Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
We’ll never see the likes of Don Shula again
NFL’s winningest coach helped put South Florida on the sports map
Don Shula, jogging, was a sight to behold. They won’t mention this in measuring the great man’s death Monday at age 90. They’ll talk of his being the NFL’s winningest coach and coach of its only Perfect Season. They’ll talk of his defining a South Florida era and of the big, unfillable void his absence creates.
Maybe even, in an attempt to capture his personality, they’ll tell how when Miami Dolphins owner Joe Robbie first phoned to offer him the job in 1970 Shula quickly said he had to go, to call back in a minute, and hung up on his future boss.
“I had to break up a fist fight between two assistants in my front yard,” he once said. But this image of Shula, jogging after practice, was the portrait of a legend in autumn. In his younger days, he ran sprints with players to stay in shape — “gassers” he called them, meaning that’s what everyone around the Dolphins called them, too.
By the early-1990s, he jogged alone after practice around the empty field as newspaper reporters waited for his daily thoughts. The television guys, and more importantly their cameras, weren’t allowed for these post-practice interviews. Shula didn’t want his lateafternoon face on television, because his was an era before stubble was stylish. Image always mattered to him that way. Ego did, too.
What stood out in those daily, post-practice jogs wasn’t the floppy Dolphins hat he often wore rather than the ball caps of today, or the way his arms were nearly spectators at his sides, like a tyrannosaurus.
What stood out was the methodical preciseness of his path around the field. He ran for 30 minutes. Never less. He always made geometric, 90-degree turns as the field’s line demanded. He never cut corners. Never.
It was such a topic of quiet conversation among the reporters as we waited, one would often quietly say to another,
“Did he cut that corner?”
“No,” the other would invariably answer.
If you’re looking for a short-cut metaphor to explain who Shula was, of his mentality as coach, of why he reached such heights, it came in that afternoon jog. He was asked in his first news conference if he had a three- or five-year plan for the losing Dolphins franchise he took over. “My plan is to go to work,” he said.
In 33 years as an NFL coach (26 with the Dolphins), he missed a day-and-a-half of work. One day when his wife, Dorothy, had an operation for cancer. A half-day when he had arthroscopic surgery on his knee.
He worked hard enough and won big enough to have an expressway, two restaurants, a football game between Florida Atlantic and Florida International universities and a chair of philosophy at his alma mater, John Carroll, named for him.
Along the way he never forgot who he was or tried to be someone different. He was a football coach. That was his focus. He once kicked author James Michener from a post-game locker room after being told he was, “a writer,” even though Robbie had invited him.
Introduced to actor Don Johnson, then the star of the hit TV show, “Miami Vice,” Shula thought he actually was with law enforcement and said, “You guys do a great job.”
When dating Mary Anne, who became his second wife, he saw a painting in her home. “Who would buy that?”
“Well, Don, it is a Picasso,” she said.
If those underline he was just a football coach, this one tells what kind of coach he was: When he first met Mary Anne at a New Year’s Eve party, he asked for her phone number. She had a date with her. Not that it mattered to Shula.
“I was never bashful,” he said. He knew what he wanted. He always did. He worked hard to get it, too. Never cutting corners, right? He won Super Bowls with a great running game in the 1970s, when the game was built on great running games. He then won in the 1980s and 1990s with a great passing game of Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, when the game changed to that style.
There were no millionaires when he began as a player in the 1950s. But as the son of an Ohio fisherman who didn’t like the water — Shula snorkeled only once in Key Biscayne and only then wearing a life preserver — he knew life was what you sculpted it.
What about coaching burnout, he was asked when then-Philadelphia coach Dick Vermeil quit in 1983, citing that cause?
“What’s that?” he said.
Did he ever have ulcers, he was asked when a player had them.
“I don’t get ulcers — I give them,” he said.
As the years went on, and the seasons drifted further behind him, he let up on that somewhat. In his late-70s, he’d greet you at his home with a hobbled step and say, “Don’t time me in the 40.”
He followed his sons, Mike and Dave, in their careers. He kept up with his grandchildren who used to call him, “Grandfather Mountain.” This is how he always imagined the good life of retirement might be, if he ever actually stopped to imagine a chapter without football.
The edge of who he once was always remained within reach, though. He’d subtly drop in conversation how Vince Lombardi only lasted 10 years as a coach to his 33. And New England’s Bill Belichick, who is within sight of his 347 careers wins? “Beli-cheat?” he’d say, referring to the Patriots’ ball-deflation scandal in 2014.
A surprise 90th birthday party was thrown for Shula in January. Friends and former players came. Larry Csonka, the old fullback and namesake of Shula’s hard-headed dog, “Zonk,” said after that night:
“I fully expect, if I’m lucky enough to still be around, to be at his 100th birthday. Because can you picture a world without Don Shula in it?”
On Monday, Csonka was cutting brush on his Ohio farm when his wife called with the bad news. His eyes misting, his voice unsteady, he became the unsteady voice of South Florida as he saw the world without Don Shula:
“I miss him terribly already.”