Remembering Matte’s Moment

November 7, 2021 Michael Olesker

In the popular telling of Tom Matte’s football life, the moment everyone remembers is the miracle he nearly pulled off on a frigid Green Bay afternoon in 1965, and a wristband informing him which plays to call, and a phony Packers field goal that kept the Baltimore Colts from a shot at the pro football championship.

Or else it’s Cleveland three years later with a ferocious wind blowing off Lake Erie into the old Municipal Stadium, and the Colts beating the Browns for the NFC championship, and Matte scoring three touchdowns in a 34-0 triumph.

But I’m stuck with a different moment, which came back the other day when Matte, the durable Colts’ halfback over a dozen seasons who later helped broadcast Ravens games, died at 82.

The moment is September of 2002 in front of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, where a few thousand people were gathering for the funeral of John Unitas.

Matte was there, bereft as everyone else. He stood just off crowded Charles Street for a few moments with Reds Hubbe and Bill Gattus, who used to circle the field and lead cheers at Colts’ games. They were there with all those who still remembered what the Colts — the gang of Unitas and Spats, and Gino and Artie, and Matte, too – meant to Baltimore, and to the rest of the country.

“We were America’s team,” Matte said that day. “All those people who used to say Dallas was America’s team? That’s just bull. The Baltimore Colts were America’s team.”

They were, weren’t they? Some of the appeal went back to the Sudden Death game in ’58, when the whole country simultaneously made pro football the new national pastime and embraced the Colts and its fabulous roster.

They had some of its most compelling stories, too, like that overtime game in Green Bay. Unitas and his backup, Gary Cuozzo, were out for the year with injuries. So it fell to Matte to take on the powerful Vince Lombardi Packers, with a makeshift wristband listing the Colts’ offensive plays so Matte, the “instant quarterback,” could give it his best shot.

And he’d have done it, except the referees clearly blew the call on a late field goal attempt by the Packers. It gave Green Bay the title shot, but it added to the heroic legend of those Colts and forever cemented Matte’s place in the local love affair.

Few understood that love better than Matte.

The day of Unitas’s funeral, Matte stood outside the cathedral and talked about the glory days. The Ravens were already winning local hearts by then, but Matte said the old days with the Colts was something even more intense.

“I don’t think it’ll ever, ever happen again,” he said. “I mean, we’d get invited to people’s weddings. Complete strangers. In fact, [Alan] Ameche got invited to be a pallbearer at some guy’s funeral.

“But the thing that stays with me,” he said, “is those crowds at the stadium, and the sound they made with the players introductions at the start of every game. We’re down there waiting to hear our names called out, and the crowd’s noise was like the ocean’s roar.

“I’m telling you,” Matte said, “you looked into every player’s eyes, there wasn’t one guy who didn’t have tears in ‘em.”

That’s the memory that came back with Matte’s death last week. He was a good guy, and a sensitive one, too. He knew he’d been part of something special, when the Colts belonged to Baltimore and America loved them, too.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.