So, do you like Johnny Unitas?

OK, dumb question, especially in this town. But on the off-chance that the answer is "yes'', you should do a couple of things. (1) Check out the most recent Sports Illustrated, the one with Joe Mauer on the cover, for an excerpt of the upcoming Unitas biography, Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas, by Tom Callahan. (As always, only subscribers can see the entire story on SI's website.)

And (2), get the book itself. It's not available until September 5, but you can pre-order it on Amazon and, most likely, the major bookstore websites.

Book excerpts in magazines tend to go a couple of different ways. They're either engaging enough only to get you through the excerpt, but not enough to make you want to read the entire book. Or they make you want to rush out and get the book right away. This falls into the latter category. SI has nailed it twice this year on that front - the first time was with Game of Shadows back in March, and if you still haven't read that, then you're behind the curve on all the BALCO and performance-enhancing talk. (Brief digression: my podcast this week, which will be up on the Sun website later today, gets into Floyd Landis, public pariah, and I honestly wouldn't be able to talk about that or any other related topic had I not read Game of Shadows. Take that for what it's worth.)

I've always been a big Callahan fan, ever since his days with the Washington Star, which tells you how old I am (the Star went out of business in 1981). The Unitas excerpt in SI reads as much like a history of the Colts as it does a biography of one player, yet it still goes into depth about what made Unitas great better than anything I've seen yet. And this is in an eight-page magazine article. It was so good, I'm not only going to read this, I'm going to finally and belatedly take the time to read Lenny Moore's book from last year, All Things Being Equal, because the mentions of him in the article piqued my interest.

I'm not gushing just to be gushing. This book sounds tremendous. If the rest of the book doesn't maintain the level and pace of what's in SI, I'll be extremely disappointed.

By the way, watch here (and possibly in the paper itself) in the near future for a review of a very, very intriguing new book by New York Times columnist and Morgan State grad William C. Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves.