National Football League - Collision of wills: Johnny Unitas, Don Shula, and the rise of the modern NFL

Entombed within a sprawling South Florida manse with a sweep of shimmering turquoise water behind him, and a lavish, manicured lawn and golf course in front, sits Don Shula, the most frequent winner in the history of professional football.

The trappings of his unprecedented success surround him: elegant furniture, magnificent statues, and original masterworks of the canvas. He is in a room deep within his huge home, and his home is deep within the heart of the community where he elevated football to higher levels than anyone else knew existed. But on this day he is no longer a choreographer of wild men; hes white haired and enfeebled. Wherever he sits, his walker sits beside him. Despite his infirmities he is kind and friendly; he offers cold drinks and polite conversation. He is a comfortable and satisfied man.

And, perhaps, he also holds the answer to one of the few mysteries still extant in the overcovered, overanalyzed National Football League ( NFL ).

Today, mighty networks and their online affiliates follow the league around the clock, bringing more probing investigation to a felonious running back than any enterprising journalist in the world applies to Irans nuclear weapons program. Theres not much that happens in the league, has ever happened in the league, that the public doesnt know.

But Shulas secret is buried deep, and it comes from a city thats so distant, its half a century away. Back then the coach wasnt decrepit; he was ferocious, a young man with ambitions that were as red-hot as his volcanic temper. Because of his later success with the Miami Dolphins, where he lasted almost thirty years, coached two Hall of Fame quarterbacks, went to five Super Bowls, and led his team to footballs only undefeated season, few remember his first job. They dont recall that Don Shula was once the brilliant young head coach of the mythic Baltimore Colts.

Some of the details are fuzzy even to him.

I asked him: Who had a higher winning percentage? The Packers under Vince Lombardi or the Baltimore Colts under Don Shula?

I dont know, he said, smiling, the old competitive fires glinting behind his tired eyes. Who?

The answer is Shulas Colts, by a single percentage point. From 1963 to 1969 they won more than 75 percent of their games against the likes of Halas and Butkus and Sayers, Jim Brown and Paul Warfield, the Fearsome Foursome, and, of course, Lombardis Packers, with whom the Colts shared a rivalry of unmatched intensity.

Yet the Packers won five championships in that tumultuous decade; Shula and the Colts, for all their success, didnt win a single one. Twice they qualified for the big game. Both times they lost in spectacular upsets. The mystery of this success-failure dynamic only deepens if you know that Shulas business partner in these pursuits was Johnny Unitas.

Since George Halas drafted Sid Luckman and aimed the quarterbacks Semitic right arm at the rest of the league, the coach-and-quarterback combination has been the most consistent indicator of success in football. Thats roughly been true from World War II to Brady and Belichick.

Unitas and Shula shouldve been the greatest of these duos. Shulas coaching career would last more than thirty years, fueled by his unmatched success. Unitas would one day be eulogized on the cover of Sports Illustrated as The Greatest There Ever Was. Separately, they achieved as much as Lombardi and Starr, winning five world championships. Unitas won two, under Weeb Ewbank, before Shula arrived on the scene and one under Don McCafferty, the first season after Shula departed. As the Don of the Dolphins, Shula quickly went to three straight Super Bowls and won two of them.

They appeared, to the public, to be in perfect synctwo young and intelligent men, deeply competitive, and extraordinarily driven. But that was merely a facade. Behind the scenes there were tensions between them that few others knew or understood.

So what was their issue?

What is it usually between two men who are at odds, money, power, or, maybe, a woman?

Sitting on his sofa I asked Shula directly, Why was it so difficult between you and Unitas?

Difficult! Shula laughs as he responds. We won a hell of a lot of games together.

True enough. But his answer is so polished, so at the ready, it was as if he knew back in the mid-60s that some swaddling baby was out there who would one day appear on his twenty-first-century doorstep with that embarrassing question. In the old days, by all accounts, an uncomfortable question like that one would have provoked an indignant answer.

But hes not that guy anymore. Years of professional success and domestic bliss have softened what was once very coarse. He has had forty-five years, a lifetime, to work on his diplomacy.

Unitas died on September 11, 2002, but he remained, to the end, entertainingly bitter. He started his career by facing Shula on the practice fields of Baltimore when both were hard-nosed young players. His emerging success came at the expense of exposing Shulas shortcomings. The quarterback soon ascended to the top of the profession, while the cornerback faded into obscurity.

Just a few short years later, in a turn of events that could happen only in the highest reaches of the military or the government, the inept player became the great players boss.