Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 7, 1993 TAG: 9311070145
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVE GOLDBERG ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: MIAMI LENGTH: Long
\ Oct. 5, 1963. John F. Kennedy was president, the Beatles had yet to hit America and Don Shula is standing on the sideline at Wrigley Field in Chicago, watching George Halas coach the Bears to a 10-3 victory over his Baltimore Colts.
"I was just in awe of him," Shula says. "Here I was, this 33-year-old rookie, and I was standing there trying to coach against this legend."
Oct. 30, 1993. Scott Mitchell, who the next day will quarterback the Miami Dolphins to the win that ties Shula with Halas for the most wins ever by an NFL coach, is recalling when he first met Shula in 1990.
"I was standing there when he came up to me, stuck out his hands and said, `I'm CoachShula,' " Mitchell recalls. "Of course I knew him. I'd seen him a million times on television. I was born in 1968, and he was already a legend by then."
\ A regular guy
"Legend" is tossed around loosely.
Maybe George Halas. Maybe Jim Thorpe. Maybe Red Grange. Certainly Vince Lombardi.
But it's hard to think that way about a coach who told free-spirit linebacker Bryan Cox, "I love you," after Cox celebrated Shula's 324th win by dousing him with ice water. There are just too many human images of the man who with his next victory will surpass Halas as the game's winningest coach.
There's "The Jaw" - the one that sticks in the mind of the young Scott Mitchell and millions of others who have seen him on television.
But there's also a humanity that reflects the adversity he's been through, in life as well as in football - five years of hell as his wife Dorothy fought the cancer that finally killed her in 1991.
It's a humanity that allowed him to totally defy his central casting image by getting married during the football season to Mary Anne Stephens, a Miami Lakes neighbor he'd been dating for more than a year. That happened two weeks ago, during the Dolphins' second bye of the season.
"Grandfather Mountain" is what granddaughter Lindsey calls him.
He has at least as many sides as that peak that overlooks his vacation home in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
\ Quick wit
It's 1974, a time when the NFL is just getting around to acknowledging that sideburns might be acceptable.
The Dolphins, with two straight Super Bowls and 32 wins in their last 34 games, report to training camp. Tight end Marv Fleming walks up to Shula, an earring dangling from one ear.
"Uh, Coach, do you notice anything different about me?" asks Fleming, who earlier had played with Lombardi's Green Bay Packers.
Shula hesitates as Fleming turns his head up and down, back and forth.
Then he says:
"Yeah, Marv. One of your earrings is missing."
\ Knowing how to win
"He wasn't what I expected," says wide receiver Irving Fryar, who joined the Dolphins this season from the New England Patriots with his own reputation as a loose cannon.
"Looking from the outside in, you think he's kind of distant from the players and not a loosey-goosey guy," Fryar says. "But he's pretty personable. He jokes around and he has fun and pretty much lets you be yourself."
Letting players be themselves.
That pretty much defines why Shula will win No. 325, either today against the New York Jets or sometime soon afterward.
For all the rigidity he seems to project, he's won with Jim Kiick, Larry Csonka and Mercury Morris grinding out 10-minute drives, and he's won with Dan Marino throwing the ball 40 or 50 times a game to the Marks brothers, Duper and Clayton.
He got to one Super Bowl with a quarterback named David Woodley, who defines the word "journeyman," and he hopes to get to one this year with Mitchell who, until Marino went down with a ruptured Achilles tendon three weeks ago, had thrown eight passes in three-plus seasons.
Shula is 27-7 with backup quarterbacks. That's a winning percentage of .794, or better than his overall winning percentage of .678 - he is 324-152-6 to 324-152-31 for Halas.
\ Staying motivated
The game in Cleveland in which Marino was injured is a classic example of why Shula is successful.
On his first play, Mitchell had an interception run back 97 yards for a touchdown to give the Browns a 14-10 lead. Mitchell came back in the second half, threw for two touchdowns, and Miami won 24-14.
Afterward, Shula seemed elated. The fact that he had lost his quarterback, a future Hall of Famer, and would have to play the rest of the year with an inexperienced backup, would seem far more important than one win in a 16-game season.
"I wasn't as elated as I seemed," he says. "But I had to seem that way. How can I expect my players to keep their spirits up if I don't project a positive image?"
There's more to it than that - like keeping the intense concentration an NFL coach needs for 30 years.
Ask Dan Reeves, whose 122 wins in 13 seasons with the Denver Broncos and New York Giants put him a mere 202 behind Shula.
"I can't imagine that. It just blows my mind to win that many football games," Reeves says. "To keep your motivation is the unbelievable part. He's in a situation where the money has nothing to do with it. He could live the rest of his life and be happy and comfortable. He does it for the love of the game. And to still be motivated, it's really amazing."
"He's a man for the arena," says George Young, the Giants' general manager and a friend of Shula's for 40 years - since Baltimore Colts Shula, Gino Marchetti, Bill Pellington and Art Donovan shared a house in Baltimore and hung out with Young, a former Colt and local high school coach.
"I remember him once telling me he might want to be a general manager. I looked at him and asked: `How are you ever gonna get out of the arena?' "
He hasn't.
\ From the beginning
Donald Francis Shula was born Jan. 4, 1930, in Grand River, Ohio, and grew up in Painsville, on the shores of Lake Erie about 30 miles from Cleveland. His father, Dan Sule, immigrated from Hungary in 1906 at age 6, and Dan's first-grade teacher Americanized the name on his first day of school.
It was a story typical of many Americans.
Dan and his wife Mary ran a grocery store, renting out the upstairs and living in the back. Don, who still attends mass daily, went to St. Mary's school, then on to Harvey High, where he played offensive and defensive back, ran track, played guard on the basketball team and spent his spare time with his buddies at Mar-Val Lanes, a bowling alley with a bar downstairs.
His grades were good enough to earn him a scholarship to John Carroll, a Jesuit school in the suburbs of Cleveland, where he was a two-way back again. Paul Brown, then the coach of the Cleveland Browns, happened to be at the biggest game of Shula's college career - a 21-16 upset of Syracuse in which he rushed for 125 yards - and gave him a shot with the Browns.
The rest, as they say, is history.
\ Lesson from Halas
Shula played defensive back in Cleveland, was traded to Baltimore in 1953, then spent 1957 with the Redskins. That's when he first crossed paths with Halas.
"We were playing the Bears and I was lined up at right corner in front of his bench," Shula recalls. "They had a great receiver - they were called just `ends' in those days - named Harlon Hill. Halas yelled at me, `Watch out, kid! He's going by you on this one.' So I dropped off and he caught an 18-yard hook in front of me.
"Later, when I got older, we were playing them again and I heard him curse out a player on the bench. I yelled over to him, `Coach Halas. Didn't I see you in church this morning? You shouldn't be using that kind of language.' "
\ At home on the sideline
Shula was an ordinary cornerback. But he wasn't an ordinary coach.
As soon as he left the Redskins, he caught on as an assistant at Virginia, then went to Kentucky for a year under Blanton Collier, with Brown one of the people he cites as a model for his coaching.
Then, at the urging of Marchetti and Pellington, owner Carroll Rosenbloom gave him the job with the Colts, replacing Weeb Ewbank.
"You always knew that's what he wanted," Young recalls. "As a player, the other guys were out carousing and he was asking questions about defensive schemes.
"But when he got to Baltimore as coach, he was still awed. I went down to see him and I remember him looking at me and saying, `Do you really believe this is happening to me?' "
It was.
Using Brown and Collier as his models, Shula began winning. In 1965, he found himself entering a playoff game against Lombardi's Packers with John Unitas and Gary Cuozzo injured and only Tom Matte, a running back who had been an option quarterback in college.
He barely lost, 13-10 in overtime.
"What could I do?" he asks. "In those days, you only had 33 men on the team and there weren't three quarterbacks. I called Matte's coaches at Ohio State to ask what he could and couldn't do. It almost worked out."
\ Time for a big change
By 1968, after the Colts beat the Cleveland Browns 34-0 for the NFL title, Rosenbloom was putting his arm around Shula in public and proclaiming: "This is the only coach I'll ever have."
Two weeks later, the Colts, 17-point favorites, were shocked by Joe Namath and the New York Jets 16-7 in the first Super Bowl won by a team from the old American Football League. It was total embarrassment for the NFL, and a year later Shula was gone, headed south for Miami.
"The loss to the Jets just destroyed my relationship with Rosenbloom," Shula says now. "It was devastating. Probably the most devastating thing to happen to me."
Miami was the most glorious.
Shula inherited an AFL expansion team - the worst of the worst.
By 1971, the Dolphins were in the Super Bowl. In 1972, they were 17-0, the only unbeaten team of the modern era, and they won again in 1973 before the team fell apart - Csonka, Kiick and Paul Warfield defected to the World Football League and Pittsburgh became the league's dominant team.
\ So serious
In those days, there was no time out for marriage, no joking about earrings.
"I can remember my first year there, one of our first preseason games, we got a bad call from an official and Don yelled at him, `You're ruining my life!' " says Monte Clark, then a Dolphins assistant, later head coach of the Detroit Lions. "That's a good indication of how serious he is about it.
"We worked out four times a day, another two times after dinner. I don't think the team had ever won two games in a row up to then. Everybody listened to every word he said and their eyes were as big as saucers."
The Dolphins got back to the Super Bowl twice more - in 1982 and 1984, losing both times, once with Woodley at quarterback, once with Marino. Then they fell off, although never to the bottom.
A supposedly mellow Shula is asked about that by a visitor, who suggests that he may have taken on too much for himself after player personnel directors Young and Bobby Beathard departed in the late '70s for general managers jobs, leaving a void in the personnel department.
Suddenly his face hardens into what his players call "The Stare."
"Who did they work for?" he asks in a loud voice. "Did George and Bobby work for me or did I work for them? Well?"
"They worked for you, of course," is the answer.
Shula's face softens.
\ In touch with reality
Two of the games he considers most memorable were losses - the Jets' Super Bowl and the 41-38 overtime loss to the San Diego Chargers in the 1981 playoffs, a game in which the Dolphins overcame a 24-0 deficit.
And he can just as easily poke fun at himself.
Peter Hadhazy, a personnel executive with the Browns, once came to a league meeting after a session of the rule-making competition committee - Shula has been co-chairman for two decades - and told people that Shula was "a genius."
Later that week, Young was in Shula's hotel room when he noticed the coach in his closet, rooting around furiously, shirts, socks and shoes flying every which way.
Young asked him what was wrong.
"If I'm such a genius," Shula replied, "how come I can't find my brown belt?"
Of that, legends are made.
\ The Shula legend\ Coach Don Shula by the numbers - see microfilm for text.
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