Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  “Everyone laughed at the question,” he says, “but I knew what the guy meant. I answered, ‘Since I’ve been in the NFL.’ At Grambling I’d just been a quarterback.”

  He’s back at Grambling this season as the successor to Eddie Robinson, the Tigers’ retired coaching legend. In May he was working out of a temporary office in a converted trailer. There was no secretary on duty when we talked. He took all phone calls himself.

  “Did I change history?” he said. “Well, I’m not going to the Hall of Fame. I like to think that I was part of history. But maybe I changed the way people looked at things. Maybe I changed things for the black quarterbacks who followed me.”

  He wasn’t the first black quarterback in the NFL. In the dawn of pro football, there was Fritz Pollard, a run-and-pass tailback in the 1920s. In the ’50s there were Willie Thrower and Charlie (Choo Choo) Brackins, mere blips on the screen. Marlin (the Magician) Briscoe was a one-year wonder for the ’68 Broncos before he was converted to wideout. Joe Gilliam once started ahead of Terry Bradshaw in Pittsburgh, but drugs cut his career short, and James (Shack) Harris had productive years with the Buffalo Bills and the Rams, although he never achieved stardom.

  “When I left Grambling (in 1969),” says Harris, who’s now the pro personnel director for the Baltimore Ravens, “Coach Robinson told me, ‘Don’t expect things to be fair in the NFL. You’re going to have to be better than anyone else just to survive.’ There was a lot of pressure, and that’s what I tried to tell Doug when he came into the league.”

  “I was a one-week holdout after I was drafted,” says Williams, who was the Buccaneers’ first-round pick in 1978. “I guess that didn’t sit right with some people. They must have figured I should have felt lucky to have been drafted at all. Then after five years and two division titles, I was only the 43rd-highest-paid quarterback in the league.

  “I held out again and eventually went to the USFL. My wife had just died of a brain tumor. There was a three-month-old baby girl to take care of. You couldn’t believe some of the letters I’d gotten in Tampa. Everyone heard about the package I got with the watermelon inside and the note, ‘Throw this, nigger. They might be able to catch it.’ It got so that every time I got a letter with no return address, I wouldn’t open it.”

  A rough career, but one Super Sunday put a grace note on it — for all time.

  “A very special moment for a very special person,” Harris says. “A special moment for all of us.”

  * * *

  Talking Football with Johnny U

  This article appeared in the Sept. 23, 2002 issue of Sports Illustrated.

  Almost 40 years later it still bothered John Unitas, the idea that people had accused him of gambling at the end of the overtime drive that beat the Giants in the most famous of all pro football games, the 1958 NFL Championship. Sitting on the porch of his home in Baldwin, Md., on a spring day in 1998, Johnny U was off on one of his favorite topics — the way a quarterback can influence a defense, almost bend it to his will. “Gambling?” he snorted. “Some gamble.”

  The play was the seven-yard pass to tight end Jim Mutscheller that put the Baltimore Colts on the one-yard line, setting up Alan Ameche’s game-winning plunge. The thinking was, Why did Unitas throw the ball and risk an interception when all the Colts needed was a field goal to win?

  “It wasn’t a gamble,” Unitas said. “They didn’t see what I saw. Nine times out of 10 Emlen Tunnell, the strong safety, would be on Mutscheller. This time it was Cliff Livingston, the linebacker, trying to take away the inside. So I checked off to a diagonal outside. Who’s there to cover him? Lindon Crow, the cornerback, and he’s got to worry about Lenny Moore. Not a gamble. An educated move.”

  The quarterback’s ability to set up a defense, to craft his own sequence of plays, was a big part of the game then. Very little came in from the sideline. It was his show, and Unitas was determined that we should understand this element of pro football, which has been lost in today’s era.

  “Look, you’re the strong safety,” he said. “I’m going to overload, put three men in a two-man area, then go back weakside. What do you do? If I want you to come up and play the run, I split the guard out farther. If I want the cornerback to play the run, I tighten the splits. You see, I’ve got you doing what I want you to do.”

  Throughout his career Unitas maintained this dogged adherence to the idea of control. His message: Don’t mess with me. I’m running the show.

  Physically he had it all — the whiplike delivery, the athletic ability, the great sense of timing and, oh, man, the courage. He had to do it the hard way. The NFL hadn’t liberalized the passing rules. His receivers could get mugged downfield. Defensive linemen could head-slap their way into the backfield, and when they homed in on a quarterback they could hit him any way they wanted. None of today’s cellophane-wrapper protection from the officials.

  And Unitas got hit plenty. He’d snarl and wipe the blood off his face and lead his team down the field on another of his great scoring drives, operating in that hunch-shouldered way of his, with the herky-jerky setup and deadly accuracy. Eighteen years of that.

  “I weigh 270 pounds,” Merlin Olsen, the Los Angeles Rams’ great defensive tackle, once said, “and I don’t know if I could absorb the punishment he takes. I wonder if I could stand there, week after week, and say, ‘Here I am. Take your best shot.’”

  Yes, Unitas was the best I ever saw. He got the gameplan on Wednesday, but once the whistle blew, it was his game to run in whatever way he chose. “I charted the tendencies of every defensive back in the league,” he said. “I could tell you how Lem Barney would react to a certain pattern, or how Jesse Whittenton would play a certain zone coverage. Raymond Berry and I put in our own set of audibles based on the tendencies of the coverage guys.”

  Coaches were an annoyance to Unitas. He’d get a little help from the press box “just to let me know about the other team’s blitz tendencies,” he said. “Otherwise, just leave me alone.” How would he feel having a radio in his helmet, getting messages from the sideline before every play? “I’d get very deaf all of a sudden,” he said. “My radio would be permanently out of service.”

  Unitas had the good fortune to play much of his career for Weeb Ewbank, one of the few coaches who had a great feel for the quarterback position and knew enough not to mess too much with the exceptional young man he had playing for him. But the two did have their occasional disagreements, and I reminded Unitas about a famous quote of his, one that stuck with me for years: “You don’t become a real quarterback until you can tell the coach to go to hell.”

  “Oh, sure, I remember that,” Unitas said, laughing. “I loved playing for Weeb, but sometimes I’d just ignore what he told me. Early in my career he’d try to limit where I could throw against certain people. He had tremendous respect for Night Train Lane. He’d tell me, ‘Don’t throw the ball in his area.’ Well, hell, I wasn’t going to give him the day off. So I’d throw at him, and maybe he’d pick one off, but we could do things against him, too.

  “Jack Butler of the Steelers was another guy Weeb had deep respect for. We played them in an exhibition game, and Weeb told me to stay away from him. Lenny Moore said, ‘Weeb, I can get open in the deep middle.’ Weeb said, ‘There’s no way you’ll get behind him.’ So next time we’re in the huddle, I tell Lenny, ‘Damn, let’s do it.’ We hit the deep post for six points two times. It proved one thing to me: I could do what I wanted out there. After the game Weeb came over to me and said, ‘John, I’m never going to tell you what to do again.’”

  The end came in 1973, 15 years after that great championship game. Unitas was 40, his body wracked by injuries, playing out the string on a hopeless San Diego Chargers team that had one major asset, a fine rookie quarterback named Dan Fouts.

  “The coach, Harland Svare, asked me to work with Danny,” Unitas said, “and Dan was all excited about it. The
n after five or six games, the offensive coach, Bob Schnelker, came over to me and said, ‘The coaches had a meeting last night, and we’d rather you didn’t work with him anymore.’ Who knows why? Anyway, I told Fouts, and oh, boy, he was hot. So I said, ‘What the hell, we’ll keep doing it. They’re not smart enough to know what’s going on anyway.’”

  I didn’t want the afternoon with Unitas to end. When it was time to say goodbye, the hand he extended was crippled and twisted. “Carpal tunnel,” he said. “When they operated on it, they cut a nerve. Now I can’t rotate the thumb to pick up anything.”

  How many more things like that were there? “In ’68 I tore muscles in my arm,” he said. “Two nerves were dead. I lost feeling in my fingers and I haven’t completely regained it. Let’s see, two knee replacements, and then the triple bypass.”

  That’s what finally got him, the heart, the one that had been the biggest and most spirited in the game.

  * * *

  Goodbye to All That, Roger

  This article appeared in the April 14, 1980 issue of Sports Illustrated.

  So long, Roger, we gave you a bum deal, kid. For openers, we never picked you All-Pro. That’s we, the writers, the pickers, the guys who vote on the AP and Pro Football Writers ballots. Now that’s a bad call right away, because all you did was end up as the NFL’s top-rated passer — in history, the whole 59 years. Higher than Unitas, than Tarkenton or Jurgensen, than Tittle or Baugh. And you quarterbacked the Cowboys in four of their five Super Bowls, winning twice. And brought the team from behind to victory 14 times in the last two minutes or in overtime, 23 times in the fourth quarter. Hey, what does a guy have to do?

  Oh, you made the all-division team a few times. But never the big one, the starting 11, AFC and NFC combined. “You look back on it and it seems amazing, doesn’t it?” says one selector. “But it just worked out that when he had his greatest years, someone had a slightly better one. And then you felt that Roger would always be around, and he’d be great for the next 10 years or so, and his time would come. So you went with the hot hand … and Staubach got stiffed.”

  And now he’s gone. Staubach made it official last week at a press conference in the Texas Stadium Club room. There were 200 witnesses, some from as far away as New Jersey, 42 of them with microphones. With the metronomic click-click-click of the cameras in the background, Staubach spoke for 18 minutes.

  He wore an open-neck shirt and a dark blue sweater. He looked a very youthful 38. A few gray hairs, a few lines in the face, but not the image of the old pro saying farewell. He looked youthful until you saw film clips of him in his rookie year of ’69. Flattop haircut, baby face — a child, really. And the guy was 27 with a year of Vietnam behind him.

  The book on Staubach was always that his four years of naval service didn’t count when you figured his NFL age, that being in Nam doesn’t age you as quickly as ducking forearms. It’s an argument that probably would have been projected into his 50th year: “He’s not really a 50-year-old quarterback, you see; his actual NFL age is only 46.”

  But last week Staubach put an end to it, joining a very small fraternity of NFL stars who quit when they could still command a big salary — Jimmy Brown, Fran Tarkenton, Whizzer White if you want to go way back. His announcement overshadowed two other major Cowboy retirements, each of which could have commanded a major press conference of its own. Offensive Tackle Rayfield Wright, 34, and Free Safety Cliff Harris, 31, with nine years of combined All-Pro behind them, each called it a career. With Wright it was a forced decision. Tom Landry decided that 13 seasons was enough. But Harris, the definitive safetyman of the ’70s and an almost certain Hall of Famer, caught the Cowboys by surprise when he told them he had a good opportunity with a young and energetic oil company, and there comes a time in every man’s life …

  Gone, too, is Hollywood Henderson, the strongside linebacker. No, his reinstatement is not being considered, nor will it be. That holds true whatever happens to his replacement, Mike Hegman, who is facing possible prosecution on a charge of theft for allegedly forging a friend’s name on $10,534 worth of checks.

  So all of a sudden there are holes all over the Cowboys’ depth chart as well as in the roof of their stadium. It is hoped that Too Tall Jones will return from his one-year boxing career. Underline hope; so far he hasn’t said anything about it. Charlie Waters, the All-Pro strong safety, is coming back from major knee surgery. And the Cowboys won’t be drafting until the third round, Nos. 1 and 2 having gone to the Colts for Defensive End John Dutton.

  So last week Landry, who hasn’t experienced such a severe case of the shorts since the early expansion years in Dallas, watched his quarterback say goodbye, and he was wondering where he’d find another one like him.

  “He hadn’t indicated anything during the season,” he said later. “He’d had such a good year, one of his best ever. But things weren’t encouraging during the off-season. Right after the playoffs, he told me he was considering the possibility of retiring. He said he wanted to tell me early, so I could get ready for it.”

  Staubach might have decided already. After the 21-19 loss to the Rams in the playoffs, he was driving home with his wife, Marianne, and he told her he’d had it. “That’s it,” he said. “Can you believe that the last pass I completed in the NFL was to Herbert Scott?”

  Every official in Texas Stadium reached for his flag on that play. Guards aren’t eligible receivers in the NFL. Staubach had been trying to throw the ball away, throw it into the ground, but he’d gotten too much on it, and it hit Scott in the belly and he reflexively grabbed it. Staubach had been zapped earlier in the game when Jack Reynolds bounced his head off the Tartan Turf, giving Roger his fifth concussion of the season.

  He was tired and his head hurt and his team had just been eliminated from the playoffs. December talk, his wife figured. She’d heard it before. But Lord knows, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Five concussions, two of them serious. He’d experienced some numbness after the Pittsburgh game.

  Twenty concussions, total, including high school. A few weeks after the Rams game, a New York neurologist told Staubach that, yes, there was some cumulative damage, a slight slowing of some of the reflexes.

  He had paid his dues. His left shoulder was dislocated 17 times before he underwent surgery to have the ligaments tightened. When Staubach tries to move his left arm backward, the motion is markedly limited. The little finger on his throwing hand doesn’t look like a finger at all. It’s a perfect Z, discounting a big round knot in the middle. The index finger is swollen and off-line.

  “I was hoping he meant it that day in the car, that he’d really retire,” his wife says. “If he’d have played again this year and he’d have been knocked out again, my heart would have stopped. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. The decision had to be his. Usually I could see his enthusiasm coming back in the off-season. This year I didn’t.”

  The idea of his retiring had taken hold, although in Dallas, Staubach had become an institution. His secretary, Roz Cole, was sending out 10,000 pictures a season. He would write a personal message on 300 a week; he’d answer 3,000 letters a year. His life had become an inspiration to the country, but it had its price. He’d get requests for 70 to 80 speaking engagements a week. Church groups, prisons, hospitals. It’s not in Staubach’s nature to stiff anybody. You’ve never heard any stories about him brushing off a kid with an autograph book. Sonny Jurgensen used to duck out on the writers, through a back door, after his games; Joe Namath had one set of writers he’d talk to and another he wouldn’t, but no journalist ever said Staubach had given him a hard time.

  What could he do? He had a life to live. He has five children at home. “They need quality time from me,” he concluded. “Not just time, but quality time. I’d be watching films and my daughter would come in to tell me about something that happened in school, and I’d say, ‘Not now, can’t you see I’m busy?’ and she’
d go away. And then an hour later, I’d think, ‘What the heck have I done?’ and I’d go and find her up in her bedroom and try to tell her how sorry I was.”

  He added up the pluses and minuses of life in the NFL. And outside: he is president of a real-estate company, Holloway-Staubach, that is branching out. In that league he was known as a “young executive.” The decision became clear to Staubach. It was time.

  A press conference was announced. The next day Gil Brandt, the Cowboys’ Vice-President for Personnel Development, was stopped by a patrolman for making an improper turn on the North Central Expressway in Dallas. He had left his wallet and driver’s license in the office.

  “I’ll tell you what,” the cop said. “You tell me what Roger’s gonna do, and I’ll let you go.”

  “Buddy, I just wish I knew,” Brandt said. The cop let him go anyway.

  On Monday morning Staubach drove to the practice field to say goodbye to his teammates. He wanted to keep it light.

  “I felt it was only fitting that Herb Scott caught my last pass,” he said. “He’s worked hard during his career, and he never got to catch one. And he did such a good job getting open on the play.”

  It was nice and loose — for a while. One more oversight in Staubach’s career is that he never got the recognition he deserved as a comic. He’s got a genuine zany streak and he should have been born looking like Woody Allen, but when you’re president of the student body in high school and prom king and a star in three sports — well, those credentials don’t break ’em up.

  A few days before the press conference, the Cowboys’ receptionist got a call from a cactus-voiced fan who told her, “If Roger’s leaving, you can just cancel my season tickets right now.” She hung up. Then came another call, nastier than the first. Then another. Then Staubach called. “I want to find out how many fans have canceled their season tickets,” he said.

  “Dammit, Roger,” she said. “They were all you!”