The first time Baltimoreans embraced a professional football team, their star and centerpiece went by Johnny U. The “U” stood for Unitas, the accidental legend: cut (Steelers), banished (semi-pro football), signed (then Baltimore Colts), forced (into fill-in duty) and, soon enough, three-time league MVP and three-time NFL champion. Through all that, Unitas came to share an affinity with locals who long idolized him.
He came to love the marching band that performed at games, home affairs, mostly, but not always, not with forever-expanding reach. Like other Baltimoreans, Unitas lamented the franchise’s relocation to Indianapolis after the 1983 season. But he welcomed the NFL back, starting in ’96. He’d visit the stadium as often as possible, usually with some combination of his children, including one teenage daughter, Paige. She’s still not sure why, but they always watched from the field, on the sideline. “He was always happy to see the team back,” she says.
Paige Unitas knew others didn’t feel the same way, that they despised the previous owners for yanking pro football and vowed to never again support a team again. But her father’s presence, the obvious ways in which it lifted locals and solidified the Ravens’ standing, all but forced her into fandom. She came to love what he loved, what connected him to them and him to her. The band that started because of professional football but never stopped playing, even when there were no games being played. She knew what all knew: that without this group, now the Marching Ravens, there would be no football Ravens and no NFL, not in Baltimore, period. “They just bring the city together,” she says.
Through everything else—scandals, shutdowns, poverty, urban decay, and more than one plan to revitalize downtown—the band was there. Always, . Marching and playing, supporting and advocating, part of a city’s fabric and what separated Baltimore from larger, fancier cities with NFL teams.
Before her father died from a heart attack in 2002, he sometimes asked Paige whether she “wanted to go see the Broadway production.” She didn’t know what he meant at first. But he clarified immediately. He was gently mocking what the NFL had become—slick, packaged, neon, pyrotechnic. He longed for simplicity. He sometimes considered his friend of nearly four decades, John Ziemann, a Marching Ravens lifer, the last person alive connecting then to now. He’s a musician and director and historian who, in Unitas’s view, never stopped fighting the fight that mattered.
Both understood what connects Unitas to Lamar Jackson—beyond Louisville, their shared college stop—what tethers Weeb Ewbank to John Harbaugh and the Colts franchise (Baltimore to Indianapolis) to the Ravens’ version (Cleveland to Baltimore).
It was the same thing that still helps explain a city’s lyrical soul.
It was the second-oldest and single-largest marching band in professional sports. Proof that, in Baltimore, anyway, the U also stands for .
