These kinds of gut punches paled before the biggest blows Don Shula ever suffered—the thinning out of his family. On April 1, 1986, the intrepid Mary Miller Shula died in Painesville at age 83, three years after her husband, Dan. Their children laid her to rest next to him in St. Mary’s Cemetery. For their famous son, life at age 56 was no longer open-ended, and certainly not carefree. But, still made of equal parts brick, piss, and brine, he put the same long hours into his team, constantly adapting young men in his image. Trying in vain to hold the line on exploding player salaries—but not his own—was making his life as an executive less dictatorial year by year. Indeed, in 1986, his 24-year-old quarterback, only three years of service under his pads, was owed a mint.
At least the USFL was no longer a threat. Its slow death was made final that year after Donald Trump persuaded his fellow owners to go directly against the NFL that fall, only to see the league crumble before any games were played. Howard Schnellenberger’s Miami team never came to be. (The vanquished league would launch an antitrust suit against the NFL and “win,” but because its woes were its own fault, it was awarded damages of one dollar, trebled under antitrust law to three). That sent its highest-paid stars into the NFL. Jim Kelly had already signed with the Bills in ’85 for eight years and $5 million, his starting salary a cool million. Steve Young, whose $10 million USFL contract guaranteed him deferred payments for the next 40 years, pocketed a six-year, $5 million deal from Tampa Bay, two years before he was traded to the 49ers.
Watching this gravy train of inflated quarterback salaries, in early September Marino and Marvin Demoff collected Robbie’s IOU, his new deal for six years and a guaranteed $9 million, with a $2 million signing bonus and $850,000 roster bonus. His salary would climb from $500,000 to $1.45 million, $1.5 million, and $1.6 million, with incentives adding another $100,000 per year. That lifted him above Joe Montana, but not Kelly. On a team molded by Shula to strip away individualism, Marino’s star power was a justifiable exception, a boon to the Dolphins’ stock value, which made Shula pine for the shares he’d sold back to Robbie on the cheap.
The Marino era certainly helped Robbie prosper more, though he sank most of the bottom line into getting his vanity stadium built. In ’86, construction on the futuristic site was rising out of swampland in Miami Gardens, a still-unincorporated tract just north of downtown off the Florida Turnpike, ahead of schedule, the project eating just about every spare penny Robbie had after paying his players, his coach, and the IRS. One reporter wrote that Robbie “had to hock the Dolphins, right down to their last jersey and pair of cleats, to keep construction going. At the Super Bowl game in Palo Alto, Robbie offered tickets to the game and transportation on a chartered plane for anyone buying a suite in his new stadium. . . . Robbie is such a salesman that before the 160-acre site had even been cleared, using only architect’s renderings, he had persuaded the NFL’s brass to put the 1989 Super Bowl in his stadium.”1
The problem was, the ’86 season interrupted Shula’s streak of staying in contention. Adhering to his new formula, Marino put the ball in the air the most he ever would—623 times. He would complete the most passes of his career, too, 378 with 44 touchdowns to 23 picks, amassing 4,746 yards. He was first-team All-Pro for a third straight season. And for all that, Shula lost four of the first five games, one in a raucous 51–45 shootout to the Jets.
With two years left on his own historic contract, Shula had begun making his case for an extension to protect his status as the top-paid coach. Slathering Robbie like butter on a baked potato, he said that, given the “good relationship” they had, Robbie “continues to support me in every way and I’m going to be loyal to him in every way.” It worked. After the team had typically battled back to 6–6, he got his extension, another five years at $1.2 million per. However, the season ended at 8–8, in third place, out of the playoffs. It almost seemed a mockery that the Giants won it all that year, their quarterback, Phil Simms, an unassuming, conservative fellow who, in Bill Parcells’s game plan, threw mainly high-percentage passes, besting John Elway’s Broncos.
Not making the playoff was a rarity for Shula. But in what was playing out as a Groundhog Day, each season was coming down to the same ending: just short of something good.
The ’87 season was momentous for the Shula clan. For one, Mike had been drafted out of Alabama by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (his last college game was the Senior Bowl, coached by his father, with his brother, Dave, the offensive coordinator). Tough like his old man, but not as talented, he had taken the Crimson Tide to a couple of bowl games but never really had a shot as a pro quarterback. Taken in the 13th round, he washed out early, then took an offer from coach Ray Perkins to become a Bucs assistant in ’88, then following the path of his brother, Dave, onto the Dolphins’ staff.
As for the Dolphins family, that ’87 season brought the fruition of what Joe Robbie had promised, to snickers, when the humbly named Joe Robbie Stadium opened. To the former nonbelievers, this was the “Miracle of Miami.” Robbie hadn’t shorted himself or the fans. The 216 executive suites were peddled for up to $65,000 a year, fitted with air conditioning, two TV monitors, refrigerator, and catered buffet and liquor cabinet. These would raise $9 million a year in lease payments, securing more loans from the banks that had financed the project. The two looming scoreboards, 140 feet wide and 56 feet high, would project nonstop highlights of Marino and of Shula’s perfect season. Six years later, when the expansion Florida Marlins were born, they would play baseball there as well, making for year-round revenue.
The first regular-season game in the place was set for September 27, week three, against the Giants. However, in late September, after the Dolphins had split their first two games, the Players Association’s collective bargaining agreement with the owners expired and it called a sudden strike, reminiscent of the in-season walkout of ’82. Catching the owners off guard, it forced the NFL to cancel the next week’s games—including Robbie’s long-awaited home opener at his stadium. This time, not wanting to lose TV capital, the NFL went with a grab bag of replacement players. Predictably, this was a disaster, the fans rejecting this bottom-of-the-barrel product. During the interlude, Shula’s quarterback was one Kyle Mackey, a discarded 11th-round pick of the Cardinals in ’84 who, after losing to the faux Seahawks, was the leader for what was now the opening of Robbie Stadium, against the Chiefs. The ersatz Dolphins won 42–0, witnessed by 25,000 curiosity seekers, few of whom would brag about being there. The next week, Mackey threw five interceptions in an overtime loss on the road to the replacement Jets.
Shula got his men back a week later, after the union crumbled once again, ending the walkout without a new CBA, the union instead filing another antitrust suit against the league. In the interim, the two sides agreed on a compromise that would permit looser Plan B free agency in return for a team salary cap. And so, the “real” opening of Robbie Stadium came on October 25 against the Bills, pitting Marino against Kelly. It drew a gate-busting crowd of over 74,000, and it was worth waiting for. Each of them threw for over 300 yards, Marino for four touchdowns, Kelly two, and neither had an interception. After Marino hit Clayton to tie it in the fourth quarter, the Bills won on a field goal in the OT, 34–31. At 2–4, it seemed the season was headed for another no-show in the playoffs.
But Shula kept them afloat, finding critical pieces. Fourth-round pick Troy Stradford would lead the team with 619 yards rushing and catch 48 passes in the abbreviated 15-game season. The second-round pick from ’84, inside linebacker John Offerdahl, was an All-Pro. The three down linemen—T. J. Turner, Brian Sochia, and John Bosa, his first-round pick that year—were young and hungry. Shula also hired a defensive coordinator, Tom Olivadotti, Howard Schnellenberger’s former defensive line coach with the Miami Hurricanes. But the team was still squarely on Marino’s shoulders. Don Strock had become such a forgotten man that, when he demanded to be paid the same salary as the 37-year-old Ron Jaworski, who had been signed as an additional backup for Marino, it was hardly noticed that Shula summarily let Strock go, to join the Browns and rip into his old coach for not appreciating him.2
Marino, who was on the same wavelength as Shula and called nearly all his own plays, made second-team All-Pro in ’87 with 3,245 passing yards and 26 touchdowns; the Dolphins were No. 1 in yards and attempts. Keeping the team in the race, Shula had given himself a chance by the season finale against the Patriots. Both teams were 8–6, and a win might have gotten him a wild-card berth, but the Dolphins were run out of their new home. Down 24–3 at the half, they lost 24–10, with Marino picked off twice. At 8–7, they again ended stuck in third place, another also-ran season, out in the cold for the sixth time in Shula’s 18 years in Miami. But again, he had believable excuses and he had Marino. That, and his reputation, were all he needed to keep the hounds off him for another year . . . or three.
Needing to keep Marino upright at any cost, Shula had to perform radical surgery on his offensive line. Dwight Stephenson had blown out his knee in ’86 and retired. That enormous gap was filled by six-foot, six-inch, 290-pound Jeff Dellenbach, the fourth-round pick in ’85. Other injuries gave the right guard spot to low-drafted rookie Harry Galbreath. Another rookie, third-rounder Ferrell Edmunds, replaced Bruce Hardy at tight end. But the going got rougher in ’88, putting Shula in crisis. Starting out being crushed by the Bears 34–7, and then losing a field-goal battle to the Bills, the Dolphins clawed back to 5–4, then lost five in a row and six of the last seven—three by four points or less—to finish 6–10, last in the five-team AFC East. It was Shula’s lowest finish of all, and only sub-.500 season other than the 6–8 slip in ’76.
In one game, Marino threw for 521 yards against the Jets, the second-most ever to Norm Van Brocklin’s 554 in 1951—and lost 44–30. There was also the game against Tampa Bay, when Don Shula coached with one son on his sideline and another on the opposite one, with Dorothy watching and keeping to a stolid impartiality. The old man just barely got by the gruesome Bucs 17–14. Marino’s regular insistence that “we’re a better team than what our record is, we just haven’t put it together” became a mantra, although it was a hard sell watching quality time being given to names like Scott Schwedes, Brian Kinchen and Weegie Thompson.
Shula did get a rare top-10 draft pick out of this dreadful season and finally tried to repair the broken running game by taking Florida State running back Sammie Smith, who in ’89 would slog a team-high 659 yards on 200 carries, then over 800 yards in ’90. But he had an alarming tendency to fumble, usually at the worst times—15 of them over those two seasons. Shula also gave in to hiring an offensive coordinator, Gary Stevens, who’d held that job under Schnellenberger with the Hurricanes. But what may have been just as relevant to Shula in ’89 was that Tom Landry was fired before the season after the oafish Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys and installed his own coach, Jimmy Johnson. That Landry was axed after 29 years without so much as a thank you no doubt made Shula, who was about to coach his 26th year, far more sensitive to criticism, and to the reality that even he could be displaced.
When the Cowboys were still owned by Bum Bright, a Dallas sportswriter guessed that the team’s next coach might be Shula, who was said to be “best friends” with Cowboys team president Tex Schramm.3 But even though Shula’s contract was due to expire in ’89, he would never have embarrassed Landry by taking his job. They were the lions of the NFL, epoxied in mutual respect. During the ’88 season, they had sat for a joint interview with NBC, displaying different reactions to criticism. While Landry humbly said it “hurts a little bit,” but that “it won’t take a toll on me,” the pit bull in Shula railed at “innuendos and half-truths,” particularly public scapegoating of his son Dave as if by proxy to criticize him—which the old man took personally. With a bitter laugh, he noted that the team had gone to two Super Bowls “and won more games in the ’80s than anyone” with Dave as an assistant.4
Whether by coincidence or not, by the time the ’89 season rolled around, Dave Shula had left to become Landry’s intended offensive coordinator in Dallas, and was kept on when Johnson took over. But the elder Shula was still dodging bullets. The year before, Mark Duper had been suspended for the last two games after testing positive for an unnamed substance. Shula was forced to deny he had ignored the problem when Sports Illustrated reported in December that he and Robbie had been warned as far back as 1986 that Duper and former Dolphin Nat Moore had been photographed by police partying with Nelson Aguilar, a Miami dealer later convicted of drug trafficking.5
For Shula, it was an uncomfortable flashback to the Reese–Crowder mishigas, and his response was just as tepid. He admitted being so warned, being “very disturbed,” and notifying the NFL security department. He also called in the pair to discuss it, insisting, “That was the extent of what I could do,” even though the team continued Duper’s suspension pending a league investigation. Indeed, Shula seemed more intent on saving his own reputation, decrying the article as “an insult to my integrity and to the discipline that I demand from myself and my players.” Some in the media didn’t buy it; SHULA IGNORES DUPER CASE, read one headline.6 Coming to his aid, the league’s communications director, Joe Browne, said it was “ludicrous” to question Shula’s credibility.
Then, in February 1989, Sports Illustrated alleged that Duper had snorted cocaine for the last six seasons, based on the testimony of a driver at Duper’s limousine business who said he supplied both Duper and Mark Clayton, a prominent anti-drug crusader.7 Duper’s agent called the story “entirely false, shameless yellow journalism,” and no further action was taken by the team or the league against either player.8 After Duper passed a lie detector test, he and Clayton were cleared of any wrongdoing by the league. Thus spared, a year later, Duper would become the second Dolphin receiver to gain over 7,000 career yards. Clayton also excelled, making his fifth Pro Bowl in ’91 before both Marks Brothers retired a year later. Yet it might have been Shula who felt the most relieved, and vindicated.
His Teflon indeed seemed undisturbed during the ’89 season. The Dolphins lost two of their first three games, but they were 7–4 after beating the Cowboys 17–14 right before Thanksgiving. The only happier person than Shula that day might have been the exiled Landry, whose bad blood with Jones made him root against the team he had ruled since its inception. He had a lot to smile about that year, when Johnson went 1–15. And Shula, perhaps learning from Landry’s fall, seemed prepared to steel himself to keep from seeming vulnerable. He was also ready to bend a bit on the passing game. Marino threw less, just missing 4,000 yards, his 24 touchdowns putting him past 200 in his career faster than anyone ever had done it, though his somewhat toned-down game may have cost him another All-Pro designation.
The offense ran more, but the defense was a mishmash of odds and ends surrounding Offerdahl and the aging Hugh Green. For Shula, it ended with one more 8–8 record, one more third-place finish. He was on a treadmill, to be sure, but, as always, trusted to sprint ahead any day now.
Entrenched in a tropical market fueled by a culture of excess, Shula had his big contract—which had been bettered when Bill Walsh was raised to $1.3 million in ’88—and his prophylaxis with the fans and the press. He seemed too big, too permanent, to fail. However, as if underlining the uncertainty of the future, right after the new decade rang in, Joe Robbie checked out. He had been in poor health for months, suffering from a respiratory illness resulting from heavy smoking. Unable to breathe without aid, he sat in his owner’s box, sucking oxygen from a tank. Knowing he had scant time, he had placed the team under a living trust for one more generation, keeping in place his wife, Elizabeth Ann, as a paper vice-president and three sons, vice-president/GM Mike Robbie, vice-president of public affairs Tim Robbie, and director of sales Dan Robbie.
Two weeks after he saw the Dolphins lose their season finale on Christmas Eve to the Chiefs, Robbie died in a Miami hospital on January 7, 1990, at 73. His legacy was deserved, the investment for which he had to scrounge around to raise 100 grand now worth $120 million. One of the first people his widow called to inform of his death was Shula, who, for all his ambivalence about a man he had once wanted to punch in the mouth, knew his career had been salvaged by Robbie in 1970.
“I’ve never been around a guy who was more dedicated or wanted to win more than Joe,” he said. “His accomplishments made sports history. I’m just sorry to see him pass away after . . . we came so close but just didn’t get there.”9
As the tributes flowed for the “tough and tenacious” Robbie, for Shula there would be the hard-eyed matter of courting loyalty with a new majority owner once the Robbies chose to sell the controlling interest to Wayne Huizenga. Balding and moon-faced, the 53-year-old Huizenga had made his fortune in the garbage collection business, founding Waste Management Inc., before adding another future Fortune 500 company, Blockbuster Entertainment. The Robbies sold him 15 percent of the team and 50 percent of the Robbie Stadium Corporation—the latter non-negotiable as they had racked up $88 million in debt on Robbie’s “miracle” stadium, killing any chance that the family could afford to retain majority ownership. The tab for Huizenga to take control was around $75 million, and he was prepared to reach deeper into his pocket to buy the Robbies out altogether.
Shula could read Huizenga’s mind. While the Robbie family had his back now, they were on borrowed time. Huizenga would surely want want to name his own coach at some point. Shula wasn’t even 60 yet, hardly geriatric by NFL standards, but his permanence, his familiarity, and of course his salary were not to his advantage. Only getting back to the top could preserve him as the enduring face of the team.
Before he died, Robbie had promoted Eddie Jones, the vice-president of finance, to the position of executive vice-president and general manager. A highly respected career NFL executive, Jones was a gracious, solicitous type, and Shula felt a lot better about sharing power with him than he would have with Joe Thomas. But subtle moves like this were a small sign that the Dolphin bosses knew they needed to become less mom-and-pop in nature. And Shula was still in the long shadow of Vince Lombardi, certainly not immortal. When the 1990 edition of Who’s Who in America came out, Shula had been dropped from its pages. As Rick Reilly caustically wrote in Sports Illustrated, “A guy has a couple of 8–8 years and they’re filling out death certificates.”10
Not just yet. Partly with a win-one-for-Joe motivation—something he had never used before—Shula turned the last decade of the outgoing millennium into a personal renaissance. Not coincidentally, this was also Marino’s contract play-out season, and with Elway up to $1.5 million a year and Jim Kelly signing a new deal paying him $1.4 million with a $3 million bonus, the incentive for Marino to perform was high. To shield him more, in the first round of the 1990 draft, Shula picked Texas A&M’s massive offensive tackle Richmond Webb, who would start at left tackle. Another rookie 300-pounder, Keith Sims, the second-round pick, started at left guard. Webb would hold his position for seven years, Sims eight, each a periodic All-Pro. With a new center, Jeff Uhlenhake, a fifth-round pick in ’89, and Jeff Dellenbach backing them up, the line resembled a herd of circus elephants, with two still-growing kids, Galbreath and tackle Mark Dennis, on the right side.
But the real surprise of ’90 was the defense. Two years earlier, Shula had found a wild man with his ninth-round pick in Jeff Cross, who now won the job at right end and made All-Pro, leading the team with 11½ sacks. The two young safeties, Jarvis Williams and Louis Oliver split 10 interceptions. A free agent walk-on from ’88, David Griggs, made it as an outside linebacker; a trade pickup, Shawn Lee, got his shot at nose tackle. A graybeard pickup from the Colts, Cliff Odom, held down an inside linebacker slot. As Marino rang up the fourth-most passing yardage in the league, the defense gave up the fourth-least.
Marino had to survive three interceptions in the opener at Foxborough, his second touchdown pass, seven yards to fullback Tony Paige, lifting the Dolphins to a gutty 27–24 win, with Sammie Smith going for 159 yards and the defense sacking Steve Grogan four times. Thereafter, the defense went on an amazing streak, giving up fewer than 10 points five times, and as many as 20 only once. The team won seven of eight, had a critical overtime win over the Eagles, and waltzed home with a 12–4 record, a game behind the Bills in the division, but enough to grab a wild card. It was all very Shula-like, circa 1973. Marino threw the fewest passes in his career in a 16-game schedule (531), for the fewest yards (3,563), with the fewest picks (11), and the second-fewest touchdowns (21).
This time around, the media didn’t go overboard. The prevailing attitude was to wait and see whether Shula had come upon the right formula. In the wild-card playoff game against the Chiefs, he fell behind 16–3 and Marino had to save them with late touchdowns to Paige and Clayton, pulling out of the fire an uncomfortably close 17–16 win. That got Shula the unenviable task of going to the divisional title game with the Bills. On a blustery 30-degree day in Buffalo, it was Kelly who could throw economically, 29 times, because he had an accomplished running game, the name of which was Thurman Thomas, the All-Pro fullback and the league’s second-best rusher. Thomas pounded Shula’s defense with 32 carries for 117 yards and two touchdowns.
Again behind, 20–3, Marino would let it rip 49 times and complete 29. He connected with Duper on a 64-yard TD, and later, there were short scoring passes to spare halfbacks Roy Foster and Tony Martin. But Kelly would parry him each time, tossing three scores, outpassing him, 339 yards to 323. Buffalo won 44–34, carving another dubious distinction for Shula—who with this game had coached in the two highest-scoring playoff games ever, in four quarters (at the time) and overall (the Epic), losing both. Kelly went on to wreck the Raiders 51–3 and get to the Super Bowl, where reality would always set in for him. This time, he tasted the first of his three Super Bowl defeats, on a blown field goal against the Giants, played at the height of the mercifully brief Gulf War.
But the fact that Shula had made it to two playoff games was a win for him. He had bought himself time to make more history.
However, 1991 began with another tragedy, the harshest realities of life and mortality stealing the last mercy he asked his God for. Dorothy Bartish Shula’s inspiring fight against breast cancer had been intense and beyond courageous, and he had let himself believe that she—they—had beaten it. But after a series of remissions and relapses, it had metastasized to her lungs and she was pronounced terminal. She fought on, and in truth, the family had been preparing for her death for eight years, living with an enormous burden. In 1987, when the Broward Booster Club held a tribute dinner for her, David Shula told the teary-eyed audience, “We haven’t had to fight the battle she has had to fight.” He addressed her, saying, “When I feel down and sorry for myself, I think of your fight with cancer. I don’t think I could have matched it.”11
Unable to attend Dolphins games and sit in her box, she was last seen in public at an American Cancer Society dinner the previous August. Weakening and wasting away, but smiling widely, she rose to give a speech urging no one to feel sorry for her, but to instead contribute to the charity. Her husband followed her on the stage and said, “Talk about courage.” He still looked at her the way he did when they were kids, deeply in love. Their friends openly wondered how he could survive without her.
“There were days he lost it, he’d come apart at the seams, which was very unlike him,” said Howard Schnellenberger. “He’s a very sensitive man, with feelings the world never sees because he hides them. That was why he stuck around so long in the game. He needed football to get him through it. The game was his salvation.”12
On February 25, 1991, the beating heart of the Shula clan finally lost her long battle at age 57, a week after her family began keeping vigil at her bedside. Her husband made the announcement the next day, saying, “She went peacefully, thank God. It was about as peaceful as it could be. She went into a coma and just drifted away. Thank God everybody was here, all the five children. That’s what she wanted.”13 The funeral was two days later at Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church in Miami Lakes, and she was buried in Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery. Dozens of players past and present attended the service, where Shula stood beside the coffin and, voice shaking, harked back to the long-ago days in Painesville, when he wore his letterman sweater.
“We were known as a sexy couple and a guy who couldn’t hold a job,” he said. “We never thought anything about having kids or picking up and moving.” Then, with a snap of his fingers, he added, “It just went like that.” It was too much for many in the church to hear without their throats tightening. In the days after, he found himself deeply depressed, sitting in a suddenly empty seven-bedroom house, staring almost in a catatonic trance at her now-empty place in their bed. His friends and the children had never seen him like that. When he did get out of the house, he would wander about, telling people, “This is going to be my first year in coaching that Dorothy hasn’t been around.” Bob Griese, who had recently lost his wife to cancer as well, understood. “Everybody sees him on the sideline with that stern jaw sticking out,” he said. “Everybody thinks he’s so much in control, and he is. But we all have to go home in the evening. Dorothy was a big support for him.”14
That year, he hired his son Mike as a Dolphins assistant. Mike moved back into the house, getting his father’s mind on football, dragging him out to play some golf, or just talking out their grief. But Shula couldn’t help sitting at a desk in the office where Dorothy, by the light of a Dolphin-helmet lamp and under pictures of their wedding day, had organized her volunteer work, paid the bills, written and signed his return letters to fans. He made an effort to grow closer to his five grandchildren, having said at the funeral that Dorothy’s greatest joy was looking forward to them growing up. “He’s really made an effort to take over a lot of the things my mother used to do,” said his daughter Donna, who was 30 then and the mother of two. “Things that we never used to talk to him about, we talk to him about now. I see him as more vulnerable. I used to see him as this almighty person. I don’t think he used to like to let anyone see that he was vulnerable or hurt or scared. He comes to me a lot of times with things to talk about. It feels good.”
He launched a foundation to raise money for breast cancer research, planning celebrity golf tournaments and fund-raisers. He had moved on well enough to resume his job in time for the ’91 draft. When spring camp opened, he was back at his own mahogany desk, checking waiver lists, taking meetings with Eddie Jones and Mike Robbie, stalking practices, yelling himself red-faced, conducting his chalk talks with the old vigor. Often, he spoke of having an epiphany.
“What I learned from Dorothy more than anything is always take the necessary time,” he said. “She always had time for people, to say or do things to help make their lives more pleasant, to feel better about themselves. At this stage in my life, that’s something I want to do. I don’t need to rush anymore.”
One of his old warthogs, Bob Kuechenberg, noticed the change in the old pit bull:
Maybe [Dorothy’s] death had something to do with it, the slow and tragic way it happened. I saw him at a dinner after that. He hugged me. He said, ‘I love you, Bob.’ When he walked away, I said to my wife, ‘Did you just hear what I think I heard?’ It’s something he never would have said in the old days. The Lombardi in him wouldn’t have let him. Now he can say something like that. He isn’t afraid to show that kind of emotion.15
The ’91 season surely tested his new sense of tolerance. Although Shula persuaded Mean Joe Greene to come to the Dolphins as defensive line coach after five years in that job with his old Steelers team, the defense was anything but mean; they crashed back to earth, falling to 24th, ranking 27th against the run. This crash was evident on opening day, when Marino lost another shootout to Kelly, mainly because Kelly again had Thurman Thomas, who ran for 165 yards. Buffalo laid 582 total yards on them, and while Marino put them ahead with a short pass to Clayton in the fourth quarter, Thomas’s subsequent seven-yard TD clinched it.
Shula did get an astonishing performance that day from Mark Higgs, a five-foot, seven-inch kick-return man he obtained in a trade in ’90. In what looked like a misprint in the box score, only Higgs carried the ball for Miami the entire game—30 times, for 146 yards—one of the strangest anomalies in the Shula era. Higgs would virtually be the entire running game that year, gaining over 900 yards. Meanwhile, Sammie Smith fumbled his way off the team and out of the league, his finale prompting chants of “Sammie Sucks” in Robbie Stadium and Smith needing a police escort from the park. Whatever was ailing Smith seemed to be evident three years later, when he was convicted of selling cocaine and spent seven years in prison.16
Marino—who, as a product of this bizarre turn, was actually the team’s third-leading rusher that season, with all of 32 yards—never heard chants like that. In ’91, he rang up 3,970 passing yards, 25 touchdowns, and just 13 picks, elevating Clayton into the Pro Bowl with him by throwing him 12 touchdowns. And Shula, who won his 300th game early in the season, 13–3 over the Packers, again kept the team in contention. The Bills ran away with the division, but after 14 weeks, the Dolphins were 8–6, a win away from a wild card. But now they had to make another nightmarish trip to San Diego. Although Coryell and Fouts were gone and the Chargers were rebuilding, it was downright eerie how much pain they could cause Shula. This time, after Miami took a 23–10 lead, Marino, on the Chargers nine, threw behind Duper and was intercepted. The Chargers stormed back and won 38–30.
Shula still had a shot at the playoffs. He was a game ahead of the Jets, who were the opponents in the season finale in Robbie Stadium. Late in the game, Marino came up clutch, finding Edmunds with a one-yard scoring pass to go ahead 20–17. But now the much-maligned Ken O’Brien, who might have remembered Marino’s slight on draft day, led a drive that produced a game-tying field goal, sending it to overtime, where another Jets field goal won it 23–20. It was another routinely demoralizing failure for Shula, who tried to get by with Higgs carrying the ball on 15 of 16 Dolphins running plays, to little effect, while the Jets’ Johnny Hector rumbled for 132 yards. Marino, with no help, threw an ill-timed interception. The Jets snared the wild card, leaving Shula out in the cold, again.
“We had control of it in San Diego and couldn’t do the job, and then we had control again here and couldn’t do the job,” was his latest lament. “This one will last a long time, for me and for us.”17 These were words he had used too often to count. But leave it to the old bulldog, he could still make them sound fresh each time he uttered them. He was safe, but for how long?