[msb-alumni] Don Shula, Coach Who Built Unbeatable Team, Dies at 90 on May 4, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 5 May 2020 15:49:27 -0400
BlankDon Shula, Coach Who Built Unbeatable Team, Dies at 90. By Ken Belson.
He had more victories than any other coach in the league and the only perfect
season
in its history, all while helping to shape pro football's modern era.
Don Shula, who won more games than any head coach in National Football League
history, led the Miami Dolphins to the league's only perfect season and helped
usher
pro football into its modern era, died on Monday in Florida. He was 90. His
death,
at his home in Indian Creek, near Miami Beach, was announced by the Miami
Dolphins on
Twitter.
Shula, a steely tactician and taskmaster, built fearsome defenses and explosive
offenses in taking his teams, the Baltimore Colts and the Dolphins, to six
Super
Bowls. He won two with the Dolphins, crowning the 1972 and 1973 seasons.
The 1972 campaign was historic: The Dolphins won all 14 regular-season games
despite
losing their star quarterback, Bob Griese, to an injury in the fifth game. With
the
top-ranked offense and defense, they went on to win the three playoff games and
capture Super Bowl VII, an unmatched string of victories.
"You were now the coach that won the big one, and that changed everything in my
coaching career," Shula said.
Shula's career embodied the transition from an era of grind-it-out football to
the
high-flying modern one of glitzy entertainment and glamour. Unafraid to
experiment,
Shula helped introduce the pass-centric offenses that are standard today. His
teams
were perennial contenders and a mainstay on prime time television, which turned
the
N.F.L. into the nation's richest league.
His undefeated season came just three years after the merger of the old N.F.L.
and
the upstart American Football League, and with the Dolphin's Super Bowl victory
over
the Washington Redskins at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the league's
transformation into America's new national pastime was all but complete.
With his perfect season Shula vanquished the ignominy of losing to Joe Namath
and the
New York Jets in Super Bowl III -- one of the biggest upsets in professional
sports -- just three years earlier, when Shula coached the heavily favored
Baltimore
Colts. The game, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, gave the A.F.L. the legitimacy it
craved while saddling Shula with the label of a coach unable to win on the
biggest
stage. It also signaled the victory of a flashier kind of football, led by an
irrepressible Broadway Joe, over Shula's blue-collar brand.
A year after that defeat, the Dolphins lured him away from the Colts, though
the
success he would go on to enjoy in Miami seemed improbable at the time.
After entering the old American Football League in 1966, the Dolphins had won
just 15
games in their first four seasons and just three games the year before Shula
arrived.
But he took to building an even more efficient football juggernaut.
With a jutting jaw and stiff spine, he had a fierce look, whether pacing the
practice
field, demanding that his players be prepared, or exhorting his teams from the
sidelines, driving them to victory after victory. Few coaches in any sport
could
match his success.
In his 33 years as a head coach, seven with the Baltimore Colts (1963-69) and
26 with
the Dolphins (1970-95), his teams won 328 regular-season games -- still an
N.F.L.
record -- lost 156 and tied 6. He still holds the N.F.L. records for games
coached
(526) and total victories (347 -- 23 more than the legendary George Halas of
the
Chicago Bears). His teams won 10 or more games in a season 21 times and reached
the
playoffs 19 times. He was coach of the year three times with the Colts.
Marv Levy, who coached the Buffalo Bills to four Super Bowls, called Shula "the
greatest coach in professional football history."
Shula, who entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1997, was a longtime member
of
the N.F.L.'s influential competition committee, which pushed to tighten rules
against
a defense's holding wide receivers; with receivers freer to maneuver, the rule
change
tilted the advantage to the offense, paving the way for more risk-taking,
high-scoring contests dominated by the passing game.
Shula coached three Hall of Fame quarterbacks: Johnny Unitas at Baltimore and
Bob
Griese and Dan Marino at Miami.
He fathered two coaches: His son Dave was head coach of the Cincinnati Bengals
for
parts of five seasons, and his son Mike was head coach at the University of
Alabama
and has been a position coach with several N.F.L. teams, currently the Denver
Broncos. Don Shula became a head coach at 33, Dave at 32 and Mike at 37.
Shula was famous for working players hard during training camp, holding four
workouts
a day in South Florida's steamy summers. During his early years on the
sideline, he
was known to be short-tempered and quick to blame players when things went
badly.
"As a younger coach, I was very intense," he told the columnist Dave Anderson
of The
New York Times in 1983. "Sometimes I was less than understanding. I hope I have
been
able to balance it out a little, but I also hope that I never give up being
intense."
By the Dolphins' unbeaten season in 1972, Shula's players had found a way to
ease the
tension. About a week before the Super Bowl, defensive linemen Bill Stanfill
and
Manny Fernandez, both fun-loving characters, went fishing and caught and
captured a
three-foot alligator. After practice the next day, running back Larry Csonka
distracted Shula's secretary so that Fernandez could leave the alligator in
Shula's
private shower.
When the coach stepped in, he found the alligator, screamed and ran into the
locker
room to confront his players.
"I said, 'I don't think that's very funny," Shula said, recounting the story in
an
interview with The New York Times in 2016. "They said, "Coach, can't you take a
joke?
," "and I said, "A joke? A live alligator?"
"They said, "We took a vote and you only passed by one vote on whether we
should tape
up the mouth of the alligator."
Linebacker Nick Buoniconti said Shula started laughing and the team soon joined
in.
"It really loosened everybody up," Buoniconti said.
The Dolphins went on to beat the Washington Redskins, 14-7, to win their first
Super
Bowl and finish the season 17-0.
Shula's arrival in Miami did not start out smoothly. He was under contract with
Baltimore when the Dolphins' owner, Joe Robbie, signed him, so the Colts filed
a
tampering charge with the N.F.L. The Dolphins were forced to give up their
first-round draft pick in 1971 as compensation. (The Colts picked the
University of
North Carolina running back Don McCauley, who played 11 seasons with them.)
"Then things changed drastically for the better," Csonka once told an
interviewer.
In his first year in Miami, Shula used an offensive line stocked with future
Hall of
Fame players like Larry Little and Jim Langer to block for Csonka and his
fellow
running backs Jim Kiick and Mercury Morris. Wide receiver Paul Warfield and
tight end
Marv Fleming, who had won league championships elsewhere, also arrived, giving
Griese
fresh targets. The core of what became known as the "No Name Defense" began to
shut
down opposing offenses.
The team's success turned Shula into a hero in Miami. In the early 1980s, a
sign in
the Orange Bowl, then the Dolphins' home field, read: "Shula is god."
The Times sportswriter Larry Dorman wrote "About the only argument it ever
generated
around town concerned whether the letter 'g' should be upper or lowercase."
A road in Miami is named Don Shula Expressway. At John Carroll University near
Cleveland, his alma mater, football is played in the Don Shula Stadium, and
other
sports events are held at the Don Shula Sports Center.
Donald Francis Shula was born on Jan. 4, 1930, in Grand River, Ohio, about 40
miles
east of Cleveland. He was a running back at John Carroll and earned a
bachelor's
degree in sociology there with a minor in mathematics in 1951. He received a
master's
in physical education at Western Reserve (now Case Western Reserve) in 1954.
In 1951, the Cleveland Browns drafted him in the ninth round and gave him a
$5,000
salary. From 1951 to 1957 he played defensive back for the Browns, under the
longtime
coach Paul Brown, as well as the Colts and the Redskins. He ended his career
with 21
interceptions.
Shula was an assistant coach at Virginia in 1958, an assistant at Kentucky in
1959
and defensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions from 1960 to 1962 before taking
over
in Baltimore.
Despite their success under Shula, the Colts lost Super Bowl III to the New
York
Jets, who were heavy underdogs, 16-7. His move to Miami was sweetened by a 10
percent
share of ownership, which he sold back to the team a few years later.
Shula's run of three straight Super Bowls ended in 1974, when Csonka, Kiick and
Warfield left for the upstart World Football League. The Dolphins returned to
playoffs regularly afterward, and appeared in two Super Bowls in the 1980s,
although
they lost both. Despite Marino and one of the league's most prolific offenses,
the
dynamic success of those early years never returned.
By 1995 Shula's Dolphins had a leaky defense and barely made the playoffs that
year,
with a 9-7 record; they were eliminated in the first round when they lost a
wild-card
game.
Players openly criticized coaches. One pro coach, Mike Ditka, called the
Dolphins "a
team without heart"; another, Ron Meyer, said, "Shula has lost control of his
team."
Shula resigned after that season, the day after he turned 66.
"I'm sad that he was driven out by all the criticism, a lot of it totally
uncalled-for," Fernandez, his former defensive tackle, told The Times. "But I'm
happy
for him that it's over. He doesn't have to put up with all this anymore."
After football, Shula played golf, owned a hotel and golf club, ran a chain of
steakhouses bearing his name and made speaking and charity appearances. His
first
wife, the former Dorothy Bartish, died in 1991 after 32 years of marriage. He
married
Mary Anne Stephens in 1993. Along with her and David and Michael, his survivors
include three daughters, Donna, Sharon and Annie; and three stepchildren, John
Smith,
Jimmy Stephens and Carrie LaNoce; 16 grandchildren and five
great-grandchildren; his
sisters Jennette and Irene, and a brother, Jim.
Shula was not happy to stop coaching.
"The toughest part will be in September," he said after retiring, "when that
ball is
kicked off, and for the first time in 43 years I won't be on the sidelines.
That is
what I will miss most."
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