Don Shula stands alone atop NFL coaching ranks with win No. 325 in Philadelphia

This column was originally printed on November 15, 1993

At the end of Sunday’s bizarre 19-14 triumph over the Philadelphia Eagles, there on the shoulders of his players and finally on a pedestal, looking down, was the winningest NFL coach of all time.

Then Don Shula the stoic, the jut-jaw, the glare, became the most human of coaches.

He beamed at his new wife, Mary Anne, and bent down to hug her.

He beamed at his questioners, revealing the softer measure of a man seldom seen this soon after a football game, win or lose.

In a telephone hookup arranged by WTVJ-Channel 4, he told son David, who had just suffered his ninth straight defeat as coach of the Cincinnati Bengals, “We’ll stand together as a family, like we always have, and things will get better for you.”

Unspoken on perhaps the greatest day of football’s greatest man was this truly searing irony: His 325th National Football League victory gave him one more than Chicago Bears legend George Halas, but the triumph that brought Shula to this celestial level probably stole the Dolphins’ prospects of making a sixth Super Bowl.

It is no fun to consider. You may be sure Shula has not and will not consider it. But the chances of the Dolphins surviving with a third-string quarterback are slim and none.

Team Shula took the man to the mountain by burning the wingless Eagles with a quarterback, Doug Pederson, who had never thrown a regular-season pass.

What made it so hard — losing quarterback Scott Mitchell with a shoulder injury, on top of the Achilles heel injury that crippled Dan Marino five weeks ago — is precisely what makes it so improbable for Miami, even at 7-2, to deal with the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants and Buffalo Bills and San Diego Chargers in the remainder of this regular season.

“The way we won,” in Shula’s relieved words, will make it that much harder down the line.

None of this detracts from Shula’s monumental accomplishment. In fact, the hardscrabble victory reflects even more credit upon Shula.

He has wiped out the previous all-games victory high — though in the height of silliness it is not called a “record.” Diehard statisticians claim he still needs 12 regular-season victories to beat Halas’ 318. That nonsense only bears out Disraeli’s line, “There are lies, there are damned lies, and there are statistics.”

The crush was so great in a special interview room that Dolphin media director Harvey Greene was ticking off, “Two minutes to the first question . . . 60 seconds . . . 30 seconds.”

“What is this?” someone asked, laughing. “An atom bomb countdown?”

And Shula looked over and laughed just as hard.

Remember, this is the man who, on his first day on the Dolphins job in 1970, discovered goulash on the menu of a place next door to the team’s then-downtown offices, and exclaimed with glee, “Great! A Hungarian restaurant!”

And this is a man who now will focus on the next game, and the game after that, and the game after that, with the players available to him.

The supposition is that 39-year-old Steve DeBerg will step in ahead of 25-year-old rookie Pederson. But the Dolphins are a team of such limited rushing-game skills that they need a skilled quarterback. One harsh way to put it: If either Pederson or DeBerg were the answer to a crisis, neither would be in Miami today.

Well, Shula has done it before.

“We did it with Earl Morrall after Bob Griese went down in the 17-0 season of 1972,” he said, when he mentioned the last time he was carried off a field.

He forgot about the 1973 season, which ended in victory in the eighth Super Bowl. But this is a man with a lot to remember.

He did it, to some extent, even before that with running back Tom Matte at quarterback with the old Baltimore Colts when both Johnny Unitas and Morrall went down.

Never has Shula, 63, faced this daunting a task. But then never has such a dauntless man undertaken any task.

“We’ve got to get it all together,” he said.

He was pumped at the idea of talking to his son David until WTVJ’s Tony Segreto said, “I think Houston won pretty big, ah . . . about 38 to 3.”

The prognathous jaw dropped. But Shula told David, “You’ll get the job done yet.”

For Shula and everyone who knows what and who he is, Sunday in The Town of Brotherly Shove was a time for laughter.

Tears, if they must, can come later.

Sunday was a day for Mike Golic, a former Eagle, shouting at the media mob, “Will you let us in so we can enjoy this for Shula, too?”

Sunday was a day for Shula to throw his arms around John Steadman, the Baltimore Sun columnist who had seen “my very first win, in ‘63.”

Sunday was a day for Shula to worry about John Sandusky, his longest active coaching-comrade-in-arms. Sandusky fell in the postgame rush to photograph Shula.

As soon as he was in the locker room, Shula wanted to know how Sandusky had emerged from the stampede. Shula’s offensive line coach has two artificial hips. “John’s fine,” someone said.

Sunday was a day for Shula to look back upon the previous Sunday and reflect that this numbers thing grew out of focus the week before, when the Dolphins lost their second game of the season to the Jets. “But they won’t get out of focus any more,” Shula said, “because we don’t dwell on individual accomplishments on this team, but what we do together.”

Sunday was a day for James Lofton, the 16-year veteran, to drop a ball that might have led to the only second-half touchdown for the Eagles. The touchdown they didn’t get. The touchdown that would have beaten the Dolphins. And Lofton was as inconsolable as Shula was undiscouraged. “Right in my hands,” Lofton moaned.

A lot of teams have had Shula right in their hands since he became a wonder-boy head coach at 32, and he has slipped out of a lot of them.

“I never envisioned this,” he said. “I’ve never made any long-range plans, Just tried to take them as they come. I’ve been so fortunate to have such a family, and such owners as Carroll Rosenbloom and two generations of Robbies.”

So many victories. So many memories. So many marvelous qualities, and so many idiosyncrasies.

The man who would weep at the slightest affliction of a member of his family could cut a player without a backward look. But Shula’s 1993 players have commissioned a bronze sculpture of a hand holding a football. Shula’s hand.

The man who has made vastly more money than anyone in coaching history is one to whom luxury means nothing. But the money Shula earns for coaching — $1.7 million this year — is part of his own way of keeping score of his professional life, and it is safe to say he is not apathetic about any sum.

Except for his immediate family, the celebrity who is greeted by a fresh celebrity every day holds old friends the dearest.

One personal memory burns brightly. At a post-Super Bowl party when Shula could have been out with any star of Hollywood or Wall Street, he instead chose a group of hardware dealers and gas station owners and other pals from hometown Painesville, Ohio.

Sunday, when he stepped down from that wooden pedestal, someone saw blood on his right hand and shouted, “What happened? What’s the matter?”

Shula looked down and grinned. “What’s the difference?” he asked. “Today, what possible difference does it make?”