“Most of the fans then made more money than we did,” said Jim Langer, the 1970s Dolphins center.
The team arrived on a barren South Florida sports landscape compared to today. Miami Beach had famously hosted the first Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight in 1964, but the city wasn’t much for big team sports. Miami Hurricanes football was closer to extinction in the ’60s than to the swaggering dominance that began two decades later. The baseball Marlins and hockey Panthers were decades away. Miami had an American Basketball Association team, the Floridians, from 1968 to ’72, but the far more
prestigious NBA and the Heat were not even on the horizon yet.
The Dolphins were the big thing in town almost by default, but the stadium rarely was ever close to filled in expansion years 1966-69 as the team slogged to records of 3-11, 4-10, 5-8-1 and 3-10-1. Some of those early-era, late-’60s Dolphins teams included future stars such as quarterback Bob Griese, running back Larry Csonka, guard Larry Little, safety Dick Anderson, defensive end Bill Stanfill and linebacker Nick Buoniconti, but nothing really clicked — took off — until 1970.
It wasn’t the leagues’ merger that did it in elevating Miami from the “junior” AFL into the far more prestigious, established NFL.
No. It was Don Shula who did it.
Robbie hired the great coach, then only 40, away from the Baltimore Colts to replace expansion coach George Wilson, and the change was immediate and dramatic.
Wilson was an aging coach playing out the string, one who was lax with his players, smoked cigarettes on the practice field and enjoyed long, cocktail-fueled lunches with his staff.
Shula was an energetic, tough, granite-jawed rising star determined to make his mark.
The Dolphins were found guilty of tampering to get Shula and had to give their 1971 first-round draft pick to Baltimore after then-commissioner Pete Rozelle ruled that Robbie had improperly used a third party — Miami Herald sports writer Bill Braucher — to contact Shula and gauge his interest in Miami.
It was the best penalty the Dolphins franchise would ever pay. A bargain.
I asked Csonka once the difference effected by the coaching change.
9
“Is there a noticeable change when the sun comes up?” he said.
Jarringly the team went from a laissez faire head coach and a losing mindset to a coach staging four practices a day, abiding no excuses, suffering no fools and demanding a champion’s mentality.
“With Wilson if it was hot we’d go swimming,” as the great running back Mercury Morris put it. “With Shula we didn’t have a drink of water on the field in six years.”
More serendipity shaping Dolphins history: It took the biggest defeat of Shula’s life to lead to the best move of his career.
He’d coached the Baltimore Colts in the 1968-season Super Bowl played at the Orange Bowl — the wrong end of Joe Namath’s famous “guarantee” in a huge upset loss to the New York Jets. That soured Shula’s relationship with Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom — or else he’d almost certainly have remained where he was and Robbie would have had to hire someone else to replace Wilson.
Had Shula not lost that game to Namath, “I might still be in Baltimore eating crab cakes,” Shula told me in the fall of 2015, smiling.
The Dolphins won right away under Shula, and reached the Super Bowl in only his second year in Miami, albeit losing big to Dallas.
The next season, all they were was Perfect.
The year after, they were champions yet again.
“Some say the bitterness [of losing that Super Bowl to Dallas] drove us,” Csonka said. “No. Don Shula is what drove us.”
When Shula took that iconic victory ride on his players’ shoulders to cap the Perfect Season, Miami rode with him.
The once woeful and largely ignored expansion Dolphins had bloomed into NFL powers, and the team lifted an entire city. Miami suddenly was on the national sports map.
The franchise’s greatest success was front-loaded, alas. Shula would spend the remainder of his 26 years with the Dolphins trying in vain to win a third Super Bowl title.
“Wish we could have won maybe one or two more games,” is how the all-time winningest coach answers when asked about any regrets.
Doing that seemed likely, even inevitable, when the generational talent, Dan Marino, was drafted in 1983. He arrived a handsome, curly-haired Italian kid out of blue-collar Pittsburgh, became the most popular player in franchise history, and left owning most every major NFL passing record. But he would retire 16 seasons later, at age 38, without the ring he so wanted.
Marino led the Fins to a Super Bowl in only his second season, 1984, but lost to San Francisco.
“I figured we’d be back a lot more,” he said.
It never happened; that would be Marino’s only Super Bowl appearance. It is not well known that losing Super Bowl teams are given rings, too.
Marino has never worn his.
In ’85 Miami won maybe the most famous regular-season game in its history, a December triumph that denied the Chicago Bears a shot to equal the ’72 Perfect Season. But the Dolphins lost in the AFC Championship Game that year.
In 1987 the Dolphins left the decaying Orange Bowl for the less intimate new stadium that Robbie – who died in 1990 and would have turned 100 this July – built with
10
private funding. But the new home did not end the club’s Super Bowl drought.
Again in 1992 Miami was within one win of reaching another Super Bowl but fell short, and would get no closer in the club’s first half century.
Shula would retire after the 1995 season — the last 22 years spent chasing but not reaching his Holy Grail, that elusive third Super Bowl win.
Marino would retire after the ’99 season as perhaps the most accomplished athlete in any sport to not win a championship, personifying the history of a franchise that saw its victory parades early and has spent what must now seem like forever to its fans trying to make new memories.
Shula and Marino head an honor roll of Dolphins in the Pro Football Hall of Fame that includes Buoniconti, Csonka, Griese, Langer, Little, Dwight Stephenson and Paul Warfield. At least one more recent player, Jason Taylor, built a résumé that suggests a bust in Canton waits for him, too.
From Garo Yepremian to the Marks Brothers to Zach Thomas, the franchise timeline has been filled with players who’ve helped make the first 50 seasons memorable.
It’s down to memories, though, isn’t it?
The franchise that was born in the 1960s and reigned in the ’70s stayed exciting and relevant in the 1980s and ’90s thanks largely to Marino. It is the new century that has grown barren, made the fandom increasingly impatient and put the onus on the current and future teams to make Super Bowls something Miami plays in again, not merely hosts.
If the Dolphins have been an enduring timeline for many in South Florida, then it is fair to say we have grown old, quite literally,
waiting for the franchise to reprise its 1972-73 Super Bowl triumphs.
Perspective: Seventy-five of the 122 franchises in America’s Big Four sports have won a championship since the Dolphins were born, but only three of them have kept their fans waiting for another one longer than the 43 years Dolfans have now been waiting.
It has been a long, long time since Joe Auer magically returned that opening kickoff and Danny Thomas sprinted for joy and Flipper flipped — long enough that an 11-year-old boy who was hugging his dad that night might be thinking of retirement now.
It