The Best Game Ever Read online

  Staying after practice for extra work was unheard of, a bewildering habit chalked up to the wide receiver’s well-known eccentricity. Artie “Fatso” Donovan wondered aloud about how strange it would be to play with a team full of Raymonds.

  “The coach would have to punish them by cutting practice short!” he said.

  Most of the players staggered off the field after the second daily practice session, particularly big men like Donovan, who usually had to drop many off-season pounds. As with everything else, Fatso made a joke out of his weight. He would arrive at the communal weigh-in room, strip off every stitch of his clothing, and then, before stepping on the sale, make a show of delicately removing his false teeth. Donovan made most things fun, but there was no way to ease the torture of training camp. The brutal summer practices were worsened by Weeb’s old-school approach to hydration. It was considered a sign of weakness for a player to take a drink of water during practice, even when the August heat and humidity soared toward three digits. Offensive tackle Jim Parker for years kept a photograph of himself on the bench at Westminster sipping from a cup, and he would tell everyone, “That’s me with a five-hundred-dollar lemonade.” It was a sweltering day, and the mammoth Parker got so thirsty he told his son to fetch him a drink in defiance of the coach’s ban. He had to pay a $500 fine, but swore for the rest of his life that it had been worth every penny.

  Competition was fierce, and veteran players employed any trick they could to hang on to their jobs. Smaller men trying to qualify for jobs on the line had the opposite problem of Fatso’s. Like most players, center Buzz Nutter lost weight rapidly once camp started, something he could ill-afford. He was undersized for his position, and overate all through the off-season to pack on pounds, only to watch them melt away in the weeks of two-a-day drills. At one camp, when he was just 215 pounds, ten pounds under the weight his contract called for, and perilously underweight for his job, Nutter borrowed one of Donovan’s tentlike T-shirts and put five-pound barbell weights under each armpit. He made the cut.

  For those who had no trouble in the weight room or on the field, there were other hazards. Offensive guard Alex Sandusky, Nutter, and an impressive young flanker from Pepperdine University, a full-blooded Indian named Jack Bighead, went drinking on their first night off training camp in 1954. Bighead had been drafted by the Dallas Texans and picked up by Baltimore when that franchise folded. He was lighting up the field in scrimmages, far outperforming the scouting reports, and challenging the team’s established wide receivers. A veteran flanker offered to give the three a ride into Baltimore, and promised to pick them up at ten o’clock to return them to Westminster. The three took the ride, went out on the town, and then showed up on time at the pickup spot, a little lightheaded with beer. Their ride didn’t show. It didn’t take long for them to realize they had been had. The senior player was trying to sabotage Bighead: they would all have been cut for failing to show up at practice the next morning. Pooling the money they had left, they found a kindly cab driver (and newly minted Colts fan) who for their twelve dollars was willing to run them out to Westminster, an hour drive west. A friendly assistant coach let them back into the dorm and Weeb never found out. They never forgot that making a pro roster meant forcing another man out of his job.

  Raymond found that the new quarterback was happy to stay after practice. Unitas wasn’t just obliging, he was eager. He was willing to throw for as long as Raymond wanted to catch. This was a quarterback who never worried about wearing out his arm, the way most did. He had a smooth, almost exaggerated way of uncoiling his throws, right down to the way he snapped his wrist as he released the ball so that his long fingers were splayed downward. The motion seemed effortless. It was also not lost on either Raymond or John that toiling away together for hours after practice was the kind of devotion that scored points with the coach. Weeb encouraged it quietly, making sure that the players had nothing scheduled for a few hours after the last field session. Sometimes Raymond would see him watching them from a distance.

  The coaches were all amazed by John’s arm. No one could yet foresee how great their bargain quarterback would become, but it was clear from the start that the Steelers had made a big mistake. Were they blind? They had cut him without giving him a chance to play. It was true that he didn’t look like much of an athlete. He was hollow-chested and his gangly frame had matured into an ungainly stoop so that he ran like an old man, with a crooked scuttle. The first few times he took off with the ball in game, opponents were so startled by his awkward intensity that it took them a few seconds to react. After watching him scoot for a thirty-four-yard gain, Ed Modzelewski of the Browns described it as “a crazy man running through a burning building; would you want to get in his way?” Unlike George Shaw, the kid wasn’t going to pose much of a threat with his legs. But he could throw the ball like nobody else. One of the most difficult passes in football was a fifteen-yard “out” pattern, thrown at such an angle that the ball had to travel twice that far. Most throwers put a little arc on the ball, trying to drop it in the right place. John’s ball came flat and hard, and with such accuracy that it might have been on a wire. It arrived with such zip that it stung his receivers’ hands.

  “I can work with Unitas,” Weeb told Raymond early that summer. “I can work with him.”

  Passer and receiver became fast friends. John understood Raymond’s perfectionism, and the advantage of close coordination and timing in the passing game. Don Shula, one of the team’s defensive backs at practice that summer (he would be traded to the Washington Redskins that year and would return later to succeed Weeb as Baltimore’s coach), played against both Unitas and Shaw in practices that summer. Shula told John’s biographer Tom Callahan that he was one of the first to notice that the extra work between John and Raymond was paying off. When Shaw was throwing to Raymond, he had no trouble defending, but when Unitas was throwing, he could not. It wasn’t just Shula’s imagination. He had to defend against Raymond in a real game the following season, and the receiver caught twelve of John’s passes (one shy of his rookie season total) for 224 yards and two touchdowns.

  Lenny Moore was the team’s first-round draft pick that year, a flashy, high-stepping phenom from Penn State who played with a Bible wedged beneath his right thigh pad and who wrapped white tape around his ankles and the top of his shoes, earning him the nickname “Spats.” Tall, big, and fast, Moore was the best athlete anyone in Baltimore had ever seen. He was also smart and sunny and selfless, traits not often found in such sought-after talent. Weeb was eager to exploit Moore’s potential both as a running back and a flanker, but the discipline of pass routes was new to Moore. When Raymond first invited the heralded rookie to stay after practice for some extra work, the suggestion was received with some astonishment. Volunteer for more practice?

  “Lenny, John won’t ask you to stay after practice,” said Raymond. “You have to do it yourself. He has to know that after three and two-tenths seconds, this is where you are going to be. You’ve got to time it up with him. It’s like music. The same beat has to be playing in all of our heads.”

  Moore started staying late. Shula noticed he was getting damn hard to cover, too.

  Both Raymond and John made the team that year, and their bond deepened. Raymond was living as a bachelor in a walk-up apartment in a row house near Memorial Stadium, the Colts’ home field. He was the only teammate John began inviting to share dinner with him, his wife Dorothy, and his children. Raymond invited John to the private film-study sessions in his apartment. On their own time, the man with a magnificent feel for football was teaming up with the Colts’ resident nut.

  For all of this intensity and method, Weeb’s new team struggled. He had won only three games in his first season, and only a combined total of ten in his next two. He and his staff all expected to be fired after the 1956 season, the year John took over as quarterback. Carroll Rosenbloom was a charming man given to flamboyant acts of generosity with his players, but he was hard on his
coaches. He would berate Weeb mercilessly after a loss. The Colts’ coaching staff figured that they were all going to get the boot as their third losing season drew to a close. In the last quarter of the final game, a home game against the Redskins, down by a touchdown, assistant coach Frank Cuminskey turned to Winner high in their box over the field and said, in disgust, “Charley, we’re gone and I’m leaving.” He walked out. He wasn’t there when Mutscheller, with his “Army legs,” caught a pass from John for an exciting last-second win, bringing the team’s record to five and seven.

  Cuminskey was never invited back, but Weeb, to his surprise, was. Rosenbloom had it out with the coaching staff after the season, but then he met with the head coach and the team’s general manager, Kellett, in Miami. Expecting to be fired, Weeb was completely candid. He felt his hands were tied by the team’s stinginess. He could not offer competitive bonuses and salaries to his players, so he lost talent to other teams. He could not build the kind of draft program Brown had built in Cleveland because the team would not pay for scouts and travel expenses. Rosenbloom was surprised to hear this. He wanted his football team to win, and actually enjoyed spending his money. It was not unusual for him to make spontaneous, generous gifts to his players. When Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb was upset after a game to find that a large amount of cash had been stolen from his wallet in the locker room, Rosenbloom just peeled off an amount in excess of Lipscomb’s loss and handed it over. At the beginning of each season, Rosenbloom met with the players, apart from the coaches, swore them to secrecy, and then violated league rules by offering them substantial under-the-table incentives for victories. He promised to match their official winnings if they captured the league championship. So Rosen-bloom was perfectly willing to spend money if that was what winning required. The problem, Weeb was happy to explain, was Kellett, who was paid a percentage of the team’s profits. The less of the team’s money he spent, the greater the profit and the more he made. Rosenbloom and Kellett were old and close friends; they had played football together years earlier at the University of Pennsylvania, so Weeb felt sure his complaint would hasten his firing. Instead, the owner gave both men new contracts. Kellett’s earnings were no longer tied to the club’s profits. The owner promised more money for scouting and recruiting, and even loaned Weeb his own plane to use on weekends for scouting trips.

  Weeb already had the nucleus of a good team. With linemen Marchetti, Lipscomb, and Donovan, and middle linebacker Bill Pellington, he was strong against the run, and with his new ability to recruit he shored up the team’s pass defense by adding the speedy, cerebral free agent cornerback Milt Davis, and a fast, vicious safety from Memphis State University named Andy Nelson.

  His offense was set. John had trundled out on the field in Chicago midway through the fifth game of the season after Shaw suffered a knee injury. The first pass he threw was intercepted and run back for a touchdown, and the Colts had ended up getting shellacked, 58-27. On the bus after that game, Mutscheller happened to sit behind the losing rookie quarterback and the Baltimore Evening Sun reporter Walter Taylor. He was surprised to hear John, after that awful performance in his first outing, calmly and confidently dissecting the loss. Unitas broke down his own mistakes and the team’s, and described exactly how they would correct them. Mutscheller wondered, Who is this guy? From that first day forward, John radiated command. He steered the team to victory in his next two games, including an impressive win over Weeb’s old mentor, Brown. In that game, he connected on a forty-three-yard touchdown pass to Raymond that seemed as natural and as untroubled as the routes they worked on after practice. It was a harbinger of things to come. With John throwing the ball, Raymond nearly tripled his production that season, catching thirty-seven passes.

  After the last losing season the Colts would see in years, the team drafted Jim Parker, a 273-pounder who had been the nation’s premier collegiate offensive lineman at Ohio State. Weeb turned Parker into a left offensive tackle, protecting the right-handed quarterback’s blind side, and gave him one assignment, “Keep them off John.” Parker would do his job so well that he played his way into the Hall of Fame, becoming the prototype for the massive left tackles who today are considered to be as important as quarterbacks in the NFL. With Parker, Weeb had all the pieces he would need.

  But most importantly, he had John, or “Johnny,” as he was now called. The young quarterback quickly became a favorite of Baltimore sportswriters, and would soon captivate the more literary scribes writing for the new national magazines like Sports Illustrated and SPORT, which catered to the growing preoccupation with professional games. There were all sorts of reasons for loving football, and John embodied one of the big ones. The fascination went beyond the sheer joy of serious competition, the brilliant athleticism on display, or the fun of rooting for the home team that swept over whole cities and regions. It went beyond wagering a few bucks on the outcome, as Carroll Rosen-bloom liked to do. On a deeper level, sports creates a well-defined forum for excellence, and for character. The forum is condensed and simplified, so that the kind of traits that merit success in the wider world over a career or a lifetime are distilled into the frame of a season, or a single afternoon. Football, in particular, was an arena where courage and resilience were rigorously and publicly tested. Just as in the larger world, success was sometimes unfair, and players of poor character, judgment, and habits achieved on the basis of luck and reckless talent alone, but usually not for long. More often success came to those athletes and teams who combined extraordinary ability with selflessness, teamwork, stamina, discipline, and fortitude. When a clever athlete like Raymond Berry could overcome a lack of natural talent with intelligence and hard work, it confirmed those bedrock virtues for all.

  John’s story, the discarded gem rediscovered almost by accident, was too good to make up. But what made him irresistible were his own qualities. He epitomized the kind of manhood prized by a generation formed in the war, battle-tested men who had learned the hard way that a phony in command got people killed. John was a man of action, not of words. He knew that the only thing that mattered, ultimately, was success. He seemed amused by sportswriters’ insistence that he comment on his performances—“I always figured being a little dull was part of being a pro,” he said years later. “Win or lose, I never walked off a professional football field without thinking of something boring to say to [Baltimore Sun football writer] Cameron Snyder.”

  He was the opposite of flashy; he hid his wit inside a gruff, taciturn shell, and he looked goofy wearing black high-top cleats on the end of those skinny, bandy legs. He didn’t look good, he didn’t sound good, he just was good, and he knew it. He was a natural leader, and not just because he called the plays. Long before he had begun to demonstrate his excellence with wins and completion percentages, his teammates trusted him completely. According to Tom Callahan, when the team’s equipment manager wondered out loud in the locker room one day in the middle of that losing 1956 season, when Shaw was coming back, the veteran Marchetti told him, “Shaw ain’t coming back.” That respect radiated outward from the Colts’ offensive huddle. The men who relied on him trusted him. John knew that it didn’t come from write-ups in the press, the size of his salary, or even the opinion of his coach. It did not come from his talent or from his eventual celebrity. It came from his judgment and his character. There was not a flashy or celebratory bone in his body, just as there was no outward sign of defeat. On the sidelines after he had thrown a touchdown or an interception, his demeanor was the same. He was utterly unaffected by the attention focused on him as he grew increasingly noticed and successful. He was simply a man at work.

  He saved that game against the Redskins, the one that ended the 1956 season with a play that Cuminskey never saw, a perfect example of what he brought to the field. Every coach believes that his system is foolproof, that if he could just find the right players to execute his perfectly designed plays, they would succeed every time. Ever since that abject loss against the Bears,
when John had made his pro debut, Weeb had been feeding his offensive system to him a little at a time. But it was clear very quickly that John didn’t just execute Weeb’s system, he played with it. It was the difference between a music student playing the right notes and a master owning the material.

  Real success on the gridiron is messier and harder than the diagrams in a playbook. It resides in the immediate reality of the field, a sense of the game that only comes from being immersed in the action, in the moment, like the knowledge that the middle linebacker has been leaning to his right, or that the attacking right defensive end has just twisted his knee but has resisted letting his coaches know, or that the cornerback has been set up to bite on an outside fake. In that sense, John was the master of now. Like a talented boxer in the ring, he had such a good sense of his opponent that when things were clicking he would play with a defense, setting them up patiently for a killer right hook, using sometimes a whole offensive series to prepare what he planned to do next; waiting, waiting, waiting until the perfect moment to throw the knockout punch. Throughout the game he would solicit ideas from his teammates: receivers, running backs, and linemen. “What have you got for me?” he would ask. “What do you need?” “What do you want to run?”

  Raymond would grab the quarterback before the team huddled and deliver intelligence, telling him this or that pattern would probably work, or that he had patiently set up a particular fake. John would take it in, survey the defense, and come up with his own idea of what would work at that moment. Weeb scripted the first three plays of every game, and after that he would occasionally send one in with a substitute, but other than that he deferred to his new field general.