Free Outside Looking In by Garry Wills Page B

study. In my conversation with him at The Golden Arm, Unitas told me that Berry had one leg shorter than the other. He was also a slow runner, had bad eyes, a bad back, and only nine usable fingers.
    Berry especially resented the way Unitas kept telling the story of his short leg after Berry had corrected him. Unitas had once seen the team doctor treating Berry for a pinched nerve in his back. The doctor kept lowering the legs alternately, to see what effect the pinched nerve had on his freedom of motion—which was why Unitas said he had a bad back. Actually, this was a temporary injury that had nothing to do with the permanent state of either Berry’s back or his legs. “I used to get letters from parents saying they had a child with one leg shorter than the other, and they knew I was playing football in that condition. I had to convince them that the story was false.”
    What about the unusable finger? “I use it all the time.” His little finger was dislocated and ended up skewed. But he kneaded putty to bring back its strength and flexibility. And his bad eyes? Berry was one of the first athletes to use contact lenses, and he did not have just one set of them. He had a case with a range of options. He had tinted ones when he was running away from the sun—in effect, built-in sunglasses. He had different tints for playing at night under lights. He had experimented for all different conditions. As a result, he had better eyesight than anyone on the field—he could hardly have caught hundreds of passes and dropped only one if that had not been the case. Unitas saw him shifting his contacts about in their special case and thought he must be practically blind.
    As for not having natural talent, Berry said that he had very large hands for catching and very large feet (size 14) for cutting, twisting, and reversing. It is true that he studied every aspect of the game with an intensity that a natural athlete like Unitas considered obsessive. But that paid off for him. Berry would go out and pace the field before games, identifying areas of loose turf, slippery wetness, or (in winter) icy or frozen patches. As he had contact lenses for different conditions, he had a range of cleats he could use for the different turfs he had to run on. He could change them in the game as rain or freezing temperatures altered the situation.
    Despite their temperamental differences, Berry could not have held Unitas in higher esteem as a player. I told him that many people thought the game had gone beyond the days when Unitas called signals without feedback from specialized experts on their headphones. Berry, who had observed the changes in the game as he coached the New England Patriots, said that he had never seen a better reader of the situation on the field than Unitas. Whatever new things had come in, he told me, all Unitas needed was minimal protection from his linemen and he would find a way to win, against any challenge. “He was just a winner.”
    Frank Deford, the great writer for Sports Illustrated, agreed. As someone who had covered all sports for many years, he had been given many autographs and souvenirs. But he kept only two—a signed basketball from Bill Russell and a signed football from Unitas. He described Unitas as not only the greatest football player he had ever seen but the greatest athlete. When Unitas died in 2002, Deford wrote that whatever other developments had occurred in the game since his retirement, and whoever had played brilliantly at quarterback after him, nonetheless: “If there were one game scheduled, Earth versus the Klingons, with the fate of the universe on the line, any person with his wits about him would have Johnny U. calling signals in the huddle.” All of us Baltimorons (as Mencken called us) emphatically agreed.

Shrivers
    Another Maryland family I had dealings with in Baltimore was the Shrivers. One day Sargent Shriver came to my house in Baltimore to go