Remembering Kiick and a generation of sports

Now it’s my friend, Jim Kiick, who is gone, isolated for weeks in his assistedliving facility, able to talk with friends and family only through a window on a telephone, with a mind they feared didn’t allow him to fully understand the coronavirus or why he couldn’t leave his room.

Slowly, sadly, we’re losing them. Don Shula, the chisel-jawed face of South Florida, went last month. Jim Langer, as tough as they came, and Nick Buoniconti, whose second act was greater than his Hall of Fame football act, left last summer.

Our greatest Dolphins generation is leaving the lineup. Bob Kuechenberg. Earl Morrall. Garo Yepremian. Jim Mandich, whose great personality was such that Heat president Pat Riley entered the media room after his death with some Heineken beer (Mandich’s “green lizards”) and said, “Let’s tell Mandich stories.”

What’s the line a surviving compatriot

COMMENTARY sings in Les Miserables? “Empty chairs at empty tables”? That’s how it felt around the dinner table, how it feels looking at the lineup of the missing names from those great Miami Dolphins teams of the early 1970s.

The only coach remaining on the staff of the Undefeated Season is Howard Schnellenberger, whose great work with that rumbling voice was just beginning in South Florida in 1972. There were six assistants then. They worked in one room.

Shula, the king of detail, went through calisthenics with his assistants upon arriving in 1970 to assure they taught players properly. He also instituted the dreaded “12-minute run,” which became a staple for years and is where Kiick’s story starts.

Kiick hated to run unless it was toward the end zone. So halfway through the 12-minute run he started to walk. Larry Csonka joined him. And here came Shula, sprinting across the field at them screaming with all his famous passion. That got Csonka running again. But Kiick?

“I’m not joining a cross country team,” he told Shula.

He always was rebellious like that. Look at the 1967 team picture of his Wyoming team. He’s the one without a cowboy hat. The only one. He said his friends back in New Jersey would never let him forget