The winter before the 1978 season, Shula’s real estate partnership with the shadowy Allen Glick belatedly bit him. In the years since they became partners, Glick had been the subject of an FBI investigation dealing with the Mob’s control of Las Vegas casinos. When that hit the papers, Shula suddenly ended the partnership, saying “it wasn’t a good idea” for “a guy in my position” to be involved with someone like that. By contrast, Al Davis defiantly increased his involvement with Glick, giving the NFL ammunition in its escalating war with Davis, which would ignite when league owners rejected his bid to move the Raiders to LA two years hence. While Glick did neither Shula nor Davis any good, in the end all three of them escaped serious repercussions from the partnership, and Glick rehabilitated his image when he became a cooperating witness against Vegas wiseguys. Still, for Shula, the headlines about being somehow associated with a Mob type were an embarrassment, the worst implication being that he was anything like Al Davis.
Even so, Shula had bigger problems with his owner. For one thing, Joe Robbie had cost him his draft guru. Fed up with Robbie’s penury, Bobby Beathard parlayed his relationship with Shula into a cushy job when George Allen quit the Redskins to go back to the Rams for the third time—only to be canned in preseason amid open rebellion by the players—and Edward Bennett Williams hired Jack Pardee as head coach and Beathard as general manager. This would prove to be the jumping-off point for the aging whiz kid to become a Hall of Fame executive, though it didn’t happen in earnest until Joe Gibbs replaced Pardee in 1981. As John Underwood wrote of Beathard’s falling out with Robbie, “his swan song was acid rock. He said his scouts had gotten one raise each in four years, and that Robbie wouldn’t even pay their way to the Super Bowl. He said Robbie was ‘just not an honorable person.’ Nice knowing you, Joe. See you around, Bobby.”1
The irony was, Robbie was sitting on a franchise now valued at $30 million to $40 million, and like all NFL owners, he profited handsomely from the league’s $140 million-a-year contracts with the TV networks. Robbie, wrote Underwood, was “a rich man with a flair for flashy spending (a $10,000 party for the cast and crew of Black Sunday in Miami; an $80,000-a-year contribution to his favorite university, Notre Dame, both accounted for under Miami Dolphins, Ltd.).” However, he had gotten himself into hot water with the IRS for back taxes, a festering boil that would soon rupture. Amid this darkness behind the team’s glowing brand, Shula’s purge of veterans could be understood as a consequence of Robbie’s henpecking about the bottom line. As Shula would say, paying guaranteed contracts “had an effect on the caliber of play. It hurt us.”2
As management, Shula toed the company line as the balance of power shifted to the players, a shift that would accelerate in the ’90s. No matter the caliber of his players, however, Shula kept the team in contention, adapting his sights to Robbie’s outdated, priggish ways, as Underwood wrote, “despite front-office turmoil that would rival the court of Louis XVI in quirks and intrigue, in divisive subplots and counterplots that would have done in or driven out a lesser man.”
Shula certainly deserved his props. Ever since his “I’ll knock you on your ass” tongue-lashing of Robbie, they had coexisted peacefully, if uneasily, the chilly discomfort between them palpable. When Shula had signed his most recent contract, he insisted on a clause that officially stated that Robbie would not interfere in coaching and personnel decisions. But Robbie could still criticize, and he had reason to do so about most of Shula’s drafts—in the ’78 edition, he had no first-round pick, and only three players would stick beyond a few seasons.
However, Shula came up a winner, thanks to the newest gamble gone bad by Joe Thomas. His next stop on his revolving-door tour of the NFL was in San Francisco, hired by the 49ers’ new owner, Ed DeBartolo Jr. as his general manager. In ’78, Thomas was determined to bring an aging O. J. Simpson to his native Bay Area. He traded five draft picks to get him, leaving the 49ers’ top rusher, Delvin Williams, disposable. Williams, a former champion sprinter, had rushed for over 1,200 yards in ’75, and Shula leaped, offering in exchange Freddie Solomon, safety Vern Roberson, and Miami’s No. 1 and No. 5 picks. Not incidentally, the Colts were also after Williams, and agreeing to send Williams to Miami may well have been Thomas’s way of flipping off Bob Irsay.3 Even though Shula had to explain why he was giving up so much for one man, he considered it a favor, and he wouldn’t forget it.
It was on the eve of the season that this writer met up with Don Shula for an interview that grew into a day-long sojourn with a man known to shun journalists beyond the locker room. It might have been the writer’s engaging personality (not likely) that eased Shula’s wariness, or the fact that, back then, there was little national exposure for athletes or coaches beyond Monday Night Football and the sports magazines. If so, this set Shula apart from Tom Landry, who was also a gracious man, but one who limited interview time and seemed not to care a whit about exposure, hating the Cowboys’ branding as America’s Team. Shula, more relaxed by the minute once away from team business, ferried the visitor around Miami in his sensible station wagon and to his home on the 16th fairway of the Miami Lakes Country Club. There, he poured himself a scotch and soda, then took a call from his son David, who was a sophomore receiver at Dartmouth. “Know all your plays?” he asked.
His other four kids were out, as they usually were, with friends, playing sports, hitting the beach, doing things their old man didn’t have much of a yen to do; indeed, he had never played the golf course he lived on. Dorothy Shula, an ample, engaging woman with a neon smile, whom he still looked at with the googly eyes of a teen, did not seem much of a Miamian either. Both of them would drop hints, unprompted, about leaving for an old-guard, big-city NFL town someday, which made it natural to ask him about his prickly relationship with Robbie.
“Our relationship hasn’t gotten any better,” he said, “but it hasn’t gotten any worse.”4
He seemed to know that was the best he could hope for, especially in light of the fact that Robbie, as if wanting to meddle by proxy, named his 35-year-old son Mike the Dolphins’ assistant general manager. But Shula would have to face losing a top adjutant, Howard Schnellenberger, for the second time. He had taken the head coaching job down the road at Miami University, where he would resurrect a moribund program and win the national title in 1983. Shula once more carried out the offensive coordinator duties himself, and there would be no quarterback or receivers coach until the next season, when he hired Dan Henning away from the Jets.
When the ’78 season began, he again kept the team in contention despite the injuries, such as Griese’s bruised ribs that kept him out of seven games of the new 16-game NFL schedule. Even missing so much action, Griese was All-Pro again, and when he was out, Don Strock ably handled the position. Del Williams ran for a career-high 1,258 yards and eight touchdowns, earning first-team All-Pro honors. Nat Moore, whom Shula sometimes lined up in the backfield to mask his routes, caught 48 passes and had 10 touchdowns.
At 8–5 with three games left, they blasted the Redskins 16–0 and then the Raiders 23–6. Now came the finale at home against the Pats, the last of three Monday night affairs. The latter had clinched the AFC East at 11–4; a Dolphin win would square the records, but not overcome the Pats’ advantage in tiebreakers. Still, Shula could take the wild card, and as it happened, Chuck Fairbanks practically gift-wrapped it for him. Detested by the Sullivans and most of his players, Fairbanks had secretly cut a deal with Colorado University to become their head coach in 1979, breaking his New England contract with four years left. A day before the finale, Billy Sullivan and his son Chuck—neither of whom had objected to Fairbanks breaking his Oklahoma contract to come to New England—suspended him. On game day, the Dolphins came out before 72,000 Orange Bowl fans to engage a dazed and confused opponent. Griese methodically went 12-for-13 for 171 yards with two touchdowns. He called a flea-flicker that produced a 38-yard completion. The final was 23–3, the late-season rally getting Shula into the playoffs at 11–5.
It was a job well done. Thin as they were, the Dolphins had scored the second-most points in the league and given up the sixth-fewest. They forced the most turnovers (53, with 32 interceptions) and suffered the fewest (30). The wild-card playoff game would pit them against the Oilers again on Christmas Eve, at home. It was no secret that Shula’s game plan was to not let Earl Campbell, the league’s top rusher for the first of three straight years, grind his team into dust. He would take his chances on Dan Pastorini’s passing, which often ended with interceptions. Pastorini would be playing with a sprained knee and bruised ribs, but so, too, would Williams and Davis play hurt.
The Dolphins would jam the rushing lanes, tracking Campbell with two linebackers. While he carried 26 times, he never broke free, gaining a very hard 84 yards. But provoking Pastorini backfired. He amassed 261 yards in the first half alone, while Griese—who took two pain-dulling shots for his ribs before the game—struggled. He went just 11-for-28 for 114 yards and was picked twice—the second after Houston went up 10–7 in the fourth quarter, preceding Campbell’s one-yard TD run that put it out of reach, 17–7. The final indignity was when Shula yanked Griese with under two minutes, and then Strock threw a concluding pick. It was, understated Shula, “a tough way to end the year,” words that had already begun to sound like a dirge.
It was Chuck Noll who was left standing at the end this time, nipping Landry’s Cowboys in the Super Bowl. Survival in the league was always a crapshoot among a few elite teams and coaches. The best teams and the best minds were offered no guarantees. As Shula had learned, the best any coach could do was stay at the water’s edge, waiting for the right tide to come in. Even when it seemed to, it could leave you drowning.
Youthful and pug-faced as he neared his 50th birthday, he still seemed like a man cruising for a fight. The coaches he invited comparisons with—Paul Brown, Papa Bear Halas, and Vince Lombardi—were gone or in retirement. The two men responsible for his ascent into pro coaching—George Wilson and Carroll Rosenbloom—died within a year of each other. The scabrous C.R. had just announced the Rams would move to Anaheim in ’81. He had been wintering at his Miami Beach home not far from Shula’s when he went for a swim in the ocean, apparently suffered a heart attack, and drowned. (Apparently because people began pushing conspiracy theories that he had been murdered, that wiseguys to whom he owed gambling debts had somehow pulled off an aquatic whacking—speculation that the LA coroner had to officially dispute even four years later.)5 He was given a VIP send-off, his funeral attended by Hollywood big shots and NFL figures, some crying a few crocodile tears. Shula may have shed some of those himself, his detente with C.R. never really free of the foulness of their breakup.
On the eve of the ’79 season, he had two years left on his Dolphins contract, and there would be the usual speculation about his intentions regarding staying in Miami. He had kept his value high by overachieving with middling squads and constant melodrama. The latest of that quotient was provided by his number one “son” returning to the family. That off-season, the Giants refused to pick up the option year of Larry Csonka’s contract, making him a free agent. By then, Csonka felt tainted by his New York detour, with reason. He helped create the most epic screw-up in the team’s long history—the late-game handoff he fumbled, which the Eagles’ Herm Edwards picked up and ran back for the winning touchdown. That play—“The Miracle of the Meadowlands”—cost both Csonka and John McVay their jobs, though McVay would go on to serve nearly two decades in the 49ers front office.
Csonka’s landing was less cushy. Now 33 and gimpy, he wanted to quit on a high, and suddenly he had a newfound appreciation for the benevolent dictator in Miami. And Shula now thought it a good idea to bring him home for a last hurrah in the sun. He talked Robbie into letting bygones be and set up a meeting between the old combatants. As Shula recalled, “Once Zonk and Robbie got in the same room together, things went pretty smooth. It’s hard to be mad at a guy that’s meant so much, that’s been such a part of the success.”6 Neither did Robbie have a problem forking over $125,000 for Csonka’s valedictory contract, though Shula had to dispute that it was an act of sentimentality rather than sound football logic.
“I have a good memory for guys that really put it on the line for me,” he said, “but if I ever let emotion enter into it, I wouldn’t be doing my job as a football coach.” Throwing in some Shula brine, he added, “He still has to win a job on the football team.”
Csonka was so serious about doing so that he even came to the rookie camp sanguine about the drills, gassers and 12-minute runs, or the rules he’d once chided as “childish.” He wasn’t Sundance now; he was dancing in the dusk. “I’ve had a mood change,” he said. “I still think Shula’s training camp is a bunch of hooey—his curfew and all that. But for the first time in my life I’m ready to cooperate in every instance.” Having ballooned to 264 pounds, he didn’t need Shula to hound him into losing nearly 30, eating one meal a day and subjecting himself to the torture of a medieval device called an Orthotron, built by the trainer Bob Lundy; strapped in, he would lift his brace-covered leg in endless repetitions. Once, the retired Jim Kiick visited the camp and heard him screaming.
“What’s all this moanin’?” Kiick asked.
“Go to hell,” a sweating Csonka replied.
“Zonk,” Butch warned him, “this is only the beginning.”
Actually, it was the beginning of the end. But it allowed Dorothy to put the old pictures back on the wall. Shula named his new collie Zonk, merrily saying the pup “was always banging into things, knocking things over. And he was the kind of dog if he ran away I knew he would come back.”7 In Shula’s merit system, there could be no higher praise than when he said, “The guy has immense pride.”
Around the team, Csonka, who felt like he was more of a dad than a teammate, was revered, a role he was not always comfortable with. A writer from Sports Illustrated, Tom Archdeacon, found him in the Miami bar he owned, Stagger Lee’s, where he “has been minding his own business, picking up bar tabs for his Dolphin teammates, including several rookies he doesn’t even know by name. . . . All eyes are on him, and although he relishes the attention, he doesn’t know what to do.”
Still, that he could turn back the clock was something even Mercury Morris envied. Now retired, and in cocaine hell, Morris also realized that Shula had his own voodoo. In San Diego, Morris said, “I could take my helmet off, get a drink of Kool-Aid, and relax,” but under Shula, “I never had a drink of water on the practice field. A player like me needs that regimentation.”8 Another Dolphin who had demanded a trade, Marlin Briscoe, now admitted that he “bitterly regretted” it. “It was in Miami that I learned how to win,” he said. Kiick, for his part, spoke of Shula as a man of subtle distinctions he couldn’t see back then. “Voicing your opinion doesn’t get you in trouble [with Shula],” he said, “but complaining gets you in the doghouse.” He admitted he did the latter more than the former.
Csonka didn’t complain. Prepared to be a third-down, short-yardage guy and blocker for Davis and Williams, he passed by Leroy Harris at fullback early on. He was now younger only than Griese and Little on a roster getting younger all the time. Yet he was the story of the season. He would carry 220 times—more than anyone, and one more than his previous high for a season—and gaining more yards per game than at any time since ’74. He put up 837 yards and 12 touchdowns, and caught 16 passes, his most ever under Shula. The Dolphins didn’t score a ton of points, nor did they need to with a defense that yielded the fourth-fewest yards and points.
The Dolphins started the season 4–0, but this was no joy ride. Thereafter, they couldn’t win two in a row again until November, along the way dropping a Monday night showdown in Oakland, 13–3, and another in overtime to the Browns. The key game was the Thanksgiving night match at home against the Patriots, each team sitting at 8–5. The Pats, coached now by Ron Erhardt, had ripped up the Dolphins 28–13 in week eight, and led this one 17–13 at the half. Then Miami wiped them out, scoring 29 unanswered points and winning 39–24.
After splitting the final two games to end the season at 10–6, another AFC East crown in the bank, a harder task awaited them in Pittsburgh, in what John Underwood described as a meeting of “football’s best team against football’s best coach,” confirming the remarkable reality that, even with Shula six years removed from a playoff win and Noll owning three rings to Shula’s two, “even today, when two or more football people get together, chances are the consensus will be that Shula is the NFL’s top coach.”9 Noll wouldn’t have argued; indeed, his own reign wasn’t built for long-term perpetuation, but for domination until inevitable burnout. At the tail end of that reign, the 12–4 Steel Curtain came in as nine-and-a-half-point favorites, the largest spread ever against a Shula team.
The game, on a cold and raw December 30, confirmed the spread. In the first quarter, the Steelers ahead 7–0, Miami safety Neal Colzie muffed an interception in the end zone and Terry Bradshaw then threw one for John Stallworth. Closing in on him, the mobile Vern Den Herder and cornerbacks Gerald Small and Norris Thomas all collided with each other, and Stallworth took it in for a 17-yard TD. Bradshaw then hit Lynn Swann from 20 yards out, and it was 21–0. The Steelers ran 40 times for 159 yards, Franco Harris gaining 83, and Bradshaw was 21-for-31 for 230 yards. In a hole early, Griese went 14-for-26 for 118 yards and a TD to Duriel Harris, but he also overthrew tight end Bruce Hardy in the end zone and later threw a killer pick at the Steeler two. The final: 34–14.
There was no soothing syrup from Shula this time. Looking sick and no doubt feeling, as Ed Pope put it, “how Napoleon felt trying to take Moscow,” he bemoaned, “I can’t be proud of the way we came here and did not challenge them in a game that meant so much.” Offensive guard Ed Newman said, “We never had a shot to express ourselves.” Pope’s take on Griese was like an elegy: “He has had a grand and glorious career but . . . he has shown a sharply diminishing ability to make the big play.”10 Griese had been given a new multiyear contract that season, but now he was talking about retirement. He would give it another go, but prepared himself to ride it out on the bench, a symbolic turn of the page as the new decade would begin with almost nothing left of Shula’s title teams, and a whole new challenge of settling on a new quarterback.
Shula was so low about how the ’70s were ending that he was dripping with self-pity. The league was about to name a ceremonial Team of the Decade, and Shula was already conceding that “I don’t think we will be given any consideration.” Someone asked him if he thought that honor would go to Chuck Noll’s team. “That’s obvious,” he said.11
He could take losing. He couldn’t take pity from others, which is what the Steelers’ faint praise for the Dolphins seemed to be after the game. Joe Greene, meeting up with some of the Dolphins as the teams left the field, told them, “Nice try, guys” and “You guys hung in there”—condescendingly, some believed. Nonetheless, the end of the ’70s would mark just the halfway point in Shula’s reign as a head coach. And Noll? After beating the Rams in the Super Bowl, he would win his division four more times, but never return to the Super Bowl—nor would the team until 1995, under his successor, Bill Cowher.
The holy trinity of Shula, Noll, and Landry, who had lost to the Rams in the playoffs, would carry on—still in eminence, but fading. Of the three dinosaurs, though, Shula would avoid extinction the longest. Impressive indeed was his seeming ability to shed his skin and reinvent himself year after year, young and swaggering all over again.