Bryan Cox can relate to Flores challenging Bengals
Bryan Cox didn’t see it, but he heard about Brian Flores walking across the field to challenge the Cincinnati Bengals’ sideline last Sunday.
And that’s enough because the former Dolphins linebacker and inspirational leader didn’t have to see it to understand it or be familiar with it.
Because he has lived it.
Just as Flores, the Dolphins coach, went across the field to challenge a foe who had taken a cheap shot on a Dolphins player, 29 years ago to the week, Cox famously made a similar trek against the same franchise, rising up against a similar injustice, perhaps with the same intent in mind.
“I didn’t see it, I wasn’t watching the game,” Cox said from his home in Atlanta. “But the thing about it is when you’re a player and a coach would do that for you, it shows he loves you. One of the things they talk about being a good coach is if a player knows you can teach him something, he’ll respect you. But if he knows you love him, he’ll go above and beyond to be successful for you. He’ll give everything for you.
“So that will endear Brian to the entire Dolphins roster, that our coach tried to stand up for us. For Brian, in Year 2 of his tenure down there, that will pay dividends for years to come.
I’m sure he’s saying I
have to be more in control and this and that. But sometimes, you know, being in control does not allow your players to see how much you care for them.
“It’s powerful because not all coaches are willing to do that. And, yeah, you need to be under control, but it takes a tremendous amount of character and a tremendous amount of love for your players to step out and put yourself in a position where you can be ostracized.”
It was Dec. 9, 1991, and Don Shula’s Dolphins were pounding Sam Wyche’s Bengals 37-13 on a “Monday Night Football” national broadcast. Things were different then.
Shula’s Dolphins were a perennial playoff team, and Wyche’s team had been to the Super Bowl a couple of years earlier. So there was pride on both sides.
But amid the blowout, there was frustration on the Cincinnati side.
Maybe that’s the reason 247-pound linebacker Alex Gordon decided to blindside Miami’s 185-pound kicker Pete Stoyanovich as he was jogging upfield after
another Dolphins kickoff. It was a freight train smashing into an unsuspecting tricycle.
After the devastating hit, as Stoyanovich lay sprawled on the turf with doctors, trainers and teammates huddled about him, a replay of the play was shown on the scoreboard. Then the cameras showed Gordon laughing about his misdeed on the Bengals sideline.
And Cox became infuriated.
So he marched over to the Bengals sideline — by himself — and tried to go after Gordon. Soon, Dolphins teammates realized what was going on and went to restrain Cox as he and Bengals players exchanged thoughtful opinions.
“For me, kickers were off limits,” Cox said, discussing the incident perhaps for the first time in many years. “To me it was you intentionally tried to injure. And you don’t play sports to try to injure people. You play sports to compete and to win.
“So to me it was an instance of somebody playing with his career, but not only that, when you talk about being brothers and teammates and the closeness you’re supposed to have, you’re supposed to have each other’s backs. And the same thing as it relates to Pete — it was a feeling of we’re out here together. We’re brothers. And if somebody messes with you, they’re messing with me.”
Cox was a rookie then. He was still playing on special teams as well as starting 13 games. But he was just 23 years old.
He’s 52 now and he has been an assistant coach for five teams — the New York Jets, Chicago Bears, Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Atlanta Falcons — and his son Bryan Jr. is on the Buffalo Bills practice squad.
So, yes, things have changed. Cox thinks differently than he did back then. Sort of.
“Now, 29 years later, me being wiser, you say, ‘Man, that was foolish.’ But at the end of the day, you have to have each other’s backs,” he said. “Because if you don’t have that, when things get hard in the game, in playoff situations, or other situations that come up, you’re going to tear apart when things get difficult.
“So back then, I was thinking revenge. I was thinking, ‘You hit that little guy, come and hit me. Come pick on somebody your own size.’ ”
And what would he have done differently if he could go back to 1991?
“I would have went to the bus,” Cox said, meaning the team bus that awaits visiting teams after games to carry them to their charter jet for the ride home. “There’s no camera on the bus. If you want to handle stuff like a man, then let’s go do it. Everybody wants to be tough when they got the pads on, with the pushing and the shoving. But if you want to handle some stuff, go to the bus. We can deal with it then, we can cut all this out right now.
“We can meet at the bus and we can handle it like gentlemen. There’s no cameras and we can do what we need to do — if you really want to do it, if you’re saying this is who you are.
“Fortunately, or unfortunately, I’ve had a few bus trips in my career.”
Cox and Buffalo Bills fullback Carwell Gardner once got into an altercation on the field, were ejected and later fined. Gardner’s fine was in part for going to the Dolphins locker room and then the team bus to try to continue the incident.
“I wasn’t the only one to do it,” Cox recalls. “But back then, that’s how stuff got handled. You went to the other team’s parking lot and it was, ‘We good, or we got a problem? What we doing?’ Those things happened.
“Most of the time it didn’t turn into anything. There was a small number of times where we had to handle the situation, but it was nowhere near the number of times that it was, ‘We’re good, everything’s cool.’ ”
Everyone understands Cox did not suffer bullies well. But he nonetheless has regrets about all the times he unfailingly took on those bullies during a game.
“One of the things I regret about a lot of my situations is that I dragged a lot of teammates into the situations and got them fined and got them in trouble, which at the time you don’t think about,” Cox said. “I brought people because they respected me as a teammate, and as a friend and as a leader. And the brotherhood we had was, ‘You go, I go.’ And ‘If you’re in trouble, I’m in trouble with you.’ So I got guys fined.
“I got Dwight Hollier fined. He grabbed me so many times in the middle of stuff, probably got him fined $20-, $30-, $40thousand in our time together. I got Marco Coleman fined. I got Troy Vincent fined. I got J.B. Brown fined. I was getting all those guys fined that were with me, Jarvis Williams, Louis Oliver, all those guys, Jeff Cross, Tim Bowens.
“It was a situation that if you messed with one of us, you messed with all of us. And I regret I pulled those guys into some stuff that was my own mess. And looking back 30 years later, if I had to do it over, I wouldn’t have cost those men money.”
Nearly three decades later, much has changed about that moment between Cox and the Bengals sideline, including the relationship at the center of it all.
Because now Cox and Gordon, the chief adversaries in the drama, are not only friends but family.
“The strange thing about it is the guy I went over there to go fight, I ended up marrying his cousin,” Cox said. “Alex Gordon’s first cousin is my wife.”
Cox married the former Kim Brown in 2004. And one year, while visiting her father in Jacksonville during the holidays, in walks Gordon.
“I’m like, ‘Who the hell is this?’ ” Cox said laughing. “Then we have a conversation and we talk about it. We’ve seen each other, we’ve talked about it, we’ve laughed about it since then. It’s amazing how it’s come full circle.”
But the circle might have not been fully closed until the episode was basically repeated by Flores last weekend.
“The bonds that were created in that game on Sunday are special,” Cox said. “Will it be remembered many years from now? Probably. Somebody is going to say, ‘Remember that time Brian Flores walked across that field?’
“Just like you’re talking to me now about an incident that occurred 29 years ago.”