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Johnny Unitas's Death
- Johnny Unitas
- Football
- May 7, 1933
- September 11, 2002
- Heart attack
The life and death of Johnny Unitas:
This is one of the pioneers who made professional football America’s number one spectator sport. And he did it in a thrilling, nationally televised overtime win in the 1958 NFL Championship game.
John Constantine Unitas was born in Pittsburgh in the Depression Era. His father Francis died when Johnny was only four years old and his mother Helen worked two jobs to support the family. His ancestors were from Lithuania and his last name resulted from the phonetic spelling of a common surname in Lithuania: Jonaitis.
Johnny attended local schools in Pittsburgh and looked for a chance to play college football. He got it with the University of Louisville and moved to Kentucky. At 6’ 1’ tall and a mere 145 pounds, gangly Johnny managed to turn heads in his first start in the fifth game of the 1951 season, throwing eleven straight completion and three touchdown passes.
Louisville had a new quarterback, but the next year, in 1952, the school de-emphasized sports. Johnny maintained his scholarship by taking a new elective: square dancing.
He ended his college career and played quarterback, safety, linebackers and even returned kicks and punts on special teams. It was quite a modest and varied start for a future football icon.
Johnny went home after college, drafted in the ninth round of the NFL draft by the Pittsburgh Steelers.
But he didn’t get far, cut in a competition among four quarterbacks by a head coach who didn’t think Johnny was smart enough to lead a pro football team. Johnny, by now married to his high school sweetheart Dorothy Hoelle…
…took construction jobs and kept his football skills sharp by playing for a semi-pro team for $6 a game.
In 1956 he joined the Baltimore Colts…
…coached by Weeb Ewbank, who snatched him away from another interested team – the Cleveland Browns.
Under Ewbank, Johnny notched a 55.6 percent completion mark as a rookie and was a full time starter for the 1957 Colts. He led the league in passing and touchdowns and suddenly Baltimore was an NFL powerhouse.
But it was that overtime victory in the NFL Championship game at Yankee Stadium over the New York Giants on December 28, 1958…
…that galvanized Johnny’s reputation and created a national audience of lovers of pro football.
Johnny went on to win the league MVP award in 1959…
…but by the ‘60’s as some of his key teammates retired, Johnny’s Colts were just not as successful as they were in the late 1950’s .But he did go on to Win the MVP award again in 1964, even though Baltimore lost the championship game to Cleveland.
And Unitas was league MVP again in 1967.
He nearly authored some of his old magic in Super Bowl 3, rallying the Colts to a touchdown as a substitute for Colts’ starter Earl Morrall…..
…but the team lost to Joe Namath and the New York Jets.
Johnny was traded to the San Diego Charges in 1973 …
…and ended his playing career in 1974.
But he maintained his ties to the game, as a color commentator for CBS sports in the 1970’s and Unitas joined the Pro Football hall of Fame in 1979.
In 1984, was involved in a dustup with Colts owner Robert Irsay when Irsay moved the team from Baltimore to Indianapolis. Johnny cuts all ties to the Colts, (even though his number 19 remains retired.) and lobbied hard for a replacement team in Baltimore.
That came in 1996, when the Baltimore Ravens were born. They used to be the Cleveland Browns, the other team that wanted Johnny in the 1950’s, and beat him for the league title in the 1960’s.
To understand his importance to pro football, Unitas was voted the NFL’s best player when the NFL celebrated its fifty year anniversary
Toward the end of his life, Johnny brought the many permanent injuries suffered by football players to media attention. He almost lost the use of his right hand…
…his throwing hand…because of repeatedly broken and ultimately disfigured fingers.
Johnny Unitas died suddenly of a heart attack while working out on September 11, 2002. Baltimore fans wanted the Ravens’ stadium him named after him, but expensive naming rights had been purchased by M&T bank. But there’s a statue of Johnny outside the Stadium.
Unitas and his wife Dorothy had five children, before divorcing. Johnny had three kids with his second wife Sandra Lemon, and they remained married until he died.
Johnny Unitas is buried at Delaney Valley Memorial Gardens in Timonium, Maryland.