Shula Pride
A long-ago interlude that today feels oracular was the brief moment in history when Donald Shula bisected with Donald Trump. It happened in 1983. That year, the boyish, bumptious Trump had bought into the last challenger to the NFL’s hegemony, the United States Football League, as owner of the New Jersey Generals. He had Herschel Walker, arguably the best runner in football, and wanted unarguably the best coach in football. Shula, who knew little of Trump, listened. When he saw more of who Trump was, and the bull he slung, he stopped listening and bolted for the door. Trump naturally blamed Shula for the crime of . . . greed.
Trump’s league went bust. His future bids to become an NFL owner were summarily dismissed. Shula—who is today nearing 90 and has never declared bankruptcy, and whose fortune of over $30 million is real1—remained in Miami, becoming football’s first million-dollar-a-year coach2 and a geographic landmark. Moral: Shula was a very winning coach, and a very rich one, because he could take the measure of men he respected, and quickly discard those he didn’t.
Shula coached in some of the most memorable and important games in football history, and in keeping with the yin and yang of a long career, won some, but never enough. He seemed to suffer years of bedevilment, as if in a cosmic bargain for one single season of unprecedented success. That, his perfect 17–0 championship season of 1972, was itself seemingly earned by his ineffable defeat four years earlier to Joe Namath’s New York Jets, when Shula’s mighty Baltimore Colts came in as 18-point favorites and left as losers of the biggest upset in sports history. No mere career coach could have been on the sidelines for two such titanic events, which can fairly be discussed as markers of cultural history. The Jets loss carved out pro football’s modern identity and threatened to leave Shula by the side of the road, in shame. For him, no win could ever expunge its sour taste.
But even after those two contrasting events were cemented in history, he had plenty left in the tank. Invested with a nail-hard, blue-collar Midwestern ethos and sensibility, he lengthened his shadow, always chasing the elusive return to glory. In that sense, he never changed. He took crap from nobody, ruled with a closed fist and deft, scientific methods gleaned from his mentor, Paul Brown. When he was unable to win, and had taken enough crap for it within his own league, he made a calculated decision to join the league he had, ironically, proved wasn’t inferior by losing to it. He took over the Miami Dolphins when they were merged into the NFL in 1970 and immediately built them into a milieu, a fan base, and a corporate turnkey operation. Over the next quarter century, he would keep whittling his gnarled but handsome Teutonic face (actually Hungarian) into the football infrastructure, always defined by the perfect season and the repeat title a year later. He also led the Dolphins to two more Super Bowls, losing both, but for an unnaturally extended period of time, he seemed immune to the consequences of big-game defeat because he always won enough.
He was more than just a coach. Though, technically, he was born just a tad late to be a member of it, he was embraced as a pillar of the generation that journalist Tom Brokaw would retroactively celebrate in the 1990s as the Greatest Generation. From the glory of winning a world war and the passage of civil rights legislation, to the dishonor of undeclared wars of choice and the perpetuation of Jim Crow, Shula stood shoulder to shoulder with men both famous and infamous: on the one hand, a president who inspired a nation into space, and on the other, a demagogic senator shrieking about a red menace, a Southern governor who stood in the door of a university to stop black students from entering, and a president who lurched from landslide victor to unindicted co-conspirator. Shula has outlived them all, and has lived long enough to see the election of the very man he distrusted and foresaw as a destructive force in 1983.
In fact, men like Shula make it easier to cope with men like George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump. Not incidental to his strengths as a coach, he was a first-generation American, like Vince Lombardi the son of immigrants who, in their day, were reviled and scapegoated every bit as much as latter-day bigots have done to people of color. It was the qualities handed down to him by hardier men than most that took Shula into the fold of history occupied by Brown, George Halas, Lombardi, and Tom Landry, sturdy men who took pro football from a ragtag circus show into a respectable profession, and incidentally into a shiny but increasingly crass and soulless corporate megalith. He was never a Lombardi, and he knew it; indeed, like Tom Landry, his defeats at the hands of Lombardi determined the latter’s legacy. Almost forgotten now is that, in the early and mid-’60s, any one of that holy trinity could have, by winning at the summit, claimed immortality.
They all hailed from middle-class, Depression-era slices of America: south Texas, the Italian ghettos of Brooklyn, a Hungarian migrant community in Ohio. All were ruthlessly ambitious. Viewed through the lens of history, Lombardi’s hair-trigger emotions and tragically premature death seemed to render his lionization predestined. But Shula had his own mythology, and as it goes with contemporary giants, it was nuanced and subject to the heartache that humanized him. Shula’s greatest success wasn’t perfection; it was living with failure by cramming so much winning around it.
Spending time in Shula’s company feels like an honor. In the fall of 1978, a commoner with a pen and notepad on assignment for a sports magazine visited him just before the season and found him untouched by the ravages of high-pressure football. It seemed almost irrelevant that Landry’s Dallas Cowboys and Chuck Noll’s Pittsburgh Steelers had passed the Dolphins by; or that three years before, another short-lived pro football league had ripped the spine from his offense, taking fullback Larry Csonka, halfback Jim Kiick, and receiver Paul Warfield from the Dolphins. Or that his All-Pro but rapidly declining quarterback Bob Griese was out injured.
“You never get used to injuries,” he lamented, “but once they happen you forget about ’em. You just get off your can and figure out where to go from there.”3
He spoke with his flat-voweled Midwestern dialect, rich in saliva, a slight lisp. His meat-hook hands clasped in front of him, his thick brown hair graying, he was stately—ruggedly handsome in the standard coach’s Ban-Lon couture: white belt matching white shoes. His idiom was bromidic coach-speak, his answer to every problem seemingly to “roll up your sleeves” and get to work. But the takeaway was that he really seemed to believe he could, by the force of his will, impose winning. And by season’s end, as if demonstrating the transferable quality that gave the article its title—SHULA PRIDE—he was in the playoffs.
Even then, at 48, he had been coach of the year four times—still a record—and compiled 166 wins, behind only George Halas, Curly Lambeau, and Brown. The only coach to win 100 games in his first decade, he had made four Super Bowl appearances and had won two world championships and a pre-merger NFL title. Tempered by some of the most torturous defeats of all time, he admitted, “I’ve never considered myself to be a coaching giant like a Halas or Lombardi.” It hurt to his core to have lost big ones. But he had reason to bask in the limelight of his march toward the record for wins—which he took to 347, including playoffs, and which may stand forever.
Shula, whose reign spanned 10 presidents, seemed immune to attrition. As Sports Illustrated’s great football writer Paul Zimmerman noted in 1993, Shula “has thrived in a world of pressure so intense that it has burned out even those who have succeeded at the highest level.”4 He coached 490 games in the regular season, more than anyone but Halas, and 526 in total, more than anyone, period. This is remarkable given that the NFL played a 14-game season until 1978. His regular-season record was 328–156–6, for a winning percentage of .677—a hair behind Halas’s .682 and Belichick’s .680 (as of 2019). The result was seven conference titles and six Super Bowls, with Shula the first of just six coaches to lead two different teams into Super Sunday.
That he came away with a ring only twice is the rub. While his teams finished over .500 all but twice in the regular season, he won “only” 53 percent of his 36 playoff games, as opposed to Noll’s 66.7 percent, Bill Walsh’s 71.4, Lombardi’s 90. He had to live with being the losing coach in the biggest upset in history, as well as the one whose team scored the fewest points in a Super Bowl (three). In retrospect, that seems like the bargain he made to also be the coach of the most dominant team in sports history, a pendulum swing only possible for a coach with nine lives. Not for nothing did Shula regularly have the highest, or close to it, salary among coaches, his half million a year by the late ’70s, million by the late ’80s, and two million in the ’90s, also coaching milestones.
Consider, too, that when the Coach of the Decade was named for the 1970s, it wasn’t Noll, who had won four rings in as many tries; it was the guy who won two in four tries, the guy with the perfect season. Even when Noll’s team took apart Shula’s, 34–14, in a ’79 playoff game, a Pittsburgh writer correctly judged it a contest between “football’s best team against football’s best coach.”5
Shula wasn’t Lombardi, and to call the ’72 perfect Dolphin team the “best ever” really means “best team of its era.” But this is hardly a demerit. In his time, Shula was a unifying figure as he aged from youngest coach ever, to young elder, to elder statesman. If not immortal, he seemed indestructible. He could move men, keep teams with less talent at or near the top, avoid paying a high price for bad drafts and trades. In 1981, Nick Buoniconti, the undersized, overly ferocious middle linebacker of Shula’s great Dolphin teams, said Shula had won his eminence by being “such a positive influence on the game,” the proof that, “under the worst conditions, Shula will still be competitive.”
Most impressive of all was that he reestablished himself after his personal Little Big Horn—and in the same Orange Bowl where he had been fed to the lions by the Jets. Yet he never shook that day. “If I would’ve lost the [1973] Super Bowl,” he told me, “the 16 previous wins would’ve meant nothing. I would’ve been crucified as the loser.” For this obsessively churchgoing Catholic, not even perfection was absolution enough for the original sin. Though sometimes it seemed easy for him to win, it never was. Someone was always ready with criticism. He even had to fend off his own allies, including two of the most headstrong, unstable owners in sports, Carroll Rosenbloom and Joe Robbie.
He was intensely insular. Running a tight ship, he hired top adjutants like Bill Arnsparger, Chuck Noll, and Howard Schnellenberger, but was loath to share power; he let his quarterbacks call the plays—as long as they did well; if not, then it was Shula to the rescue. As omniscient as he was, he felt his flaws were more magnified than those of Lombardi and Landry. Which is why Shula protected the honor of his perfect season like a pit bull refusing to let go of a bone. When Belichick’s New England Patriots stood one win away from updated perfection—a 19–0 season—Shula’s famous jaw tightened, and he called the coach who got caught spying on an opponent’s coaches’ signals during a 2007 game “Beli-Cheat.”6 No one was giddier when the Patriots lost the Super Bowl to the underdog New York Giants, making Belichick feel what Shula had in ’69. To Shula, that was justice.
He learned from the best. As a young man, he was drafted by his own personal football Jesus, Paul Brown, absorbing Brown’s methods and genius during a gritty decade as a defensive back in the ’50s for the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Colts. He retired to become a college assistant coach, and then got his break as head coach of the Colts. Over the decades since, he coached a holy trinity of quarterbacks—Johnny Unitas, Bob Griese, and Dan Marino, gearing his offense around each in different ways, according to the surrounding casts and best chances to score (though, with Marino, he let the seduction of the big pass turn his head, and his inattention to the running game derailed many of his teams). But in his salad days, when no facet was overlooked, his system was plug-in. Not even the loss of Unitas in ’68 could stop him from going 13–1 with the journeyman Earl Morrall at quarterback; and when he lost Bob Griese in ’72, he still went perfect with . . . Earl Morrall.
His mythological powers were nothing like Lombardi’s, but just the thought of making a mistake in Shula’s presence could induce cold fear among his players, many of whom went into the Hall of Fame. Even Csonka and Kiick, whose shared countercultural insolence tested Shula’s tolerance, wound up toeing the line. They had a near-allergic reaction to losing. As safety Charlie Babb told me back in ’78, “We’re all poor losers around here. That’s why we never seem to lose two games in a row.” Shula craved being a dictator, but made the subtle distinction that “I want their respect, not their fear.” Well, he got both.
It’s remarkable how much he squeezed out of teams that only rarely made good draft selections. Shula told me, “I didn’t concern myself with drafting because I didn’t want to know about kids’ college careers,” and until late in his coaching tenure, he proved it didn’t matter that his team’s picks were, as Buoniconti once said, “pitiful, horrible.” Of course, he had little choice but to settle for leftovers, since he rarely had high first-round picks and even primordial draft gurus like Bobby Beathard and George Young, who began Hall of Fame careers as NFL executives with Shula, couldn’t dig up enough talent to make the task any easier. What Shula had, he won with.
Not all of his players loved, or even liked, him, but none blamed him for gut-tearing defeat. Words like honest, real, and fair trailed him around, testament to both his coaching and his character. That meant a lot to a man who wanted to be a model of moral probity and Christian values. He demanded of himself what he did of his players. Even into his 60s, he was running the same post-practice “gassers”—wind sprints that drained the will to live—that he put the team through. His teams were always the best conditioned in the league, and the most verbally strafed. Shula didn’t lose his temper without a tangible purpose, a means to add emotion to a dispassionate, machinelike system. One of his buffet of All-Pros and Hall of Famers, center Jim Langer, told me, “He does things in an adult way,” albeit an adult who could get so impatient that he once spit profanities at a player who had the nerve to bend over and tie his shoelace.
Shula insisted, “I try to relate to my players, and try to be fair in whatever I do and I think they know that. I can’t appreciate a win-at-any-price philosophy because I have to live with these guys all year round. . . . They all have different egos and psyches.” The key word there was try. It didn’t always work out that way. As Buoniconti noted, Shula “would cut his mother, if it meant the team would be better.”7 He was once said to have signed a picture of himself to his immigrant parents, “To Mom and Dad, best wishes, Don Shula”—which sounds like a joke, but wasn’t, since he had grown up in a family that emphasized respect above affection. He did the same with his own sons, David and Mike, who both became college and pro coaches. It was all he could do to call them by their first names, rather than “Coach Shula.”
Shula’s parents had hopes for him becoming a priest, before football claimed him. But religion stayed a major facet of his life, even if he eschewed smarmy, self-serving piety and facile applications of Christianity to football, saying, “It’s what I feel within for God that makes me a Christian, not my emotions during a game.” He still began every day praying over his rosary beads, just as he did back when attendance was mandatory at the team’s daily Mass, and Augustine priests lined the field during the team’s workouts. In his old age, he loved to hear such testimonials as Bill Arnsparger dubiously saying that all of the head coach’s decisions were “based on his religion.”8 Even so, he was part of the football-equals-religion-and-patriotism equation that would, at its crude extremity, allow a feckless president to imagine ordering players who knelt, in silent protest of racism, during the national anthem to stand or else risk deportation—a position Shula no doubt agrees with, at least the standing part.
Still, he kept religion in the background when asked to provide his own epitaph, which, with mock seriousness, he once said was: “Didn’t lie to anyone, didn’t screw anybody, traveled first-class.”9 The version he shared with me even earlier was: “If I’m remembered for anything, I hope it’s for playing by the rules. Winning by breaking the rules perverts the meaning of winning.” However, this was also a coach who wanted to give jobs back to two linemen who had done time for dealing cocaine, a rising plague in Miami during his reign, saying they had “paid their debt to society”—or, more accurately, to Don Shula. Robbie vetoed the idea, but Shula maintained that he had not been a hypocrite and that his moral code did not have loopholes. Maybe not, but he was either remarkably naive or insentient when he also signed, for a brief time, Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, who had once snorted cocaine on the sideline during a Super Bowl game before Tom Landry dumped him.
Shula played by his own codes, such as the gamesmanship that had him ordering pregame ceremonies at the Orange Bowl to stretch on seemingly forever, so that opponents baked in the burning sun before the kickoff. Shula also knew how to exploit his image, his baleful scowl on the sideline aimed at the cameras. The money quote about Shula is his own: he was, he said, as “subtle as a punch in the face.” But the best-kept secret about Shula was that he had a weak side, that of an old softie. The porcine, garrulous Hall of Fame defensive tackle Art Donovan, who roomed with him in Baltimore when they were Colt teammates, once said Shula was “one tough sonofabitch” who “got everyone in Miami kissing his ass and running scared of him . . . But I’ll tell you what, Shula doesn’t like to see me coming, especially when his players are around, because I’ve got stories that knock that hard-guy image right on its keester.”10
Shula indeed seemed to have a double standard at times, letting some players get away with conduct he fined or even released other players for. He let his emotions and fondness for players dictate how he treated them, cutting slack to those he thought needed it. For the others, who needed a dictator, he was, as his defensive back Lloyd Mumphord put it, “a man who can’t compromise.”11 Shula played favorites, but expected loyalty from all. It hurt him that three men he regarded as sons—Csonka, Kiick, and Warfield, and especially Csonka—did not return to him when the WFL went under, but that didn’t stop him from making room for Csonka when he wanted to play out his career back in Miami. Any feuds Shula had with players dissolved in the long light of their shared glories. After Eugene “Mercury” Morris served time for cocaine smuggling in the ’80s, Shula recommended him for a radio job, and appeared as his first guest.
He held few grudges against players—not openly, at least—even when he knew that more than a few players couldn’t stand him, most notably Unitas. He himself couldn’t stand Rosenbloom and Robbie, nor they him. Rosenbloom was so irate when Shula broke his Colts contract to sign with the Dolphins that he savaged him as a “pig” and worse. Robbie got Shula so riled, he threatened, “I’ll knock you on your ass.”12 But few fans around the league hated Shula. When he won his record-setting 325th game, they cheered him—even in Philadelphia, where they boo funerals and Santa Claus.
Shula was briny, and brainy. While playing at John Carroll University, the small Jesuit school near Cleveland, he majored in sociology and later endowed the Don Shula Chair in Philosophy. (His roots run deep at the school, where they play football in Don Shula Stadium, inside which is a Don Shula memorabilia room. In 2014, his grandson Chris put in a year as the team’s defensive coordinator, en route to his current job as the Los Angeles Rams’ linebackers coach.) He played psychological games, picking an argument as a means to test others’ knowledge. Ed Pope, the late sports editor of the Miami Herald, told me on my trip to Miami that Shula was a “very complex fellow. The moment makes the mood with him. Sometimes, you can go tooth and nail with him for an hour, then he’ll tell you how much he enjoyed the conversation. You walk out scratching your head.”
He also habitually reads everything written about him, looking to humiliate those who had reasonable questions. Zimmerman found that out, writing, “Do not—repeat, do not—challenge Shula on a football matter unless you’re on very firm ground. You don’t remain so high, for so long, by being confused.”13 Few writers or broadcasters ever did rag him. During a Monday Night Football match in 1983, Shula raged at a referee after a call, screaming, “Bullshit!” and “Horseshit!” When this was picked up by a field-level microphone, broadcasters Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, and Howard Cosell slung some cloying BS of their own, saying that Shula “feels the emotions of the game” and that “the strength of the man is written on his face.” So was self-pity. Another time, Shula bellowed to a ref, “You’re ruining my life!”—during an exhibition game, no less. On yet another occasion, when a ref tried to calm him by saying, “Don, it’s only five yards,” Shula confessed, “Five yards is my life.”14 He may have even believed it.
Even so, there is at times a Zen-like calm about him. As Zimmerman observed, “Shula does not become haunted by the terrors of the night, and if he ever did, he would keep his feelings well hidden.” He came onto the field serene, always believing he had a dynasty in Miami. When he retired—a euphemism for being forced out—in ’95, Shula was 65, still the fighter, and his team was in the playoffs as if by rote. Only two years before, Sports Illustrated had named him Sportsman of the Year, mainly for the overall mileage and hardships he had weathered—the most egregious being the tragic death of his wife of 33 years in 1991 from cancer. He owes much to Dorothy Shula, who knew him like no other, but he rebounded when, two years later, he married a rich society divorcée 15 years his junior; their net worth was over $400 million, about one-ninth of it his, and if fans and old friends believed she had hooked him for ongoing status, he considered it a reward for a life very well lived.
He himself had a lot of life left, and a lot of punch to his brand, which remains profitable, as proven by his chain of eponymous steak and burger restaurants, a golf resort, and a conveyor belt of TV commercials, many with Marino as sidekick. He has bred a family dynasty. Two of his five children, David and Mike, though not born with great talent, made it to the NFL. The Shula surname was hardly a hindrance, then or thereafter, when they moved up through the coaching ranks, David getting his shot as a head coach with the Cincinnati Bengals when he was a year younger than the old man had been when he got his—though Dad didn’t give him an inch, beating him twice. Mike Shula, Alabama’s starting QB for two years, became an assistant coach for his father and he moved on as the Carolina Panthers’ offensive coordinator and the hand behind Cam Newton’s rise, and is now the New York Giants’ offensive coordinator.
The patriarch, meanwhile, kept selling himself and the “Shula way,” the “secrets” of which—among them, conviction, consistency, honesty—he laid out in two motivational books. When he went into the Hall of Fame in 1997, the football world beatified him. And why not? His victories on the field traced the growth of the game itself, from junkyard dogfights to a $20 billion-a-year corporate entity. He had shaped the nature and rules of the game as a member of the league’s competition committee for 18 years, leading one rival owner to grumble that Shula “runs the league,”15 about which Shula could have only thought: If only. He had also won the battles with himself over humiliating failure. Indeed, as the last hero standing, there was nothing left for him to prove, except perhaps for one thing: being able to expunge that goddamn Jets game.