CHAPTER 8

Hanging with the Miami Dolphins

MY PARENTS WERE ADAMANT ABOUT being polite and engaging with others. They believed that you never knew when someone would come into your life. When that happens, connections are created that can change or create other connections that can/will influence your life. For me and my life, Dorothy Shula, the wife of Hall of Fame football coach Don Shula, became the connection that opened the door for me. Not only did she enable me to experience up close and personal the Miami Dolphins of the 1970s and the 1980s, but so much of my life, including my entrée to football, I can trace back to her connection to my mother.

Hialeah Miami Lakes High School opened its doors in 1971. Mom worked there as the assistant principal for guidance. The Wessel family’s personal connection to the Dolphins began the day Dorothy Shula walked into Mom’s office.

Dorothy asked Mom for her opinion: would she send her kids to Miami Lakes? Mom told her she would send them to the Catholic High School, Pace High.

The Shulas ended up sending their first son, David, to Pace High. And through that first meeting, Mom and Dorothy began to play cards together, forming a relationship that lasted until Dorothy died of cancer in 1991.

Thus, Mom’s ability to engage with people and make them feel welcome laid the groundwork for my future in football as a player and a coach.

Don Shula played for the Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Colts, and Washington Redskins. He became head coach of the Colts, then moved on to the Miami Dolphins, where he coached the 17–0 team in 1972.

As for Dad, he had been a Dolphins season-ticket holder from the beginning, when they were an expansion team in the old AFL. I started to attend games with him during the 1970 season, when I was eight.

Going to those games would be quite an affair. Our drive to the Orange Bowl would take us about thirty minutes. Dad and his friends packed their trunks with coolers filled with food and beverages so we could tailgate. The adults would sit around shooting the bull before the game while the kids threw around the football on a grass parking lot outside the Orange Bowl end zone.

Once inside the historic venue, I enjoyed many memorable Dolphins moments sitting next to Dad.

Dad went to New Orleans when the Dolphins made their first Super Bowl appearance in 1972. They got smoked, 24–3, by the Dallas Cowboys at Tulane Stadium.

When they won the Super Bowl the next season, they beat the Redskins 14–7 at the Los Angeles Coliseum on January 14, 1973. That proved to be a big day in my neighborhood. Everybody went out into the street to celebrate the win.

Along with Shula, Howard Schnellenberger joined the Dolphins’ coaching staff in 1970. His wife, Beverlee, also asked Mom for advice about schools. She joined the card group, which included Betty Jane Arnsparger, wife of Dolphins coach Bill Arnsparger. Through my mother’s connection, I met one of the Schnellenbergers’ sons, Stu, in 1975, and we became friends, teammates on the high school football team, and workout partners.

Mom’s friendship with Beverlee and Dorothy grew. As a Dolphins fan, Dad enjoyed that connection, as well.

Meanwhile, Mom’s friendship with them, and my friendship with Stu, opened the door for me to know Shula’s sons. Those relationships also bought me entry to the Dolphins’ training camp at Biscayne College (now known as St. Thomas University) in the summer before my junior year at Pace High School, which sat on the same plot of land as the college.

Stu and I worked for janitorial services at Biscayne. We picked up jocks, took out trash, that sort of stuff. Our menial jobs didn’t mean much to us. What mattered were the afternoons when we’d get to work out with the Dolphins. That proved to be my first exposure to the NFL. That taste of the NFL made a lasting impression on a fifteen-year-old.

Talk about a kid’s dream. What I experienced was a fantasy. I found myself getting to know the guys who comprised the team I’d watched and admired. When I’d played neighborhood football games, I’d pretended to be any one of the Dolphins players. They were the guys who had done all that winning. Shula’s first eight seasons coaching in Miami saw the Dolphins going 83–28. I’m sure Dad was just as excited as I was about my chance to be around them, though he low-keyed that kind of stuff. He’d been around celebrities, so he wasn’t particularly impressed by fame.

Since we lived in Carol City, we were four to five miles north of Biscayne College. Miami Lakes was about ten miles away. That’s where Shula and Schnellenberger lived.

Mom and Dad would occasionally get invited to parties over at their houses.

Some of the players from the Dolphins’ undefeated season were still on the team when I first started hanging around them. Some were on the tail end of their careers. Did they ever talk about their undefeated season? Oh God yes. There were always references back to that 17–0 season, which seemed to have had a life of its own.

Bob Kuechenberg served as the ringleader for a weekly Friday ritual during training camp. He and the other linemen shot the bull around a cooler stocked with Busch beer, which many would drink until they couldn’t move. Some of them smoked cigarettes. The equipment managers, Dan Dowe and Bob Monica, were all about the linemen. They catered to Kooch, Jim Langer, Larry Little, and Norm Evans. On occasion, they would let others in their group, but everybody knew the group belonged to the offensive line.

As for Larry Csonka, I didn’t know him well. In fact, he terrified me. But he was always the prankster. He’s the one who put a little three-foot alligator in Coach Shula’s shower. He was always doing something to get the coaches riled up.

Shula was old school. You never saw such a perfectionist. He strived for perfection in everything he did.

Schnellenberger maintained a gruff manner. You always felt as though he were sizing you up, like, “Why are you here?” Adding to his persona, he smoked a pipe and had a deep voice, which helped sculpt a scary figure. Shula and Schnellenberger weren’t shy about bringing discipline to the team. The players talked about that fact all the time.

Arnsparger came from another angle as a quiet leader. In contrast, Shula was a little more vibrant. Of course, this was my perspective as a kid. At the time, I didn’t have the coach’s lens I would later have.

Defensive linemen Bob Baumhower and A.J. Duhe were friends and called themselves “Peanut Butter and Jelly,” because Baumhower was from University of Alabama and Duhe was from LSU. Of course, Stu and I mimicked them and started calling ourselves “Peanut Butter and Jelly.”

I didn’t think much about how being around all of those guys affected me, as I was too wrapped up in the experience. Later I would realize that being around people who had some measure of fame helped me understand they weren’t any different from me. I think that taught me a good lesson—not to be intimidated by such public figures.

Of course, the funny thing about childhood is that you never quite know where people are going to wind up. Around my junior year, I came to know Harry Wayne Casey, better known as KC, the leader of the world-renowned KC and the Sunshine Band.

Though KC reigned as a megastar in the 1970s, to us, he was just the Schnellenbergers’ neighbor.

I met him my junior year of high school at a party at the Schnellenbergers’ house.

The Schnellenbergers were home, so I wouldn’t classify the party as a raucous high school party, but more like a hangout of sorts. After KC and I were introduced, we had a conversation about water skiing.

I’d been water skiing since I was eight, thanks to Dad and his love of the water. When we went fishing, we’d carry along the water skis and ski on our way to shore after we put away the fishing gear. Dad was a good water skier, in part because he grew up at the beach, and he had all kinds of friendships he could tap into for different water activities, including water skiing. Through Dad’s relationships, I knew some people at a boat shop near our house. I told KC I’d get him a deal on a slalom ski if he wanted me to help him.

At the end of the party, about ten of us went over to KC’s house, where I met some of his bandmates. It was there that KC took me up on my offer, and I got him a deal on a slalom ski. After that, we started water skiing with him on the lake where he lived.

Even though KC was at the height of his popularity, fame didn’t go to his head. I always found him down-to-earth, and not some big shot with entitlement issues. He liked being around younger people—appropriate, I guess, because young people comprised his audience and were the ones buying his albums.

He was on the road a lot back then, but when he wasn’t, we would water ski and hang out. He’d get us tickets to concerts in the Miami area, and yes, there were some pretty good parties we attended. Girls were never scarce, especially at his Christmas party. I was never “in the band,” but hanging out with them made me feel like I was at times.

Bill Chastain spoke with KC during the writing process, and KC recalled the early days of our friendship:

“Because I loved music so, I wanted to put myself in the position where I was just happy doing anything associated with what I loved. So I tried to share my personal philosophy with Joe. He was just a very ambitious guy. He was really into sports, and he really wanted to have a career in football.”

I felt close to KC, and so did my family. As KC recalled, “Joe and I spent a lot of time together. We talked a lot. I got to know his family, too. The whole family is just very caring and kind. They devoted their lives to charities, and people. And being a part of the community. You just got that kind of feeling from them. Once you met them, you felt like a part of their family.”

All these years later, I appreciated KC’s remarks, particularly regarding my family, who served a critical role in my formative years, though I never really considered their impact on my friends. When, ultimately, my janitorial job abruptly ended, leaving me without a job for the remainder of the summer, I feared the reaction of my parents (as most kids my age would have). Yet Dad emerged as my greatest ally. I think he remembered being young and having to work to make money. That experience had prevented him from doing some of the things that he’d wanted to do. He told me, “Joe, you’re going to have the rest of your life to work. You’ve got football. You keep working at your football, and I’ll make sure you’re taken care of from a work standpoint.” As usual, Dad was spot on. Not having to work eliminated one pressure in my life at that time and gave me more time to lift, work out, run, and throw to wide receivers. What a blessing afforded to me by Dad.