In 1976, when the Nixon years were purged by the election of a smiling Georgia peanut farmer, the NFL was forced to accept that its players could begin to share in the exploding profits previously hoarded by the owners. That year, the players’ union’s gamble paid off when a district court judge handed down a verdict in John Mackey’s suit, ruling that the Rozelle Rule violated antitrust laws. Rozelle vowed to fight the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, but for the time being, he wrangled the union into accepting “Plan B” free agency, giving owners the right of first refusal on 37 of their players, a policy that still exists for one chosen veteran player per team since the rule was rewritten in 1992, when unrestricted free agency became a reality.
The ruling, which Joe Robbie swore would make the NFL an “endangered species,” had an immediate effect on the WFL refugees, who still belonged to their old NFL teams but only owed them the right of first refusal, after which they could sign elsewhere without compensation. Csonka, Kiick, and Warfield were also freed from John Bassett when, rebuffed from entering the NFL, he released them, meaning he wouldn’t have to pay them after all. The three were so intertwined that there was still the possibility they could again swing a package deal, though this was complicated by Ed Keating having branched out on his own. While he still represented Butch and Sundance, Warfield stuck with IMG, where he was being represented by ex-Browns fullback Ernie Green. He did sign with Cleveland, while Csonka dallied with returning to Miami.
In truth, Shula missed Csonka in the two losses to the Colts in ’75. Now the coach arranged a “summit” in Miami between himself, Csonka, and Robbie, which Bill Braucher believed would prove that “Shula has an edge. His personality and methods hold a compelling fascination for Csonka,” having made Csonka “a durable wonder . . . almost in spite of himself.” However, when Robbie’s offer got back to Csonka, he felt insulted and canceled the meeting, saying, “I was made out to be a fool” and “what he [Robbie] did hurt me deep down.”1 The next day, April 7, Csonka signed a fat, three-year, $1 million deal with the Giants, who would move that season into a new stadium in the New Jersey swamps and hoped for a revival after two dolorous seasons under Arnsparger. To help lure him, the team hired John McVay, Csonka’s Memphis coach, as an offensive assistant, though the deciding factor may have been the personal enrichment of playing in the Big Apple.
Kiick, meanwhile, had to settle for a far less lucrative deal from the Denver Broncos as a backfield backup, to be released during the ’77 season and play out his career with the Redskins. Thus ended the short-lived football buddy movie, the aging urban cowboys riding off toward different sunsets, though Csonka would still have another scene to play out with Sheriff Shula down his dusty road.
Shula had less regret about losing his “sons” the second time. As Howard Schnellenberger saw him, Shula “wasn’t gonna get that close to any players again. He’d tell ’em all the same thing: ‘You’ll know when I’m damn ready to play you—or damn ready to trade you.’ ”2 That spring, several aging players found that out. Norm Evans, left unprotected in the expansion draft, was taken by the new Seattle Seahawks. Doug Swift, facing a crossroads, retired. These moves alone saved the team $150,000 in salary. Nick Buoniconti announced his retirement in July after Shula said he would only have a backup role, but injuries to other linebackers led Shula to talk him into returning for one more season. Then there were the usual fandangos with Mercury Morris and Jake Scott.
Shula hung on to both, despite Morris’s feeling that he was a goner and Scott’s habitual trade demands, and despite them having the highest salaries on the roster. But Braucher wrote that Scott and Shula had “bickered” all through the ’75 season, and it continued into training camp. Shula had seemingly defused it, grinning that the All-Pro safety hadn’t repeated his trade demand since camp began. But in mid-August, Scott cursed out an assistant coach. When Shula interceded, Scott barked, “I wasn’t talking to you.”
Still, Shula let it go. A photo of them on the practice field ran in the paper, Scott, in thick muttonchop sideburns and dark shades glaring at Shula, who was holding his head as if he had a splitting migraine. Then, after injuring a shoulder, Scott refused a painkilling injection before a preseason game, sitting out instead. Shula, of course, had gone through this with Morris, though Scott went further, threatening to sue Dr. Herbert Virgin for malpractice, and Shula suspended him. He was reinstated a week later, whereupon he blew off the team’s annual awards banquet benefiting the Boy Scouts, at which attendance was mandatory. After Shula fined him $500, Scott laughed that he had come out ahead, since he’d won $700 at the track that day.3 Ed Pope, taking Shula’s side as usual, foamed that Scott, who had been called “Big Play Jake,” had lost his hunger with a big contract, was an “old” 31, and had been given “exceptional personal latitude.” Concluding that Scott was a “burr,” Pope asked, “Who needs it?”4
As for Morris, he went on mouthing off, saying he felt like “the odd man out” again in the backfield. At the same banquet, the team award for best offensive back went to Morris, Nottingham, and Bulaich. Morris took this as another sign that he was about to be shipped out, and even said he’d be happy to go anywhere except the moribund San Diego Chargers. And Shula was finally “damn ready” to trade both problem children. In late August, saying Scott had “refused to play,” Shula dealt him to the Redskins for safety Bryant Salter and a second-round draft pick. Morris was sent packing hours later—to San Diego, for a mid-level draft choice.
Morris assumed the destination was intentional, a case of Shula spite. Decades later, he said, “I’m still bitter about it.”5 Scott, on the other hand, left skid marks getting away from Shula. Weeks later, after intercepting two passes in a game, he rebutted Shula by saying, “I never did refuse to play, at any time. But I will take no Xylocaine in a preseason game. That’s ridiculous.” Unlike Shula, he said that, under George Allen, “you’re respected like a man.” He went on, “The system here relates to the intelligent ball player. In Miami it was more of a robot-type system.”6
He didn’t say anything about winning two rings playing in Shula’s system. Nor would he win any more under Allen in Washington, who after another three fruitless seasons left to coach again for the Rams. Scott, still effective but never to make All-Pro again, would be gone from the game a year later. As for Mercury, he reported to the Chargers, intermingling uninspiring play with pot shots at Shula. But, given that the broken-down Morris was a second-stringer in San Diego and gone from football after one more season, the corroborative lesson of these purges was that Shula usually made such moves after he had wrung all he could out of his players. And then, they weren’t set free as much as they were disowned.
Only weeks before the ’76 season would begin, Shula maintained his usual stoic calm and clenched-jaw resoluteness, even as the papers were writing about the Dolphins’ “upheaval.” He said he didn’t consider their situation to be such, but rather the plight of any team in transition. And he had some good fortune. Among the new pieces were draftees like Arizona State linebacker Larry Gordon. He fell into Shula’s lap when Joe Theismann decided to leave Canada and play in the NFL with the Redskins, who had to give Miami their first pick, at No. 17. Two slots later, with their regular pick, Shula took San Jose State linebacker Kim Bokamper. Later picks brought New Mexico State receiver Duriel Harris and Cal Poly running back Gary Davis.
Shula also shuffled his assistants. After Bill McPeak suffered a mild stroke, he took a leave. Shula had also let go of Vince Costello, and then Monte Clark when the 49ers offered him the head coaching job in ’76. Shula filled that hole by hiring John Sandusky away from the Eagles staff to coach the offensive line—for what would be the next 18 years. Schnellenberger concentrated on the receivers. Carl Taseff was given double duty with the runners and special teams, Tom Keane with the defensive backs and punters. Don Doll, who had replaced Shula as the Lions’ defensive backs coach and had been doing the same job in Green Bay, came to Miami as linebackers coach for two seasons. But there was no actual offensive or defensive coordinator. Shula regarded himself as both.
He also was his own general manager, and he made a fortuitous trade by acquiring linebacker Rusty Chambers from the Saints. When the season started, the Dolphins won two of their first three games, then lost three, including another to the Colts and one in overtime to the decaying Chiefs. With passing yardage exploding around the league, Shula wanted a real passing attack, and though it was not his forte, Griese made it work. In early November, he went 16-for-21 with two touchdowns in a 27–7 rout of the Jets, putting the Dolphins at 5–4. But now they had to play three straight powerhouses—Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Cleveland—and lost them all.
The three defeats killed the season, which ended at 6–8, third in the division, Shula’s first of what would be only two sub -.500 seasons. He had an excuse: 10 of his players had surgery during the season, but he blamed himself for staying too loyal to the old dogs. “Maybe,” he said, “I felt too strongly that people like Mike Kolen and Manny Fernandez and Dick Anderson would be able to come back and play. I can’t let that happen again. If they come back next season healthy, fine, but I can’t accept it as guaranteed until it happens.”7
He was fortunate to be able to get back the guy he was most loyal to: Bill Arnsparger. Entering the ’76 season, Arnsparger had won 7 of 21 games overseeing the Giants. Then, in the stadium in the Meadowlands, playing before enormous crowds of 80,000, the team imploded, Csonka debilitated by numerous injuries. Winless after seven games, Arnsparger was axed and replaced by John McVay. He would never again hold a head coaching job, but he always would have a sanctuary with Shula, who rehired him as defensive coordinator. It was Csonka’s sad fate, however, to remain the center of attention on a lousy team, running only around a dozen times a game and insisting pitifully, “I’m not an old man.” Casting his gaze southward, he was tantalized by the fact that Shula had finally gotten natural grass put in the Orange Bowl, while in Giants Stadium he was running on the artificial turf he had hated during his Dolphin years. Suddenly, the thought of playing again in Shula’s backfield before he crumbled seemed appealing.
With the Dolphins’ 1976 season ending early, Shula had time to ponder what had gone right and wrong. They’d come in 15th in points, for and against, losing only eight fumbles, best in the league, but while Benny Malone ran for nearly 800 yards, Griese threw 11 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. Jim Langer was the team’s sole All-Pro. The Colts did displace the Dolphins at the top of the division, going 11–3 before being slammed by the Steelers in the first playoff round—costing Joe Thomas his job. With the Patriots also highly competitive, Shula seemed on the side of the road as the Raiders finally slew Noll’s Steel Curtain in the AFC title game, earning them the right to trash the Vikings in the Super Bowl.
Worse for Shula, his team—and he—were suddenly tainted by scandal and legal woes. In late January of ’77, a story broke that the arrest and trial of a former golf pro and gambler named J. Lance Cooper on bookmaking charges had “prompted an investigation” of the Dolphins by the NFL—which was requested as a cautionary measure by Shula, who was called a “friend” of Cooper, as were Bob Griese and other players. The NFL cleared them of any wrongdoing; Cooper pleaded guilty and was given probation.8 Then, offensive tackle Darryl Carlton—Shula’s first-round pick the year before, who was busted for marijuana possession but was kept on the team while he served in an “intervention” program—“went berserk,” beating up a bouncer in a strip club. He tore a door off its hinges before fleeing in his car, which he then wrecked in a fiery five-car crash that left him with serious burns. Carlton plea-bargained down to careless driving and was handed one year of probation—a common dispensation for athletes at the time.9 Shula eventually traded Carlton to the Redskins.
Finally, the ominous news broke on May 4, the second day of the ’77 draft, that Don Reese and Randy Crowder had been arrested on felony charges for selling cocaine to undercover Miami cops in a sting operation. Also arrested was a 23-year-old flight attendant, Camille Richardson, for having arranged the $3,000 sale. She told the Herald she’d partied and snorted coke with nine NFL players—six of them Dolphins, though only Reese and Crowder were named and charged. Caught with more than a pound of cocaine, the pair nonetheless pleaded innocent. Shula seemed shell-shocked. “It’s almost bizarre,” he said. Acting decisively, he suspended the two, saying “their futures hinge on what a judge and jury decide. If they’re guilty, naturally, I don’t want them around.” That went for any other of his men who were involved with drugs—at least, the drugs not prescribed routinely by the team doctor. “I would like to know [who they are] as soon as possible,” he said, vowing: “I wouldn’t want someone to get special treatment because he’s a football player. If a guy’s guilty, he should pay the penalty just like anybody else.”10
This raised the question of why he didn’t know what was going on right under his own nose, an ignorance that had likely shortened the career of Mercury Morris and perhaps others. Shula was no different than other coaches, even the toughest of them, who were perhaps willfully ignorant of the burgeoning problem. Indeed, despots like Chuck Noll and Tom Landry had nothing on Shula when it came to cultural tunnel vision—or perhaps just looking the other way. Both of them ducked blame for some hellish behavior by their players. Noll, for example, had put up with Ernie Holmes, who in 1976 had been busted for coke possession but whose trial was postponed so he could play the season, and who was eventually acquitted.11 Noll’s backup quarterback, Joe Gilliam, was addicted to cocaine and heroin, and was sent to rehab, but he never got clean and would die at age 49.12
To coaches, these were “isolated incidents,” as Shula himself said. However, that was of small solace when the Herald ran a page one headline like SIX DOLPHINS USED COCAINE, DEFENDANT IN DRUG CASE SAYS. Shula’s longtime bootlickers in the press corps didn’t cede him any safe space; headlines like CLOUDS OVER DOLPHINS GROWING DARKER and ARRESTS LEAVE TEAM IN DISARRAY seemed to indict him for losing control. For whatever reason, Shula never did get to the bottom of the drug problem, nor did he ever say if he knew who the other cokeheads were. He also took a lenient position, hinting he might take Reese and Crowder back, even if they were convicted. But Robbie had already made up his mind, summarily waiving them while blustering about protecting “our legal rights,” not the players’. That prompted the Herald’s Bob Rubin to opine that, “in Robbie’s eyes, they are guilty no matter what a jury finds.”13
Reese and Crowder were convicted weeks later, sentenced to a year in the Dade County Stockade, then given probation and told to keep their noses clean. When they got out in August ’78, Shula said they “should not be condemned for all time,” arguing—like the liberal he once was—that they had paid their societal debt. He took flak for that in the papers, and was shot down again by Robbie, who not only said they would “never play for the Dolphins again,” but called for Pete Rozelle to ban them from the league. Rozelle, foreseeing the legal tangle of doing so, left the door open for any team to sign them. Quickly, both were picked up, Reese by New Orleans, Crowder by Tampa Bay. After a final year in San Diego, Reese would retire in 1981 and write a landmark exposé of the league’s drug plague in Sports Illustrated, in which he violated his parole by admitting to continued cocaine use.
Reese’s anecdotes about playing for Shula were damning. He said cocaine had been “pushed on players, often from the edge of the practice field. Sometimes it’s pushed by players. Prominent players.” He said Lloyd Mumphord had brought it into the team’s training camp dorm, and that he was snorting at least once a week, as were “half the players on the Dolphins—whites as well as blacks.” On the team plane, he recalled, “we’d be in the back where it was dark, with our little brown bottles that held about a gram, and we’d sit and sniff right out of the bottle. Or if we were being extra cautious, we’d slip into the bathroom and sniff it there.” Shula passed off the sensational revelations as the product of Reese’s imagination. “I just refuse to believe [it],” he said. “I realize now there had to be some [cocaine] involvement. . . . But I wasn’t ever conscious of [it]. [And] I’d be the first to notice it.” As proud as he was of his players, he concluded, “I would not accuse or indict them on what Reese says.”14
Reese—whose return to prison coincided with Mercury Morris being sent to jail for cocaine trafficking with a 27-year sentence (he was released after three, on a technicality)—would insist Shula knew more than he let on. Still, Shula kept things from blowing up the way they had with other teams, including the Saints teams Reese played on, as white powder swept through the NFL with no real response by the league office. Though there would be still more problems in this area, and some would judge Shula as weak and even clueless, Reese acknowledged that, despite the coach’s lapses, “[T]he best thing we had going for us in Miami was Don Shula. He’s smart, and he’s been around players too long not to see things. Everybody always had to be on their toes. That kept the lid on.” Even if not on those little brown bottles.
Shula dealt with the loss of two starting defensive linemen by drafting LSU defensive end A. J. Duhe and Alabama defensive tackle Bob Baumhower with his first two picks. As the purge of old-timers went on, Shula gave Jake Scott’s old free safety slot to an undrafted walk-on, Grambling’s Vern Roberson; a ninth-rounder, Norris Thomas, would soon start at left corner. Earl Morrall, at 42, could finally quit, Don Strock having paid enough dues to qualify as Griese’s backup. Garo Yepremian would join him in retirement after the season, going out as an All-Pro. And Nick Buoniconti agreed to return for the final season of his Hall of Fame career. The fourth round pick, Texas A&M halfback Leroy Harris, would get as many carries as Norm Bulaich. This flurry of change was rare for Shula, but becoming less so. Rick Volk, who at 32 was signed as a free agent that year, said he was a coach “trying to get control of a team a lot of people assumed was a mess.”15
As if Shula needed any more uncertainty, Griese’s vision was now an issue. The year before, having double vision in his right eye—he later would say he was actually legally blind in the eye—he began wearing contact lenses, then glasses. Up in New York, when Larry Csonka was asked about it, he said his old teammate “could play with one eye” and, “if they put braille on a football, he could play blind.” If Griese had any vanity issues, he put them aside, becoming the first bespectacled QB, even if it meant he would look more like Buddy Holly than Bart Starr. In the season opener in Buffalo, the Dolphins slogged to a 13–0 win in a driving rain. “Sometimes I had to throw through bubbles,” he smiled, “but I could see.” He appeared on Shula’s TV show wearing battery-powered specs with tiny windshield wipers.
The Dolphins won their first three, the last a 27–7 rout of the Oilers in which Griese rang up 21 first-quarter points for the first time in seven years. Dan Jenkins jived in Sports Illustrated, “It is still too early to know for sure, but it now appears that the city of Miami will be saved by Bob Griese’s four eyes—and not by legalized gambling or nude beaches or [orange juice pitchwoman] Anita Bryant.” He noted that “Miami has gone from a grind-it-out team to a ‘get the ball into the hands of Nat Moore or Duriel Harris or Freddie Solomon if you don’t mind’ type of franchise.”16
Griese would indeed throw for 2,252 yards, his most with Shula, his 22 touchdowns (against just 14 picks) the most in the league, and he was first-team All-Pro for the first time since ’71. His big target, Nat Moore, also made the first team with 12 touchdowns. Almost with no one noticing, the rushing game was the league’s fifth-best, Malone clearing 600 yards, halfback Gary Davis 500, Bulaich and Leroy Harris 400, and Nottingham 200.
Tied for the lead in the AFC East at 9–3, they had to go to Foxborough to play the Patriots, who were 8–4 and an elite bunch that, but for a horrific call in the playoffs the previous year, would have scuttled the Raiders’ march to the title. However, Chuck Fairbanks had managed to make enemies all around, with the Sullivan family that owned the team overruling his inflated contract promises to key players. But Fairbanks motivated them. On an icy field, the Dolphins fell behind 14–0, forcing Griese to throw 38 times, completing 22 for 260 yards. In the third quarter, his arm was hit as he passed and the fluttering ball was intercepted. The next drive, he seemed to throw a TD to Moore, who was ruled down short, and on the following play, he overthrew Tillman in the end zone, kicking the turf in anger. He did hit Moore with a 23-yard TD later in the quarter, but the Dolphins lost 14–10.
However, quite helpfully, the Colts managed to lose later that day, too, creating a three-way tie. Shula had to win the finale against the lowly Bills in Miami on Saturday and hope the Pats beat the Colts on Sunday, letting the Dolphins sneak in. There were only around 40,000 in the Orange Bowl, most fans having given up hope, but Shula had his men growling. Griese went 10-for-14 for 210 yards and two touchdowns, Moore reeling in five passes for 144 yards, one on which he followed Larry Little on a flare pass all the way to the end zone for a 67-yard score. Buffalo’s Joe Ferguson threw for 331 yards, but was picked thrice. It was 21–0 Miami at the half, 31–14 at the end. The next day, Shula had a premature tingle when the Pats took a 21–3 lead on the Colts. Then Bert Jones’s third straight touchdown pass made it 24–23 Pats, and with Shula sitting on a folding chair at the training facility, watching a TV, can of beer in his hand, Baltimore took it down the field and ran it in, winning 30–24.
Frozen out again at 10–4, he went home cursing that the refs had screwed the Pats. The Colts’ win did them no good; beaten once more by the Raiders in the playoffs, they would finish no higher than fourth over the next decade. But Al Davis, too, would stumble, losing the AFC title game to the Broncos, who fell victim to Tom Landry’s resurrected Cowboys in the Super Bowl.
To be sure, Shula and Landry had proved through the most trying of circumstances that they could keep a team in the pack at the home stretch most every year. Their greatness was certified. But living with defeat, and making excuses for it, would claim large portions of their careers. Neither would ever be able to accept it, but as Shula had learned long ago, it was the nature of the business he had chosen. And the thrill now seemed not to be in the kill, but rather the hunt.