The third team on Shula’s budding journey had begun in 1932 as the Boston Braves, then the Redskins, before owner George Preston Marshall moved them to D.C. in ’37. They won two NFL championships, in ’37 and ’42, and played in six title games by ’45, but had ebbed since the end of the war, though they usually contended under coach Joe Kuharich, who had played for Elmer Layden at Notre Dame and would later coach there. His team had several Pro Bowlers and a top quarterback in the sawed-off Eddie LeBaron, and Kuharich liked Shula’s smart, scrappy style. Shula arrived for the second game, a 37–14 laugher in which Kuharich brought him off the bench. However, he went through an emotional three-week stretch in November when the team played the Browns twice, sandwiched around a game with the Colts.
The first was in his old digs, Municipal Stadium. Paul Brown had Jim Brown now, but the ’Skins led 10–7 at the half and hung in, though they lost 21–17. The Colts then came into the Erector set–like Griffith Stadium, and if Shula thought he’d be less vulnerable to Unitas and Berry than he had been in those practices, he learned otherwise. The first scores of the game were identical—Unitas to Berry, twice, the first for 67 yards, both times in Shula’s area. In the Colts’ 21–17 win, Berry set a team record with 13 receptions, and Shula guessed years later that “nine or ten” were against him. Afterward, Unitas may have been tweaking him when he said, “It was asking too much for their wingbacks [cornerbacks] to cover deep passes and also come up to stop the running plays.” In the rematch with the Browns, the ’Skins had a 10-point lead entering the last quarter, then had to salvage a 30–30 tie. It was satisfying, but at 2–5–1, they were out of contention. They would finish strong, winning three of the last four, and in the loss to the Eagles, Shula picked off Sonny Jurgensen and rambled for a 30-yard return. In the end, their 5–6–1 season was another waste for Shula, who had three picks but was also picked on. When Kuharich filled out his depth chart after the new year, he listed a rookie as the starter at right cornerback and ranked Shula third.
Shula saw that and knew the score. He received no offer from the ’Skins for 1958. He could have tried to sign on with another team, but he was 27 now—an old 27. And if he didn’t want to lose Dorothy, it was time to shift his focus to more permanent pursuits. Apparently tired of waiting for him to finally propose, she applied for and was offered a teaching job in Hawaii. Recalled Shula: “She informed me of that, and I said, ‘What?!’ ”1 He tried to convince her she was making a mistake, but she was as stubborn as he and split. Knowing his halting career wasn’t going to win her over, he began thinking of coaching, a more long-term plan for the future, and resolved to pop the question if she’d come back home. He explained all this in a flurry of love letters to her. And she began to weaken. She was able to get a job back home, and so she returned in the middle of the bitter-cold Painesville winter, expecting a ring to be put on her finger. He had one for her, and the pair agreed on a date after the next football season, provided he landed a job as a coach.
“You can’t get along in my profession unless you have somebody at home,” he wrote in his memoirs. Toward that end, he had been calling around, seeing who needed assistants. When he went to a coaches’ convention in Philadelphia, he ran into Frank Lauterbur, an assistant coach at Army. The Cadets’ defensive-line coach, Dick Voris, had just taken the head coaching job at Virginia, which had a rich history but whose football program was hurting. Voris, he said, was looking for assistants, but could not convince the better ones to come. Lauterbur told Shula he’d put in a good word for him, and when a job offer for $6,500 was proffered in mid-February, Shula accepted without even speaking with Voris first. On February 18, Voris announced his new assistant, who would “specialize in defensive play.”
To be sure, it was a culture clash: the son of Hungarian immigrants in the land of the old Confederacy, making his coaching bones at the Charlottesville school founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, awash in the antebellum aristocratic heritage. At the time, only a handful of black undergraduates had been admitted, none to be allowed on the football squad until 1970. Even a half century beyond that, Charlottesville was infamously chosen as a rally site for white supremacists. Football had its own heritage in the South within the folds of racist exclusion, dating back at the school to 1888 and the South’s oldest rivalry, Virginia versus North Carolina. Through the years, the Cavaliers regularly ranked in the top 20. However, when Shula got there, school president Colgate Darden had all but gutted the program, blasting the influence of “big-time football” on academics, even refusing a Cotton Bowl bid. Playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference since ’53, its teams had given almost no scholarships since then.
Still, it was a job. And even with the pay cut he took, Shula was now able to marry Dorothy, who always melted when he put aside his macho preening and spoke of things like love, family, and God. They wed at St. Mary’s on July 19, 1958, leaving just enough time before training camp for a honeymoon at the New Jersey shore and for her to move into his cramped, off-campus apartment, the beginning of a life she would live in constant flux until they could become settled, and with a husband totally immersed in the minutiae of football.
Shula helped Voris erect a defense based on the Paul Brown model, putting the players through its highly repetitive paces. The Cavaliers had a quality running back, Sonny Randle, but little else. They finished 1–9, with an offense, ranked 102nd among 112 college teams, that scored just five touchdowns, all on passes to Randle—who praised Shula for taking time off from the defense to give him a few tips on running strategy. “Coach Shula,” he said, “has really helped me on my movements this year. It takes a lot of extra work. You have different situations as the game progresses.”2 Shula’s defense, meanwhile, came in 111th. Worse, the games were surrounded by none of the pomp and wild fan support that flavored Saturday afternoon football in the rest of the South. At Virginia’s home grounds, Scott Stadium, there were more mosquitoes than fans. As Shula glumly remembered, “The college spirit wasn’t anything like I thought it would be.”3 Seeing no reason for hope—wisely so, as Virginia was in the midst of losing 28 straight, the second-longest losing streak in NCAA history—he talked it over with Dorothy and submitted his resignation, then went about searching for a job not on the Hindenburg. Indeed, Dorothy was all for it. Sharing his ambition, she had gotten in Voris’s face, arguing that her new hubby would never get to be a head coach if Voris kept sending him on the road to scout players. “I surprised myself,” she once said of that incursion. “Don, of course, was mortified.”4 Still, having her so fiercely behind him would always steel his spine.
Not incidentally, his old team was lifting the pro game to a level not far below the colleges in terms of public attention. In ’58, the Colts went 9–3, winning the NFL championship against the Giants in Yankee Stadium, a game forever to be known, fancifully, as the greatest ever played. In the first-ever sudden-death overtime, when Unitas led a long drive and Ameche ran through a gaping hole for the game-winning touchdown, the drama of continuously shifting tides kept building with each play, as did a national audience, establishing pro football as a sport for the TV age. Shula, watching at home in Painesville in his old apartment, where he and his new wife spent the off-season, figured he belonged in the coaching arc of the pro league, but he needed more on his coaching résumé to get there. He was prepared to pay some dues at the college level, where he seemed to be able find a job quickly. He made a repeat trip to the Philadelphia coaching convention and came upon Blanton Collier, his old backfield coach with the Browns. At 53, Collier had been the head coach at Kentucky since he replaced Bear Bryant in 1954. Surprised to see Shula looking for a job, he gave him one, as the Wildcats’ defensive backs coach. Offered $7,500 and a rent-free house on the campus for him and the now-pregnant Dorothy, Shula left the convention employed.
A couple months after the Shulas moved in, Dorothy gave birth to a son, David, in a Lexington hospital. As would become a fixed habit, Shula had scant time to be a dad before turning his attention to the job. The university, founded in 1865 just as the Confederacy expired, remained soldered to Jim Crow, going 84 years before admitting a black student in 1949, though none would be on the school’s sports teams until the late ’60s. Not that this was much of a concern to Shula, or to great numbers of white Americans conditioned to accept inbred racism. A coach, not a crusader, he entered a daily grind of skull sessions, again teaching the Paul Brown method. Collier’s brain trust were all football academics; indeed, this may have been the greatest assemblage of coaches on one staff in football history, with Shula joining assistants John North, former Kentucky All-America tight end Howard Schnellenberger, Bill Arnsparger, Ermal Allen, and Bob Commings. The first three of those would become NFL head coaches, and Schnellenberger also a championship college coach; Allen would be an assistant coach for Tom Landry, Commings the head coach at Iowa. The Wildcats’ backup quarterback, Leeman Bennett, would also become an NFL head coach, as did a later Collier assistant, Chuck Knox.
Schnellenberger, an engagingly windy man three years Shula’s junior who would assist five Hall of Fame coaches before becoming a head coach himself, sized up Shula this way:
I liked him and he liked me. But he was a pain in the ass. We used to play tennis after practice. We’d fight over each point, because he cheated. He would always yell, “It’s in!” on every ball that hit near the line. It could be ten feet away. We’d fight the whole time. I could do that when I was on his level. Later, when I was his assistant, we still played. But when he’d say, “It’s in,” all I could do was say, “Yeah, it was.” That’s what he did as a coach. He didn’t cheat, but he fought over every point.5
The problem for Collier, an avuncular fellow with thick glasses, wasn’t his coaches, but his players—or, rather, lack thereof. He was unable to recruit quality players to a school a cut below Southeastern Conference giants like Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Ole Miss, and Auburn. The football team was also a sideshow next to Adolph Rupp’s glorified roundball team coming off its fourth national title in ’58. As in Charlottesville, fan support for football in Lexington had waned. At historic Stoll Field—where the first college game in the South was played in 1880, and the first SEC game in 1933—attendance at some games didn’t reach the 30,000 capacity. With thin talent—not a single Wildcat would make All-SEC that season—they lost five of their first six and were thrice shut out.
The defense was solid, the 24th best in the nation, giving up 10.7 points a game. But, as with Virginia, the offense scored exactly zero rushing touchdowns all season, and only five overall. They ended at 4–6, and Shula put the blame for the mediocre season on the state of Kentucky itself, something he never would have dared to do in Ohio. There were, he said, only around a hundred quality players in the entire state of Kentucky, leaving scraps after the big programs took the best. The upside for Shula and the other assistants was that their work was recognized around the football meridians.
There was also a bigger employment pool for incipient pro coaches in 1960, with the American Football League starting up. Al Davis, for one, took his first pro job in the AFL, on Sid Gillman’s staff with the original Los Angeles Chargers. And Shula, having had two years to make his case to pro coaches like Gillman, reckoned that was enough to get out of the South. After the season, calls came from the Detroit Lions and Chicago Cardinals’ coaches, George Wilson and Pop Ivy. It was clear to the Wildcat staff that he already had a foot out the door. Said Schnellenberger, “Blanton wanted Don to stay. But you can’t stand in the way of a guy getting a better job.” A laugh. “Shit, we all wanted out. There was nothing to do in Lexington. It was a graveyard.”
Shula was interviewed by Wilson and Ivy on a single weekend in January, and he was offered the position of defensive backfield coach by both. The Lions intrigued him more. They had, of course, been an elite power in the ’50s. Wilson, a Papa Bear Halas protégé, had been on their staff since ’49, becoming head coach in ’57, when they routed the Browns in the title game. They had tanked since, though, perhaps hastened by Wilson trading Bobby Layne to the Steelers in exchange for another quarterback, Earl Morrall, a lumbering but talented former standout at Michigan.
Wilson, a respected coach, was relatively easy on his players. With top veteran talent, he glided along, letting his assistants do the grunt work. He already had a defensive-backs coach, Bob Nussbaumer, and wanted Shula to be more of a coordinator. Signed by general manager Edwin Anderson, his salary was $11,000 a year for two years—a pretty penny then, especially for a new father who had another child on the way; his daughter Donna was born on April 28, 1961. The Lions’ owner, automobile heir William Clay Ford, personally welcomed him aboard, and Shula made tracks out of the graveyard. “All he said to us,” said Schnellenberger, “was ‘adios.’ ”6
For Collier, it was just the beginning of the exodus of his staff. Within a year, Schnellenberger, too, would be gone, hired as his old coach Bear Bryant’s offensive coordinator at Alabama, where he recruited the teenage Joe Namath. Collier himself would fail upward; fired after that ’62 season, he leaped to the NFL—as the successor to Paul Brown, no less. In the small world of football coaching, Don Shula was already just a few degrees of separation from a good many coaches who would go on to mold the game.
Shula rented a house in suburban Allen Park for his growing family, though he spent most of his time in the Lions’ training headquarters in Bloomfield Hills, surveying the talent he’d have. He could almost hear a faint bluesy trumpet in the movements of Dick “Night Train” Lane, a four-time Pro Bowler, who came in a trade with the St. Louis Cardinals that year. At 31, he still wore the name of the 1952 blues song well, retaining much of the speed, stealth, and catlike reflexes that had enabled him to set the interception record—as a rookie—with 14. He’d become available because of gambling losses, but Wilson took a gamble on him—and won.
Shula also had a great safety, Yale Lary, and a real buster at middle linebacker, Joe Schmidt, who Art Donovan once said “had a neck like a killer turtle and was about as subtle as a heart attack.”7 Schmidt would win 10 first-team All-Pro selections and later coach the team, but there were also future All-Pros in cornerback Dick LeBeau and linebackers Wayne Walker and Carl Brettschneider. The draft brought another star, massive defensive tackle Roger Brown, a future six-time All-Pro who solidified the latest incarnation of the Fearsome Foursome front line with Alex Karras, Bill Glass, and Darris McCord. On the sideline, the Lions’ other assistant coaches included former Packer coach Scooter McLean, whose 1–9 record two years before got him fired and replaced in ’59 by a guy named Lombardi. The defensive line coach, Les Bingaman, a former Lions All-Pro, had once been arrested for domestic abuse. He also owned a downtown bar. One night, after he served Bobby Layne seven scotches, the quarterback was arrested for drunk driving. He got off easy when Bingaman admitted that he saved money by putting only a small amount of booze in his bar’s drinks.8
Spending the first half of games in the press box, getting a feel for the flow of things, Shula would then make changes at halftime and spend the second half on the sideline, barking out signals. His key was Schmidt, who got less publicity than Sam Huff or Bill George, the other elite middle linebackers, but was clearly better than either, and ranked ahead of Shula’s old Colt teammate Bill Pellington. Schmidt was even more sneering and snarling, taunting opponents by calling them “honey” and blowing them kisses, which he could get away with because he almost always nailed the ball carrier. No defense was as scary as the Lions’, but on the other side of the ball, it was a mess. During the 1960 season, the quarterback, Jim Ninowski, would throw two touchdowns and 18 interceptions. But Shula was helping to rig up suffocating zone defenses, and after the team stumbled early, losing the first three, the repeat champion Colts came into Briggs Stadium. As Ewbank feared, Shula knew them like the back of his hand and could decipher any shifting the Colt offense did to hide its tendencies. The score was 19-all in the fourth quarter, but the Lions kicked two field goals. Then Night Train Lane picked Unitas and ran 80 yards for the touchdown to ice the game. Six weeks later, they did it again, whipping the Colts in Baltimore, 20–15, intercepting Johnny U three times.
They also beat the Green Bay Packers in the annual “black and blue” Thanksgiving game, 23–10—the game entered team lore as the “Thanksgiving Day Massacre,” in which the Fearsome Foursome swarmed Bart Starr like a pack of rottweilers, sacking him 10 times (sacks were charted, but were not yet an official league stat), once for a safety. The home crowd was so eager for more hits that they booed when the offense took the field. Still, there were not enough of these moments. The Lions wound up 7–5, behind the Packers, who went to the NFL championship game. There, Lombardi lost his only postseason game as a coach, to the Philadelphia Eagles. The Lions’ consolation prize was to play in the inaugural Bert Bell Benefit Bowl, a really bad idea that would be dubbed by players and the press as the Runner-Up Bowl or Loser Bowl. Held a week before the annual Pro Bowl all-star contest, it pitted the divisions’ second-place teams against each other, honoring Bell, who had died in 1959, and benefiting the players’ pension fund. Both postseason games were more like expense-paid vacations. But Sports Illustrated has retrospectively called the Bell event “the worst kind of garbage time,”9 staged in the Orange Bowl, under the hot Miami sun, with players preparing mainly by lying around and drinking margaritas. Though no records were recognized, and the games were classified as exhibitions, Shula could take some pride in winning the first one 17–16 over the Browns; moreover, the Lions would win the first three Bert Bell Bowls. Garbage time or not, it went on the résumé and earned the winners up to 600 bucks in mad money.
Don Shula had definitely solidified his job. The Lions’ defense had forced and recovered 15 fumbles and, after giving up 275 points the year before, yielded only 212, third-best in the league. Night Train, freed by Shula to use his favorite weapon—grabbing opponents’ face masks, twisting their heads like a bottle cap—was so terrifying that the league thereafter banned the move. In the ’61 season, the Lions ticked up a notch, but again finished behind the Packers at 8–5–1, sending them back to the Loser Bowl, to beat the Eagles.
More and more, little by little, Shula was making gains and being noticed for his work. Back in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer seemed eager to pimp him. One puff piece by Gordon Cobbledick read: “Much of the credit for the uniformly fine performance of the [Lion] defense is given by the Detroit staff to Don Shula. . . . ‘Definitely head coaching material,’ is the way admiring Detroiters now describe the ex-Blue Streak.”10 To be certain, Shula was not content to remain a highly respected adjutant. As it was, Wilson trusted his judgment enough to send him on spring scouting missions, watching college scrimmages prior to the ’62 draft. On his recommendation, the Lions’ first pick was Kansas quarterback John Hadl. But Hadl was kept away from the team by Sid Gillman’s top lieutenant with the relocated San Diego Chargers, Al Davis, who in the parlance of the day “babysat” Hadl, keeping him under his watch until he eventually signed with the Chargers. Hadl would be a four-time AFL All-Star and then lead the unified NFL in passing yards and touchdowns in 1971, and failing to get him for the Lions left a burr under Shula’s saddle. Shula and Davis were interlocked in history, and if Shula lacked Davis’s boastful grandiosity, they both shared a desire for world domination. As yearlings, the two of them were already in a race upward, their ambitions burning so brightly that neither of them had to wait long before they could snipe at each other from the very top of the football sanctum.