Those hands belonged to Paul Eugene Brown, whose path through life seemed similar to that of Don Shula’s. Born in Norwalk, Ohio, in 1908, Brown predated Shula as a product of the Steel Belt ethos. Growing up in Massillon, near Canton, the son of a railroad dispatcher, he was an undersized kid, but, with a yen for football that people thought strange, he worked his way up as a single-wing quarterback in high school, and then as a small-college All-American at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Like Shula, the uncertainties of pro football led him to pursue a fallback—pre-law—but when offered the job of coaching at a prep school in Maryland, he took it and won the state title. In 1931, he returned to Massillon High School as its coach, a job he held for nine years, winning the state crown six times.
Even at this low level, he formulated highly advanced theories and modes of behavior for players, turning high school into a Plato’s forum of football study. It was here, developing his split-T, perpetual-motion offense and complex zone defense, that Brown wrote the first playbook, with any given play determined by what the sports geeks today call analytics—predictive models based on the chances of success for a play on a given down and distance. Nobody ever really understood it all except Brown, who used hand signals from the sidelines to call plays. He also utilized a tightly organized nexus of allied coaches and scouts to attract players from across the state, not caring a whit if they happened to be black.
Glowering and distant, he was a strict taskmaster, close to a martinet, always in a tie and gray suit with cleats, almost never smiling or indulging jokes. Few players, worked as they were like chattel, went as far as liking him, but they swore their souls to him. And by 1941, Brown was ready to take his arcane ways to big-time college football. Ohio State hired him at age 33; bringing some of his schoolboy players with him, he also signed purebred talent, such as the trucklike defensive lineman Bill Willis. In ’42, with the country at war and many team rosters thinned, Brown’s Buckeyes won the national championship. But then the Buckeyes were also at the mercy of the draft, and in ’44, Brown’s own number came, turning him into a lieutenant in the navy.
He was assigned to Naval Station Great Lakes, near Chicago, and did little else but coach the base team. Brown was far from unique in this respect. Early in the war, various arms of the service opened training programs at colleges, such as the navy at Purdue and Michigan. When the best football players arrived at their bases, commanding officers wanted them to keep playing. Among Brown’s players were two future Pro Football Hall of Famers: Willis and another pachyderm, the 240-pound prototypical fullback Marion Motley. In an acrid irony of the times, both of these African Americans were the stars of their base team, yet could only have served in segregated units. Another player on the squad was a Miami of Ohio halfback, Ara Parseghian, who hurt his ankle and never played, but could observe Brown on the sideline—an education he called “priceless” as his coaching path carried him to a national title with Notre Dame two decades later. Brown’s team became a national power, losing only to Notre Dame and his own Buckeyes. But then his path took another turn. As the war was winding down, in September of ’44, a competitor to the NFL, the All-America Football Conference, was born, the brainstorm of Chicago newspaperman Arch Ward. It began play when the war ended as an eight-team circuit of mainly big cities, including Cleveland, where the team’s owner, Arthur “Mickey” McBride, went after Brown with an immense offer: a $17,500 a year salary—more than any coach, college or pro, was earning—and a monthly stipend of $250 until the war’s end. Brown was loath to quit Ohio State for good, but that kind of bread proved irresistible.
The NFL in those days was hardly a model of how to run a business, but few believed that even Paul Brown could make the fledgling AAFC a success. Still, when the league began play in the fall of 1946, its owners had ponied up enough cash to sign over 100 NFL players. They even brought the first pro team to Florida, called the Seahawks. Out in LA, a team called the Dons was owned by a group that included Louis B. Mayer, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby. But Brown was the great equalizer, a one-man league. He came to Cleveland bearing talent loyal to him, including Motley and Willis, the only two black players on the roster. Coming shortly after the Rams had signed two black players, pro football had thus beaten major league baseball to integration; it would be seven months before Jackie Robinson arrived in Brooklyn.
The last thing Brown wanted was for the team to bear his name, but McBride forced it on him, and it fit. The rise of the team paralleled the postwar industrial boom and the explosive growth of a middle-class culture eager for new heroes. In this maw, the Browns became synonymous with the potential of pro football, a nearly unbeatable force mirroring the unlimited power of an America that held, for now, all the nuclear weapons. Future Hall of Famers abounded in Cleveland, the most celebrated being quarterback Otto Graham, who, when he was at Northwestern, had handed Brown his only loss in ’41 and another in ’43, proving one of Brown’s adages: anyone good enough to beat him belonged on his team. He paid Graham top dollar, $7,500 a year, to keep leading the Browns to their titles without interruption. In 1951, the NFL merged with the AAFC, taking in two other teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the original Baltimore Colts, just to be able to get the Browns within its purview; the Los Angeles Dons also merged separately with the Rams. And that was when the nearly obscure Don Shula entered into the pro football culture, as an afterthought.
The NFL draft—which began in 1936 with the first player ever chosen, Jay Berwanger, saying thanks but no thanks to pro ball—occurred on January 18 and 19, 1951, at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, where cigarette and cigar smoke choked an airless room as general managers made their picks over 30 monotonous rounds. There were no scouting combines, no workouts with individual teams, no football gurus weighing in with projections, no real-time media coverage. Players were either notified by phone or telegram. When it commenced, Shula was busy winding up his studies and running track.
The likes of Kyle Rote and Y. A. Tittle went early, and few took note of the last pick of round nine, when Paul Brown selected Don Shula. The next day, with the last pick in round 22, he picked up Taseff. Or at least that’s what the two roommates saw in the papers; no one from the team bothered to let them know. They were, of course, elated that the pro football caliph—who just weeks before had capped his first season under the NFL banner by defeating the team that once played in Cleveland, the LA Rams, on a last-minute field goal—had taken them; even better, two of their Carroll teammates were chosen, too, by other teams. But after two weeks, they still had not heard from the Browns. Shula, not one for sitting back and waiting, recalled, “I couldn’t have been any happier. [But] I couldn’t take the suspense any longer so I called them myself. They told me they were waiting until track season was over before contacting me. I felt greatly relieved, to say the least.”1
Brown may have grinned at the kid’s impudence. As it was, there was no guarantee he would make the team. Shula was prepared to fight like hell for a spot, but the realist in him told him to apply for a job with area high schools just in case, and he quickly had an offer to coach and teach math at Lincoln High School in Canton, where the NFL was born and where, in 1963, it became the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The offer was for $3,750 a year, but Brown was willing to sign him to a contract, sight unseen, for $5,000. The roommates traveled together to the Browns’ office, then went to a bar down the street and ordered martinis, which they’d never had before but believed was in order for men of their new status, and for Shula, his status as a 21-year-old able to legally imbibe—until he threw up all over the bar.
But now came a complication. Before they could report to the team’s summer camp at Bowling Green University, they got their notices from the government to begin their impending military commitments. When the draft board learned that they were about to begin playing for Paul Brown, they were allowed an extraordinary concession: they would report to the national guard’s 37th Infantry Division at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, but for only a month, after which they would be able to return to the gridiron, the balance of their hitches with the Ohio National Guard to be fulfilled at a future time. Any delay was welcome. At the time, the shadow of the Korean War was lengthening, and the country was steeling itself for more years of war, not that many could understand why; unlike the last war, there were no attacks on America and the objective wasn’t to free the world, but to contain the vague threat of “Red China” conquering a distant peninsula with two Koreas—one good, one not.
This was not easy for a man like Shula, who had clearly defined values and precepts of good and evil, to make sense of. Still, quite clear was that a football career seemed to be his means of avoiding picking up a rifle in anger. Taseff, who’d already seen combat, was made a sergeant at the base while Shula had to figuratively lick his boots, as a private. During this interim, a reporter from the Plain Dealer, Bill Cobbledick, caught up with the pair at the camp. Shula, his mind on football, told him, “Just say we hope to make the [Browns].” Taseff added that they were keeping in shape “running up and down these hills” and that, at his orders, “Don dug two foxholes today.”2
Shula met Paul Brown for the first time when he got to the Browns’ camp in mid-July, and it was all the kid could do to keep his knees from knocking. “I was,” he recalled, “completely in awe of the man.”3 For years, he had scrounged up enough money to buy Browns tickets, watching and making mental notes about how Brown coached, sounded, looked. He even took to walking around with his arms crossed at chest level—the iconic pose imitated by coaches everywhere. He read instructional pamphlets written by Brown, and thought about how to play within his sytem both on offense and defense. Once on the inside, theory became law. The first day of camp, Brown asked, “Why do we have a playbook?” The players, even the 30-something veterans, would begin scribbling on paper like grade-school kids. He’d do the same with complicated concepts, expecting in-depth essays about things like trap blocking and strong-side zone coverage. It was, Shula recalled with epic understatement, “tedious work.”
Brown explained his canons on the chalkboard and also had games—and even practices—filmed from different angles. At team meetings, he would run plays back and forth through a projector, with players called on, pop-quiz style, to answer impossibly technical questions. The meetings would stretch into the evening. The entire time, Shula said, Brown would “dictate and the players would write it down word for word.” They would surprise themselves when, after endless repetitions, they actually understood more than a little of the subject matter and took it into games. From the start, Brown, with Motley at fullback and halfbacks Dub Jones and Rex Bumgardner, never considered Shula or Taseff as offensive players; they were put on the depth chart as scrub defensive backs, where they had split their time at Carroll. Impressed by Shula’s quick reflexes and sure hands, Brown and his defensive backfield coach, Blanton Collier, penciled him in at safety. They were again impressed, and a tad amused, by the kid’s chutzpah. During a scrimmage, Motley broke through the line and rumbled down field, right at Shula, whom he outweighed by at least 40 pounds. Shula described what happened:
It was just the two of us in the open field. I came up to meet him, force against force. I lowered my head and put everything I had into the tackle. I wrapped my arms tightly around his legs and Motley went down. What a feeling of satisfaction I had. All of a sudden I heard Paul Brown’s voice.
“Nice tackle, Taseff!”
I couldn’t let that pass, not after the tackle I made. I looked back and yelled.
“It’s not Taseff who made the tackle, it was Shula. S-H-U-L-A.”4
Brown, he remembered, “broke into a laugh.” The coach seemed to be getting used to having him around. Midway through camp, though, he and Taseff could hardly believe it when they received letters from the government informing them that, just weeks after their first hitch, their national guard unit was being called up and their notices to report would be sent in the near future. As a result, Brown began reducing their playing time, not wasting that of other players who would still be around. Shula, in rare form, decided to march down to the unit’s armory in Cleveland. Confronting the commanding officer, he asked for an exemption, telling him, “Sir, my pro career is at stake.” And damn if the top cat didn’t see things his way, agreeing to wait until the end of the season to call Shula and Taseff to duty.
As crippling drills in the hot sun gradually turned into longer scrimmages, Shula’s name began showing up regularly in the Plain Dealer’s team reports. He was also gradually taken into the cliques of the veterans, he and Taseff invited to go out carousing with grizzled bears like Lou “The Toe” Groza—the left tackle/kicker who had booted the winning field goal to beat the Rams in the ’50 championship game—and Lou Rymkus, the right tackle. Ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie worked one-on-one drills with him, on their own. Even the famously icy, glowering Otto Graham shot the breeze with them.5
A tougher task than fitting in was learning Brown’s system. A reporter ventured that the players “more often look like scholars than bruising exponents of the ‘play-for-pay’ ranks.”6 As the season approached, Brown, with only 33 roster spots to fill, was apparently about to cut bait on Shula, perhaps relegate him to the “taxi squad,” so named because McBride also owned a fleet of cabs and would give these players jobs driving while they sat around doing nothing. Only some urging by linebacker Tony Adamle, the defensive captain, kept Shula aboard long enough to prove he belonged. That happened in the final preseason game, against the Rams, when all he had to do was prevent future Hall of Fame receiver Tom Fears from catching passes from future Hall of Fame quarterbacks Bob Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin.
Shula, wearing a rookie’s number, 96, had no hesitation in getting into a scrap with Fears on the first pass thrown to him. Making a hard tackle, Shula rolled Fears over. Thinking Shula was twisting his ankle, Fears kicked at Shula’s unprotected face, mashing his nose. Normally, this might have sent a Shula foot or fist back at him, but that would have gotten him run from the game and irked Brown. Instead, he coolly went back to his position—and proceeded to intercept two passes in a Browns win. Still, the Plain Dealer noted a week before the September 30 opener against the 49ers that among those expected to be cut were Shula and Taseff. The way Brown made his cuts, envelopes would be given to the victims. When Shula and Taseff got theirs, they were loath to open them; when they finally did, the letters inside told them they had cheated the hangman; they were the only rookies to make the team. “I was,” Shula would recall, “the happiest guy on the face of the earth.”
He and Taseff, who wasn’t totally safe, being put on the taxi squad, shared an apartment at 1596 East 34th Street. He also gave his parents a hefty portion of his paycheck. That had been part of the bargain for rejecting the priesthood: his assurance that playing football for a living was honest work.
Brown’s defensive system worked out of a 5–3–3 alignment: the five down linemen, including a middle guard—or nose tackle—and three mobile linebackers. His defensive backfield was held down by rangy, hard-hitting cornerbacks Warren Lahr and Tommy James. An opening did develop when safety Ken Gorgal, who had six interceptions as a rookie the season before, was called into the service for two years. Brown said that four guys might get that job—Shula, Stan Heath, Ace Loomis, and Ken Carpenter—but he went with a veteran, Cliff Lewis, who was also Otto Graham’s backup. Shula, assigned to special teams, would have to wait for his shot. Taseff would come off the taxi squad and be used, rarely, as a kick returner and scrub fullback and defensive back. The season began with a rare poor effort, a 24–10 loss to the 49ers. The Browns then had an early critical match against the Rams in LA. After falling behind 10–0, they awoke and came away 38–23 winners. Typical of Brown’s teams, they would not lose thereafter, and only two games were remotely close.
Shula had more to do with the team’s performance than anyone would have thought. Before the third game, against the Washington Redskins, Tommy James was hurt in practice and Brown started the mouthy kid he had nearly cut. That week, Brown personally tutored him during practices, giving him a priceless education in four days. Brown’s teams were so strong that the substitution hardly mattered. With Shula meshing perfectly with the veterans, they beat the ’Skins 45–0—typically, not good enough for Brown, who moaned that they had played “sloppy” but had gotten the breaks. Shula remained in the lineup when the Browns met the New York Giants, whose flinty coach, Steve Owen, was past his championship years but still employed a suffocating array of complex zone/man schemes of his own, dubbed the “umbrella defense,” and whose offense was led by Chuckin’ Charlie Conerly. Owen had beaten the Browns the year before in the regular season, but fallen in a playoff game. And the Browns had to scrape by, winning 14–13, the difference being a missed New York extra point. So intense was this affair that Motley, who had a bum knee and wasn’t supposed to play, got off the bench and limped into the huddle, without Brown’s permission, and pounded out key yardage.
This was a common dynamic for the Browns. Graham never missed a game in his career. When someone did miss a game, and the replacement did well, Brown kept the latter in the lineup. Thus did Shula make James a forgotten man for most of the season. He would play nine straight games, intercepting four passes—though in his memoir, he believed it was six. Against the Bears, on a day when Dub Jones scored a record-tying six touchdowns, the paper ran a stirring photo of the novice Shula, his outstretched fingers grabbing a pick. But Brown figured he needed to restore James for the final regular-season game, to prepare for the playoffs. Shula, gritting his teeth, was allowed the cold comfort of returning a kickoff, for six yards.
“Although I didn’t agree with Brown’s decision,” he would confess, “I kept my mouth shut. But it hurt. Oh, how it hurt. I felt as if my world had collapsed.”7
This was an early tell that when Shula later said that five yards was his life, he was dead serious. His life, his world, was football. To be sure, the season was a rush while it lasted for him; less so for Taseff, who rushed for 49 yards and scored two touchdowns, as well as catching a TD pass for 18. (The Plain Dealer, in a glorious typo, reported in October that he would be “filling in with the dickoff and punt return units.”) Accordingly, while Shula would look back with reverence for Brown, his judgment of the coach would become nuanced, and in some ways negative. As a member of a changing culture in the game, Shula bridled at the caliph’s antiquated rules that were, in reality, destructive—such as not allowing players to drink water during practices, however scorching-hot the day. Not only Brown, but, he would say, all coaches believed that water “was supposed to give you cramps or something, just like weightlifting supposedly made you muscle-bound.” Another was Brown’s favorite exercise, the duck waddle, which required players to walk through practice with their knees bent. That, Shula believed, “was absolutely the worst thing for your legs.”
There was an even greater imposition, if only for those who actually obeyed it: mixing the sporting life with archaic Episcopalian folderol about self-denial. Most players laughed about Brown decreeing off-limits any sexual activity except for Sunday night and the Monday day off, as well as smoking or drinking in public. Said Shula: “The no-sex-after-Tuesday thing was just something to kid about. . . . Brown used to talk about it in the meetings, and everyone would laugh and tell jokes. I mean, how would they check?”8
He stopped short of saying whether he himself made any effort to comply, though as a young bachelor with a healthy store of aggression and testosterone, his modern concept of piousness had loopholes for such manly norms. To be sure, willing women were available for the taking, a reward for men who made a good living on athletic fields.
As it was, Shula could see tension between Brown and Graham, who admitted years later—at Brown’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony, no less—that he had often “cussed out” the imperious coach.9 That was something other players, especially green, precociously hot-headed, individualistic ones like Don Shula, might have wanted to do but didn’t have the status, or the stones.10 While Brown would endure in the game until the dawn of the next millennium, his best years would fit into one decade and dim with acrimony between him and his players and McBride. When, years later, Shula spoke of coaches needing to deal “with sensitive kids, getting them to feel confident, the personal angle—and never to assume they knew what they didn’t,”11 it was clear that he was, by long distance and implication, putting Paul Brown behind him.
Though the Browns finished at 11–1, the close call they had the year before against the Rams was a sign the rest of the sport was catching up to them. Brown faced the Rams again in the ’51 title game in the Los Angeles Coliseum. They led 10–7 at the half, then wilted. Graham, who won the first of his three league MVP awards that season, and who played in the championship game every year of his career, coughed up a key fumble and threw three interceptions, while Motley and Jones ran for a combined 37 yards. The Rams went ahead, the Browns tied it late, and then Tom Fears snared a 73-yard pass from Norm Van Brocklin to win it, 24–17—Brown’s first defeat in a title match. “We just lost one—period. We lost a football game, that’s all,” was Brown’s stony postmortem. For Shula, however, no one deserved more blame than Brown—for benching him.
“I felt I deserved to start,” he said years later, taking his token appearance late in the game as an insult.
When the final gun sounded that day, he and Taseff were immediately eligible for duty with the national guard, again with the 37th Infantry, now bivouacking at Camp Polk in Louisiana. Found there by a reporter, Taseff said, “This is taking us away from a good job, but it has to be done and we might as well do it with a smile.”12 In truth, the only thing the pair could smile about was that, as the stalemated Korean War raged on, they never got any closer to Pork Chop Hill than the bayou, mainly playing on the camp baseball team. During a road trip, they even jumped the team to catch the College All-Star game and bend their elbows in Chicago, a side trip Shula would later admit was technically AWOL, though he admitted the jaunt was “a gas.” However, given the feral competition on the Browns, missing the team’s summer drills and the first two months of the 1952 season would put them on borrowed time with the team. When they were honorably discharged in mid-November, Shula brashly called Paul Brown to ask if he had a job. As it happened, Brown needed to replace an injured Tommy James again. After asking whether Shula was in shape, Brown said, “Get here by tonight.”
He and Taseff returned to Cleveland to be signed for another year at a $500 raise to $5,500. Starting the very next day against the Eagles, a typical face-first tackle left Shula with a busted, bloody lip and three loose teeth. He’d be stitched up and be ready for the next game, a plastic face mask—the kind being worn by some quarterbacks—nailed to his helmet, though this was a break with convention; as a Plain Dealer know-it-all believed, “Defensive backs cannot wear [them]. It ruins their chance to see enemy passes.”13 Shula played five games until James was healthy, intercepting no passes. He was then on the bench as the Browns finished their stroll to the ’52 championship game, though with a less-than-preeminent 8–4 record and with a spate of injuries.
They were an aging, brittle team now—Dub Jones and Mac Speedie would miss the next championship game, and Motley was crumbling—less sturdy than the Rams and the newest NFL power, the Detroit Lions, who edged out the Rams to face the Browns in the title round. The Lions were a team on a hard rise under coach Buddy Parker, with a quarterback who would have given Brown the vapors: the boozy Bobby Layne. The onetime Texas All-American could barely stand erect or focus his eyeballs, prefiguring Joe Namath as he partied and flaunted dates with beautiful women; out of vanity, he would never consent to wearing a face mask. Layne was All-Pro in ’52—even with a sub-.500 completion percentage and 20 interceptions to 19 touchdowns, hampered by favorite target, Doak Walker, being injured most of the season. In the title game, however, Layne threw an early touchdown, Walker ran another in from 67 yards, and the defense stymied Brown’s offense to win 17–7.
Shula and Taseff, who never came off the taxi squad, felt like they were dead to Brown. It was a logical assumption considering that, when Brown divvied up the losing share of the playoff pool—a full share came to $1,712.49—Shula was given a half-share for his half-season, one of several Browns who were stiffed.14 Shula had spent parts of the past two off-seasons working toward his master’s degree in physical education at Western Reserve Academy, a small college and prep school in Hudson, Ohio, to bolster his credentials as a coach/teacher. That March, still waiting to hear from the Browns about ’53, he picked up a paper, saw his picture, and read that he and Taseff had been part of a massive trade with the expansion Baltimore Colts. He was so livid that he had been dealt without as much as a call from Brown, or anyone else in the Browns’ front office, that he slammed down his coffee cup.
There was relief for young men like him when the fruitless conflict in Korea finally ended, in a stalemate, just before that 1953 season, after over 36,000 American combat deaths. The world had dodged a nuclear bullet, but was trapped in a Cold War mentality; the specter of commies hiding under beds would sacrifice innocent reputations and lives in televised witch hunts by the likes of a besotted Wisconsin senator. Once again, sports would be a narcotic for those with disposable income in a decade unfolding with placid, self-satisfied calmness, under which a rumbling of anti-heroism could be detected in the rebellious, laconic stereotypes up on the movie screens, exemplified by Brando in a T-shirt or leather jacket. The men who gave birth to the Baby Boom generation had their subdivisions and strains, but pro football had made it through the stormy years, auguring a boom soon to come. But from where Don Shula sat, his cashiering by Paul Brown posed a dilemma. If this was how they treated people of his high moral and physical fiber in the NFL, maybe he had given enough of his time to a dream that seemed less plausible every day.