Don Shula, 1930-2020. Fondly remembering the man who made Miami matter: the perfect coach
He made us matter, nothing less. He put Miami on the national sports map, and helped us discover how one team — just the right one — can knit a community with the power to lift an entire city.
Donald Francis Shula was the perfect coach at the perfect time.
He passed away Monday morning at his home in the Miami suburb of Indian Creek, after a monumental life lived long and well. He was 90.
Shula is survived by wife, Mary Anne, and by five children, 16 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He held nothing in his life higher in importance than family and faith. He also leaves a successful national chain of eponymous restaurants.
Of course, it is football and his Miami Dolphins that formed the legacy and bond that made Shula one of those most admired, respected and beloved figures in our history, in or out of sports — our patriarch and patron saint. He is an enduring South Florida icon, and the present tense there is intended. His status only grows now as we reflect and appreciate all he meant.
We had time to be ready for this day. To expect it. Shula coached here for 26 NFL seasons, through 1995, but had been retired for nearly as long. He faded by degrees from public life, especially in recent years, when age saw his health ebb.
And yet the news Monday still hit like a punch unexpected. A punch to the heart.
We have lost a member of our family.
And to lose him now, in the midst of the global coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic, means he will not have the huge public memorial his stature warranted. Someday. For now, we can only miss him at a social distance.
We don’t lose Shula, though, as he lapses into legend and cherished memory. He is still here, a young man balanced high on his Dolphins players’ broad shoulders, getting the victory ride of his life and taking all of us along with him.
The Miami Dolphins’ perfect season
Shula’s grand career has at the top of its marquee the 1972 Perfect Season, that still-unique diamond, the first of his consecutive Super Bowl championships. That frozen snapshot of him being carried off the field, 17-0, remains the picture of perfection almost 50 years later.
Only one coach, in any sport, at any time, at any level, anywhere, is famously associated with the word “perfect.”
“I like that,” Shula said, smiling, as we met in 2015 for an extensive interview related to the Dolphins’ approaching 50th anniversary season. “I like that word. Perfection. I like the sound of that.”
Just below perfection on that crowded Shula marquee: his NFL-record of 347 coaching victories including 328 in the regular season and 19 more in the playoffs. He sailed into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on the first ballot.
Another team might finish a season with a perfect record someday (well, maybe). And another coach, perhaps Bill Belichick, might someday surpass his career victories total. Maybe.
But Shula died the perfect coach, and the winningest.
“To know my record, that my teams won the most games, that’s something I’m very proud of,” he said.
Shula’s epic epoch in Miami saw the granite-jawed coach as the constant amid surrounding turbulence. For so many of us, he was a timeline for our lives.
Shula one of most revered figures in NFL
I grew up with Shula, as so many of us did. I was a kid with acne banging around the halls of McArthur High School in Hollywood when Shula arrived from Baltimore. I was a married father of two when he retired from coaching. It was as if he helped raise me. Shula on a Dolphins sideline was one of the most reassuring constants in my entire life.
He grew to be one of the most revered figures in NFL and Miami history. Twenty-six years leading the Dolphins were marked by not a single personal blemish or controversy in a career embossed by winning and class.
It bears reminding that when Shula first arrived here to take the reins of a toddling four-year-old franchise that had neither won nor drawn very big crowds, our sports landscape was a barren expanse.
Hurricanes football was more than a decade away from the onset of its glory days — closer in the early ‘70s to extinction than to any future claim of inventing swagger.
Heat basketball was more than fifteen years away.
Marlins baseball and Panthers hockey wouldn’t exist for decades.
Miami was close to a non-entity in terms of major team sports, irrelevant nationally, and the expansion-era Dolphins — with a record of 15-39-2 those first four seasons in the AFL and with meager attendance to match – did not bring an instant change.
But Shula did.
His first Dolphins coaching office at the old Biscayne College training camp in 1970 had a leaking roof and plastic pail to catch the water.
“What’s the word?” he said. “Spartan?”
From those modest surroundings he won big that first season here, rose to perfection in only his third year and never stopped winning. An imprimatur of consistency, Shula had but two losing seasons – two – in 26 years here. (The franchise has had 11 of those just in the past 16 years).
The end to his Dolphins days was not as perfect as he would have liked.
Then-owner Wayne Huizenga was enamored of Jimmy Johnson as the ’95 season ended and Shula, then 65, was gently nudged into retirement. The hurt softened over time, but sat sour in Shula’s stomach to the end.
“Jimmy who!?” he said, 20 years later. “No, I wasn’t v happy about that. Jimmy Who wasn’t a big favorite of mine. To go out with him coming in to take my place … those aren’t high spots in my career. I didn’t feel very comfortable with that.”
A big regret for Don Shula
Shula also regretted not being able to add another Super Bowl ring to the two he won as a young man — especially one with Dan Marino.
“Maybe we could have won another game we didn’t win,” as he put it.
In at least one instance, though, a Shula loss benefited Miami, and profoundly so.
His Baltimore Colts lost the third-ever Super Bowl, to the New York Jets, with Shula on the wrong end of Joe Namath’s famous “guarantee.” The game was played in Miami, funny enough. Had the Colts won that game, it’s nearly certain Shula would have remained in Baltimore and that Dolphins owner Joe Robbie would have hired a different coach to replace George Wilson.
“I might still be in Baltimore eating crab cakes,” Shula said.
Things worked out, put it that way. The few regrets are overwhelmed by the legacy Shula formed.
“Overall when I think about the things we did do I’m pretty satisfied,” he said.
The old coach always said the one thing he could never duplicate in retirement was those three hours on the game-day sideline – that non-stop adrenaline rush.
Didn’t mean he didn’t try, though.
At age 79, “The Don” found himself in a Blackhawk combat helicopter slicing across the Afghan desert over Taliban territory. He wore a 40-pound bulletproof vest. His family thought he was nuts.
“They did question why,” he told me, with that impish, barely-there smile of his.
Shula spent eight days on a summer USO tour visiting thousands of American troops, pelted by a sandstorm and by 115-degree temperatures in Kirkuk, Iraq. He visited a U.S. base two days after it had been hit by a rocket attack. He visited soldiers in a hospital ward in Afghanistan and stopped thinking of football as a battle, stopped cold, that day.
“There were a couple of burn victims that all you could do was say prayers for them,” Shula said, “and wonder what their life might be like if they survived.”
He called that trip “one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done in my life. We take too much for granted. It made you feel very fortunate.”
To the end, Don Shula was an appreciative, thankful man, and one of his joys late in life was seeing son, Mike, 50, reach the Super Bowl (though he lost) as offensive coordinator of the Carolina Panthers. Mike’s father flew to Santa Clara, Calif., for the game to watch a Shula in a Super Bowl for the first time in 31 years.
It was a good life for Shula
Shula and Mary Anne lived locally in the exclusive village of Indian Creek, spent a couple of summer months each year at another residence on the Spanish Bay golf course in Pebble Beach, Calif., and also owned a getaway place a mile up in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Blowing Rock, N.C.
It was the good life, and so richly earned.
Just before this past Super Bowl held in Miami, Mary Anne threw a surprise 90th birthday party for Shula at the home of a friend. Family and friends and former players, including many of the ‘72 Perfectos, were all there. Shula was surrounded by love, the king in his winter.
“An emotional evening that I will always remember,” he called it.
Shula may have wished he could have “won another game we didn’t win,” but that isn’t how football history, or South Florida, will see it.
The sport he loved and the city that loved him will forever best describe Donald Francis Shula, the coach and the man, with but a single word:
Perfect.
This story was originally published May 4, 2020 at 12:42 PM.
