MIAMI — Don Shula had this beaming smile that winning brought out, and he’d have been smiling Saturday. Not just because Miami Dolphins fans flocked to Hard Rock Stadium to say thank you in a Celebration of Life for the iconic, beloved coach who passed away last year at age 90.
Family would have had him smiling, because it was the only thing that mattered more to him than football.
“The Shula men are 9-0!” eldest son Dave noted, with a grin of his own.
Dave is Dartmouth’s receivers coach, his son Chris is linebackers coach for the Los Angeles Rams, and Don’s younger son Mike is Cleveland Browns quarterbacks coach — all three teams 3-0.
Must be the genes.
Dave Shula flew in for the event honoring his father after coaching in game Friday night.
“He’d be so tickled his family was 9-0 ...”
South Florida said hello to Donald Francis Shula in 1970 and goodbye just over a half century later, on a gorgeous, balmy Saturday filled with wistfulness, emotion and gratitude. “Goodbye” doesn’t feel like quite the right word, though.
Greatness that reaches the magnitude of legacy never leaves. It survives retirement and even death. The history books assure it and the memory does, too, with great care. Shula is our family heirloom. He deserved this event, and so did Dolfans who had to wait through a pandemic to show the appreciation and thanks their hearts had been holding.
About 10,000 fans RSVP’d for the event to the club, and it seemed perhaps 5,000 or so were there. Fans were given commemorative “347” patches. It was the number of his NFL career victories. No coach ever has won more.
Sometimes it seems life moves so fast there isn’t time to stop, to exhale, to hit the pause button and think. We’re forever in what’s-next mode, especially in sports, right?
Everything is happening right now. The Heat and Panthers are about to begin seasons of high expectations. The Marlins close their season on Sunday as Inter Miami continues its uphill chase or a playoff spot. Dolfans wonder about Tua Tagovailoa and the heat rises around Hurricanes coach Manny Diaz.
On Saturday, amid all of this, we took time as a community to remember, to appreciate, to say thanks in honoring the man who made Miami matter.
It was a time to feel nostalgic, to embrace the greatest time in Miami Dolphins history, Shula’s gift of the glory days.
“We were nothing in sports down here before Shula,” as one fan, Hector Avila, put it, dressed in a Dan Marino jersey. “He lifted us. Raised us. Us. He put us on the map.”
This first public honor since Shula left us was way overdue but nobody’s fault. The great old coach died on May 4, 2020, just as the coronavirus pandemic was hitting us and accelerating. Even the private service at his Catholic church was socially distanced.
Finally, on Saturday, 17 months later, there came the public farewell he so richly earned.
Dolphins fans who have longed so long for new glory days showed up in droves for Shula.
A series of videos shown on the stadium’s massive screens depicted Shula’s life from a small-town childhood in northeast Ohio through the Dolphins years, including the back-to-back Super Bowls in 1972-73 and of course The Perfect Season — still a singular signature in NFL history.
Dignitaries on hand to honor Shula at the two-hour event included NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, Pro Football Hall of Fame director David Baker, Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and the Archbishop of Miami, Thomas Wenski.
His former players on hand representing all eras of Shula’s 26 Miami seasons included Bob Griese, Larry Csonka and Larry Little; Bob Baumhower, Kim Bokamper and Dwight Stephenson; Joe Rose, John Offerdahl and, of course, Dan Marino.
Said Goodell of Shula: “He put Miami, and to a large part the NFL, on the national map by establishing one of the great franchises in the NFL.”
He inherited a 3-10-1 team and went 10-4 his first season, and reached the playoffs. It was only the start.
“Strictly business all the time,” former running back Mercury Morris said. “He was only interested in one thing: Beating the team we were playing and then getting back to practice on Tuesday to get ready for the next opponent.”
“A coach everybody believed in and trusted,” the great receiver Nat Moore recalled of Shula. “We believed in what he was preaching, and we worked our fannies off for him. He made us winners, as a team and as a community.”
The Hall of Famer Csonka, who probably trails only Shula and Marino in all-time franchise stature: “We were the worst team in the league. Four years later we were the best team in history. It’s hard to fathom, but had that pictured in his mind.”
Bob Griese was watching a 1970 TV interview with Shula the day after he took the Miami job. TV guy asked the coach what he thought of the Fins’ young quarterback he was inheriting.
“I like him a lot, but I wish he’d stay in the pocket more!” Shula said.
“I said to the TV screen, ‘I would stay in the pocket. I just wish there was one!”
Shula and Griese would grow old together, after both were done with football, over lunches and wagering at Gulfstream Park.
“He was a good guy,” Griese said. “I lost my own father at age 10. Shoes was 15 years older than me. He was like that father figure to me.”
The loudest cheer of the late afternoon-into-early evening program came when Goodell mentioned the Perfect Season.
Imagine. Dolfans have been waiting nearly 50 years to cheer a champion again. Generations of fans know Don Shula only as a distant name guilded in gold. As their father’s memory.
He lives on, though, as the proof of possibility, the father of the glory days, a man of relentless integrity in a Hall of Fame life. He lives on, eternal now, minted by Saturday’s farewell, as the only coach in any sport at any level forever associated with the word we used to think unthinkable:
Perfection.
“Remember, Dolphins fans,” went Dave Shula’s last words to the crowd, “he left us — still — undefeated.”
