Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas

PREFACE

You almost had to know all of us to know any of us.

It Was the Players’ Game Then

On black-and-white televisions, in a black or white time, men played football for something less than a living and something more than money. They didn’t deny the attractiveness of money. On their own scale, they were as venal a collection of chiselers and money-grubbers as professional athletes are today. But they were football players first. If the Browns cut them in Hiram, Ohio, they hitchhiked to Westminster, Maryland, to try out for the Colts; and if Baltimore had no use for them either, they would play for the Annapolis Colts, or the Bloomfield Rams. If the sandlots were full, they might form their own semipro team and call themselves the Antioch Hornets. They were going to play football.

Most of them were white; a few were black. (Black-and-white is their color, all right.) On average, the white ones were just about as bigoted as the country. Yet there were surprising incidents of enlightenment, fellowship, even brotherhood. The pro football players of the 1950s were regular guys who, by and large, stayed regular guys. They were slightly less famous, somewhat less prosperous, than the baseball players. But literally and figuratively, they were in the same ballpark. When the World Trade Center crashed down on September 11, 2001, among the small, exquisite details was the fact that Carl Furillo, retired batting champion of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had worked in the construction of the Twin Towers, installing Otis elevators. Today’s pro athletes won’t be installing any elevators. That’s the thing that sports will never get back. Once, the players were one of us. They lived right next door. They don’t anymore.

On September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of that horror, the legendary quarterback Johnny Unitas died of a heart attack. He was a football player, said Unitas’s primary receiver, Raymond Berry. Those words don’t look like much on the page, but you should have heard Berry say them. "Unitas was the football player," said Sam Huff, an old linebacker for the New York Giants. The best player of Huff, Berry, and Unitas’s day—and maybe of any day—was Cleveland fullback Jim Brown, who, in a conversation with the writer George Plimpton, once mentioned a Pro Bowl practice conducted by Giant coach Allie Sherman. All right, Sherman called out across the field, let’s have the first team offense over here. But no lists of first or second strings had been posted. Every player present was a starter and a star. Nevertheless, one by one, with scarcely a word spoken, hardly a glance exchanged, eleven of them moseyed over and took their places. Ballplayers know, Brown told Plimpton. And if one of the eleven had been too modest to step forward immediately? The others, Jim said, would have waited for him. The position would have stayed open until he walked in and filled it. Can you imagine any other quarterback, no matter who the guy was, shoving John Unitas aside to get into an All-Star lineup? No, man, no way.

Unless it was Sonny Jurgensen of Washington, sticking a friendly needle in Unitas. Don’t you remember, Jurgensen asked a sportswriter not long ago, what I said to him that day we were all together in his restaurant? Remember how he howled? He howled! Of course the sportswriter remembered. The restaurant was the Golden Arm in Baltimore. The fourth man in the booth was a round bartender named Rocky Thornton. I’d like to thank you, John, Sonny told Unitas earnestly, for naming the place after me. Not waiting for John to stop laughing, he added, Back when we were playing, I don’t remember you being this eloquent with the press. Unitas sipped his beer—the sportswriter had never seen him drink anything except beer—and said through that toothy, crooked smile, "I always figured being a little dull was part of being a pro. Win or lose, I never walked off a professional football field without first thinking of something boring to say to [Baltimore Sun beat man] Cameron Snyder."

Almost every celebrated athlete has an original story of being burned in print. John’s involved a New York journalist named Leonard Schecter. I was at a golf outing in the early years, Unitas said, an airline junket: American Airlines. After the golf, we were all sitting around the clubhouse, just like we are now. Everybody was drinking. Nobody was taking notes. I said a few things I shouldn’t have, questioning Weeb [Baltimore head coach Weeb Ewbank] in a way, contrasting our offensive philosophies. The story came out: ‘What Johnny Unitas would do differently if he were the coach of the Colts.’ Ain’t that a kick in the head? The lesson I learned there kept me pretty quiet the rest of my career. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, you better be careful what you say.

Several years earlier, at his home in Oxford, Ohio, Ewbank told the same story, but better. One of those first off-seasons, he said, John phoned here to say, ‘Weeb, there’s a magazine article just out that is going to be very embarrassing to you. A fellow named Schecter wrote it, but it sounds like I wrote it myself. It lists all of the little things I’d change if I were the coach instead of you. I want you to know that everything in there is absolutely accurate. It’s exactly how I feel. I honestly have no idea how the guy was able to keep it straight. He didn’t take a single note. But I also want you to know that I didn’t mean for it to be printed. I apologize.’ Thinking back, Ewbank chuckled and said, That’s Unitas. Punching his visitor in the arm, he said, Nine hundred and ninety-nine players out of a thousand would swear they were misquoted or that what they said had been taken out of context. Not him. It was exactly how he felt. I just said, ‘Forget it, John. Thanks for calling.’ To tell you the truth, I’m not sure if I ever even saw that article.

Through the beery mist of the Golden Arm, the conversation staggered in many different directions until, as usual, it had reeled its way back around to Berry, Gino Marchetti, Jim Mutscheller, Lenny Moore, Jim Parker, Alan the Horse Ameche, Artie Donovan, Bert Rechichar, Bill Pellington, Jimmy Orr, Gene Big Daddy Lipscomb, Alex Captain Who? Hawkins, L. G. Long Gone Dupre, and an era of life and football that was also long gone. If you knew any of us, Jurgensen said for the entire National Football League in the 1950s and 1960s, you knew all of us. Not to contradict Sonny, speaking only for the old Colts, Unitas reworked the sentence slightly. I think you almost had to know all of us to know any of us, he said.

This is a book about all of them, in the pursuit of trying to know one of them, Johnny U. It begins and ends with him. But it is as much about a certain time as a single player. It is less about a specific place in the country than a place where the whole country used to be. Of course, it flies in the face of Plimpton’s literary maxim that the smaller the ball, the richer the subject. Pro football isn’t usually thought of as a romance, but that’s the way it is offered here, in black-and-white.

Ours was the great era of professional football, Jurgensen said, because it was the players’ game then. It’s the coaches’ game now. In those days quarterbacks looked their own guys right in the eye, and then stared across the line at the other guys. Who’s ready to do it? Who’s starting to quit? We controlled the game. We applied the psychology in the huddle. You know, if in the first or second quarter we found a defensive player we could take advantage of, we didn’t always show him up right away.

We might save him for later, Unitas agreed.

We’re in scoring territory now, the game’s on the line. Sonny set up the play.

All right, let’s abuse him, John said, and they laughed.

After Jurgensen and Thornton departed, and the notebook was put away, Unitas posed a question of his own. Doesn’t it make you sick today, he said, seeing so many jigs in the end zone? Though the word was jigs, the sportswriter heard jigaboos, and answered too quickly, I’m not going to listen to that, John.

To what? Unitas asked.

Jigs.

Dances, he said.

The sportswriter apologized twice. Don’t be sorry, Unitas said softly, but shouldn’t you know me better than that by now?

John, I don’t know you at all.

Don’t worry about it, he said. Nobody does.

ONE

1933

Well, I’m going to play professional football.

Francis Unitas and Helen Superfisky

"M y 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 okay 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 a dollar fifty. It wasn’t bad. Helen fielded the coal orders and worked for a bakery in the morning, sold insurance in the afternoon, and cleaned office buildings at night. Though lacking a high school diploma, she studied bookkeeping, passed the civil service exam with the highest possible mark, and ended up in the employ of the city of Pittsburgh.

Just watching my mother, how hard she had to work for everything we had, John said, was the greatest thing I ever saw. Sometimes I’d come home from a ball game all beat up and she’d say, ‘You know Mrs. Wrigley up the street?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I know Mrs. Wrigley up the street,’ and she’d say, ‘Well, she has three tons of coal sitting out in front of her house. See that it gets put in.’ I could hardly move, and I’d say, ‘Ma, it’s raining.’ And she’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s raining. Go do it.’ And I did.

It was Millie’s job to wake the kids and get them off to school. Rousing John was a particular challenge. You know how much the man liked to play football? Leonard said. That’s how much the boy loved to sleep. The children stumbled downstairs every morning to what Shirley called Mom’s infamous notes on the kitchen table. She’d leave, like, mother’s oats and stuff on top of the double boiler, so that they would still be warm, along with the day’s instructions. Under no circumstances was anyone to leave the house that afternoon until the following things were taken care of. And you knew, boy, you didn’t dare. ‘Start the dinner, peel the potatoes …’ John’s job was to keep the furnace banked. If Mom came home to a cold house, there’d be hell to pay.

Helen was a fervent Catholic. The family marched in a loose formation to Sunday Mass in the basement of Saint Justin’s High School. Sometimes, after everyone else was gone, the Unitas family lingered to walk the Stations of the Cross. She was never flowery, Shirley said. You didn’t get kisses and hugs from my mom. You knew she loved you because she was taking care of you. If you complained about something, she’d say, ‘You ate, didn’t you?’ All of Helen’s harsh sayings have been stitched into samplers in her children’s memories. If you have to clean toilets for a living, make them shine. "Show me where it’s written that you’re supposed to be happy. If you have a ‘need,’ we’ll talk about it. But if it’s only a ‘want,’ don’t bring it up."

Though her large extended family had split off and spread out, Helen remained the matriarch in an Old World sense. With hats in hand, uncles came to the house on William Street to fidget and squirm on the edge of their chairs while requesting her permission to marry. I was very young then, Shirley said. I couldn’t imagine these big boobs asking my mother this. At Christmas, the whole family came back together. Shirley remembered a few bleak Christmases. Sometimes we’d go down to the tree and there’d be nothing under there. Or you’d get a little doll or a tiny purse. I remember one year my sister got a brush and a comb. But many of the Christmases were brilliant. Helen’s brother the priest, Father Constantine Superfisky (Father Connie to the children, and the contributor of John’s middle name), would arrive from Tiltonsville, Ohio, in an automobile loaded like a sleigh with presents.

In Lithuanian homes, Christmas Eve was the day of Kucios, a special seven- or even ten-fish supper. Ordinarily Helen was the plainest of cooks. Though no one ever had the nerve to say so, her spaghetti sauce and her chili tasted exactly the same; one had beans. Once a week, she served liver and onions. But for Kucios each branch of the family brought a dish. Not so much for the smelt or the herring, but for the ritual (and the potato pancakes), John and Shirley loved Christmas Eve most of all. There was one catch. In order to receive their gifts, the children were required to perform. One year John sang I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.

He had a worse than average singing voice. At the peak of Unitas’s fame, a Baltimore confectioner, Mary Sue Candies, hired him to warble its Easter jingle on television. (Mary Sue Easter Eggs / they’re the best Easter Eggs / honey, your money can buy / So rich and nutritious / and mmm-mmm delicious / so Mary Sue Easter Eggs, try.) Anyone who ever heard that commercial can still call back the sensation in the metal filling of a tooth. But Unitas had a meter if not a melody. The silent boy who you never knew was even in the house turned into a constant whistler. Not that you could recognize what he was whistling, Shirley said. But you always knew where he was.

He may have been moved to song by the Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne.

A baseball mitt or, later, football shoes clearly fell into the category of want, not need. My brother Leonard thought of those things, Shirley said. He was our dad that way. Once, John and I were throwing a ball around the house and we broke the globe on a lamp. In a panic we called Leonard. Somehow—I have no idea how—he came up with an exact replacement before Mom got home. Leonard was incredible. When the games started to take over John’s life, Leonard always saw to it that John had whatever he needed to play.

Until the games started, Shirley was one of the gang on William Street. She hung out with John and the boys who sat on a corner curb in front of McGuinness’s drugstore nursing a pint of ice cream. When the beat cop came along to rap his billy club against the fence, she scattered with the others. Even after John discovered the games, he didn’t coldly jettison Tootsie. She went on swinging the backyard tire through which he spun his football, and they continued to make most of their regular rounds, like following up a stiff Sunday Mass by sitting back in the grass beside the Baptist church enjoying the amazing music and watching the building shake.

John loved all of the games, and he was good at all of them, said Joe Chilleo, a classmate and teammate from third grade through the end of high school. I don’t call him a natural athlete; he just had more push. We played baseball at a place called Cargo, where there was no left field. For that matter, right field was in a gully. The right fielder was actually out of sight. You had to yell at him, ‘Look out, the ball is coming!’ I can remember that. The Mount Washington Owls, as they named themselves, scheduled a few formal baseball games with other nonuniformed teams, but mostly they competed against one another, playing a version of baseball called roundies. Three men batted, everyone else took a position in the field, and whoever made the putout changed places with the hitter. If the three batters ever filled the bases, the lead runner was automatically out. So there were numerous plays at home plate. And Cargo was one of those fields you had to oil, Chilleo said, to keep the dust down. Because there was no left field, anyone who hit the ball to the left side of second base was also out.

One day, Chilleo said, John turned around and started batting left-handed. He didn’t say anything about it; he just did it. That’s how he was. Pretty soon, we were all hitting left-handed. We were an entire team of left-hand hitters. It just made sense, with no left field. There was a recreation center nearby where we could swim in the summer—in the nude, as a matter of fact—and play softball or paddleball. John seemed to think paddleball was unmanly. So none of us played paddleball. In basketball, he was probably our second-tallest [and their thinnest] guy; he could have been our center. But John was the playmaker. He just was. Of course, in football, he was always the quarterback.

In school, John told Steve Sabol of NFL Films, I think it was the eighth grade or seventh, we had a substitute teacher by the name of Mrs. O’Connor. Beautiful girl. Boy, I had a bad crush on her. She went around the room asking everybody what they wanted to do with their life. And when she got to me, for some reason—don’t ask me why, I don’t know—I said, ‘Well, I’m going to play professional football.’

Chilleo’s father was a railroader, an engineer. He was a silent, undemonstrative man, a stickler for schedules and rules, as someone who operates a locomotive might naturally be. He enjoyed cowboy books, Zane Grey. In those days, Joe said, you didn’t ask questions about who died or what. But I knew John didn’t have a father. Because he was always asking me about mine. I didn’t know what to say. I remember John’s surprise when I told him that my dad had never let me ride up front with him in the engine. I said, ‘John, he could be fired for that.’ John said, ‘Well, my father used to let me ride on the running board of our truck.’ He claimed to remember—come on, a four- or five-year-old’s memory—that the door flew open once and knocked him right under the wheels. He said he would have been run over and killed if his dad hadn’t slammed on the breaks just in the nick of time. The back wheel supposedly stopped an inch from his head. But John said, ‘He still let me ride on the running board.’ I gave him that one. I always felt sorry that John didn’t have a dad.

In school, John paid relatively close attention and always did his homework. But he was an undistinguished student. Surprisingly, he preferred oral tests to written ones, and he could navigate multiple-choice and true-false questions far better than essays. On report card day, the old, gray pastor of Saint Justin’s, Father Barry, handed out the cards personally. To be more precise, he flipped them out, along with sarcastic, not to say sadistic, commentary. Look at this one, he’d tell the class, skimming it over their heads like a pebble across the water. You’ll make a good truck driver someday. Oh, here’s another one. You’ll be digging ditches. The prospect of being mentioned by Father Barry chilled John more than any of the prophecies.

Except for comic books, he wasn’t an avid reader. We always had comic books, Shirley said. John would stretch out on the floor and read them for hours and hours. But in the first big upset of his career, he did happen upon a library once where he discovered the adolescent sports literature of John R. Tunis and reveled in the escapades of a young protagonist named Roy Tucker. Partly because Unitas was Catholic, mostly because quarterback Johnny Lujack was from western Pennsylvania (Connellsville), John also fell in love with the University of Notre Dame. Just as the single-wing offense was giving way to a modified T-formation, Lujack became the Irish quarterback in 1943, when Angelo Bertelli (the Springfield Rifle) was called into the marines. After his own time-out for war, Lujack returned in 1946 to tackle Doc Blanchard in the open field and save a scoreless tie against Army. That allowed the Irish