In 1955 a rookie quarterback was released by the Pittsburgh Steelers without taking a single regular-season snap. The following year he was playing on rough fields for a semi-professional team and a few dollars a game. Within three years he had won a championship in the most important football match ever played.
John Constantine Unitas grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of a coal delivery driver who died when John was a child. He was thin, unremarkable physically, and turned down by the college he wanted most on the grounds that he was too light to survive. He went to Louisville instead, played well in a programme nobody was watching, and was taken late in the 1955 draft by his home-town Steelers.
Cut, and the sandlot year
Pittsburgh released him in training camp. The reasons given afterwards vary and none of them reflect well on anybody. He went home, took a job, and spent the season playing for the Bloomfield Rams on fields that were part dirt and part gravel, for about six dollars a game.
The Baltimore Colts signed him in 1956 after a phone call and a tryout. He opened the season as the backup. When the starter was injured early in the year, Unitas came on and threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown on one of his first attempts. He kept the job anyway.
The greatest game ever played
On 28 December 1958 the Colts met the New York Giants for the league championship at Yankee Stadium, in front of a national television audience. Baltimore trailed late. Unitas moved the team the length of the field in the closing seconds to set up the kick that tied it, and the game went into sudden-death overtime - the first time a championship had.
The Colts won it with a touchdown at the end of another long drive. Whether it was really the greatest game ever played is a matter of taste; that it was the most consequential is not seriously disputed. Television executives watched a nation stay in front of its sets through an unscheduled extra period, and professional football's commercial future was decided that evening.
Television did not make the NFL out of nothing. It made it out of one December afternoon in which a quarterback nobody had wanted refused to run out of time.- PuroGoal
What he actually changed
Unitas called his own plays, which almost no modern quarterback does, and he called them at a pace that his own linemen sometimes found uncomfortable. His particular contribution was the organised late-game drive: moving a team down the field against a defence that knows exactly what you have to do, using the sidelines and the clock as resources.
Before him, trailing in the last two minutes was generally understood as losing. After him it became a phase of the game with its own techniques, its own practice time and its own specialists. Every hurry-up offence in football is a descendant.
Unitas threw a touchdown pass in forty-seven consecutive games between 1956 and 1960. The streak stood for more than half a century - longer than any other major record in the sport survived - before it was finally beaten.
The receiver who caught everything
No account of Unitas is complete without Raymond Berry, the receiver he threw to most. Berry was not fast, had unequal leg lengths and poor eyesight, and compensated with preparation that bordered on obsessive: catalogued defensive habits, route repetitions counted in the hundreds, and private sessions with Unitas after training had finished.
The two of them effectively invented the modern idea of a quarterback and receiver working on timing outside team practice - the ball thrown to a spot before the receiver has turned, because both know exactly when the turn will come. In the 1958 championship drive, with the clock almost gone, Unitas threw to Berry three times in a row and Berry caught all three.
The look
Part of the Unitas legend is visual, and unusually so for a player from the black-and-white era. The crew cut, the stooped shoulders, the black high-top boots he kept wearing long after everyone else had moved on. He stood in the pocket with his weight back and threw a fraction after the moment a defender expected, which is a description of both his technique and his temperament.
He was also, by every account, almost impossible to rattle. Team-mates describe a huddle in which the score was never mentioned.
The long finish
Baltimore won championships in 1958 and 1959 and reached the top of the sport again a decade later, winning Super Bowl V - though Unitas was injured during that game and watched most of it from the sideline. By then his arm had been through two decades of punishment. He finished his career with a short, unhappy season in San Diego in 1973 and retired.
His later life was marked by the physical cost. He lost the use of his throwing hand, the result of accumulated damage, and spoke plainly about the condition of players from his generation who had none of the medical protection or pension arrangements that came later. He died in 2002.
Why the story keeps being told
Partly because of the shape of it: released, discarded, sandlots, then the most famous game in the sport's history. But mostly because what he was good at is now the thing the sport values above everything else. Modern football is organised around the quarterback to an almost absurd degree - the contracts, the coverage, the entire structure of a roster. Unitas is where that begins.
