Goodbye, Kingfish

Sporting News, The, Jan 15, 1996 by Paul Attner, Steve Gietschier

`Here,' said Johnny Unitas, handing a football to Don Shula after yet another Shula tirade. `You want to be the quarterback? Take the ball.'

Don Shula finally is taking that ball and leaving. Not to play quarterback. But to play father and husband and grandfather. He is not leaving the way he wanted to, fresh after a seventh Super Bowl appearance, riding the shoulders of his players, heating fresh praises of his greatness. But what happened this season, the way free agency produced a gutless team that betrayed the dedication of its coach, will be remembered only as a blip on his screen of triumph.

So much departed with Shula when he left the Dolphins, training complex last Friday, eased out by Owner Wayne Huizenga after 33 years as a head coach and a 347-173-6 record. In the sound-bite era of the `9Os, his resignation is today's event, forgotten amid tomorrow's newest development. But hit the stop button on the remote just this once. Come ride with Shula on his players, shoulders one last time enjoy the wonderment of where he has been and what he has meant and why pro football isn't quite the same today as it was yesterday.

Halas, Lombardi, Brown ...

The league executive isn't so young anymore. But age hasn't clouded his memory of one of his first NFL meetings. He looked around the room and saw George Halas. And Vince Lombardi and Paul Brown. A very young Don Shula was there, too. The executive was in awe of such company. And when he heard that Shula, the final link of greatness that kept the NFL past chained to the NFL present, was retiring, he felt a pain in his gut.

It is the same pain that brougnt Tex Schramm to tears, that caused Pete Rozelle to reflect somberly on what used to be and moved former Dolphin Manny Fernandez to declare, "It's almost like you are talking about the end of football in Miami."

"I see him as the god of football," Dolphins running back Terry Kirby says. Shula surely was the last on-field god left from an era that defined the NFL vaulted the league into elite status and turned the game into an American triumph. He comes from an era that we now contemplate with growing nostalgia; we yearn again for one last pep talk from Lombardi, one final sideline tirade from Halas, one concluding play call from Brown. As long as Shula coached, we could see the past, when football was more fun and the world of business less intrusive. Of course, it was never that pure--just ask Shula even now how he feels about the World Football League's raid on the Dolphins in the mid-'70s-but at least there was no free agency or franchise movement. Coaches were in charge; players didn't ask why.

"Society changes and Don changed with it," Bob Griese says. "But I would have to think that things might have been a little more fun for him before life got more complex. One of his gifts, though, was he never looked back and worried about the past. He was always moving on, looking at the future and how he could win. I don't see one change on how he does things. He still prepared meticulously. He still was a details man. You still knew that at a particular time every day, he was doing the same thing he did 15 years ago. I don't think his hunger left him. Just don't tell me he can't still match anyone with X's and O's."

With Shula gone, an age of coaching dictator ship goes with him--an era built on huge tempers and and an obsession with rigid rules and regulations. Ask Shula now what he is most proud of, and he will tell you that he was honest and consistence and that his teams stayed within the rules. Almost every season, it seemed, the Dolphins led the league in fewest yards penalized. Not in 1995; only eight teams collected more penalty yards. "I don't know what the hell happened," he says. Took at the era, Don.

But even this generation of players can't go

touched by Shula's genius, even if it wanted to avoid it. His legacy is in the rules that have so changed the game over the last 20 years. As a member of the competition committee since 1975--he became cochairman in 1993--Shula has pushed for regulations that have helped protect quarterbacks from unnecessary injuries and backed innovations that have opened up offenses and reduced domination by defenses. And he trumpeted instant replay, which someday could return. He'll remain on that committee, a sort of elder statesman of football, a guy who can remember how Halas and Lombardi and Brown would want the game played.

Namath, Unitas, Griese...

Before he became the biggest winner in NFL history, Shula was a loser. Couldn't win a championship. Joe Namath predicted a Super Bowl victory and then grabbed-one by downing Shula's Colts. That's why even today Shula glows any time his 1972 team, the 17-0 Dolphins, is mentioned. Can't win, huh? Just see if anyone can match that record.

It is a mark of the man's enormous ego that he doesn't want that mark broken. None of this records-are-made-to-be-smashed baloney for Shula. His place in history is important to him. He wants to be the coach with the most victories, the coach of 17-0. He knows what he has accomplished and where that places him among the greats. It is a status he enjoys.