(author’s note- what follows was originally posted on Facebook, three years ago, in honor of what would have been his eightieth birthday)
The Birth of a Legend
Eighty years ago today, a child was born who would change the game of professional football forever. The second son of Lithuanian immigrants, whose father died when the child was five, John Constantine Unitas grew up in the hardscrabble reality of working class Pittsburgh- a child whose opportunities for success were as remote as the possibility that he could achieve a boyhood dream of playing professional football. Skinny, unassuming and silent, his was the story of dogged determination- a testament to the virtues of hard work in the face of adversity. He played quarterback for tiny St. Justin’s high school and managed to attain a scholarship at the University of Louisville- hardly a football powerhouse in the early 1950s. Oft- injured and lacking in physical attributes, he was drafted in the ninth round by the Pittsburgh Steelers and never given a chance to play in even a single play of the 1955 exhibition season.
Summarily cut by the Steelers, he hitched a ride home to a construction job and played semi-pro ball for $6.00 a game that year, on fields of broken glass and iron cinders. Then in 1956, he received a phone call from the league’s worst team at that time, the Baltimore Colts, and given nothing more than a tryout. Something in his audition caught the eye of a visionary coach named Weeb Ewbank, and Unitas was signed for a salary of $7,000.00- assuming he would survive the cuts to come later that summer. He managed to make the team- as a backup to George Shaw, whose mid-season injury gave Unitas the chance to step up and be counted. Despite early setbacks (his first pass intercepted and returned for a touchdown) Unitas persevered on and took charge of the team whose respect he gained by example and leadership. Asked what would happen when Shaw came back, team captain Gino Marchetti said, “Shaw is not coming back- Unitas is the quarterback, now”.
The next year Unitas “arrived” and was named MVP of the National Football League. He went on to lead the Colts to consecutive world championships in 1958 and 1959. Credited with inventing the three-step drop back, the five-step drop back, the swing pass and, most famously in the 1958 sudden death classic, the two-minute drill, Unitas changed the entire country from a baseball-oriented focus to a professional football-oriented focus, making the NFL the most popular sport in America.
By the time he retired in 1974, he had set twenty-two lifetime records at a time when the rules did not favor the passing game as it does today. The records have fallen in the wake of such rule changes, but there is no doubt as to who is the greatest quarterback of all time- it is the poor, skinny kid with a Lithuanian name who showed the country what he could do, when everyone around him thought otherwise. Simply stated, the NFL without Johnny Unitas, would not be the financial and entertainment powerhouse that it is today.
-Drew Nickell, 7 May 2013
© 2013 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved