BUTCH, SUNDANCE, AND A CUDDLY CYPRIOT
Despite its painful end, Shula’s maiden season in Miami was a marked success. He came in second to the old guru Paul Brown in the Coach of the Year voting, though Brown’s Bengals were just 8–6, and he certainly had justified his hiring, getting somewhere fast with a team that had had no idea how to win and soon developed a hip, collective persona. In his game story after the December 13 win over the Jets, Bill Braucher wrote of the apostates in the backfield with a brief reference to the hip Newman-Redford Old West buddy flick just out:
Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick—the Dolphin version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—sat in a triumphant glow in their customary corner. “What’s the matter?” Csonka jibed a later-arriving interviewer. “Don’t you even bother to talk to me unless I gain over 100 yards?”1
Braucher wrote up some byplay between Csonka and Kiick regarding an option pass Kiick threw, which was caught by Karl Noonan for a big gain. “Hey, ask Kiick about that pass,” Csonka said. “Ask him why he didn’t throw it to me. I was open.” Kiick said something about it being his first pass in three years and how he wouldn’t waste it on a fullback. Delivered with their dry cynicism, the dialogue indeed seemed Butch and Sundance-like, aided by Csonka’s Wyatt Earp mustache, Kiick with his Fu Manchu and frizzy mop top—though, somehow, in the transition, Csonka came out as Sundance and Kiick Butch, reversing the logical roles for each. Taking it onto the field, Kiick in one game was buried under a pile of bodies. Gazing up at Csonka, he asked, “Who are these guys?”—a catchphrase from the movie.2
Even more of a freethinker was linebacker Doug Swift, who ambled around wearing earphones, grooving to psychedelic music. He was also the team’s player-union representative, which pitted him against Howard Twilley, a throwback right-winger. The two of them would argue for hours, always with Twilley threatening not to pay his union dues. Watching the story lines grow, Joe Robbie was pleased that Shula could run herd over what seemed a freak show at times.
In Baltimore, meanwhile, Carroll Rosenbloom was pleased that the Shula melodrama was over. Of course, Shula had made it possible for the Colts to go 11–2–1 that year, and for Unitas to be bailed out often by Shula’s holdover double zone defense. The Colts tamed the Raiders in the playoffs and got back to the Super Bowl, winning on a last-second field goal against Tom Landry’s hard-luck Cowboys in the Orange Bowl—pitting two old NFL franchises, just as the NFL brotherhood had hoped. A good many Colts, including McCafferty and now even Rosenbloom, could be magnanimous about the guy who had walked away, who watched from the stands with mixed emotions as his “other” team won the ring that had eluded him.
C.R. clearly enjoyed not sharing any of the spotlight with his coach, few people knowing who McCafferty even was. And now, after 15 straight winning seasons, Rosenbloom talked of retiring. He made Steve president, retaining for himself the title of chairman of the board. But he had a bigger conquest in mind: going Hollywood. When Rams owner Dan Reeves died in April 1971, C.R. typically came up with a novel idea. Having increased the value of the Colts to $20 million, without legally ever paying a dime in tax,3 he would face a $4 million tax bill if he sold the club outright. The solution: trading the franchise for the Rams. It would take a while, but, as it would play out, Shula’s growing authority in Miami would play an indirect role in the making of that history as well.
Shula got his first crack at drafting his own Dolphin players at the ’71 draft, though without a first-round pick—the Colts, given the 22nd selection for the tampering business, took running back Don McCauley. Shula’s first selection, in round two, was Iowa State receiver Otto Stowe. Often forgotten is that, in the fourth round, he picked Joe Theismann as an insurance quarterback. He might have given Griese a stiff challenge, but the latter caught a break when the flashy Notre Dame star’s salary demands were rejected by Robbie and he went to the Canadian Football League for three years—his rights subsequently traded to the Redskins.
The real gem came in round nine: six-foot, six-inch defensive end Vern Den Herder out of minute Central College in Pella, Iowa, where, despite garnering little attention from the scouts, he had set records that put him in the College Football Hall of Fame. Den Herder would mainly sit during his rookie season, as Shula’s lineup was mostly set. The only changes were second-year pro Tim Foley platooning at left corner with Curtis Johnson, and second-year tight end Jim Mandich with Fleming.
Shula worked furiously to refine the team. In ’71, everything was just a bit tighter, quicker, smarter. The zones meshed more fluidly. The missteps were fewer. As crafted by Bill Arnsparger, the defense began to utilize the in-vogue 3–4 alignment. The wrinkle he introduced was to use the fourth linebacker in passing situations, either rushing the passer or dropping into coverage. The man for the job was Bob Matheson, whom Shula had acquired from the Browns the year before. At six foot four and 240 pounds, tall and mobile, his range on the weak side provided cover for the other linebackers to blitz. As Arnsparger explained in footballese, “We were able to rush five guys and cover with six. That’s what you need to run a zone blitz. We could usually drop a linebacker into that slot zone, and that gave people a lot of problems.”4 In the Dolphins’ schemata, the alignment was dubbed “53,” for no reason more complicated than that it was Matheson’s number, and when it got enough attention, the “53 defense” would become not only terminology, but the stuff of mythology.
The crux would again be the running game. But when training camp came around, Csonka and Kiick weren’t. Their contracts had run out—each had been making around $30,000 a year—and rather than take what Robbie offered, they chose to hold out in tandem. Paul Warfield had recommended his agent, Ed Keating, from Mark McCormack’s Cleveland-based IMG agency. A brass-knuckle type, that same year Keating made Ole Miss quarterback Archie Manning the highest-paid football rookie ever, after he was drafted by the New Orleans Saints. For Butch and Sundance, he demanded that Robbie deal with them as a unit, not separately, and that they would split a three-year, $300,000 package. Robbie refused, and, reminiscent of the famous dual holdout of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale with baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers, they remained out into August, the negotiations with Robbie called “acrimonious” by Csonka.
He and Kiick were “training” by living in Keating’s penthouse hotel suite. When Joe Thomas, who had recently undergone bypass surgery, threatened that if they didn’t sign, they’d get no raise, Kiick, in his best Butch mimicry, said, “That really chaps me.”5 Thomas repeated the threat, supported by a less than sympathetic Shula.
Butch and Sundance did some posturing of their own. Hanging out one night at Joe Namath’s short-lived Fort Lauderdale bar, Bachelors III, they told the manager, Bobby Van, to tell Namath they wanted to be traded to the Jets. Van did, and Weeb Ewbank made an inquiry. But it was an empty threat, one that Csonka had made before, telling Shula that life would be a lot easier for him under Ewbank. Shula always shut down that argument with a quick comeback.
“You wouldn’t win,” he would say. And Sundance knew he was right.
Butch and Sundance didn’t think it wise to cross Shula for any longer than necessary. They came to camp unsigned, and Keating didn’t stick with the united front, though in the end, the backs would sign for what they held out for: identical three-year deals splitting $100,000 per, minus a combined $6,000 in fines.
Shula never did fully understand Csonka and Kiick or their generation. Nor they his. While most of the players were, according to Csonka, “totally afraid of Shula,” a hard core didn’t sacrifice their individualism. John Stofa, whom Csonka called “a fellow Hungarian, truly crazy, a real gypsy,” decided during camp to have a party in the dorm. He brought in “an all-time corner-bar sexpot,” who bumped and grinded in a G-string as Dolphins danced around in jockstraps. He said Shula “sat there not moving, not too sure what to expect. All of a sudden, she flipped off her G-string.” At which point, reported Kiick, “Shula’s eyes about popped out of his head. He didn’t smile”—though he apparently lingered for a better look.6 Coincidence or not, Stofa was cut before the season; the new backup would be 49er and Eagle retread George Mira, a former star at Miami University.
For a time, Griese, too, was a holdout, among 14 Dolphins still unsigned when camp began. Dealing with Shula and Robbie on his own, he came to terms. And he would improve the most. In ’71, his throws were zippier, the scrambles more contained. Most of the team’s peaks and valleys of the year before were smoothed into a steady mainline. After another stumbling start, with a 10–10 tie in Denver and a loss to the Jets in week three, the season was smooth sailing. They ran off eight in a row, then had a letdown that nearly cost them big. At 9–1–1, they tanked against the lowly Patriots, 34–13. Next came the Colts, whom they had beaten three weeks before in a fierce battle in Miami on a late field goal.
Shula’s old team was a half-game behind in the division, looking for retribution—and they got it. Tom Matte capped two drives in the first half with touchdown runs. The Colt defense was suffocating, picking Griese twice and holding the Dolphins to a field goal in the 14–3 win. Both teams were on safe ground, having already clinched playoff berths, but for Shula there was undeniable pride in winning the division. And the Dolphins, a half-game behind, took it as a character-defining moment that they whipped the Packers in the finale at the Orange Bowl, 27–6, while the Colts were upset in New England, 21–17. That gave Shula his first division title in Miami; awarded another game ball, he turned it over to Csonka, who had played on a bad leg.
At 10–3–1, his team had racked up impressive numbers. They came in fifth in offense—first again in rushing, with 2,429 yards—and fifth in defense. Griese, ever closer to perfection, had 19 touchdowns with just 9 picks, and a career-high 90.9 passer rating. Csonka cracked 1,000 yards, while Kiick gained 738 and Morris 315. Griese, Csonka, and Warfield (11 touchdowns, 23.2 yards per-catch) all made the Pro Bowl and first-team All-Pro, as did lineman Little. Yepremian, who led the league in points, also made the first team. Jake Scott was a second-team All-Pro.
Shula had prepped them perfectly, the intensity of those last two weeks a launching pad for the playoffs. They would need that intensity, the playoffs taking them on Christmas Day for a war against the Chiefs in Kansas City.
Hank Stram’s boys had also finished 10–3–1, winning the AFC West. They were a finely tuned bunch. Stram’s endless sets and innovative “moving pocket” gave old pro Len Dawson time to throw—most effectively to Otis Taylor, who was as smooth and deadly as Warfield. Their offensive and defensive lines were massive, and they had the best linebacking corps in the game with Bobby Bell and Jim Lynch flanking Willie Lanier, and maybe the best secondary, right cornerback Emmitt Thomas having made eight interceptions. Eleven Chiefs went to the Pro Bowl, including the kicker and the punter. The game was held in ancient Municipal Stadium—the last one there before the team moved to Arrowhead Stadium. On an unseasonably warm, wet, 60-degree day, a war of attrition took hold, an endless sequence of parry and thrust that lasted all day and into the night.
The Chiefs went ahead 10–0 in the first quarter. The Dolphins broke back in the second to tie. The Chiefs regained the lead in the third and in the fourth, the Dolphins tying the score each time. Both teams racked up enormous yardage—the Chiefs 213 rushing yards, 100 by Ed Podolak, who accounted for 350 total yards by himself, including punt and kick returns. But the mistakes were big, too; each team had four turnovers. Griese, needing to pass more, went 20-for-35 for 263 yards, seven to Warfield. His five-yard touchdown to Fleming with 1:25 left made it 24-all. Podolak ran back the ensuing kickoff 78 yards, kept from a game-winning TD by, of all people, the elfin Yepremian, who got in his way and made him run out of bounds. It still looked like the end was near when, four plays later, Jan Stenerud, the AFC’s second-team All-Pro kicker, came in for a 32-yard field goal. Both teams had their own priest on the sideline—Shula two of them: Father John McDonnell and no less than the Archbishop of Miami, Coleman F. Carroll. Only divine intervention seemed responsible for Stenerud sailing his kick just wide.
All through the game, the toll was heavy. “Guys were exhausted on the sideline,” said Buoniconti, who had a hellacious game with 20 tackles. “Everyone was getting cramps in his legs.” Center Bob DeMarco had cramps in both hands, making every snap torture. And now came overtime, in the gathering darkness. Both kickers missed game-winning field goals, Stenerud again when Buoniconti got a hand up to block his kick. Then, deep into the second overtime—the first time in history a game had gone that far—players seemed to be carrying safes on their backs, as if trying to run up a hill. Something had to give, and it did when Griese called an against-the-grain cutback run by Csonka, who rumbled like a runaway milk wagon for 29 yards, deep into Chief territory. At the 12:21 mark—after a record 82 minutes, 40 seconds—Yepremian booted a 37-yard field goal for a 27–24 sudden-death victory.
Shula grabbed and hugged a couple of his coaches by the shoulder, ran to midfield to console Stram, and ran off the field, lineup chart still in hand, stepping so lightly his feet seemed not to touch the ground. In the locker room, a call came from Florida governor Reubin Askew. Trying in vain to hold a serious tone while celebrating what he called his “greatest victory,” when a reporter asked who made the big block to spring Csonka, Shula shrugged.
“Let’s not get technical, the hell with that! This is too joyous a moment to start going into football science and tactics”—a remarkable deviation from the norm.7
The most joyous of the players was Yepremian, who had come a long way since the season opener, when he blew four field goals in Denver. Though he missed that first OT field goal, he was the hero. Across page one of the Herald the next day was the headline IN THE LONG RUN, DOLPHINS WIN BY A TOE. The cover of Sports Illustrated had him following through on the kick, the game story titled UP, UP, UP AND AWAY! The last time a kick meant so much was when Shula’s Colts were screwed on Don Chandler’s tainted field goal; the SI story noted the ironic twist that “the longest game in the history of American professional football [was] decided by the smallest player on the field. . . . A Cypriot, with an accent. . . . And cuddly.”8 Stenerud, by contrast, suffered enduring emotional scars. He would play another 14 seasons and become the first kicker inducted into the Hall of Fame. But he would never get over having blown three of four field goals in that game, and decades later, when asked to recall the game, he replied in earnest, “Do you want to talk about my mother’s funeral, too?”9 As was shown that day, the difference between heaven and hell was a few inches.
As it was, Shula’s stomach had already come through more than a few of these gut-churning affairs, usually on the short end. But when the high wore off, he had to train his sights again on the Colts. They had swept away the Browns 20–3 in the same round, meaning that the AFC title would be determined the following Sunday, January 2.
In Miami, where it was said that thousands of people had turned off their ovens while cooking Christmas dinner as the Chief game went on and on, 25,000 fans were at the airport when the Dolphins arrived home. When Shula and his son David, whom he had taken to Kansas City, got in their car in the parking lot, it wouldn’t start. The other Dolphins had cleared out, it was Christmas Eve, cabs weren’t around, and Shula said they’d have to hitch a ride.
“You’re kidding, Dad,” David said.
The first car to stop had two couples inside. They all recognized him, flabbergasted that Don Shula was asking for a lift to Miami Lakes. The Shula men squeezed into the back seat, gabbing with the others all the way home. When they got there, Shula invited the four in for drinks. Shula loved telling this tale as his Christmas story, a parable of the town’s newfound adoration for the team, and for him.10
The Orange Bowl was quickly sold out for the Colts, the theme of the game set by Cameron Snyder in the Sun: “For Shula, playing the Colts is always like looking into a mirror,” an assessment Shula confirmed by noting, “Our styles are so similar” that “the team that executes best will win.”11 Of course, they really weren’t so alike. At 38, Johnny Unitas was crumbling, again beset with arm and shoulder woes. He had started just five games, mopped up in others for Earl Morrall, while throwing three touchdowns and nine interceptions. Morrall, at 37, started the rest and won seven, but his touchdown-to-interception ratio was also unsightly, seven to 12. Unitas’s passer rating of 52.3 was the lowest of his career until then, save for his injury-ravaged ’68, and Morrall was only marginally better at 58.2. But McCafferty’s rushing game was the league’s fifth-best, Norm Bulaich was a Pro Bowler, and the defense gave up the fewest yards and second-fewest points.
Shula, who the day before the game was named Coach of the Year, 16 votes to five over McCafferty, stood again on the high road. He said he thought Unitas was throwing better now than he had all year, though he was only so-so in the Colts’ 20–3 playoff win over the Browns. Unitas was equally solicitous of the Dolphins, calling Griese “the best young quarterback in the game.” McCafferty only gently tweaked Shula, citing the latter’s expanding waistline, which he said was due to “all that good living down there.”
In truth, though, the game loomed as a walkover for Shula, given that the Colts would be without their starting backfield of Bulaich and Matte, both injured. But, coming down from the Kansas City slog, Shula described his team as “tired and beat,” a good number of them unable to practice until midweek. He also fretted about the condition of the cement-hard, jagged Poly-Turf surface of his home field, which would be more ragged with the college Orange Bowl played the night before. And while the Dolphins were favorites, it was hard to bet against Johnny U in what could be his last big-game roundup.
The Dolphins, on the other hand, were a fairly unknown commodity, save for the backfield. Part of this was because Shula kept his team in rigorous balance, no one ever seeming to do something more than necessary or spectacular. Csonka and Kiick rarely carried 20 times in a game, Griese rarely threw 30 passes, Warfield rarely caught more than five balls. The shifting zones and strategic substitutions made for a different hero every week. Shula had seen and heard the team called “the no-Name Dolphins,” its defense “the No-Name Defense,” despite All-Pros on both sides of the ball. He himself would repeat those terms to stoke a communal sense of being overlooked and underestimated. Days before the game, a reporter, noting that the Colts had scored 14 points in both games of the season series, jokingly asked if the Dolphins defense would “concede” 14 points. As it was reported, “Shula’s expression hardened briefly into what he calls his ‘dull sideline look.’ ‘I don’t think,’ he said quietly, ‘that this defense would concede two touchdowns to anybody.’ ”12
Late in the afternoon of January 2, it was cloudy and drizzly, at 73 degrees a relief from the usual tropical Miami heat and humidity. The Orange Bowl was stuffed with a record 78,629 humans. Shula’s game plan was to make the replacement Colt backfield of Don Nottingham and Don McCauley feel the hurt. The zones would allow shallow screen passes to the backs, then defenders would hit like jackhammers. Shula would call it his “rubber-band defense.” If the Colts had a wrinkle, it might have been to rattle Shula. As the game wore on, Mike Curtis and Fred Miller, on plays near the sideline, would woof at him, and Shula went right back at them.
“Don’t ask me what was said,” he said later, “it’s unprintable.”13
Beyond that, the Colts had little to say. On the Dolphins’ second drive, from the Miami 25, Griese play-faked and, Rick Volk recalled, “I bit, I admit it. I froze.”14 Cornerback Rex Kern also froze as Warfield flew down the sideline. Kern tried to bump him, but missed. Warfield reeled in the pass over a leap by Kern and pranced into the end zone—a 75-yard lightning bolt. It was still only 7–0 at the half, after McCafferty went for it on fourth-and-inches on the Dolphin nine, whereupon Buoniconti nailed Nottingham, spinning him around in midair for a loss.
The hitting on both sides was savage. Griese would take borderline-legal shots from Bubba Smith that left him with blurred vision and his left shoulder throbbing. Seeing double, he kept the ball on the ground, throwing a mere eight passes, completing four, but for 154 yards. Because the defense bottled up the Colts’ running and short-passing game, the Dolphins didn’t need to blitz. Playing straight up, they indeed bent, giving up more yardage than they gained, but clamped down in the red zone. The Colts missed two field goals and Miami blocked another. Unitas kept chucking, going 20-for-36 for 224 yards, but was sacked thrice and also intercepted three times—the killer being when Curtis Johnson got a hand on the ball and it deflected to Anderson, who ran it back for a 62-yard touchdown. Griese then hit Warfield with a 50-yard strike and Csonka blasted it in to put away the 21–0 victory.
They were going to Super Bowl VI on the back of the first shutout of the Colts in 97 games, dating back to Shula’s third season as coach. This point was not lost on Shula, who relished telling the press, “They talked about the Colt defense before but now they’ll be talking about ours.” The players spoke mainly of the relief of surviving two pressure-packed games. But Csonka was typically grouchy. Sitting on his stool, wincing and sucking on cigarettes as a trainer pulled off his socks for him, he moaned, “God help us if they don’t do something about that damned Poly-Turf. I don’t know how much more of that stuff I can stand. The buzzing in my head [from landing head-first on the turf] was so noisy I couldn’t hear Griese’s calls.” Griese, his head hurting as well and his vision still cloudy, sat mummified by bandages, seemingly not knowing where he was. Shula would need to have them all healthy and amped after two weeks of hell, but at least the Colt albatross was off his neck.
To many, Shula really was the team, those All-Pro no-names just chess pieces. In the Sports Illustrated game story, the first words were: “Who are these guys?”—the favorite inside-joke line of the Dolphins. One newspaper game story called them “the incredible Dolphins,” their playoff march an “impossible dream.” Shula’s explanation was simpler: “The Dolphins,” he said, “weren’t pushovers anymore.” Before he could leave the stadium, though, a reporter rubbed up an old blister, asking if his epochal failure the last time he got to the Super Bowl had left any “lasting wounds.”
“Not except when someone like you brings it up,” he said, in full glare.
Earlier that afternoon, Tom Landry, seeking redemption for the Dallas Cowboys’ loss to the Colts the year before, made it back to the summit by beating the 49ers 14–3 in the NFC title match. This meant that the Super Bowl would match the two most erudite—and, to some, overbearing—coaches in the game. Not that everyone was willing to consecrate Shula. It was now that George Wilson chose to make his derogatory remarks about Shula being an opportunist and ingrate who had won with Wilson’s team. To Shula, Wilson was a footnote, and he brushed him off, saying, “I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”15
Landry had, of course, also paid the piper in pain and humiliation. He had lost two excruciating NFL title games to Lombardi, his agonized sideline reactions both times enduring as rare displays of emotion by the famously stone-faced World War II fighter pilot. A brilliant tactician, Landry had prefigured the future not only with the flex defense in the ’50s but by using computers in formulating game plans. But, like Shula, he also had to put up with disgruntled players, centrally his star halfback, Duane Thomas, who had run for 11 touchdowns in 11 games, averaging 4.5 yards a carry, making it easier for Roger Staubach to shine at quarterback. Employing a Griese-style attack—conservative passing set up by punishing running—the ex-Navy midshipman went to the Pro Bowl. He, too, was able to uncork a bomb to receivers like the molten ex-Olympic sprinter Bob Hayes and Lance “Bambi” Alworth, the doe-eyed, graceful former AFL star now in his final season. Staubach threw 15 touchdowns and only four interceptions, and—with Landry hating it as much as Shula did with Griese—scrambled for over 300 yards.
The Cowboys had led the league in offense and were third in defense. They had eight Pro Bowlers, including the bedrock of their “Doomsday Defense,” the massive, terrifying right tackle Bob Lilly. The offensive line was anchored by right tackle Rayfield Wright, and Landry had gotten important contributions from the old, but still ironclad Mike Ditka at tight end and the ex-Packer fixture Herb Adderley at left cornerback. Shula, who knew the pitfalls of being a prohibitive favorite, came in now as a six-point underdog. Even he seemed lowercase beside Landry, whose knowing, Lincoln-like rectitude and mythology starkly clashed with Shula’s red-faced, sputtering temper. As one reporter framed the game, it was SHULA’S FIRE VERSUS LANDRY’S PATIENCE.
After he arrived in New Orleans 10 days before the contest at rickety Tulane Stadium, a reporter at Shula’s first press conference actually called him Tom. Having lived with a Lombardi inferiority complex, Shula could only laugh.16 The old-guard NFL bias in the media was still extant; John Underwood, jabbing his Sports Illustrated stablemate Tex Maule, the magazine’s lead football writer, ventured that if Dallas won, “the Cowboys’ enduring advocate will finally be vindicated” and should get the game ball.
But Landry had to pay a price for getting to that precipice: putting up with Thomas, who got most of the ink that week, as one story said, “confounding even his teammates with sullen silence augmented by a missed practice.” Landry even had to promise that Thomas would show up for the game, and, with fullback Calvin Hill’s right knee aching, carry the load. Shula could certainly promise every one of his men would be there. What’s more, he didn’t lock them up. On the Friday night of their arrival, he gathered them in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel and told them they could cruise the French Quarter. Buoniconti said it was a chance to “turn loose, raise a little hell, and get our minds off football.”17 Shula’s reasoning, from experience, was familiar, that “the kind of guys you need to keep under surveillance for all but 20 minutes a day would find something to do in those 20 minutes.”18
However, gauging the Dolphins’ practices, Shula would write in his memoir, “Our momentum seemed to be going the wrong way.”19 Fortunately, he had a brilliant football strategist on his side. That week, Richard Nixon made his famous phone call to Shula, suggesting a can’t-miss play: down and in to Warfield. Shula had little choice but to be gracious, noting that Nixon had sent him a comforting letter after the Jets’ loss “when no one was calling or writing me.” In that letter, the impending president wrote that losing is the predicate for winning. He had no idea how relevant the reverse of that equation would be, over time, for both of them.
Super Bowl VI, witnessed by 81,023 people, the largest crowd for the game up to then, was played in perfect football weather: 35 degrees with a cool wind. At least it was perfect for one team. Shula had said the game would be won on “physical merit, the hitting will decide it.” It was evident in the opening moments that the Dolphins hadn’t gotten their minds around the demands of the third such game in succession. In the first quarter, Csonka, who had not fumbled all season, lost the ball, setting up a field goal for a 3–0 Dallas lead. Moments later, in what would be the lingering highlight, or lowlight, Griese was flushed from the pocket. He started retreating on a crazy backward scramble, reversing field three times as he went back . . . and back . . . until Bob Lilly caught up and dropped him for a highly embarrassing 29-yard sack—still the longest loss of yardage in Super Bowl history.
On the other side, Thomas kept slicing through gaping holes to gain 95 yards on 19 runs. Landry’s scheme was to misdirect Buoniconti by having the backs take a step or two one way, then cut back to the middle as he was sealed off by two guards—Landry called it a “slip-wedge.” Running behind it, rugged halfback Walt Garrison added 74 more yards, Hill 25. Nor did it help that, after one loud helmet-to-helmet hit, Buoniconti blacked out for several moments. He came to and played the rest of the game—today, according to the NFL’s concussion protocols, a player would need to sit out until receiving clearance from the team doctor—though he would be unable to remember even playing in it years later, when numerous such head shots took a grievous toll on his health. Meanwhile, muzzled by a swarming Dallas front seven, Kiick, playing on a bum knee, led the team with just 40 yards on 10 carries, Csonka the same on nine carries. Morris never got a single carry, only returning four kickoffs.
Staubach, the game’s MVP, passed only 19 times, completing 12, with short touchdown passes to Alworth in the second quarter and to Ditka in the fourth, sandwiched around a one-yard TD run by Thomas in the third. Dominant all the way, Dallas led in first downs 23–10, yardage 352–119, plays 67–43, and rushing—gulp—252–80 in setting a Super Bowl record.
Playing from behind, Griese was red meat for the defense. He went 12-for-23 for 134 yards, and was picked by linebacker Chuck Howley, who played a monster game. Warfield caught four passes, but for only 39 yards, also muffing one at the Dallas two. Only a goal-line fumble by Hill kept the score from being worse than 24–3.
The “Cowboys stampeded,” Maule happily wrote of a contest made the most memorable by the halftime tribute to the recently deceased Louis Armstrong, featuring Ella Fitzgerald and Al Hirt. Losing the big one, naturally, was familiar territory for Shula. Having been the first NFL coach to lose to the AFL, he now was—and still was until Super Bowl LIII—the only one whose team failed to score a touchdown in a Super Bowl. Things got so bad that, after he ragged the officials, one of them warned him, “Shula, if you open your mouth one more time, it’ll cost you.” Minutes later, he shouted, “Hey, dummy, move over.” An official threw a flag, though Shula insisted he was saying it to one of his players. He asked the zebra what the penalty was. “Coaching from the sidelines,” he was told.20
For the Cowboys, it was hard not to gloat. Even when they tried to compliment the Dolphins, they could hardly keep from sounding condescending. They pointed out that when Csonka ran, Warfield cheated a few steps to the inside to block for him, a sure tip-off that got by Shula and his coaches. The usually fawning Florida papers weren’t sympathetic. IT’S DOOMSDAY FOR DOLPHINS was the Herald’s banner headline. Ed Pope quoted Shula as saying, “The only way we can ever be completely happy now is to win the Super Bowl. We can’t just drop our heads and cry. We have to walk away feeling as though we have gained something.” He concluded, “That ‘something,’ though, was hard to define after this kind of trampling.”21 Bill Braucher, who had started the Butch and Sundance thing, wrote that the outlaws “came to the end of the glory trail.” Kiick added that the movie characters had it better—at least they went out with guns blazing. “They were dead and didn’t know it. We’re alive, and we’ll feel it for six months.”
Csonka, admitting that his fumble was a killer, insisted the Chiefs and Colts were actually better than the Cowboys. But Shula’s own postgame words in a Herald headline were the epitaph: “WE NEVER CHALLENGED.” Still, he wasn’t as deflated as he might have been. For him, that enigmatic “something” was the valuable experience of a Super Bowl baptism for a young and growing team. The first thing he did was tell them, “We have to dedicate ourselves to getting back [here] next season and winning it.”
Csonka could see how badly Shula needed to do that. The coach, he said, had a “monkey on his back,” and it would be holy hell on them as long as it stayed there.