How Shula made the Dolphins perfect and made Miami matter, and the coach today at 90 | Opinion
This is the second of a two-part Miami Herald series on how the Miami Dolphins so quickly went from expansion losers to back-to-back Super Bowl champions — including the Perfect Season team voted the greatest of the NFL’s first 100 seasons.
▪ Part 1 was the remarkable untold story, from players themselves, of the stunning dysfunction under first coach George Wilson, while all the while the most underappreciated man in franchise history quietly was assembling a treasure trove of talent.
▪ Part 2, here, tells how and why the arrival of Don Shula instantly and dramatically transformed the Dolphins from bums to history-making champions, including a look at Shula’s life today, at age 90, with an exclusive, rare interview with the all-time winningest coach.
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He came to Miami 50 years ago, almost to the day, and everything changed. The way the rest of the country thought of us and the way we thought of ourselves — it all changed. He put a star on the map at the bottom of a far-flung peninsula, in sports and beyond.
He made us champions. He made us matter.
Today his name is almost mythic; there is a historical quality to it. When you get to be 90, people can begin to forget what you used to be. After all, he last roamed a Dolphins sideline, jaw jutting, in 1995. He worked 26 seasons here but has now been out of coaching nearly as long.
Increasing numbers of South Floridians know him mostly as a memory shared by elders, who hold him close like a family heirloom, a sign of their own mortality as glory days long past are recalled
Now, the Super Bowl is in Miami on Sunday to crown the NFL’s 100th season, and fans arriving at Hard Rock Stadium will walk past a bronze statue of the man — larger than life, of course.
Now, in the middle of the tropics, Donald Francis Shula is the King in his Winter.
No coach in professional football history has won more games than Shula.
No other coach in the sport has ever had a Perfect Season (which we still capitalize around here).
And only one coach, this one, sits on that mountaintop that is the undefeated, 17-0 Dolphins of 1972, recently named the greatest team of all-time by the NFL itself as part of its centennial celebration.
Shula, whose public appearances are more and more rare, plans to be at the stadium for the Chiefs-49ers Super Bowl, to participate as the NFL honors its 100 greatest players and coaches of the first 100 years.
Miami is well represented with four former Dolphins (Dan Marino, Dwight Stephenson, Paul Warfield and, though briefly, Junior Seau) and five ex-Hurricanes (Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, Ted Hendricks, Jim Otto and Devin Hester). And of course Shula, who is among the 10 all-time coaches being honored.
But his ‘72 team being named the greatest ever — that is what mattered to the coach.
“It was very rewarding that the league acknowledged our accomplishment in this way,” Shula said this week. “But it’s not an honor you gain by votes — it’s an honor we won, and deserve.”
“Nobody crowned us shit,” the old fullback, Larry Csonka, says defiantly of the honor. “We took it! Nobody else could get there. If the NFL could have found a way to not [name us No. 1], they probably would have.”
Says Larry Little, the great guard, with a rumbling laugh: “It brings us back from the dead. Like [during a season] when another team is going undefeated...”
Mercury Morris, the fleet running back: “We beat everybody to start with, we beat everybody in the end, and we won every game in the meantime.”
Nearly 50 years later Shula is seen at public events less and less. He rarely grants interviews now, and agreed to this one via email. He underwent a heart procedure in 2016. He gets around in a motorized scooter; the legs and back can be trouble. But he is sharp, his humor intact, his smile still quick.
“I feel great!” he said this week. “I am enjoying every minute of life, despite the wear and tear of 90 years...”
We’ll get back to the way his milestone birthday was poignantly celebrated by family, friends and former players, back to his life today, to the king in his winter.
First let the clock stop, and then reverse. Let the memory cast back a half-century, to understand why Don Shula became famous, became a cherished Miami icon unparalleled.
The 1969 AFL season had ended with the Dolphins 3-10-1 under about-to-be-fired inaugural coach George Wilson, who by then was a hard-drinking man coasting to the end of his career.
Shula, the Baltimore Colts coach, would soon be on the wrong end of Joe Namath’s famous Super Bowl “guarantee.” He said it in Miami. If it hadn’t proved prophetic, Shula would have stayed in Baltimore and Dolphins history would forever have been different.
The NFL-AFL merger was happening, and Miami, city and team, was about to change. Shula would replace Wilson for the 1970 season.
Csonka barks a belly laugh at the question: How were things different under Shula?
“Day and night. High noon and midnight,” he says. “Shula was leaner and meaner because he had lost a Super Bowl to Namath. For us, everything changed overnight”
The 1966-69 pre-Shula expansion Dolphins had stockpiled impressive talent under personnel director Joe Thomas, including future Hall of Famers Bob Griese, Csonka, Little and Nick Buoniconti, along with future stalwarts like Jim Kiick, Manny Fernandez, Dick Anderson, Bill Stanfill and Morris.
That talent languished undeveloped under Wilson’s sloth and lack of discipline. But what Wilson could make nothing of, Shula would spin into gold. Perfect gold.
“Two different human beings altogether,” says Little, the great guard who paved Zonk’s path for years. Shula had been an assistant under Wilson in Detroit, but, “Shula didn’t take any traits from George.”
Anderson, the great safety: “He had every minute of every day planned. It was like playing sandlot [under Wilson], and then professional football overnight. Shula dealt with details. The atmosphere, the coaching, the discipline — it all changed overnight.”
Griese had been the first future Hall of Famer in a Dolphins uniform, arriving in 1968. The quarterback was only 10 when his father died of a heart attack.
“He was a strong head coach, a father figure I never had. That’s what I needed. That’s what we needed,” says Griese. “We were impressed. He was always chomping at the bit to get on the practice field. I could tell from his intensity, this was gonna be something good. A complete turnaround from what we had.”
Wilson used to cancel practices on especially hot days and told his players to jump in a pool. Shula was hell-bent to turn Miami’s searing heat from a liability to an asset, sometimes running four practices a day, two in full gear.
“We’ll be camel-like, Shula told us,” says Csonka. “I remember him saying ‘camel-like.’”
The late-’60s expansion Dolphins still were segregated under Wilson, such as in rooming on road trips. Shula changed that with a sweep of his arm.
“The first thing he did was put Paul Warfield in with Bob Griese,” says Morris, the lightning back to Csonka’s thunder. “That was the end of that. It got or attention.”
Shula inherited a team that needed exactly what he had to give.
“The first thing was to show them how hard work and discipline — through long meetings and intense practices — would bring success on the field,” he says.
This was Don Shula: It was January 13, 1973, the day before the Super Bowl that would crown the Perfect Season. Shula had arranged to be let into an empty Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum before dawn. He’d had an intricate diagram made of the inside of the stadium. He sat and watched the sun come up and later was there to watch the sun go down to gauge the light and glare on the field before choosing which sideline his team would sit on.
This was Don Shula: It was the 1973 season, after the unbeaten year, and the Dolphins were practicing at the old Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, before playing the Raiders. Miami was using the home team’s lockerroom that day. Csonka had the locker used by Raiders defensive tackle Art Thoms, who had inadvertently left behind the team’s playbook and defensive game plan. “I handed it to [assistant coach] Monte Clark and said you’d better look at this.” Clark took it and walked away without a word. Miami lost that game. “Afterward I asked Monte, ‘Did you show the old man the game plan?’” He had. And Shula told him: “Throw it away. I don’t want to look at it.”
Shula’s self-confidence was such he wanted no favors or untoward edges, once famously saying, “I don’t get ulcers, I give ‘em!”
The playbook story underlined for Csonka what he’d already known.
“I have never witnessed a more dedicated, ethical man than Shula,” says the old fullback, smiling slyly as he adds a jab at Bill Belichick. “Shula would not be one to put extra air in a football.”
The 3-10-1 team Shula took over went 10-4 his first season. By 1971 they were in the Super Bowl, though losing to Dallas.
“After we lost that Super Bowl 6, he said, ‘I want you to remember this moment’,” Csonka recalls. “’Because of this moment, we’re going to build a team like nobody’s ever seen. We’re going to comeback like a lion!’ The one statistic Shula demands is victory.”
The Perfect Season came the very next year. Another Super Bowl win followed.
The Miami Dolphins have not been back to a Super Bowl, or even to an AFC Championship Game, since Don Shula retired.
That was 25 years ago (verifying time flies), and life is good today for the king in his winter.
Shula and wife Mary Anne, still in Miami, oversee a brood that includes three daughters, two sons, 16 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Don follows the Dolphins “closely, closely,” he says. Of current coach Brian Flores: “I have heard only good things and I wish him the best. He seems to be doing the right things, and things can only get better.”
Shula is as big a fan of three other teams, though. Youngest son Mike is the newly hired quarterbacks coach of the Denver Broncos. Oldest son Dave is the wide receivers coach at Dartmouth. And Dave’s son, Chris, is outside linebackers coach for the Los Angeles Rams.
“He’s doing fantastic,” says Mary Anne of her husband. “He’s still telling lots of jokes. He’s content, happy, fulfilled. He has a beautiful life.”
Shula turning 90 has been celebrated with gratitude by loved ones, not downplayed.
It began with a 12-day European summer cruise with 37 family members, to Croatia, Albania, Greece, Italy, France and Monaco.
Closer to his January 5 birthday there was a private family celebration at home.
But the biggest party was a surprise celebration organized by Mary Anne with help from the Dolphins at the Miami home of lawyer and close friend Robert Zarco.
“It was for Don and his ‘72 team,” says Mary Anne.
More than 100 of the old Perfectos (“The undefeated guys,” Little calls them), more recent Dolphins like Marino, and friends and family (who all had arrived earlier by bus) hid in the back as Don and Mary Anne arrived for what he thought was a small dinner party.
The surprise worked.
“I was standing right there when he came in and his mouth became agape,” says Little.
Warm laughter rose from the gathering when Shula boomed, “Where the hell were you all last year when I turned 89!?”
Csonka: “Shula doesn’t show emotions a lot, but he was really happily surprised. It really tickled him everybody showed up. He was smiling from ear to ear. I’ve never seen him smile that much.”
The host’s home was lavish; the menu was not. They served Don’s favorite dish: Hot dogs with Cuban beans. Memories and love filled the night, along with the palpable feel of the passage of time.
“An emotional evening that I will always remember,” Shula calls it.
The years and decades have raced by for the greatest team of all time, “the undefeated guys.”
The head coach turned 90. Many of the perfect players have died, Buoniconti the latest.
“I see myself as the 73-year-old guy who played a long time ago. But they don’t see you as 73, they see you still being 25,” says Morris, of the fans who come up to him, the ones who still remember. “The guys were simply regular people who did an extraordinary thing.”
Bob Griese and his father figure still meet for a quiet lunch occasionally at Gulfstream Park, the racetrack in Hallandale Beach. A companion/aide, Arthur, accompanies the coach.
“Can you believe I’m 90?” Shula recently asked his old quarterback.
After the big surprise party, says Mary Anne, “Don was already asking me how we are going to top this for his 100th!”
Fate will do what it does and when it pleases, but in NFL history, in the annals of the Dolphins and in the hearts of Miami, Donald Francis Shula and the greatest team of all time will live forever.
The ending will always be Perfect.
This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 1:12 PM.
