Don Shula was a few weeks shy of 12 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. For Dan Shula, who had been too young to fight in the last world war, and too old in this one, his work at the rayon factory took on an even more frenetic pace, the demand for textiles production keeping the plant humming nearly around the clock and producing greater income. Joe, now 18, enlisted in the army. His younger brother continued his schooling. Turning 14 in 1944, he entered Thomas Harvey High School, named for a 19th-century Ohio educator. It was the only public high school in Painesville, and because it was a magnet for teenage athletes, it would pose a fatal hurdle for his parents in trying to keep him from the ball fields.
From the start, he was smitten with the scholastic sports scene. The football team was coached by Howard Baughman, who also coached the basketball team, and both teams often had undefeated county championship seasons. As a sophomore, the young Shula, still under his parents’ embargo on sports, could only watch Red Raiders games from the stands, despondent that he wasn’t out there, kicking tail. When he turned 15, as a junior, he tried out for the football team, forging his parents’ signatures on the permission slip. Baughman had left to coach at a Cleveland Heights high school and was replaced by Clarence Mackey. Shula quickly made the team. However, he soon caught measles. When he recovered, he thought he had lost his place on the squad. An assistant coach, Don Martin, saw him in the stands and told him to put on a uniform.
That was when he had to fess up to his parents that he was again playing, and that he had a game the following Saturday. But, to his shock, his father didn’t blow up at him for the forgery. His boy was now around the same age as Dan was when he had dropped out to work. He could see that his flesh and blood had the same mulish individualism, the rugged self-belief. And so Dan approved, and he and Mary even attended the game, the first they had ever seen. That day, they watched him return a punt for a 75-yard touchdown, and stood up and cheered for him like any other American parents.
Being allowed to play came with conditions. He still had to work and contribute to the family pot. And, even with scant spare time, he did various odd jobs for a dollar a day; at week’s end, he would give his mother five dollars; she in turn would give him a dollar allowance. Dan and Mary could be proud of him. With everything else going on, he earned honor-roll marks. What’s more, he had become a BMOC at Harvey, his striking face appearing on numerous pages of the school yearbook, The Anvil, on the football and basketball teams and in student activity groups. In his second year on the football team, Mackey made him tailback in his single-wing T formation, and he looked smugly confident in the team picture in his number 15 uniform. “There were other guys who were more talented, but Don was tough, fearless,” remembered Tony Cimaglio, a teammate. “Don was always the aggressor.”1
Don Martin, though, believed he was a too-angry kid who needed a few lessons in humility—and realized as much himself. Martin recalled:
One day during a scrimmage, he and another boy exchanged a few heated words, and were told to drop it and stick to business. A few plays later, it happened again and Coach Mackey asked if they understood what he had said. When Don started to justify his actions, Coach Mackey, usually a very mild-mannered man, slapped him. Don’s face flushed with embarrassment and anger, but not another word was said. After practice, he hung around until the players had left and came into the office. I was fully prepared to hear him say he was quitting the team. Instead, he said, “I’m sorry coach, it was all my fault.”2
That 1945 season came four months after President Franklin Roosevelt died, and only weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled by the awesome and awful new weaponry of mass destruction. Shula was the Red Raiders’ big weapon. Along the way, Mackey began to use him at quarterback. Not that he owned the greatest arm, but Shula had an instinct for when and where to throw it, or keep it and go off on one of his headfirst rushes. In the season’s fourth game, reported the yearbook, “the first touchdown was made from the [Willoughby] 45 yard line on a pass, Shula to [Charlie] Schupska.” Against Fairport High, Shula learned how quickly success can go south. Though he scored the first touchdown, a bad interception led to Fairport taking it in late for a 12–6 win—sending Shula under the bleachers for a good cry. But he came back tougher. The climactic game was the big rivalry match against Ashtabula. It was, said the school paper, “the hardest fought game of the year,” though it ended in a 14–9 loss. Their 8–2 record was good for second in the circuit, damned with faint praise by the paper as “a fairly successful football season.”3
As for Shula, it went on, “Don did an outstanding bit of ball carrying this season. He has the knack of feinting a would-be tackler off balance so that he misses. He is also a defensive man. Being only a junior this [coming] year we will expect a lot from him next year”—an expectation that he would one day need to become very familiar with.
In some of those yearbook photos, he looked surly, eyes narrowed. His public persona was not far from the Marlon Brando–esque tintype that would define a whole new era of antiheroic manhood in the late ’40s. How much of this was real and how much a pose was debatable. In other shots, the non-athletic ones, he was draped in sharp-creased slacks and preppy cardigans, looking as straight an arrow as any well-mannered college boy in postwar America. He was courtly to his teachers and other students, didn’t cut class, didn’t cuss. In a shot of the junior class officers, Shula seemed to grab the camera, leaning forward where the others sat back. One might have suspected he had something nagging inside him, something that drove him beyond the normal pursuits of his classmates. Time would tell.
In his senior year, he was a polished performer on the gridiron. The Red Raiders were 6–3 entering the finale against Ashtabula, who were 5–0 and had already clinched the county title. But Shula ran in a touchdown from the 2-yard line in the fourth quarter for the lead. Playing defensive back as well, he also made a game-saving tackle by cutting through a wall of blockers, leading the opposing coach to come into the locker room after the game and congratulate him for making the finest defensive play he had ever seen. That won Shula honorable mention on the All-Shore schoolboy team.
In his high school career, he won three letters in football, three as a shortstop and pitcher in baseball, three as a forward in basketball, two running track—11 in all. He lost the election for senior class president to Charlie Schupska, his big receiver and the captain of the football team. But he was a class officer, and basketball team captain. His picture in that capacity, in a dark, double-breasted jacket, half-grin on his face, read: “An athlete strong and competent.” He also won for having the best build. No prude he, with each senior asked to compose a mock self-testament for The Anvil, he wrote that he was the author of “How to Be a High School Casanova.”4 Mocking or not, it was accurate.
When Shula looked back at his days at Harvey High, he had little to say of his athletic achievements. Rather, he spoke of an English teacher who had gotten through to him as no one else had:
All the other English teachers I had had would pat me on the back and give me a B because they liked me and wanted me to like them. Not Miss Symmes. The first essay I wrote for her she returned with an F and told me I was better than that. Since I was already a student leader, I thought I could get by with my gift for gab, but she insisted that I needed to learn to write, too. And she wouldn’t back off. She pushed me and pushed me until, on the last paper I turned in to her, she was proud to give me an A. I was proud too. I’ll never forget her.5
His swagger seemed to embody the words of the school’s valedictory song—“Our Solemn Will”—which was played as he accepted his diploma, a teary Dan and Mary Shula in the audience. All of his considerable qualities, however, did little to impress the recruiters, whose eyes seemed to be trained elsewhere than on the only high school in Painesville. Two offers did come, one from no less than Ohio State—but for track, not football, and with very few expenses covered. Mackey had also gotten him a tuition-only scholarship from his alma mater, Emory and Henry College in Emory, Virginia. But neither of these bids seemed worth leaving his home turf, and so he prepared himself to become one more working stiff.
Then came a fateful encounter. Filling up his jalopy at a gas station in Painesville, as he waited at the pump, the nozzle stuck into his gas tank, he saw a familiar face. It was Howard Baughman, the coach who had first noticed him at Harvey High before leaving. They hadn’t seen each other since. Recognizing him, Baughman strode over and struck up a conversation, saying he’d followed his high school varsity career in the papers and through the coaches’ grapevine. He assumed Shula would have no problem getting into college, and asked which one he’d be playing for in the fall.
“I didn’t get any worthwhile scholarship offers,” Shula told him, “so I decided to go work instead.”
“No, no, that’ll be a mistake, Don,” he said. “You should go to some college.”
“But where?”
Baughman thought a moment. He knew Herb Eisele, the coach at John Carroll College, later John Carroll University, an all-male school run by the Jesuits, who took greater pride in turning young men into priests than into professional athletes. “I’ll talk to Herb,” he said, getting back into his car. “I’ll get back to you in a couple of days.”
“That would be great,” Shula said, not at all convinced anything would really happen.6
But the coach shot straight, and as it happened, Shula’s teammate Roy Kropac had also appealed to Baughman for help. He was able to package both kids to Eisele, who had them come into the Carroll admissions office for a joint interview. That netted each a one-year scholarship, at first for tuition alone. If they made the freshman team, they’d be given a full ride. It was a foot in the door to a school that Shula believed was perfect for his goals, the possibility of becoming a priest still in the back of his mind. To be sure, at Catholic schools like these, football was a religion. At Notre Dame, the library wall would one day be covered by a mural depicting the son of God, arms upraised as if resurrected as a referee signaling a touchdown—which they shamelessly called “Touchdown Jesus.”
But Shula was already forming his rationale, separating Jesus from the touchdowns. He had an idea of which way the wind would blow. He had been in enough scrapes and sneaked enough beers and backseat whoopee—and been to the confessional enough—to know he was not ideally suited to the Sacrament of the Holy Orders. The pop cultural themes of the day, heavy on Irish Catholic guilt and redemption, as seen in almost any Jimmy Cagney movie, caricatured life for many Catholic boys, but the cool guys in these morality plays usually weren’t the priests; they were the straying best friends of the priests, their sometimes dark betrayals of the church soothed by a Father Flanagan. In Shula’s purview, being Catholic was noble, and ever-binding; he had his own Father Flanagan, many of them. But in the hard life of the Steel Belt, tough guys went their own way, down the road to sovereign manhood, even if it meant chasing a football.