Frederick Kail already had created a bigger-than-life bronze of Johnny Unitas, but this one was going to be even bigger and grander. With less than two months to go before the dedication ceremony, he called his longtime friend to kid him a little bit about the statue's scale.
"Back in '73, when I did the statue of him down at the University of Louisville [Unitas' alma mater], that one was 7 feet tall," Kail says while standing outside Ravens Stadium, watching as workers secure the foundation of the new statue, to be unveiled tomorrow. "And his reaction to it was, 'Well, it'll give the pigeons something to sit on.' So I told him, 'This one is 2 feet larger than the one in Louisville. It'll hold five more pigeons.' "
That would be the last time Kail spoke with Unitas, who died Sept. 11. "That was John," he says quietly. "He shunned all the accolades."
That Unitas is getting this one is due to the skill and perseverance of Kail, who got it into his head about three years ago that the greatest Colt of them all deserved a statue outside Baltimore's football stadium, regardless of the name of the team that plays there now. It was Kail who pitched the idea to the Ravens and the Maryland Stadium Authority; who persuaded Unitas to approve the project, as a tribute not only to No. 19, but to all the great Baltimore Colts; who raised the needed money - about $250,000 - without getting a cent from the city or state; and who sculpted the astonishingly accurate likeness (right down to the unusual way Unitas laced his shoes, wrapping one loop around the other before tying a second knot) in the studio of his Lutherville home.
"You get, as the NFL team in town, a lot of people calling with a lot of ideas, some good, some not so good," says Kevin Byrne, the Ravens' vice president of public and community relations. "When Fred called me about the statue and asked would we be interested in having it up at the stadium, we said yes, but we have neither the time nor the ability to make it happen.
"It was like, 'Yeah, if you can do that, God love ya,' " Byrne explains. "I really didn't anticipate hearing back from him. But then he came back to us and said, 'I'm going to raise $250,000, and by the way, would you like to start us off with $25,000?' "
The team agreed, and minority owner Steve Buschetti chipped in another $25,000. So, too, did the Orioles - a rare moment of cooperation between Baltimore's dominant sports franchises. Tomorrow, Baltimore football fans officially get their statue.
No holding back
Standing with Kail as he watches masonry workers secure the statue's base outside Ravens Stadium, it's hard to picture anyone better suited to the task of paying lasting tribute to Unitas. Qualifications aside - including a pair of sculptures in Indianapolis' National Art Museum of Sport - he simply looks and acts the part. Like Unitas, whose famously damaged knees barely seemed capable of supporting his body, Kail walks with a limp - the result of an adolescent bout with polio. Dressed in simple tan pants and a blue jacket, his face lined in a way that both obscures his 65 years but suggests he's earned every one of them, Kail walks slowly, unassumingly, uncomfortable in the spotlight, his hands stuck firmly in his pockets.
He's even trying to think like Johnny U. Besides unveiling the statue tomorrow, he'll be presenting a check for $30,000 - left over from his fund-raising efforts - to Unitas' Golden Arm Foundation. "That would have satisfied John, that would have made him happy," he says.
"I'm going to try to help the foundation," Kail promises, adding simply, "They've lost their man."
A native of Uniontown, Pa., a short drive from Unitas' hometown of Pittsburgh, the young Kail loved playing football, but polio cut that career short. Still, he continued playing; "I broke my brace twice playing football," he says. No doubt Unitas appreciated that sort of grit. "When I couldn't play, I kind of fell back on my artistic talent."
Growing up in western Pennsylvania's coal-mining country, Kail explains, "Everybody was poor in those days, so you made your own toys. I formed my own figures out of clay, because we couldn't afford anything else."
Kail, who by this time had moved with his family to Hagerstown, was good enough with his hands to earn a four-year scholarship the Maryland Institute College of Art. One day in the mid-'50s, on a whim, he crafted a ceramic figure of the Colts' Art Donovan that impressed friends enough that they persuaded him to take it down to the Colts' offices. "I walked in, set it down on the counter, and just said, 'My friends over at the institute said I should bring this over and show it to you,' " he recalls.
Kail doesn't remember the receptionist's reaction, but soon John Steadman, the late News American and Sun sportswriter who was then working for the Colts, came to talk with him.
"He asked, 'Can you make a lot of these?' " Kail recalls, "and I said yes. He asked how much I'd charge, and I thought, and said $5. Then he said, 'OK, we'll put these up there and sell them for you.
"I walked out of there on cloud nine," he says with a laugh. "I walked back to the institute and the guys said, 'See, we told you.' "
Kail soon began making ceramic figurines of some of the other Colts (that's how he first met Unitas), as well as other NFL players. He made a little money off his cottage industry - "All the work was done on my mother's kitchen table every weekend," he says - until lawyers and dealmakers started approaching him about licensing rights and copyright infringements. He tried to work out several deals, but the combination of bad timing and poor business sense kept him from making any real money.
Not that he didn't leave a mark: among the creations he did receive money and credit for were the first set of bobblehead dolls made of the characters featured in a new comic strip called Peanuts. "Charles Schultz had rejected five previous designs," Kail says, "but he accepted all five of mine."
Realizing he could never make a living sculpting, Kail ventured into graphic design. He worked for General Foods, designed packages for Winston, Camel and Salem cigarettes ("If I knew then what I know now about cigarettes, I never would have done it," he says). His company, Telesis, operated for nearly 25 years, before shutting down in 1992.
Still, he never stopped sculpting. In 1973, when a group of Colts fans wanted to present Unitas with a token of their appreciation and respect, they turned to Kail. The result was a bust of No. 19 that still sits in the Unitas living room.
"It's the only thing I kept. Everything else we donated to the Babe Ruth Museum," says Unitas' widow, Sandra. "It's such a marvelous likeness."
So impressed was Unitas, in fact, that when the University of Louisville wanted to commission a statue of him, he recommended Kail.
"That was an honor for me, just in itself," Kail recalls, "for him to call me and say, 'Fred, I'd like you to do this.' "
"Fred is such an artist," Sandra Unitas says. "He's the only person John would ever allow to do anything."
'Highlight of my life'
Tomorrow, when the statue is unveiled, there'll doubtless be a stadium full of memories being revisited - young boys meeting Johnny Unitas outside Memorial Stadium and getting him to pose for a picture, guys sitting down with Unitas and other Colts greats for a beer at the old Pine Ridge Bar in Towson, couples stopping for dinner at the Golden Arm Restaurant and getting paid a visit by No. 19 himself, football fans confident that, as long as Johnny U. was there in the pocket, no loss was ever certain.
For Fred Kail, perhaps his memory will wander back to 1962, to an afternoon he still insists may have been the high point of his 65 years.
"I used to go out to Bryn Mawr, where the Colts would practice, and work out with the guys," he says. "One day, I asked John if he would throw me a pass. He laughed and pointed in the direction of a bunch of trees, and said, 'You run down there, toward that fifth tree, and I'll throw you the ball.' So I ran and I saw the tree and I turned around, and that ball was just hanging in the air there, like an apple on that tree.
"That was the highlight of my life, catching a 40-yard pass from Johnny Unitas."
Tomorrow, Fred Kail gets to say thanks one last time.
"I know it meant so much to John," Sandra Unitas says. "I remember saying to him once, 'Honey, do you realize how fortunate you are that you're still alive, and you can see how much you meant to people?' "
For now, the statue stands outside the stadium's Gate A, covered by a Ravens-purple tarp. The dedication is scheduled for halftime of the Ravens-Jaguars game, and Kail already knows he'll be as proud as he's ever been. Standing 15 feet high from base to ball, the bronze of Johnny U. planted in the pocket, his arm cocked for another one of those surefire touchdown passes he spent 17 years rifling to his Colts receivers, is probably his finest work, and certainly the one he worked hardest on to get right.
He only wishes all this could have happened sooner.
"I don't know what could possibly surpass this, outside of something for my kids or my family," Kail says, as workers use yardsticks and levels to ensure his statue will rest comfortably and permanently in what will be christened Unitas Plaza tomorrow. "But I've got ambivalent feelings about the dedication. I'm just sorry it couldn't have been done while he was alive."