Roy Exum
When I was in junior high school I met Raymond Berry and I’ll never forget sitting watching him at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes banquet because I was in total awe. I couldn’t even eat my food that night. Here was a guy who could barely see, who was born with one leg longer than the other, who had a bad back, and who was unmistakably the greatest wide receiver for years in the National Football League.
Raymond, who played 13 years for the Baltimore Colts, has been one of my favorite players forever. I was so delighted to meet him again this week when the newest issue of Sports Illustrated magazine featured an excerpt of a dazzling book on its cover, calling the 1958 championship game between the Colts and the New York Giants “The Best Game Ever.”
Mark Bowden writes how in this one game, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in late December, Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry “invented the modern NFL”, but it is so much better than all of that. You see, the author Bowden is so brilliant he’s figured out a way to teach you all a guy with an MBA degree knows once you plunk down $4.50 for this week’s magazine.
I defy any of our collegiate beard-strokers to teach a better lesson in excellence than Bowden does in this magazine. Further, I’ve already been to the bookstore and ordered the book, which will come out in June, because, if the Sports Illustrated piece is any measure, it will contain more examples on being a success than you’ll find in a year of lectures on any college campus.
I mean, 17 Hall of Famers played in this one game alone and Bowden writes about all of them. The excerpt focuses on Berry and the fact he paid such microscopic attention to detail. One of the cleats on each of his specially-made shoes was purposefully longer than the others, this from a man who fumbled only one time in 13 NFL seasons.
It also illustrates Berry’s unquenchable desire to be better. The article tells pretty explicitly about some of the things he did to overcome his hurdles and, as this particular magazine has done so many times for me in the 50 years I have read it, it leaves you thirsting for more.
A quick aside: back in the day, I wasn’t a good student and, because of that, I hated school. But I loved to write and Sports Illustrated was my primer. I devoured every word. An incredible series of circumstances enabled me to meet the heroes I’d read about (my grandfather owned a newspaper) and soon I was hanging around with some of the writers who were the best wordsmiths in the world.
That led to my waltz with people like Ernest Hemingway and Pat Conroy, columnists like Jim Murray and Mike Royko – not to mention the brilliant Southern writers I swapped late-night stories with for years, but I digress; that’s stuff for a slower day.
In today’s mail the new issue of Sports Illustrated will come, which means the shelf life of the current issue with Johnny U. on the cover is short, so today’s deal is to somehow get a copy of the magazine and cajole those you hold dearest into reading what Bowden has written. If even one person learns only one of the lessons Raymond Berry offers through example, the $4.50 is chump change.
The other day I had lunch with Bill Curry, who played with Unitas and Berry for a bunch of years in Baltimore, and Bill, who as the center snapped for Unitas, was wonderful as he recalled his long-time buddies.
“I remember one day in particular that our second practice of the day had been one of the toughest I could remember. Afterwards I stayed late to center for the punters and then I had to run with those guys, all of ‘em fast and me very slow,” Curry laughed of one pre-season day with the Colts.
“So I remember being so tired, and so whipped, standing in a cold shower and then it was nearly dark by the time I got my clothes on and I nearly crawled out of the locker room. I got outside and in the stillness I could hear something, but I didn’t know what. It came from the practice field and, as I strained to see what the racket was, there was Johnny still throwing passes and routes to Raymond.
“When the Colts would practice passing drills, the receivers forming two lines and running downfield on either side of the quarterbacks, Raymond would have a manager with a good arm downfield. When Raymond’s turn came, he’d do his thing, but then flip his caught ball to the manager who could then pass it back to him on the trip back to the line. He demanded that he catch twice as many balls as anybody else. That is Raymond Berry.”
As Curry talked and praised the Sports Illustrated article, it wasn’t lost on me that as he ate his salad he was wearing one of his championship rings, one he’d earned with Unitas and Berry and the Baltimore Colts.
Bill also won two championship rings with Vince Lombardi at Green Bay and holds the distinction of being the first player in the NFL to play in the Super Bowl for two different teams. So he’s something of an expert and he claims, “No way should Raymond Berry have ever made it in the NFL, but he became one of the greatest players I have ever seen in my entire life. What does that tell you?”
Do this. Get this week’s Sports Illustrated. Then get Mark Bowden’s forthcoming book. Then if you are too young or too old, too dumb or too slow, too poor or too lazy to go to graduate school, take heed to the lessons in excellence that an Ivy League university cannot begin to replicate.
royexum@aol.com