Free Outside Looking In by Garry Wills Page A

Baltimore in 1961. In fact, I was rooting for the other side when the Colts won their first national championship (1958), in what is widely considered the greatest football game ever played, against the New York Giants. I was dating my future wife at the time, in her hometown of Wallingford, Connecticut, and I watched Giant games with her father, John Cavallo, rooting for Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and the other New York players.
    I could not watch the championship game with John, since it occurred over the Christmas break and I was visiting my parents in Michigan. I heard the first part of the game on my car radio, but when it went into late minutes with the Giants ahead, I ducked into a bar to watch on television. Then, though the whole Giants defense was keying on the wide receiver Raymond Berry, Unitas hit him with three passes in a row, taking the ball into field goal range. That kick tied the game and sent it into overtime. Unitas steered his team to victory in the first overtime ever played in professional football.
    In Baltimore, my whole family succumbed to the town’s fascination with the Colts. And as the sixties turned to the seventies, and the team cooled off, we were close to two informal shrines to the Colts, since we lived just a couple of blocks away from Unitas’s restaurant (The Golden Arm) in one direction, and Artie Donovan’s liquor store in the opposite direction. My children knew Donovan’s son, and told a story about the swimming pool behind his house. Artie, who called his autobiography Fatso, was huge in his playing days and got huger afterward. Once, in the winter, when the pool was empty, he fell in after a few drinks too many and no one could pull him out. Legend later grew that a crane had to be brought over to hoist him up.
    One time, in the seventies, I went into Artie’s liquor store to interview him about the Colts team. I was wearing a slipover shirt that looked vaguely like part of a sailor suit—I had grabbed it in Rome after the airline lost my luggage. Since my wife was not with me at the time, my taste had not been impeccable. Artie, who never disguised his feelings, gave me a queer look and said, “What are you—an Englishman?” He loved to talk about his teammates, including the “weirdo” Berry and the superhuman Unitas. He said that Unitas was so accurate with a football that once, when a defensive player sacked him and rubbed his head in the dirt, he told the apologetic lineman who had let the charger in to let him through again on the next play. As the opposing lineman thundered at him, Unitas jammed the football around his face mask and broke his nose. It was counted an incomplete pass.
    There were many myths about the combination of Unitas throwing and Berry receiving. Berry was so surehanded that in his entire career he had only one fumble. At The Golden Arm, I asked Unitas if he had some special affinity with Berry as a receiver. He said, “Hell no. Raymond bugged me. He wanted to tell me all these fancy steps he would take, the new patterns he was inventing. I told him I did not want to hear that stuff. Just get clear, I told him, and I’ll find you.” I went to see Berry in Massachusetts, where he had gone after retiring as a player. He was working for the New England Patriots, first as a receivers coach and then as head coach (in his second season at the top spot, he took the team to the Super Bowl).
    I repeated to Berry the common myth that he and Unitas shared a single brain, or some invisible connection. His wife, Sally, laughed out loud at the thought. Though the two men had practiced together in the off hours at first, they soon got on each other’s nerves. Berry was especially concerned at the stories Unitas would tell about him—stories that entered accounts still being published. Unitas thought he was paying tribute to Berry as a man with little natural talent who overcame all obstacles by hard work and