley said, “but no recollections of him at all. I don’t even remember the sound of his voice. The only memories I have are little ones that John shared with me: like Dad flying up the stairs three steps at a time to make sure Mom wasn’t hurting John in the bath. I think there was a lot of my dad in John that we didn’t know or recognize, but Mom did.” He had those same big dukes. (Anyone who ever shook the hand of Johnny Unitas never forgot it.)
One year apart, John and Shirley were Jem and Scout. He called her Tootsie. The others laughed at how quiet he was. “He very seldom spoke,” according to Leonard. “Once in a while he’d come out with something.” But Shirley understood his silences. “John was always thinking,” she said. And blinking. Many who later huddled with him swore they could hear his eyeballs clicking as he double-checked his calculations. At ages ten and nine, John and Shirley were fused together permanently by forty-two plunges of a syringe. Shirley said, “John loved animals more than anything, you know. We always had a dog.” Tippy was killed in traffic. Skippy wasn’t nearly as adventurous. Weegee was another story entirely. The sweetest in the long line of mysteriously bred mutts that Leonard kept rescuing from the pound, Weegee was the only dog they ever had who could give the OK signal with his tail. Missing for three days, he came home wet, bedraggled, and rabid. As John and Shirley were washing him in a tin tub, Weegee changed personalities. Both kids were nipped on the face and nose.
Panting turned to growling turned to screaming. Summoned from work, Leonard was able to trap Weegee in the cellar. While nobody slept, the poor dog moaned all night and made toothpicks out of his side of the door. When Leonard opened it a crack in the morning, Weegee lay there exhausted, his face bathed in a white froth and his jaws dripping foam. The police strapped him into an ugly leather harness and took him out in a bag. Two days later, John and Shirley were called to Southside Hospital for rabies shots. The hardest part was sitting through a torturous school day before climbing onto the streetcar alone. All the way there and back, they held hands.
In the same room, each received twenty-one injections, first in the stomach, then in one buttock, then in the other, then in one arm, then in the other, then back in the stomach, and around again, and again and again. Did John cry? “Oh, God, no,” Shirley said. “I couldn’t either, in front of him.” On the return trip, as the streetcar approached their stop, John whispered the first full sentence of the day: “It’s only a needle, Toots.” He was Johnny Unitas at ten.
With Francis gone, Helen streamlined the family and dropped down a social notch to a two-bedroom house on unpaved William Street in Mount Washington. “The highlight of the year,” said a neighbor, Joe Chilleo, “was when the scrapers came up to scrape the street just before the election. We’d go out there and watch them. We thought it was wonderful.” Helen, Millie, and Shirley shared one of the bedrooms; Leonard, John, and Great-Uncle Tony the other. Although he could cough with Doc Holliday, Tony was good company. There still was only one bath. To Millie, it was “like living on the tip of a mountaintop.” From the porch of their yellow house, which looked orange at sunset, you could see the city, a few tall buildings at least, the Monongahela River, and the bridge where the streetcars crossed over. “The automobiles were just specks,” she said.
Until Leonard was old enough to drive the coal truck, men were hired to work under Helen’s supervision. They set no records for sobriety. The sisters at Saint Justin’s School, including a six-foot-three nun whom everybody called Big Red, pretended not to notice Leonard’s grogginess in the morning (he had been up since four-thirty shoveling coal), and they sighed sympathetically every afternoon to see him hustling back to the job. Eventually, John would pull his share of after-school turns with the shovel. “If you put in three tons,” he said with a grin, “you got ...
