Daddy had continued to live his famously colorful life after our game, and continued to play all-pro football-forcing fumbles, roaming sideline to sideline. He was named to the Pro Bowl in 1958 and 1959. After the '59 season, he took up a new off-season job: pro wrestling, as a way to stay in shape, and get paid for it.
And befitting that big heart, Daddy insisted that his character in the ring be a good guy: "Nobody," he said, "is going to say that Big Daddy is a mean man."
But no one doubted that football was his true love, and the stabilizing force of an unstable life. He didn't carry around pictures only of his gruesomely murdered mother; his folder of photographs also included stills from the 1958 game, which he delighted in showing to anyone and everyone. Behind the menacing physique, and the worried face given to mysterious outbursts of tears, Lenny Moore told me, lurked a kind and gentle man: "To go show you what he was about internally-and I found this out later-Big Daddy used to take bags of groceries around to poor families and knock on the door and drop it off to them. Out of his own pocket.
Took care of those folks-never told me, never told Parker."
After the 1960 season, the Colts traded him to the Steelers, with Buzz Nutter, for receiver Jimmy Orr. In Pittsburgh, Daddy's off-the-field legend grew: a lot of drinking, and a lot of eating. And a lot of women-sometimes, reportedly, at the same time. But he still had a lot of great football in that big body of his. In 1962, by all accounts, Daddy was getting even better. In his final game, the 1962 Pro Bowl, Daddy was named the lineman of the game.
Eugene Lipscomb was thirty-one when he was found dead on the floor of his southwestern Baltimore apartment shortly after his final game. "A homemade syringe was found near his unconscious form," reported a Pittsburgh paper. Four fresh needle marks dotted his arm. The only witness to the evening's events was an admitted heroin addict and ex-con who has since passed away. Daddy had supposedly had $700 in his famously fat wallet that night. ("Big Daddy had a bad habit of carrying excess money in his pocket," Lenny told me. "We told him, 'Daddy, don't be flashing your money around.' ") The authorities found just $73.
Today, some of his teammates insist that Daddy's death was the result of foul play. Lenny Moore thinks that the man with Lipscomb killed him to take his money.
"There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of Big Daddy," Moore told me.
"I will never forget that Friday, ever. I was talking to him Thursday. We'd made plans to go up to New York to one of the jazz clubs, to see [organist] Jimmy Smith play. We were going to drive up. Big Daddy said, 'You want to take your car, my car, whatever?'
I said it didn't matter. He says, 'We'll go up, maybe stay overnight in a motel, drive back.' After that, he told me, he wanted to go to Pittsburgh to deal with his contract, and see the grandfather who had raised him.
"I wake up seven a.m., hearing the news on the radio: Big Daddy Lipscomb, dead. I said, 'What?' It was all over the news.
I called around, and talked to [former Colt running back] Buddy Young, and to Parker, and to Sherm [Plunkett]. We were all real close. I said, 'I talked to him that day. Did you see him?' They said, 'Well, the only thing we know is he went by a club, left the club, ended up down at an apartment.' I said, 'Okay, but who was there?'
They said, 'I don't know, other than a couple of guys who did drugs.' I said, 'What was he doing around them guys?' They said, 'We don't know; all we know is he passed out from an overdose, and they waited a long time before they called the ambulance.'
"So I talked to the coroner. I said, 'Do your autopsy checking.'
He said, 'Big Daddy was right-handed, wasn't he?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'All the needle marks were in his right arm.' He says, 'The first shot was a heroin shot that was enough to take five people out.'
"Here's the thing: Daddy was scared to death of needles. One time six or seven of us had to hold him down in Los Angeles after he hurt his ankle and they were just going to give him a shot to make it numb. As far as needles, he wouldn't even take the flu shot."
"[Former Colt defensive back] Johnny Sample and I both put up a thousand dollars to have his death investigated," Milt Davis told me. Milt was Daddy's roommate on the road. "We were told to cease and desist, by letter, from lawyers representing Spiro Agnew-'or we're going to take you to jail.' What is that all about?
That really happened: Spiro himself. From the governor! "My roomie," Milt said, "should be in the Hall of Fame. He's not, though, because of the taint of his death."
"He was one of the greatest guys you ever want to meet," Moore added. "All he was doing was trying to fill the void in his life; there was nobody there to fill in the pieces."
Weeb's Colt era came to an end after the 1962 season, after going .500 that year, and 21-19 over his final three years. As Marchetti said, Weeb wore out his welcome, and the old Colts were wearing down. In fact, Gino himself had something to do with Weeb's firing, albeit unwittingly. "We played the Bears on a Saturday night, and they beat us," he told me. "Monday morning I get a call. From Carroll's secretary: 'He wants to see you at ten o'clock at the Sheraton.' I was nervous. I thought I was going to be traded.
"I go in, and Rosenbloom smiles, and says, 'Nothing to worry about.' He said, 'I have my excuse to fire Weeb now.' And I said, 'So what am I doing here?' And he says, 'I want you to recommend someone.' I recommended Don Shula. We'd been roommates when he'd played with the team in the early fifties. So Rosenbloom hired Shula."
So I guess it turns out the Colts owe a whole lot more to Gino Marchetti than just all those years of great play: he gave them a Hall of Fame coach.
Of course, none of it would have been possible without Rosenbloom, the man who oversaw a franchise that after 1956, with Carroll as the owner, never had a losing season-a span that featured three championships and eight division titles.
But Rosenbloom's final act in life was every bit as mysterious-and tragic-as Big Daddy's. The man Bill Curry told me was "the best owner ever"-who could also be "both . . . cruel and loving"-lived his last twenty years embroiled in one controversy after another.
Off the field, player after player told me, Carroll continued to be generous and to take an active interest in their lives. That altruism speaks of a special man; he helped anyone and everyone, long after their own success could have benefited him. He famously helped out on medical bills for anyone who ever needed them.
An Ernie Accorsi anecdote, from the days when Ernie ran the public-relations office of the Colts, sums up this side of the man pretty well: "He called me one Sunday morning, because there was something in the paper he didn't like. My wife was ill; I thought it might be her appendix, and I wanted to take her to the hospital we didn't have 911 in those days.
"I said, 'Mr. Rosenbloom, I think my wife is having appendicitis.' He said, 'Give me your address, I'll have Dr. Freeman there in thirty minutes.' I said, 'You don't have to do that. I'll drive her to the hospital.'
"He said, 'Don't move.' And a few minutes later, on a Sunday morning, here's the doctor. I said, 'Doctor, you didn't have to come over here.' He said, 'I didn't have to come over here? You should have heard the phone call I had from Carroll Rosenbloom. I had no choice.' "
On the other hand, as the years went on, the relationship between Rosenbloom and the city of Baltimore increasingly unraveled. Faced with waning attendance and a spartan stadium ("Memorial was outdated the day they finished it," says his son Steve), Rosenbloom asked the city for financial help. Not only was he rebuffed, but he soon found himself on the losing end of the pen of famed Baltimore sportswriter John Steadman. According to Steve: "He would go after my father personally about whatever that was happening that he didn't like . . . His attacks would run the gamut on everything." Steadman had been the Colts' assistant general manager before returning to newspapering. Today, Steve Rosenbloom attributes Steadman's attacks on his father in the Baltimore News-American to the fact that Rosenbloom didn't hire him when Don Kellett retired as general manager.
According to an
old friend of Carroll's who requested anonymity, Rosenbloom, despite all of his achievements, was acutely sensitive to how people treated him, and to how all of his generosity went underappreciated: "He'd always lament about himself, about how no one does enough for 'poor old Carroll.' He was nice to his friends, but he liked to be coddled. Loved people to bow down to him. He was one of the most intelligently manipulative people I ever met. There was nothing he didn't do in the end that wasn't for Carroll."
In the end, the critics beat him down-the newspapers, the city fathers who wouldn't give him more money. Rosenbloom grew weary of it all. He'd talked of moving the franchise for years, but in the late sixties, no one moved NFL franchises; it just wasn't done.
"But he said, 'I'm getting too old for this-all we've done is win, and look what I'm going through,' " Steve recalls. "That's when he first said, 'I gotta do something. I'm not living like this.' That's how this deal was dreamed up."
The "deal" was something that had never before been seen in sports, and never will be again. Rosenbloom traded his team for Robert Irsay's Los Angeles Rams. As soon as the Colts became Robert Irsay's, the team hit a downhill slope, and never recovered, from its first losing season in 1972 to the night in March of 1984 when Irsay packed up the team's equipment into Mayflower moving vans and the team slipped away into the night, to Indianapolis.
In the meantime, says Rosenbloom's friend, Carroll was in heaven out in Los Angeles: "That was the world he wanted. He got Hollywood." Gone were the nagging sportswriters, replaced by a host of luminaries in Carroll's box, from the legit to the not-so-legit. "The visitors to his box in those later years were pretty interesting," says his friend. "Bobby Kennedy, Spiro Agnew, [Maryland governor] Marvin Mandel-with a little Mafioso mixed in. He always mixed with some interesting people. If you didn't know him, maybe you'd say he was part of the underworld.
"He was a combination of tough and spooky. One time, when I had brought a very important guest to his box, who hadn't been there before-he was superstitious about that-we were losing at the half, and he said to my guest, 'We better win this game, or I'll cut your balls off.' "
On April 2, 1979, Rosenbloom drowned in the surf behind his home in Golden Beach, Florida. The circumstances immediately struck anyone who had known him as suspicious: "He was a very good athlete, in good shape," says his friend. "He swam every day."
Four years later, PBS's Frontline series debuted with an investigation of the NFL's possible underworld connections, and included interviews with organized-crime types who said Rosenbloom's legs had been held underwater while he drowned. Or, as Artie puts it now, "The Sicilian Frogmen got him."
Rosenbloom's wife, Georgia Frontiere, a former showgirl, inherited the team. She knew nothing about football-"It would be like me telling you that you're taking over the World Bank tomorrow," says his friend. But after she moved the Rams to St. Louis, the team won another Super Bowl. Winning was always, somehow, in the Rosenbloom blood.
At Rosenbloom's funeral, it was fitting that Oakland/Los Angeles Raider owner Al Davis, another maverick who'd been a thorn in the NFL's side forever, gave a eulogy. "Among the great people in my world, Carroll Rosenbloom was the giant," Davis said. "Come autumn, and the roar of the crowd, I'll always think of him."
Why is Carroll's mysterious side at all relevant to this book?
Because of the ongoing discussion about that second-down pass to Mutscheller, in overtime, when a chip-shot field goal could have won it. Because of the still-lingering, if ludicrous, suspicion that Rosenbloom, because he had a bet on the game, might have had something to do with Unitas's call. The betting line was 3 ½ points, which meant that a field goal would have won the game, but Carroll would have lost his bet.
Rosenbloom himself later said that he was sitting in the stands for our game, which would have made it impossible for him to have anything to do with the play-calling: "I didn't want to sit in the press box," he said. "I didn't want to be around anyone I knew.
I called Timothy Mara and asked him to find me two seats off by myself where I could see the football game and the only ones who would know where I was sitting would be Tim and myself . . . He got me two seats, and Don Kellett went up there with me. They were way up high."
Before he passed away earlier this year, the Colts' center, Buzz Nutter, admitted that the rumor had always been around in Colt circles: "I know that everybody says we went for it because Rosenbloom had a bet, and he'd given four, but I never thought about that."
"I know that he used to bet on college games and stuff like that," Steve Rosenbloom told me. "I'd be at the house. He just liked to do that kind of stuff. Maybe he wanted to distance me from it, but I never knew that he bet on any professional game. People have told me that he did, and that he came clean with them, but I can't say one way or the other. I can tell you this: winning was so important to my father, even if he had bet on games, that became secondary to winning the game. Had he bet on that game? I don't know. After all these years, I think it's irrelevant."
Rosenbloom's friend told me that Carroll did, indeed, have money on the outcome of the 1958 championship game. "I talked to one of his partners, who assured me Carroll bet on that game," said his friend. "He was a betting man, and he was a terrible bettor.
He'd lose five of six on any given Sunday. Carroll loved to bet. He would have the day's line; he'd make me go over the day's line every Sunday morning."
But the idea that Rosenbloom could have somehow had something to do with Unitas's passing to Mutscheller, so that the Colts could beat the point spread, is ridiculous. If he did bet, I have no doubt he had some anxious moments down there, but he didn't have anything to do with that call. That call was all Johnny's.
There's one other quote that figures into all of this, though, one made by Johnny Unitas himself. After the game-jokingly, I have to believe-Unitas told some reporters, ' "I went for the touchdown [on the pass to Mutscheller] because I had bet a few thousand on the game and I had given three and a half points."
Later on, Johnny insisted it had been said in jest: "I didn't even know what the points were," he told John Steadman. Bert Bell was apparently not pleased, and "read him the riot act," said Steadman some years later. But it was absurd, as far as I'm concerned. It just sounds like something Johnny would say to get a laugh.
I have weighed all of this, and firmly believe that Johnny Unitas went for that pass because he was Johnny. Period. He knew it would work, and it did. And it was a second-down call. John always made his own calls, even if it wasn't what Weeb wanted. Every call Johnny made was a good one.
What's unfortunate about Unitas's joking quote, and the controversy, is that they planted the idea in people's minds that Johnny Unitas was a gambler. That perception would come to haunt him a few years later.
No one in our game had as bittersweet a life as Johnny-with an emphasis on "sweet," when you take into account his marriage to Sandy Unitas. Johnny married the former stewardess in 1970, and today her fondest memory is of her husband stopping the lawn mower during his yard duties to bring her wildflowers up at their farmhouse. According to Sandy, Johnny liked nothing better than to ride that mower and tend the animals on their Maryland farm.
In fact, on the day he'd played his last football game for the Colts, Ernie Accorsi asked him for all of his equipment, to give to the Hall of Fame. Johnny didn't surrender the shoes: "They're good for cutting the grass," he told Ernie.
I finally got to know Johnny some years after our game, in Vietnam. It was the winter of '66. I'd just retired; Johnny had another decade to go in the NFL. Our foursome was Johnny, Willie Davis of the Packers, Sam, and me. We'd gone over there as NFL emissaries to meet our troops, and things got a lot hairier than we'd ever anticipated-or, I'm sure, than Pete Rozelle had anticipated when he asked us to go.
You can learn a lot about a man sitting next to him in a helicopter as it lands in Vietcong-occupied territory, or on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea, or when he's talki
ng to hostile Montagnards wearing grenade belts in the jungle. I learned a lot about Johnny. And none of it surprised me.
He was cool under pressure over there, too, when the rest of us were a little less composed. On our first night, we were holed up in a barricaded hotel in Saigon. "You guys better be sure you look under your bed before you go to sleep," our babysitter, a young lieutenant, said. Sam said, "What's that about?" The guy said, "Well, you never know. They may have put an explosive under there. You better take a look." I'm thinking, Good Lord. What are we into here? We had some terrifying nights, when we could hear grenades and sirens and gunshots going off-sitting in the hotel, which was guarded, but wondering how long it would be before they got to us.
Johnny never showed the slightest concern. He was there to spread goodwill, and he seemed to enjoy every minute of the trip especially the very scariest part. There was this one particular South Vietnamese colonel who was from Baltimore, and he loved the Colts. This guy was way out in the jungle, right in the middle of it all, and of course he made a request to meet Johnny. They basically asked us out to lunch-in the middle of a war zone. On our way out there, our veteran helicopter pilot said, "I'm going to touch down and be on the ground for about five seconds. Be ready to get your asses out. Otherwise they're going to shoot my ass out of the sky. I'll be back in two hours."
Willie, Sam, and I were ready to go home. "John, this is just great," said Sam. Johnny just smiled; he didn't seem worried at all.
He'd told us he'd always wanted to be a pilot, but failed the depth perception part of the eyesight test, so he was having a ball flying everywhere in Vietnam.
Johnny was the hero of that lunch, in the colonel's headquarters behind enemy lines, in a shack hidden in the jungle (the pilot got us back out)-just as he was the focus of attention on our visit to the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. In all the places we went, from the carrier to the outposts in the middle of the jungle, it was almost as if someone had called timeout on the war to sit down and have lunch with, to meet, to get a piece of paper signed by Johnny Unitas. A man of few words for the most part, Johnny was amazing with the soldiers-genuinely glad to be giving them something to smile about.
The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever Page 25