Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a book that is "as much about a certain time as a single player," journalist Callahan (In Search of Tiger) offers not only a biography of one of professional football's early legends but also a look at the nature of the sport in his day. He charts the career path of Unitas from an undersized and unheralded Pennsylvania quarterback prospect to his glory days leading the Baltimore Colts to three championships from 1958 to 1972. In narrating Unitas's story of tryouts, cuts, timely phone calls and chance scouting encounters, Callahan reveals as much about Unitas's character and ambition as he does about the machinations of a talent system very different from today's. He also relies heavily on extended comments from a range of Unitas's coaches, friends and fellow players: as teammate Raymond Berry notes, Unitas "had a certain blend of humility and self-confidence that was unusual, to say the least." Quotes like this help the book feel more like listening to a group of old-guard players reminiscing around the back table than reading a strictly structured biography. The result is light, conversational and bound to fascinate anyone interested in Unitas or the hardscrabble, blue-collar era of football he dominated. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Crown (September 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400081394
• ISBN-13: 978-1400081394
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (74 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #215,197 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Decent Biography of Johnny Unitas, September 11, 2006

By	C. Baker "[e-mail]" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I love reading about football, football history, and great players of the past, so I very much enjoyed this biography of John Unitas (1933-2002), one of the best quarterbacks in professional football history.

First a little bit about Johnny U. Unitas grew up in a hard scrabble environment in Pittsburgh. His father died when he was five and his mother and older brother worked hard to keep the family intact. Unitas was a bit light for a football player but was the starting quarterback for his high school. His dream was to play for Notre Dame but he couldn't get in so he went on to play at the University of Louisville in the early 1950's. While the team didn't do very well, Unitas did and his jersey number (#16) is the only one retired by that school. In 1955 Unitas was drafted in the 9th round by the Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL but was soon cut and ended up playing in a semi-pro league around Pittsburgh. Through the football grapevine the Baltimore Colts brought Unitas in for a tryout in 1956 and was signed to back up starter George Shaw. Shaw went down in the forth game and Unitas held on to the starting job, except when injured, from 1956-1972.

Unitas won 3 NFL championships in his career - the first which many consider to be the most pivotal professional football game ever played - the 1958 NFL Championship where the Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants 23-17 in the first overtime game in NFL history. The game was televised nationwide and many credit the game for drawing the public's attention to the National Football League and as the launching pad for today's lucrative television contracts and the sport's wide popularity. Some still refer to this game as the "Greatest Game Ever Played." Unitas was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1979 and is one of four quarterbacks on the NFL's 75th Anniversary All Time Team. (Note I am counting the 1958 and 1959 NFL Championships, which preceded the creation of the Super Bowl, and Super Bowl V as the Colts 3 NFL Championships. I am not counting the 1968 NFL Championship as the Colts lost to the New York Jets in Super Bowl III and Unitas was hurt that year and rarely played.)

Callahan says in his introduction that he sets out to write not just a biography of John Unitas but also to give the reader a sense of what it was like to be a professional football player in the 1950's and 1960's. As a biography of Unitas, Callahan is quite successful. We see Unitas not only through his own eyes, but through the eyes of the players, coaches, family, and friends who knew him. He really brings to life the personality, toughness, smarts, and perseverance that made Unitas the great quarterback and team leader he was throughout his career. The biography also includes interesting short vignettes on other great players on those Colts teams like Gino Marchetti, Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, Art Donovan, and Jim Parker, to name a few.

Callahan is mostly successful at giving the reader an idea of what it was like to be a player in the 1950's and 1960's, although the way he does so is one of the biggest drawbacks of the biography. The structure and writing is sometimes rather disjointed and not well structured. There are too many asides, long parenthetical comments, or chapters that drift looking backward in time, or in the future, and then coming back to the main point, which was a little frustrating for this reader. While I do not expect a completely linear book - I felt the author could have done a better job of being a bit more seamless in the storytelling.

This drawback aside Callahan does provide one crucial insight - that the players of that era, unlike today, really were part of the community (at least the Colts' players were). Since players made much less money back then a lot of them worked in the off season. Thus they lived, and often worked, in the communities where they played football. Further, they often lived in modest homes among everyday citizens, not tucked away in mansions or high income neighborhoods. As a result, the community became very attached to the organization and the players, and often vice versa. The depiction of the long, historical, close relationship between the Colts and the city of Baltimore really brought home what an awful event losing the team was to the city.

Finally, I have to mention that probably the best chapter was the one dedicated to the 1958 Championship Game. It's told from the perspective of the Colts, not the Giants, and is a game that demonstrated Unitas' leadership in pulling out a victory.

Overall, despite the jumpiness of some of the chapters, I found the biography a worthwhile and interesting reading experience and would recommend it to those who want to know a bit more about Johnny U and his Baltimore Colts.

[Reviewer Note: Author Tom Callahan is a journalist and sportswriter. He has worked at both Time magazine as a senor writer and the Washington Post as a sports columnist.]

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Portrait Of Professional Football, September 12, 2006

By	Mr. Richard D. Coreno "Mr. C" (Berea, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Terrell Owens is not the first pro football star to have questions about an autobiography. When asked about the glaring errors - his father's name is incorrect, for example - in his 1960s autobiography, John Unitas told a reporter that he never read the book, let alone wrote it.

Such gems on Unitas, arguably the greatest quarterback in NFL history, is found in the outstanding biography by Tom Callahan. Portions of the book were recently excerpted in Sports Illustrated.

Callahan mixes past interviews and material on Unitas with interviews from teammates, opponents, family and friends to present a complete picture of the era of sports and culture. Particularly interesting are comments by ESPN college analyst Lee Corso concerning Unitas the college player and one whose recommendation carried as much weight off the field as in the huddle.

Callahan uniquely covers the landmark 1958 championship game between the Colts and Giants by using a play-by-play summary with comments from participants.

An interesting chapter covers the time Unitas spent with the San Diego Chargers; when illegal drugs and steroids began to replace beer and mixed drinks as tools for players to relax and bond. It was an end of an era in so many ways.

There are plenty of books chronicling pro football that hit the bookshelves in September, but Johnny U should be your first "draft pick."

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unitas We Stand, November 15, 2006

By	Jerry K. "Jerry" (Las Vegas) - See all my reviews

First of all I am biased: I attended 95% of the Baltimore Colts games that JU played in (Section 32 Upper row 27) - I was a teenager and a fanatic Colts fan - Callahan captures just about everything I remember from 45 years ago. This book should be read by everyone under 50 who believe that Elway, Montana, Marino and Manning were the best QBs ever - if they read this book they'll know what we Colts fans (that's Baltimore not Indy) have known since 1958 - that Unitas was the best ever and Unitas We Stand!