Professor Bonnie Mann was right: humans will always fail in one way or another, even the sovereign males. One of the most sovereign of them all, Donald Francis Shula, learned early in his rise that failure was a partner of success, and its most enduring artifact. He could live with it, if uneasily. And now, in retirement, if there was any relief to watching and not doing, it was because he could observe other coaches absorbing the same education, riding the same roller-coaster ride of jubilant heights followed by deadly curves of descent.
The hardest one to watch was his own flesh and blood, as Dave Shula’s misery only deepened in Cincinnati. After somehow making it through two more laborious losing seasons, he was freed after the ’96 season by Mike Brown, though Peter King noted, “It is unlikely whether Vince Lombardi or, yes, Don Shula could have won many more games with this bunch.”1 The numbers were gruesome; Dave’s winning percentage of .268 was the worst ever for a coach who lasted that many games. Not once did he beat the Dolphins, losing six times as a player, head coach, and assistant coach. Understandably chapped, he turned to the off-field business of being a Shula, running the Shula’s Steak House/Shula Burger chain, which would grow to have franchises in 15 states.
On the other end of the scale, the patriarch more than enjoyed the eclipse of Jimmy Johnson, who, after his red-carpet entrance, won just 55 percent of his games in Miami, far below Shula’s 66 percent. His cop-out was that he would also have needed to coach 26 years to be fairly compared to the man he replaced. “This is my sixth year,” he said before his Miami debut. “I don’t think I’ll make it that long.” He only fell 22 years short. Making the postseason thrice in his four years, he made it no farther than Shula, bricked by Elway’s Broncos 38–3 in ’98 and, incredibly, 62–7 by the Jacksonville Jaguars in ’99. Shula felt no pity for him, only for Marino, who, in Johnson’s contained, defensive-oriented system, never again made All-Pro.
Debates still rage about whether Marino should be bronzed or docked for being so dominant while the team failed so much—his backers make the case that he never played with a Hall of Famer in the backfield or among his receiving corps (which, in turn, sparks other debates, such as whether the Dolphins’ all-time leading receiver, Mark Duper, with 511 receptions and 59 touchdowns, deserves to be one). That would shift the blame to Shula for his personnel decisions. Marino surely left pieces of himself all around the league. After the ’99 season, when his body was shot and he missed five games, he limped away at 38—his last play a touchdown pass. That came days after Johnson quit, with no sham retirement ceremony, having fallen so far that he only made Shula look nobler.
In retirement, Marino and Shula—a coach/quarterback tandem that had won more games than any other (116, since surpassed by Belichick and Brady’s 207 through 2018)—were again joined as permanent avatars within the football culture. Shula went into the Hall of Fame in 1997, after the minimum one-year waiting period. At the Canton festivities, wearing the hall’s ceremonial yellow jacket, suntanned, designer shades over his eyes, he laughed easily as Dave Shula preceded him by playfully reviewing the litany of defeat that came before his arrival in Miami, which, Dave said, “fueled the fire of an intensely competitive man.” Mike Shula then spoke of his father’s “tender side—you just have to find it.”
After the three of them embraced, the patriarch had his moment in the August sun. Mary Anne and the grandchildren were in the first row, along with his surviving siblings, the triplets whose births had been such a big story. So was his coach at Harvey High, Don Martin, and a Catholic school coach, Joe Jenkins. Of course, Carl Taseff was there. Bill Arnsparger was, too, with a dozen of the greatest Dolphins, four of them in the Hall, with Nick Buoniconti, Dwight Stephenson, and Marino yet to be. Earl Morrall made it there. Perhaps pointedly, Johnny Unitas managed not to.
“It’s 50 miles from Grand River to Canton,” Shula began, the eyes of the bronzed bust of him seemingly staring right into his, “and it took me 67 years to travel that distance.”
He hailed Dan and Mary Shula for teaching him there were “no free lunches,” and even lauded a logic professor he had at John Carroll, whose theories he said he used as a coach. He curdled his mouth in jest as he recalled his blackest day, needing only to say “the Jets,” but gave a nod to Weeb Ewbank, who was there, two years before his death at 91. He praised his nemeses Pete Rozelle and Al Davis. He singled out Paul Brown, Tex Schramm, Chuck Noll, Howard Schnellenberger, and other assistant coaches, though neither George Wilson nor Blanton Collier. He thanked his three owners. The fans, he said, were “the best,” the writers “true professionals.”
The speech nearly over, he admitted, “I would’ve liked to have ridden off into the sunset,” adding sadly, “but it didn’t happen.” That was something he knew he would have to live with; that he had done something unprecedented, yet it could have been better. Should have been better.
He lived not entirely uneasily, retirement never blissful but easy enough, a peripatetic figure in the city he often fantasized about leaving. He did consider straying from the Dolphin family in 1998, when he joined in a group of investors angling to bring a new Browns team to Cleveland the following year—as with Modell’s previous entreaty, perhaps the only other one he would have made an exception for. In the end, though, the group was outbid by bank magnate Al Lerner. But Shula would have been an absentee owner. Unlike Dorothy, Mary Anne had no affinity for cold-weather climates, and so it was in South Florida that he would enjoy his post-career life.
He became so unimpeachable in his later years that he could freely abhor the decline of civilization bred by the drug culture and not have to answer for the coked-up players he had selectively excused. In 2001, Don Strock wrote an autobiography in which he wrote that Shula was the best coach in creation, but that he “didn’t stick up for me” and “doesn’t stick up for anybody other than himself and his son, maybe. . . . Special tantrums, wild rages, veiled threats—all have always been part of the Don Shula package.” He also wrote of widespread use by Dolphin players of Ritalin, which is today classified as a performance-enhancing drug. Players, he said, had “private pillboxes and bottles.” He confirmed the shots of Xylocaine and Novocain; and that when Glenn Blackwood broke his nose, he was given an injection “right between the eyes.” Once, in the Superdome, Strock wrote, the doctor “slipped [the needle] under the carpet . . . and that damn thing might still be there, rusting away.” Asked if he meant Herb Virgin, who retired in 1983, and his son Charles, the team doctor until 1988, he said, “You could assume that.”2
There would always be whispers, intimations, winks about being complicit in the drug accounts. The trainer who replaced the Virgins, Bob Lundy, once said that drug usage on Shula’s Dolphins “wasn’t done recklessly or anything,” but that “it’s like how they used to send people into coal mines; the consequences weren’t known at the time.” Jim Langer, in retrospect, called it “part of the dark side of the NFL,” but said that, at the time, it was “just the way it was with our team.”3
Shula’s resolute defense is: “The only way pain-killers were used is if they thought it wouldn’t be long-term harmful. I would never want them used if they’d jeopardize a player’s career.” It was all he had to say to rise above it all.
In the brutal heat of Miami, he eased the aches in his bones and settled comfortably into the business of being Don Shula, maintaining his restaurants and golf resort. He kept himself in remarkably good shape, still doing gassers in his backyard. As for his old team, he didn’t stray far. In 1996, his name went up on the Dolphins’ Honor Roll in Pro Player Stadium. Once Johnson’s palace coup was itself overthrown, he began, with no title or official attachment—nor the stock that had been bought back—acting like a team spokesman, even a consigliere—not in board meetings, but through his periodic remarks in the media. In this capacity, he seemed to enjoy riling things up, saying what the coaches couldn’t.
In 2007, when Nick Saban quit as the Dolphins’ coach with three years left on his contract to take the same job at Alabama University, Shula saw it as no less than sedition—no matter that Shula himself had once walked out on a team to take a better job. Saban, he fumed, had “run away from the challenge . . . That tells you a bit about the guy. [He] likes to hear himself talk and then doesn’t follow up what he says.” Not incidentally, there was another factor involved: Mike Shula, who, after being stiffed by Belichick in Cleveland, had done quite well, hired by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as offensive coordinator, then back to the Dolphins as quarterback coach. In 2003, he was hired as the Crimson Tide’s head coach. The school was under sanctions for recruiting violations, yet by his third year, they won 10 games and were ranked No. 10, earning him a new million-dollar contract and a six-year extension. But when Saban became available a year later, another Shula was out in the cold.4
The same family tie might also help explain why, beyond pride, Shula pricked Belichick during the Patriots’ 16-game, undefeated regular season in 2007. While the old coach acknowledged that Belichick had done “a tremendous job,” he averred that “the Spygate thing has diminished what they’ve accomplished,” referring to Belichick’s illegal videotaping escapade, which cost the Pats its No. 1 draft pick—the same penalty Shula himself had once cost the Colts.5 Shula even did a guest shot during a Monday night game that fall, openly rooting against the Patriots, something that seemed tacky to many fans; one Boston writer, even a decade later, judged him to be “an angry old man.”6 When “Beli-Cheat,” as he called him, was upset in the Super Bowl by the Giants, Shula lavished praise on Tom Brady, but added, “I can’t say anything nice about Belichick.” Even when that game faded and Shula’s perfect record stood, he wouldn’t let go of Belichick’s ankle, reminding anyone who would listen, “We didn’t deflate any balls.” His achievements, he said, overlooking his own ethical lapses, were “always done with a lot of class, a lot of dignity. Always done the right way.”7
Once, he kept those sort of grudges quiet. Now he didn’t need to play nice. He always believed Marino had been misused by Johnson, virtually shoved out the door. When Marino was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2005—Shula’s 14th and last player to go in, and the eighth Dolphin—he claimed proprietary rights to him. Before heading to Canton for the ceremonies, at which Marino called him “the greatest coach ever” and, “other than my father, the most significant influence” on his life, Shula said Marino “had one coach” in his career. That was Shula’s revenge on Jimmy Johnson.8 And as for Belichick, Shula could savor another big-game loss by the Patriots, to the Eagles in Super Bowl LII. The winning coach was Doug Pederson, the third-stringer who had fleetingly tasted glory in 1993 before Shula forgot about him. As tenuous as that proxy was, to Shula, it was justice being served.
He had enough commercial and banquet appearances to keep himself occupied. In 2000 he was paid handsomely as a “financial coach” for Shochet Securities, a discount brokerage house in Boca Raton. He had his golf tournaments, the burgeoning empire of his restaurants, and charities—when the former Dolphin team dentist’s son died of cystic fibrosis, Shula began a fund in the son’s name. He avidly participated in nostalgic documentaries about the perfect season, Marino, and himself. He was, to be certain, a peripatetic figure, hovering around the Dolphins, getting together with his old players at reunions. After the Dolphins retired Marino’s number in 2000, Shula took the microphone at Pro Player Stadium. “Before I start,” he said, “I want to thank all of the general managers in the National Football League who passed on Dan Marino. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have tonight.”
He seemed the picture of health, a swinging, suntanned senior, handsome as ever, trophy wife on his arm. He and Mary Anne were often seen together on the golf or tennis court, and in numerous TV commercials. As much as people rolled their eyes about the marriage, she kept him young and rich and was a ferocious protector of their mutual interests—and definitely her own. Still receiving $1 million a year in alimony from her late former husband, she sued her former stepson for having “drained the assets” of the Stephens estate. She sued the city, also in vain, to roll back their property taxes, saying that Shula was “on the back nine of his life. . . . If our taxes go up, he’ll suffer. What gives you the right to do that?”
Such melodrama created openings for the media to poke some fun at the aggressive, magnolia-drawling belle who had bagged the legendary coach. “Are the Shulas broke?” asked one article. “Or is football demigod Don’s wife just a cheapskate?”9 If they were broke, they had a funny way of showing it. In 2004, they paid $2 million for a second home, a Mediterranean-style villa they called their summer retreat, in Palm Beach Gardens—inside Old Palm Golf Club, whose course was designed by Ray Floyd. The two-story, 6,087-square-foot lakefront home features four master suites, four full baths and one half bath, a gourmet kitchen, vaulted ceilings, and a summer kitchen in the backyard.
Even without Mary Anne’s fortune. Shula, at a net worth of $30 million, ranked fourth in a 2017 Money magazine list of the richest coaches of all time. (Jimmy Johnson was first, at $40 million, Belichick next, at $35 million.)10 As with many of his generation, great wealth moved him from FDR Democrat to Reagan Republican, but his only official political endorsement was for Charlie Crist, a moderate Republican later turned Democrat. He also hosted a fundraiser for Democrat Bob Graham, the Florida senator and former governor, in 2003 when the latter announced a short-lived presidential run. He always did know when to go out on a limb for someone, and when to make a statement by saying nothing at all. The latter seemed to be his approach to his old foil, who, to his astonishment, somehow became president of the United States, proving that some things in life simply cannot be explained on any logical basis. But then, he knew that to be reality the day he lost Super Bowl III.
Living like a king, he appeared immune to age as his contemporaries began to drop. Bill Braucher died in 2014, Ed Pope in 2017, a year before Wayne Huizenga. His oldest football confrere, Carl Taseff, went in 2005. He has outlived some of his players, such as Johnny Unitas, Earl Morrall, and Garo Yepremian. Others suffered in uneasy retirement—David Woodley, for one. While he and Hall of Famer Ken Stabler were the only quarterbacks to win over 60 percent of their games and throw at least 10 more career touchdowns than interceptions, few remembered the lanky Dolphin quarterback. After becoming a heavy drinker, in 1992 he underwent a kidney transplant, and in 2003, he died of kidney and liver failure at the age of 44.11
Others had to cope with a living death, the result of something no one in football paid much attention to in the old days: the cumulative effects of head trauma. Nick Buoniconti, Shula’s only defensive player on the Dolphins to be elected to the Hall of Fame, had lived well in retirement, doing much TV work. But in 1985, his life took a cruel turn when his son Marc, a linebacker for the Citadel, injured his spinal cord, and was rendered quadriplegic.12 Buoniconti sued the school, settled for $800,000, and began raising funds to find a cure for paralysis, with Shula joining in the effort. Then his own health began to deteriorate, with symptoms that only in recent times became familiar indications of traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the condition found in the autopsies of many NFL players. “At 55 I was very normal,” he said in 2017. “I’m not normal anymore. I can’t remember how to lace my shoes. My left arm won’t do what my brain tells it to do.”13
Jim Kiick went through the same hell. As “Butch” hit his 60s, his mind began to fail, and in 2011, he was diagnosed with dementia/early-onset Alzheimer’s and possible CTE; five years later, his finances drained, living in squalor, he was placed in an assisted living facility. Looking back in anger, he blamed an easy target: the coach who had told him so often, “Just get back in there.”14 Mark Duper disclosed in 2013 that he, too, had tested positive for signs of CTE.15 Bill Stanfill underwent hip replacement and three spinal fusion surgeries and had crippling neck pain and the loss of feeling in his hand and arm. Possibly suffering as well from CTE, he was diagnosed with dementia before dying in 2016.16 “Sundance” Csonka suffered from spine damage.
There were also those with self-inflicted wounds. Similar to Mercury Morris, Mark Ingram was convicted of money laundering and fraud in 2008 and was sent to prison for seven years.17
Shula hurt for them all, but he refused to believe that anything he had ever done contributed to their woes. Football, he said, was not a game for the weak of heart or limb. He could give thanks during his daily Mass that his mind was nimble, what with the hits he took as a player. But he had his own health issues. In his 80s, his speech grew slow and slurred, his famous ramrod posture stooped, but after brushing off minor problems, he awoke one night gasping for breath, frightening him and Mary Anne when they learned he had sleep apnea, the condition that had caused the premature death of the Packers’ Hall of Fame defensive end Reggie White. He began wearing a ventilator to sleep without disruption, and as his legs weakened, he began using a motorized cart to zip around in.
“He invited me to come and play in one of his celebrity golf tournaments,” said Rick Volk, “and when I got there, I saw him in a wheelchair and I was shocked. He always seemed indestructible, ageless, to me. I said, ‘What’re you doin’ in that thing?’ He just smiled and said, ‘Rick, we all get old.’ ”18
He still likes to drive, usually too fast, sometimes on the Don Shula Expressway. Those sorts of monuments were all around him. One exception was the stadium Robbie built for himself, which was never renamed Don Shula Stadium. Bouncing from one sponsor to another, it was renovated and rechristened five times; after Huizenga sold the team in 2009 to real estate magnate Steven Ross for $2.2 billion, it became Land Shark Stadium, then Sun Life Stadium, then Hard Rock Stadium, the address of which is 347 Don Shula Drive. It has a 10-foot statue of Shula on the sidewalk and a huge mural of him on the outside wall; in many ways, it is Don Shula Stadium.
In the wreckage of a once-haughty team that has had 10 coaches since he left, only his name and image can evoke phantasms of better days ahead, mirroring the better days past. Not that he became less crotchety about the “kids” he had to put up with and never really understood, and the changes in the game that had caused him complications. As Ed Pope wrote, Shula “revered and reveled in his game so much, worked at it so passionately, so honorably, he could not even begin to understand why Eric Green did not gather in passes as hungrily as Raymond Berry and Howard Twilley and Nat Moore had. Couldn’t see why paying someone $3.5 million in advance should not have the slightest effect.”19 Such old-world sensibility seemed quaint, but it was why Greg Cote could write dreamily in 2018, “How long has this franchise, my team, been riding the fumes of Shula’s early successes? We forgive that he spent his last 22 seasons wanting nothing more than to win a third Super Bowl but failing to do so. Shula is our granite-jawed deity, still.”20
The family continues to annex turf within the sport. Mike Shula, who fashioned Cam Newton’s whirlwind offense that took the Carolina Panthers to a nearly perfect regular season—with the patriarch saying he “would love” for Mike’s team to go undefeated—and one game short of a title, was fired when the team collapsed. He then went to the Giants as offensive coordinator in 2018. And now there was a third generation. Dave’s son Dan—named for his great-grandfather—landed with Florida Atlantic University, where Howard Schnellenberger had founded the football program. Dave’s middle son Chris crept up as an assistant at Indiana, Ball State, and, in 2014, as defensive coordinator at John Carroll, where his grandfather had taken him as a teenager a decade earlier, when the new football field was dedicated—Don Shula Stadium. Chris made history by becoming the Blue Streaks’ head coach, then advanced as an assistant coach with the Chargers and the Rams. Even Dave Shula began to get itchy again, and in 2018, he returned after 20 years to become head coach at his alma mater, Dartmouth.
The patriarch, meanwhile, remained content not to haunt any sidelines, and is sympathetic with those who followed in his footsteps in Miami, without success. When Adam Gase became the Dolphins’ coach in 2016, Shula pronounced him a “good guy” and asked the fans to give him a “fair chance,” as he had done with the previous coach, Joe Philbin. At that point, he was engaging simply in boosterism, but he clearly enjoyed being asked to lend his support (not that it spared Gase from the gallows after the 2018 season). Just as he enjoyed being asked to play himself in a cameo role in the pilot episode of Ballers, the Miami-based HBO football series starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The script had him lounging in the back of a yacht with a fictitious Dolphins coach. He had one line, telling a new player, “You’re an asshole.” He did it, perfectly.
In April 2018, the swells gathered at the Fontainebleau Hotel to see Joe Namath be presented with something called the Don Shula Sports Legend Award. Namath, at 73, was nearly half a century removed from the day he caused Shula’s heart to break. When he rose to accept the award, he walked slowly and painfully, at the mercy of his prosthetic knees. Shula, at 88, sat waiting for him in his cart, puckish grin on his kisser.
“I can’t believe I’m presenting Joe Namath an award,” he said, still gritting but able to laugh about it. But what was hardest to believe was that both of them were relics of a sport they had, by turns, defined by their youth.
Shula, at a still-spunky 88, was no longer youthful, but he has left his mark, particularly around South Florida. Over the summer of 2018, the writer who had interviewed him so long ago was in one of those too-quickly constructed bar/eateries along the slinky Intracoastal Waterway, yachts and sailboats floating lazily by. Shula, he had learned, had been to seemingly all of these places at one time or another, signing autographs between bites and digressing into battle stories, some of them literally so—such as the one about how he and Mary Anne visited the troops in Afghanistan, wearing 40-pound bulletproof vests as they rode in an army helicopter, squirming as machine-gun fire was aimed at it from the ground. When they landed safely, he said, you could smell the gunpowder from a suicide bomb that had gone off only hours before. He would tell this story, and then, when asked to take a selfie, he would laugh and say, “Thirty-five dollars, two for seventy.”
One need not have an interest in football to feel as if they know him. At the bar this night, an underdressed woman in her mid-60s, sipping a margarita, heard a man utter the name Don Shula.
“Oh, yes, I know him,” she said, confidently. “Shula Burger.”
Where brands are concerned, other sporting legends have had eponymous restaurants, but in Shula’s case, being synonymous with a slab of ground beef just fits the contours of his being. He knew that when he began the chain. Because, in his self-awareness, it was clear that what sustained him for so long wasn’t the sizzle, but the meat.