11

 

“THE BIGGEST THING SINCE BUBBLE GUM”

Many around Baltimore, and the NFL, wondered how Shula could possibly recover from the stain of the biggest upset any sport had ever experienced. Dorothy took the heat even more personally than he. When an expletive-laced “fan” letter criticizing him came to their mailbox, she couldn’t sit idly by. Somehow tracing the sender’s phone number, she called him, posing as a law enforcement agent and putting a good scare into the guy, threatening to come and arrest him.¹ All Shula could do was press on, cloaked in shame and with Unitas’s once-golden arm rusting. Because the tendons in his right elbow would further weaken, after his career he would need to use his left hand to write. Yet he would be Shula’s starting quarterback again in ’69. The would-be hero of the previous season, Earl Morrall, the reigning MVP, went back to his accustomed spot on the bench. Not that this made Unitas any less irritable.

Shula had lived a charmed existence, held unaccountable for all the postseason failure. Even now, the goodwill he had built up shielded him. While there was predictable second-guessing about him keeping Unitas on the bench too long, among other grievances, no writers or fans were calling for his head. One letter to the Sun read, “Mr. Shula worked hard to make a team that is a real team [that] I’m sure will be right next year.”² Still, the sorrow and pity seemed to cling to him, and was intensified by a sort of guilt by association when the similarly favored Orioles lost to the “Amazing” New York Mets in the ’69 World Series; such titanic failure seemed somehow endemic to the descent of Baltimore itself. The Orioles’ manager, Earl Weaver, a sort of blustery mini-Shula, would at least be able to say he broke this paranormal grip the very next season. But for Shula, there was a subtle difference in the way his men would see and play for him. Invincibility didn’t drip off him; vulnerability did. In fact, Shula would confide to Howard Schnellenberger that he spent hours in church praying to get past the Jet infamia. “He was confused about why it happened, why God put him through that,” Schnellenberger said.³

Just getting past that winter was a task. Shula and Dorothy got away, taking a vacation in Mexico, but the wounds were raw. Blaming the Baltimore writer who reported C.R.’s caustic remarks about him, Shula gave few of the local beat men his time; instead, he gave an interview to his old Cleveland bobo Chuck Heaton during the league’s March winter meetings in Palm Springs, California. “It was tough for a while,” he said of the post–Super Bowl malaise. “People [won’t] let me forget it.” Heaton’s story was helpfully titled SHULA’S STAR STILL RISING.⁴ But the past would always be present, keeping his insecurities close to the surface. During the winter meetings, he was at the pool at the El Mirador Hotel when a page came over a speaker: “Call for Don Shuler.”

Looking for a phone, he half-laughed, half-grunted.

“If that was Vince Lombardi,” he said, jaw clenched, “they wouldn’t have mispronounced his name.”

As it happened, Lombardi had returned to coaching that ’69 season, as the new czar of the Washington Redskins. No one doubted that he would reclaim his imprimatur. Shula, meanwhile, approached the season searching for redemption, acknowledging, “We have to start all over again.” Not kidding himself that his “all-time great” defense could stand pat, he used a second-round draft pick to take Miami’s mayhem-making, two-time All-American linebacker Ted Hendricks, who at six foot seven and 220 pounds had been anthropomorphically nicknamed “The Mad Stork,” or “Kick ’Em in the Head Ted.” The second pick in that round brought a replacement for Bobby Boyd, who had retired at only 31, ranking third all-time in interceptions: Texas A&M corner Tommy Maxwell; both would start on an otherwise veteran squad. Shula and Arnsparger, a milquetoast-looking guy often mistaken for a schoolteacher, brainstormed a new zone scheme. “We called it a double zone, which they call two-deep now,” said Rick Volk. “The safeties covered half the deep zone and everyone else was in shifting middle zones. It worked because Hendricks was so tall and fast, but it was really Curtis at middle linebacker that made it work. He could go from one zone to another on the same play, and even cover deep. To use a middle linebacker deep, I’d never seen that, but I sure as hell saw it after that, all over the league.”⁵

As the last pre-merger season neared, Rosenbloom stopped kvetching. Shula’s contract, which was structured to renew every five years, still had four years to run, and for all his diffidence about coaches, C.R. still needed him. The problem for Shula, who himself was still under 40, was that he had a geriatric team not unlike the Packers, who had come apart all at once. He also lost Chuck Noll to the Steelers, leaving Shula feeling much the way he had left Blanton Collier, saying how much he hated losing a “fine young man” to a better job, but in the lurch because of it. Shula moved in Bobby Boyd as defensive backfield coach. Braase and Szymanski had also retired, but still 11 Colts were 30 or over, and Unitas was 36, while Morrall was 35. Morrall contemplated retiring as well, but Shula talked him out of it. While many of the holdovers were in their prime, a free-spirited newbie like Hendricks could feel like he was walking into a corporate boardroom. As he would later say, the Colts were “an old team, very set in their ways.” Shula had not drafted or traded for a young quarterback, putting his full bet on winning now.

The Colts were favorites to win it all. But Shula was being henpecked by doubters. Al Davis, still fighting the expired war between the leagues, popped off in late August that the Colts were “not that great a team,” and that “their defense is suspect.” Shula shot back that Davis was trying to “copy Joe Namath’s psychology.”⁶ Yet slings and arrows followed the Colts into the season, with Shula feeling very much alone and on the spot, cold-shouldered by NFL executives. And it would only get worse.

Though Unitas was back, he took a hit in preseason that left his knee throbbing. Mackey, too, hurt a knee while Shula experimented with him at fullback. Multiple other injuries hit the team as Shula was refitting his defense, with two new starters at linebacker, Hendricks and second-year man Bob Grant, and two more in the secondary, Maxwell and third-year pro Charlie Stukes. A strange hybrid of tried and true and untested, the Colts swept all six preseason games and opened the season at home against the Rams. Leading 17–10, with Unitas throwing touchdowns to Mitchell and Orr, they crumbled. Unitas was intercepted three times, Roman Gabriel threw three touchdowns, and George Allen walked off with a 27–20 win.

Shula could brush that off as a wake-up call. But the next week, in Minnesota, he had no explanation for what he saw before his eyes. “Indian Joe” Kapp, who threw the feeblest-looking passes known to man, cranked up and administered the worst beating a Shula defense would ever endure. He threw for seven touchdowns and 449 yards. It was 31–7 at the half, 52–14 at the end. Unitas, after going 8-for-22, gave way to Morrall, who threw a touchdown and two more picks. The Colts were outgained 538–195. Shula looked like a ton of bricks had landed on him.

“This is the first defeat since I came here that I’m ashamed of myself and the football team,” he said. “Hate to be connected with any of it.” Accepting blame, he went on, “It’s my job to get them up for the game [and] they weren’t ready to play.” Then, “I’m going to have to take a long, hard look at every phase,” even using the word quit, and that he would evaluate everyone. “Something has to be done and it has to be done now.”

Confirming fans’ fears, the team still seemed hungover from the Super Bowl, trapped in a crisis of confidence. Had Rosenbloom been in a mood, Shula might not have made it to the third game. But that was when he did some of the best coaching of his life. Against the Falcons, the Colts led early, only to fall behind 14–7. Then rookie Jim Duncan ran a kickoff back 92 yards to tie it, and in the fourth quarter, Unitas, who completed 18 of 24 passes, led a drive that ended with a six-yard touchdown toss to Mackey, winning it 21–14. Against the Eagles a week later, they never led until, again in the last quarter, a long drive and a short TD run by Matte gave them a 24–20 win, Unitas passing for 250 yards but also throwing two more picks. They beat the Saints 30–10, lost to the mediocre 49ers, blew away Lombardi’s Redskins 41–17, and topped the Packers 14–6, even with three more Unitas picks.

The Colts were 5–3, but shaky, Unitas throwing so poorly that Shula yanked him in the 49er game for Morrall, who went down with an injury. Having refused to draft a quarterback, Shula had no third man, and Unitas came back and threw a touchdown to Perkins for a late lead, but John Brodie pulled it out with a TD pass to Jimmy Thomas. That was pretty much how the season went, the Colts on their heels. In November, Shula seemed ready to concede. “It looks like we are out of it,” he said.

To Cameron Snyder, Shula seemed “strangely unemotional.” Indeed, in his mind, Shula may have had a foot out the door. As Volk said, “We were taking a lot of heat, and I’m not sure Shula thought he’d be around to fix it, or wanted to be, because he knew Carroll wouldn’t have any patience.” Snyder defended Shula as the “whipping boy” for ills left unaddressed by management. Yet by midseason, Snyder wrote in a mock memo to Colt fan Spiro Agnew, “If you don’t want your name associated with a loser, please stop following your favorite team, the Baltimore Colts.”⁷

Bobby Boyd said years later that Shula was a dead man walking that season, never able to shake off the Jet loss. Before the Ram finale, Snyder reported “rumors of [Shula] leaving,” which may have been fed by Shula himself in confidence. Openly, though, he dismissed them, saying, “I am perfectly satisfied here.” Only partly giving him the benefit of the doubt, Snyder opined:

Shula isn’t a devious man [but h]e would be silly, which he isn’t, not to want a deal like Vince Lombardi got at Washington, which included a piece of the action. But the first to know . . . would be Carroll Rosenbloom, because Shula would tell him immediately.⁸

Shula may well have made such a demand to stick around, perhaps as a poison pill that Rosenbloom would surely reject, thus giving Shula a basis for leaving. If so, it was all kept on the downlow as the season played out. And the Colts didn’t quit on him. “We really were ready to pack it in a few times,” Volk said. “He wouldn’t let us.” While Unitas was never healthy, and put up stats he would have sneered at in the past—2,343 yards, 13 touchdowns, 20 interceptions, 64.0 passer rating—they lost only twice over the last eight games, gaining the fourth-most yards in the league. Even when a loss to Landry in Dallas in the penultimate game finished them, their record 7–5–1, Shula leaned on them to rough up the playoff-bound Rams in the finale on the coast, winning 13–10, holding Allen’s team to 153 total yards.

An 8–5–1 season wasn’t exactly a disaster, and wouldn’t seem to have been fatal to Shula. In fact, Rosenbloom could still smell a championship if things broke right the next season. Shula, too, looked ahead with enthusiasm. “This is the team you’ll see next year,” he said, adding the Rams win “justified all our beliefs.” Bill Curry was so taken with that game, he gushed, “Right now I feel like we’ve just won the world championship,” which only seemed to signify how far the team had fallen. But Shula seemed overly sensitive to criticism. He had been writing an innocuous weekly column for the Sun at the same time that Bert Bell Jr., son of the late commissioner, who had quit a job in the Colt front office in ’66, wrote a sports column. Shula believed Bell was taking shots at him.

“Bert,” he told him, “I’ll pay you $35 not to write the column.”

When Bell refused, Shula gave the editors an ultimatum: him or me. They sided with Bell. In spite, Shula gave up the gig.⁹ Other small things peeved him, and he was clearly seeking a way out of Baltimore. If the right offer came along, he was prepared to listen, even though he was under contract and risked opening himself to allegations of tampering. He was too smart not to know this, but in matters as profound as maintaining his lofty status and self-respect, morality was not a factor. At least not until he could get to the confessional.

Rosenbloom apparently had his own agenda: keeping Shula while having the license to embarrass him. Right after the turn of the decade, Shula and his assistants went to Mobile, Alabama, to coach the South team in the Senior Bowl. During practices that week, word broke that Rosenbloom had upgraded the role of the Colts’ general manager, hiring Don Klosterman from the Houston Oilers.

The 40-year-old Klosterman, who had once backed up Otto Graham with the Browns and Bob Waterfield with the Rams before being partially paralyzed in a skiing accident, was a big mover and shaker among the AFL elite. Previously, as GM of the Kansas City Chiefs, he’d set them on the path to two Super Bowls—the second of which would come just a week after the Senior Bowl, when they demolished the Vikings. For Rosenbloom, Klosterman would ease the transition to the AFC. Shula, though, was either not quite ready to elevate the Colts’ new conference to parity, or else just not keen on ceding any of his authority. When the owner felt him out about making the move, Shula said he didn’t think Klosterman could be pried away from Houston. Rosenbloom swore he could do it, and made it official on January 7, three days before the Senior Bowl. By then, his work done, C.R. prepared to set sail on a cruise to the Far East with his wife, former lounge performer Georgia Frontiere. He left it to his son, Steve, whom Carroll had made president of the Colts, to introduce Klosterman at a press conference.

Asked how Shula and Klosterman would work together, Steve said each had his duties. Then, throwing in some ill-executed but telling humor, he added, “Of course we all know that the only reason Shula was made a vice-president is that we needed one more person around to sign checks.”¹⁰ Shula was said to be “highly disturbed” by the comment.

The next day, after Carroll Rosenbloom and Klosterman flew to Mobile to observe the Senior Bowl game, a prickly Shula told C.R. what he thought of the remark. The owner insisted his son meant it as a joke, but said he understood why it bothered Shula. Even so, seeing the two poobahs together, Shula would later write in his memoir that he could see “major changes” ahead, and that “they knew what was going on,” but he didn’t. Shula’s one-off as a college head coach was a wild affair, his quarterback, Louisiana Tech’s Terry Bradshaw, and the West’s Dennis Shaw conducting a shootout that ended in a 37–37 tie.

Shula then returned to Baltimore, still preferring to believe he had control of the football operation. He and Klosterman put their heads together for the late-January draft, in which, with their first-round pick, they agreed on TCU’s bowling ball–shaped fullback Norm Bulaich, passing on the Heisman Trophy winner, Oklahoma fullback Steve Owens.

But if the coach expected comity, he was more optimistic than Harry Hulmes, who had been demoted to assistant general manager and then, only days after smiling for photos with Klosterman, quit to take the GM job with the Saints (later to spend 25 years in the Giants organization). Shula, too, felt demoted. After having represented the Colts at the league’s annual winter meetings every year since becoming their coach, he was informed by Steve Rosenbloom that his presence at this year’s meetings in Honolulu was not needed; Klosterman would go instead. Growing more wary of his own allies, Shula demanded that Steve phone his father so that he could hear from the horse’s mouth just what his responsibilities were. As Shula recounted, the elder Rosenbloom again became incensed, telling him he was ungrateful despite “everything he had done for me.” Shula called the one-sided conversation “one big continual tongue-lashing.” As a sop, Rosenbloom said he would pay for him and Dorothy to stay a few days at the owner’s oceanfront club in Miami Beach. He ended the discussion seeming to dare Shula to quit, saying that if Shula had “decisions” to make, meaning leaving, to go ahead and make them. He did not say anything about giving him permission to do so, but to Shula, that seemed no reason to keep from doing it.

By early February, rumors were flying that Shula was on the way out. One had it that he would become the Packers’ head coach, though how he could do that, or make any jump without Rosenbloom’s permission, and perhaps compensation for the Colts, wasn’t explained. A reporter sought out Dominic Olejniczak, the Packers’ chairman of the board, at the winter meetings. He said, tongue in cheek, “Yeah, we got him.”

More seriously, a strong clue came when Bill Arnsparger suddenly resigned for what were called “personal reasons,” to accept a “business opportunity,” which left open the possibility he could rejoin Shula with a different team. However, it was already getting a bit late for such a move. The draft had already taken place, and Shula later said he had received only one call from another team about his availability, identifying it only as “one of the stronger franchises.”¹¹ If it was an AFL-cum-AFC team, he may have concluded by now that the parity between the former leagues, which was only proven when an anvil fell on Shula at the Orange Bowl, was indeed complete. Indeed, jumping to a native AFL team seemed like a smart move. After several conversations, however, he said the mystery team had decided to stay with its coach.

The truth was, he was desperate to get out, feeling “ignored and left behind.” He might even have quit, walking away from the contract that suddenly felt like paid servitude, until he could plot his return. But something else had happened, seemingly out of the clear blue, when in mid-January, Bill Braucher, a sportswriter for the Miami Herald and a former teammate of Shula at John Carroll, called him with a most unusual query: Would he be interested in becoming coach of the Miami Dolphins? That one was really out of left field. All Shula knew about the Dolphins was that his old boss George Wilson, after being fired in Detroit, had taken the head coaching job there when the AFL expansion club began play in ’66. Wilson had gone 15–39 in three years, and both he and the team went nearly unnoticed. Startled, Shula asked his old friend if he was somehow making him an offer.

“I have the authority to speak about it,” Braucher replied, a clearly unethical role for a journalist who covered the team, and possibly in contravention of the league’s tampering rules.¹²

As Braucher explained years later, he and Edwin Pope, the Herald’s sports editor who also wrote a popular column, had been called into Dolphins owner Joe Robbie’s office the day before. Robbie, unsatisfied with Wilson, was thinking big. He had already offered the head coaching job to Bear Bryant, who considered it but begged off. That made it possible for Shula to be the next to get the offer. Robbie, a highly personable man of Irish-Lebanese descent, had fronted an eight-man cartel of Lebanese-Americans, including the actor Danny Thomas and entrepreneur George Hamid, that bought the fledgling Dolphins in 1965 for an $8 million franchise fee to the AFL. He was a savvy business guy and pitchman, much like Rosenbloom, and was also a player in Democratic Party politics, having once made an unsuccessful run for governor of his native Minnesota and a confidant of Hubert Humphrey. Although he had seemingly waited too long to make a coaching change for 1970, he asked the two scribes who they thought would be a good coach to hire.

Pope’s first suggestion: Don Shula. All three men knew he was bound contractually to the Colts, so Robbie asked Braucher to act as his beard. Desperate as he was, Shula listened.

“So Robbie is aware of it?” he asked Braucher.

“That’s right.”

“Tell him I’ll call him in the morning.”¹³

He did—technically a breach of league rules specifying that any initial contact by a team with an interest in another team’s coach must be from management to management. Shula waded in deeper, asking about being given part ownership in the Dolphins, which Robbie said would be possible. Robbie asked how many more years he was signed for. Shula said three. “That wouldn’t be a problem,” Robbie replied. All this was treading on dangerous ground, and Shula’s conscience kicked in—though not so much about Wilson being sacrificed. He told Robbie he had to talk first with Steve Rosenbloom and request permission to talk turkey with Robbie.

“What about Carroll?” Robbie asked.

Shula told him he was on his cruise, and “unavailable.” But was this true? Was C.R. unavailable even by ship-to-shore radio, or telegram? Was a business mogul like him ever out of the loop? Or was it simply more fortuitous for Steve to be put on the spot and have to make the momentous decision to grant his coach permission to skip out, bare months before spring camp?

Whatever the case, the next day, Shula called Steve, whose snap decision was that he wouldn’t stand in the way of his advancement. Shula then notified Robbie, and said he could contact Steve for confirmation. It’s plausible that Steve acted this graciously because he did not believe the Dolphins, who operated on a shoestring playing in the sparsely attended Orange Bowl, could afford Shula, or that Shula would be eager to coach a team so unfulfilling. But Steve underestimated Robbie. A lawyer and lobbyist for the tobacco industry, he seemed to be able to raise other people’s money—he had only ponied up $100,000 of his own for the partnership that bought the team, and then, as Al Davis did a few years later in becoming the Raiders’ managing general partner, consolidated his power by systematically buying out the original partners. He had long-range plans to build a new stadium, so he could stop paying the city rent to use the Orange Bowl, and he was starting to recruit well-heeled donors for the project. And he was prepared to make Shula a very rich man.

Over the next few days, Robbie flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with Shula and his lawyer, David Gordon, at the Marriott. The pair then traveled to Miami to hunker down with Robbie at the chic Jockey Club. When Shula looked up from his table, he saw none other than Vince Lombardi at the bar, along with the New York restaurant owner Mike Manuche. He bade Vince to join him and Lombardi—who, unknown to most people, was dying of cancer—asked what Shula was doing in town. Shula lied that he was on vacation.

A deal in principle was reached the next day, and Shula flew back to inform the Colts. For that, however, Steve wouldn’t do. He needed to give the word to Carroll Rosenbloom, who suddenly was available, after all. Shula recalled the owner acting “kind and understanding,” echoing Steve’s original judgment that he couldn’t stand in the way of Shula moving on. Rosenbloom said he would talk to Robbie to give his official assent and to discuss proper compensation. That conversation only occurred on Wednesday, February 18, with Shula having been prematurely signed and about to be introduced by Robbie as his new head coach, regardless of when the Colts would assent. And Rosenbloom didn’t make things any easier. He told Robbie that the latter would have to notify Pete Rozelle that he was giving permission for Shula to terminate his Colts contract, and had attached a new condition that precluded Shula from speaking with his Colt assistant coaches until a new head coach was named, so that they wouldn’t flee to Miami. A joint statement was hurriedly released by the teams that day, but the issue of compensation was still to be worked out.

That afternoon, Shula, Dorothy, and Gordon, their plane fare to Miami picked up by Steve Rosenbloom, came to the Dolphins office to sign his contract, hours after Robbie fired Wilson, offering him a lesser role in the organization. Then, at the hastily arranged press conference in a side room at the Jockey Club, the beak-nosed, bespectacled Robbie read the statement that rocked the sport. “With mixed emotions,” he began, “I announce that Don Shula is the new coach of the Dolphins after four highly satisfactory years of work by George Wilson.”

The details were still under wraps, but they were impressive. The “handsome young” Shula, as the AP called him in its report, would be paid $70,000 a year for five years, $10,000 more than he’d been making with the Colts. He would also be a team vice-president and own a three percent stake in the team, which at the time was valued at $15 million, making his stock worth $450,000. The deal finally gave him the perks that put him on the same plane as Lombardi, if not quite the same level (when St. Vince sadly died soon after, on September 3, 1970, his salary was $110,000 a year and his Redskins shares worth half a million dollars). Still, Robbie acknowledged the obvious: he had conceded quite a bit to land his man, who he said would own “a sizable chunk of the club.” Aware that his defection was thorny, Shula said that it had come about only because of “immediate and substantial interest” from Robbie, insisting, “The last two weeks have been murder. I weighed this deal from every angle.” And: “I have regrets in leaving Baltimore and a fine owner in Carroll Rosenbloom and I regret leaving that fine ball club of young men.”¹⁴ In the end, it was business, not personal—“Being active in ownership while still coaching is something I’ve always wanted,” even if he felt he needed to say “money certainly wasn’t the decisive factor.”

Because people were already blithely saying Shula had broken his contract, he made sure to point out that both Rosenblooms had given him permission to negotiate with Robbie. Putting a positive spin on it, he enthused that a new rivalry had been birthed, given that the two teams would play in the same division, as would the Jets, to meet twice each season starting that fall. “I expect the Baltimore-Miami rivalry will get pretty hot because of my move,” he added. Playing down the hard feelings sure to come out of Baltimore, he sounded quite believably sad to be “leaving a great organization” that “treated me very well,” as well as his friends and “a fine bunch of football players [who] I’m sure would enjoy beating me when we meet.” He concluded that Miami “wants a winner,” and that they would have one. “I don’t have any magic formula. I’m not a finesse man. I’ve always been straightforward with my ball players and we’ll depend on hard work.” Watching his new coach slickly handle the delicate matter of his mercenary exercise, Robbie swore to the fan base he hoped to ignite, “This is a red-letter day for the Miami Dolphins.” He repeated it more than once.

With beneficial timing, Shula was spared scrutiny and opprobrium in the Baltimore papers, as both the Sun and the News American had gone on strike on January 2, not to publish again for 74 days. In Miami, meanwhile, the papers were crackling. In the Herald, the headline DOLPHINS NAME SHULA COACH, GIVE HIM PART OWNERSHIP dwarfed lesser news such as NIXON REVEALS STRATEGY FOR PEACE IN ’70S, 5 OF “CHICAGO SEVEN” GUILTY ON RIOT CHARGE, and UNIFORM INTEGRATION APPROVED BY SENATE. Finally free to reveal the details of the process that lured Shula to Florida, Ed Pope wrote in his column that an “acquaintance” of Robbie had recommended Shula—that man being himself. He made sure to say, not quite accurately, that the acquaintance “fulfill[ed] both legalities and protocol.”¹⁵ The other player in that plot, Bill Braucher, passed up self-congratulation to hail the new man with a column titled DON SHULA—DETERMINATION-PLUS.

But Pope’s Herald writers were also reporting that the Dolphins players were hardly thrilled at the change. Luther Evans wrote that they were shocked that Wilson had been sacrificed after four years of slow progress. Quarterback Bob Griese said, “I hate to see George go.” Middle linebacker Nick Buoniconti said it was like “losing a father.”¹⁶ Sensing this undercurrent, Shula insisted that replacing Wilson was “one of my biggest regrets” about taking the job. “The man I’m relieving is a personal friend.” Wilson, for his part, gritted his teeth and said he wasn’t blaming anyone for the loss of his job. And, in a moment of goodwill, Steve Rosenbloom said, “We’re sorry to see Don go,” but “it’s our policy that, if anyone has a chance to better himself, never to stand in his way.”

Still, the notion that he was a contract breaker rankled Shula to no end. Some in the press did provide cover for him, one writer wondering if Klosterman had been somehow responsible for his defection. When the Sun published again, Bob Maisel would boil it down to “Don simply got too fantastic an offer to turn down. . . . You can’t blame him for accepting it. He was hemmed in here. He’ll be missed.” And, “If Don Shula isn’t an honest man, then I’m a poor judge of character. [And] I feel sure Shula thought he was acting in accordance with the rules.” Maisel also absolved Steve Rosenbloom for giving Shula permission, since Shula was going to sign that very day. “What could Rosenbloom say then except ‘yes’. . . . If he said ‘no,’ he had a disgruntled coach on his hands.”¹⁷

But now, some Colt players felt liberated to snipe at him. Don Shinnick said he felt betrayed that Shula hadn’t put him back into the lineup after he missed four games with an injury. The most savage was John Mackey, who believed he had been jerked around by Shula during the backfield experiment. Mackey—who had just been named the first president of the NFL Players’ Association and would sue the league over its restrictive free-agent policy known as the “Rozelle Rule,” which subjected player movement to prohibitive compensation—let loose a jeremiad, calling Shula a “dictator” and “two-faced,” and claiming that Shula had made Unitas a “puppet” and had “panicked” during the Super Bowl loss.

“I’m not a bit sorry he’s gone,” he said. “He thought he was the biggest thing since bubble gum.”¹⁸

As wounded as Shula was by epithets, he turned the other cheek, praising Mackey and his family, and wrote in his memoirs, “You never really know what a player thinks of you until after you have gone.”¹⁹ Shula had tried to head off snipe hunts like that by meeting with Klosterman before he left. Said Klosterman at the time, “Don said he realized the timing couldn’t be worse . . . leaving right after I came. He was concerned how that would look, and I appreciate his concern. I always liked Don.” Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Klosterman said he believed Shula “wouldn’t even have considered leaving except for the chance to become a part-owner.”²⁰

But the elder Rosenbloom, who wouldn’t match Robbie’s offer, wasn’t so magnanimous. When he bumped into Shula, now representing the Dolphins at the winter league meetings, Shula stuck his hand out, but C.R. “completely ignored me and turned his back on me.”²¹ Yet, when the owners took a vote in late May to approve Shula’s stock windfall in Miami, it was a unanimous aye.²² That was good enough for Shula to believe he could move on in peace, granting that “a lot of unpleasant things happened,” but that only one thing mattered: doing what was right for No. 1. Especially when it came with stock.

In Baltimore, though, there was no healing. Not so long as compensation was still to be determined. Despite his sanguine parting with Shula, Klosterman, no doubt at the behest of Carroll Rosenbloom, began tossing out words like “tampering,” “subversive,” and “unfair.” This was a slender thread indeed, given that both Rosenblooms had approved Shula’s defection. The senior Rosenbloom, once he had a chance to reflect on the irony that his underling had escaped to a place where he himself owned a home in Miami Shores, along with a beach club and several condos, and would have loved to own the team there, piped up, “Everybody in the country knows that fellow Robbie was tampering when he took Shula away from us. They waited until I got out of the country to continue their little talks.” Shula, he went on, “has very few fans among the players and I certainly am not one, either.” Not since Weeb Ewbank, C.R. said, did his coach have a rapport with the players, and Shula “left me with a legacy . . . the first NFL owner to lose the Super Bowl.” In the end, he claimed, Shula’s exit had actually saved him from having to fire him.²³

Irrational as he sounded, Rosenbloom did have one real grievance—the tampering issue—and he took it to Pete Rozelle. In April, Rozelle saw it his way. Conceivably, he could have sent Shula back to Baltimore because of it; instead, he ruled that the Dolphins had palpably tampered because they had made Shula an offer before being permitted to, and because Shula had not told the Colts he was signing with Miami until after he already had. Rozelle rewarded the Colts with Miami’s first-round draft pick in ’71, which would rob Shula of a vital building block.²⁴ That ruling hurt Shula the most, implying that, for him, the ends justified the means.

Defending himself, Shula called the decision “unfair,” claiming that other teams had done worse and gone unpunished. Though he conceded in his memoir that, under a “strict interpretation” of the rules, “I guess [my actions] could be wrong,” he argued that “there weren’t any undercover dealings.” That being so, he concluded, “I believe the Dolphins were victimized,” perhaps inferring that the old league was exacting retribution for losing to the AFL.²⁵ That would also explain why he grumbled that Rozelle kept quiet about fining Rosenbloom $5,000 for his vicious personal insults.

Back in Baltimore, there was chaos, and even scuttlebutt that Unitas might be named head coach, a hell of a way to show up Shula. But Unitas wanted to keep playing and would sign a new contract. Rosenbloom would keep the team in familiar hands by promoting Don McCafferty and rehiring Shula’s assistants before the latter could get at them. This meant that both teams would bear the stamp of a coach who had not yet won the big game, but had caused more fuss than any other coach in football. It also meant that Shula had scant time to justify earning his salary and stock. Around the new NFL, though, the smartest people sensed the timing was perfect for Shula and his team. Perhaps partly in envy, Al Davis declared that the Dolphins had “bought themselves into contention.”²⁶