A moment come and gone

Sporting News, The, March 20, 2000 by Dave Kindred

Dan Marino a Viking? Well, why not? If Randall Cunningham and Jeff George could win there, why not Marino? Possible, yes. But somehow the words never rang true. Marino the Viking had an empty, scary, please-God-not-this sound.

It was Unitas as a Charger, Stabler an Oiler, Namath a Ram. It was Montana leaving his heart in San Francisco and going to ... Kansas City???

Even measured against those other melancholy denouements, Marino with the Vikings likely would have been the saddest/sorriest season a Hall of Fame quarterback ever suffered. For two reasons:

* Marino's quick quarterback's mind still screams at his knees, "Let's get outta here!" The knees answer, "Yeah, yeah, we're considering it." Here Marino gets buried under a laughing kid who 10 years ago would have arrived at Marino's side only as the ball fell, a feather from the sky, into a Dolphins receiver's hands 50 yards downfield.

* As Marino atrophies, the Vikings implode. Their moment has come and gone. This. winter they lost two Pro Bowl offensive linemen to free agency and failed to improve a pathetic defense. And that's not the worst of it

For reasons unknown but suspected to be pride, arrogance and boneheadedness, coach Dennis Green won't deal with Jeff George. The refusal comes after the veteran played for minimum wage and pulled Green's considerable fat from the '99 fire.

Instead of rewarding George's work, the coach promised his job to Marino. Green told Marino to imagine throwing deep to Randy Moss, tossing short to Cris Carter, handing off to running back Robert Smith. One more year, the coach suggested, and Marino might get the Super Bowl championship ring he pursued for 17 seasons in Miami.

Get a ring?

Here's what he'd get:

Dead.

Metaphorically, anyway. Marino's knees were no good at age 2 8, and they're gone at 3 8. His arm, an A-plus then, is a C-minus now. On a mediocre Vikings team, he'd have been hurried/sacked/injured on a weekly basis, if not hourly. It would have been a most unpleasant thing to see.

It must have been a cold-reality wakeup call for Marino to declare his free agency and hear sweet talk only from the Vikings. Given absolute power to build that franchise, Dennis Green has razed it. He has no offensive line, no defense, a mediocre running game and salary-cap problems created by giving a superstar's contract to Cunningham, a one-year reclamation wonder.

Everyone agrees Marino no longer can throw deep. The poor guy would have been subjected to relentless blitzing usually reserved for frightened rookies. Early in his greatness, so fabulously did he deliver the ball to targets thought unreachable, Marino might have survived such assault. But he now needs the safe haven of a team built around him, not on him.

He needed runners, defenders and a ball-possession passing game. The Dolphins and coach Jimmy Johnson gave him all that the last two seasons. Yet it worked only occasionally, and Johnson more than once suggested that the quarterback's obvious failings sabotaged the coach's obvious brilliance. Marino suggested Johnson might best discover what's wrong with the Dolphins by dose study of a mirror.

A 62-7 playoff loss to the Jaguars in the last game of the Johnson/Marino era may be proof that both men had squeezed the lemon dry. Because Johnson already had retired once, only to come back a day or two later, we expected his farewell at season's end. Marino's decision had to have been more difficult because, unlike Johnson, he wanted to keep going.

The vain Michael Jordan watched his last shot go in, after which he posed for future artists with his shooting hand arranged just so. His farewell took on a mythic quality, as if gods retired only after glorious victory. The truth is different and better. Many great ones quit only when they have no choice.

Willie Mays stumbled in centerfield for the Mets. Who remembers that Walt Frazier ended up a Cavalier? That Babe Ruth played last for the Braves, Hank Aaron last for the Brewers? Does it truly matter if Jordan quit with a victory rather than a defeat? Would we think less of John Elway had he failed to win a second straight Super Bowl? How long since Wayne Gretzky won a Stanley Cup?

Muhammad Ali last fought at 3 9, losing to mediocrity. John Thompson, then the Georgetown basketball coach, said, "All his life, Ali has fought against the odds in everything he has done. Now that he's old and everybody's telling him to retire, he's fighting against those odds, too. If he didn't, he wouldn't be Muhammad Ali."

Bill Bradley wrote, "Fans want stars to retire on top in part to protect their fantasies. That makes no sense; consider Jerry West or Oscar Robertson, whose last two years of struggle didn't diminish the 12 previous years of achievement. In a way it made them more likable than if they had sought to retain an heroic level through early retirement. The decline is sad but human, for it is the one thing that strikes ineluctably in professional sports. To miss it makes a pro's experience incomplete."

Dan Marino's experience is now complete. When the only team for which he ever played no longer wants him, and when his only job offer comes from a franchise in freefall, even Marino gets the message: he has been to the mountaintop and is far, far down the other side.