Talking Football

Almost 40 years later it still bothered John Unitas, the idea that people had accused him of gambling at the end of the overtime drive that beat the Giants in the most famous of all pro football games, the 1958 NFL Championship. Sitting on the porch of his home in Baldwin, Md., on a spring day in 1998, Johnny U was off on one of his favorite topics—the way a quarterback can influence a defense, almost bend it to his will. "Gambling?" he snorted. "Some gamble."

The play was the seven-yard pass to tight end Jim Mutscheller that put the Baltimore Colts on the one-yard line, setting up Alan Ameche's game-winning plunge. The thinking was, Why did Unitas throw the ball and risk an interception when all the Colts needed was a field goal to win?

"It wasn't a gamble," Unitas said. "They didn't see what I saw. Nine times out of 10 Emlen Tunnell, the strong safety, would be on Mutscheller. This time it was Cliff Livingston, the linebacker, trying to take away the inside. So I checked off to a diagonal outside. Who's there to cover him? Lindon Crow, the cornerback, and he's got to worry about Lenny Moore. Not a gamble. An educated move."

The quarterback's ability to set up a defense, to craft his own sequence of plays, was a big part of the game then. Very little came in from the sideline. It was his show, and Unitas was determined that we should understand this element of pro football, which has been lost in today's era.

"Look, you're the strong safety," he said. "I'm going to overload, put three men in a two-man area, then go back weakside. What do you do? If I want you to come up and play the run, I split the guard out farther. If I want the cornerback to play the run, I tighten the splits. You see, I've got you doing what I want you to do."

Throughout his career Unitas maintained this dogged adherence to the idea of control. His message: Don't mess with me. I'm running the show.

Physically he had it all—the whiplike delivery, the athletic ability, the great sense of timing and, oh, man, the courage. He had to do it the hard way. The NFL hadn't liberalized the passing rules. His receivers could get mugged downfield. Defensive linemen could head-slap their way into the backfield, and when they homed in on a quarterback they could hit him any way they wanted. None of today's cellophane-wrapper protection from the officials.

And Unitas got hit plenty. He'd snarl and wipe the blood off his face and lead his team down the field on another of his great scoring drives, operating in that hunch-shouldered way of his, with the herky-jerky setup and deadly accuracy. Eighteen years of that.

"I weigh 270 pounds," Merlin Olsen, the Los Angeles Rams' great defensive tackle, once said, "and I don't know if I could absorb the punishment he takes. I wonder if I could stand there, week after week, and say, 'Here I am. Take your best shot.' "

Yes, Unitas was the best I ever saw. He got the game plan on Wednesday, but once the whistle blew, it was his game to run in whatever way he chose. "I charted the tendencies of every defensive back in the league," he said. "I could tell you how Lem Barney would react to a certain pattern, or how Jesse Whittenton would play a certain zone coverage. Raymond Berry and I put in our own set of audibles, based on the tendencies of the coverage guys."