Happy Birthday to iconic Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas (b. May 7, 1933, in Pittsburgh, PA), who led the team to championships in 1958, 1959, 1968, and 1970. The first of these is known as The Greatest Game Ever Played and was the first time sudden-death overtime decided an NFL championship. The next day, the front page of the New York Times proclaimed: “Johnny Unitas was the man who engineered the dynamic offensive that moved the visitors from the shadow of defeat to the glory of their ultimate success.” Unitas later reflected on the surreal aftermath of the 1958 championship, stating: “The next couple of weeks were a big blur. I had had time to get used to being a professional football player whose name people had heard of, but this celebrity treatment was new to me, and even though a lot of it was pleasant, and anybody who says it isn’t is just saying so because he thinks he ought to say so, it still takes some getting used to. It’s like I was saying about eating out in restaurants: Some people are irritating but the great majority of them just want to be nice.”
Citations: Dave Klein, The Game of Their Lives (New York: Random House, 1976), 3, 21, https://archive.org/details/gameoftheirlives00klei; Louis Effrat, “Colts Beat Giants, Win in Overtime,” New York Times, December 29, 1958, 1, https://nyti.ms/3wo7Ts0; Johnny Unitas and Ed Fitzgerald, Pro Quarterback: My Own Story (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968), 94, https://archive.org/details/proquarterbackmy0000john; Malcom W. Emmons, “Professional football player Johnny Unitas as a member of the Baltimore Colts,” photograph (location unknown, 1967), public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1967_Johnny_Unitas.jpeg#/media/File:1967_Johnny_Unitas.jpeg.
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