Raymond Berry, Self-Made Player

Featured book excerpt
Football in America: Game of the Century
By Bob Oates

Most All-Pros are gifted athletes. A few, though, have been self-made players whom practice made almost perfect.

Raymond Berry was a skinny, near-sighted, crooked-legged, bum-backed Texan who, in the decade after 1955, as a receiver for the old Baltimore Colts, played his way into the Hall of Fame by practicing football thoughtfully, meticulously, scientifically. As the NFL’s coaches became more systematic and organized in the 1950s and ’60s, players like Berry and his quarterback – another Hall of Famer named John Unitas – refined their skills with hard work and dedication.

Berry and Unitas shared three things in common: They formed the greatest passing combination of their age, they led the Colts to two NFL championships, and they did it as, fundamentally, self-made football players. Neither was born to win championships or, indeed, even play in the NFL. But they helped set a standard for effort and dedication that has since been followed by such All-Pros as Emmitt Smith, Jerry Rice and others who began with much greater natural talent.

Berry in particular made more out of less than any other pro I’ve known – probably any other twentieth-century football player. In addition to his uneven legs and pain-wracked back, the fingers on one of his hands were permanently out of joint, and his eyes were a joke. He was the first big-time athlete to wear contact lenses, and, whenever the sun was bright behind Unitas, Berry put on specially designed bug-eyed dark glasses.

For all his physical flaws, he compensated with a shrewd and unique practice program. And the first year Berry made All-Pro, I tracked him down during the week before a Baltimore game and asked him what he worked on in practice.

"As a pass receiver, the payoff for me," he said, "is getting my hands on the ball, and holding it. So I have a daily hand drill that’s the most important thing I do in practice. Although I’ve been playing this game for quite a few years, I’ve found that I can’t do such a simple thing as catch a football unless I work at it regularly."

During your hand drills, I asked him, what are you specifically trying to achieve?

"My objective," Berry said, "is one hundred percent concentration on the two parts of the job: watching the ball into my hands, and getting it under my arm fast."

When you’re working on this, what is Unitas doing?

"I don’t rightly know, because I never use the regular passer in practice. Our practice goals are so different that it would get Unitas into bad habits if he worked with me. In a practice situation, his goal is to throw good passes, and mine is to catch bad ones. I ask the fellow who works with me – it’s usually Billy Pricer, the (backup) fullback – to throw the ball over my head, on my shoes, behind me, and everywhere else. What I’m doing with Pricer is simulating the tail end of a pattern when I might have to move away from where Unitas expects me to be. Or Unitas might be rushed into less than a perfect throw."

Is Pricer any threat to Unitas?

"Billy has a good arm. He stands twenty-five yards away and slams it in. We work with a backstop to block overthrows because part of the time, I turn my back to him. He fires at one of my ears, and hollers, ‘Ball.’ " For what period of time do you actually work with Unitas at practice each day?

"It’s a matter of seconds, not minutes. We’re lucky if we get in twenty minutes a week. A pro team is trained and polished not during the week but at training camp. It doesn’t matter how tired you get in July when you’re not playing games. But when the season starts, overwork is the worst thing you can do. The trouble with even one day of overwork during the week is that you can’t recover by the weekend. At least seventy-five percent of the job of catching passes is done by the legs."

Getting under the ball?

"Footwork, yes, but also the spring. It takes a good spring to get a lot of balls, and when your legs are tired, you don’t have the pep for it. You drop more balls when you’re tired."

"You dropped one the other day. What did Unitas say?

"He said, ‘Pricer can play quarterback for this club, Berry, but what’s he going to use for receivers?’ "