Miami's Unmiraculous Miracle Worker

MIAMI, that lotus land of sun, sand, surf and swimming pools, is also a city of golf and mah-jongg, of Shecky Greene and Liza Minnelli--a high-rolling town where lacquered young ladies comb the bars along Collins Avenue through the long, hot winter, trading favors for bread. It is an unlikely kind of football town. Who thinks of apple-cheeked American youth playing a fast game of touch on Jackie Gleason Drive or Arthur Godfrey Road? Who would expect hoarse cries of "Dee-fense! Dee-fense!" from a bathing-suit salesman dressed in a robin's-egg blue sports jacket and ocher slacks?

Miami expects just that. Lately even the girls have taken to requesting professional football tickets in lieu of cold cash. Like everyone else in town, they know that the hottest action around is not on the jai-alai courts or out at Hialeah, but in the Orange Bowl. There the Miami Dolphins are grinding up National Football League opponents like so many herring. And irony of ironies, the undisputed hero of sybaritic, leisure-loving Miami is the leader of the Dolphin pack, Coach Don Shula, 42, a rock-jawed, Jesuit-trained disciplinarian who would seem to fit the city's image about as well as Frank Sinatra would suit Painesville, Ohio.

Bleak Memories. Shula and his deadly Dolphins are the wildest thing to hit Miami since Nick the Greek and a team of shills took Oilman Harry Sinclair for $900,000 at a memorable craps party. Car bumpers are plastered with "I Am a Dol-Fan" stickers; "Dial-a-Dolphin" programs are stealing the play away from local disk jockeys. Raving fans pack the Orange Bowl (capacity: 80,010) to wave white handkerchiefs at their rugged young superteam. The reason is simple: more than anything Miami loves a winner, and Shula's Dolphins are the biggest winners in pro football. Starting the season with bleak memories of the 24-3 birching administered to them by the Dallas Cowboys in last January's Super Bowl, the Dolphins have reeled off twelve victories in a row, including last Sunday's 37-21 win over the hapless New England Patriots at Foxboro, Mass. Having clinched the American Conference's Eastern Division title, the Dolphins are sailing toward the N.F.L.'s first undefeated season in 30 years.* More important, they have established themselves as the early favorites to take the Super Bowl trophy that has twice eluded their doughty, determined coach.

The football climate in Miami was not always so sunny. A 1966 expansion team in the old American Football League, the early Dolphins won only 15 out of 56 games in their first four seasons and seldom drew more than 30,000 fans to home games. In 1970, tired of losing both money and football games, the Dolphins' principal owner, a fast-talking attorney named Joe Robbie tried to lure Coach Paul ("Bear") Bryant from the University of Alabama. Bear declined, so Robbie then turned to Shula, who had twice been named N.F.L. Coach of the Year during seven successful seasons with the Baltimore Colts. Shula won a lifetime enemy by bolting a five-year contract with Colt Owner Carroll Rosenbloom (who this year swapped his downsliding Colts for the Los Angeles Rams) to snap at the hook Robbie had baited with part ownership. Rosenbloom filed a "tampering" charge with the office of N.F.L. Commissioner Alvin ("Pete") Rozelle, who responded by awarding Baltimore the Dolphins' No. 1 draft choice for 1971.

Characteristically unmindful of the controversy snarling around him, Shula looked over his new team, which had a modicum of talent, a minimum of organization and a miserable won-lost-tied record (3-10-1) in 1969. "I'm no miracle worker," he announced. "I don't have a magic formula that I'm going to give to the world as soon as I can write a book. I'm not a person with a great deal of finesse. I'm about as subtle as a punch in the mouth. I'm just a guy who rolls up his sleeves and goes to work."

New Dynasty. In fact, as his players and many of his coaching peers agree, Shula has perhaps the soundest best-organized technical mind in pro football today. Studying films hour after eye-reddening hour, harping with drill-sergeant insistence on conditioning and the execution of fundamentals, Shula began to build a new dynasty. His 1970 team, green in more than the color of its jerseys (average age: 25) compiled a 10-4 record, gained the A.F.C. play-offs and won Shula his third Coach of the Year award. Last year the Dolphins won ten regular-season games, as well as the longest game in history, an exhausting two-overtime thriller against the Kansas City Chiefs (27-24). Then they whipped the Colts 21-0 for the A.F.C. title before the battle-tested Cowboys shattered their dream of becoming the youngest expansion team ever to win an N.F.L. title.

They have another chance to realize that dream this season. In Miami, Shula seems to have honed and polished a team that has everything. At 27, Bob Griese (TIME cover, Jan. 17) is one of the best young quarterbacks in the game; he is almost ready to be reactivated after having missed seven games because of injuries. At 38, crew-cut Veteran Earl Morrall, Griese's mid-season replacement, has demonstrated that he may be the best old quarterback in the game by keeping intact the Dolphins' winning streak. Sleek, swift Paul Warfield is a nonpareil pass catcher who runs square-out patterns of almost geometrical perfection. The other starting wide receiver, Howard Twilley, is small and slow, but he has an uncanny knack for getting open and holding on to passes in a crowd.

In a year of the running back, which may see a dozen N.F.L. players gaining more than 1,000 yds., Miami has three of the best: Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick (known as "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid") run through and over opposing lines like wounded rhinos, helped by blocking from all-pro Guard Larry Little; stocky Mercury Morris (5 ft. 10 in., 190 lbs.) runs around them. When their runners are stopped, or their passes fall incomplete, the Dolphins figure to get points from the talented instep of another new Miami folk hero: soccer-style Place Kicker Garo Yepremian, an off-season tie salesman who was born in Cyprus, of all places, and who led the A.F.C. in scoring last year.

Then there is Miami's stingy, aggressive "no-name" defense--so called because a majority of the starters are relative unknowns*--which has given up an average of only twelve points a game. Just as significant, and more than a little frightening to opponents, is the fact that the Dolphins figure to get better before they get worse: only four players on this extraordinarily well-drilled squad of 40 are over 30.

Injuries are the bane of any ball club, but Miami, thanks to Shula's shrewd stockpiling of excess talent, has as much depth as any team in the league. That was demonstrated in the Dolphins' fifth game of the season, against the San Diego Chargers. In the first quarter, Deacon Jones and Ron East hauled Griese to the ground, dislocating the star quarterback's ankle and breaking a bone in his leg. But Shula had come prepared. In reserve he had reliable Earl Morrall, the seasoned N.F.L. journeyman whom Shula had picked up from Baltimore last April for the $100 waiver price. "I happen to have a good memory," says Shula crisply. "I remember what Earl did for me in 1968 when John Unitas was out all season." What Morrall did then was take over the Colt reins, guide the team to the Super Bowl and get himself named N.F.L. Player of the Year. Once again, Morrall has risen to the task. In the first seven games after replacing Griese, he completed 56 of 99 tosses (including seven for touchdowns).

Devout. With Morrall at the controls, the Dolphins last month defeated the Patriots by a score of 52-0, setting a team scoring record. It was also a personal record for Shula: his 100th victory since becoming a pro coach. (He is the first man in N.F.L. history to win that many games within one decade.) As it happens, there is no great secret to his success: in his own words, it is "singleness of purpose." Says he: "Basically I'm shy, but I can talk to people or go on television okay by concentrating on the subject. That's what happens in a ball game. I just shut everything else out." To hear others tell it, he does the same thing before and after a game. Says Owner Robbie: "From July until the end of the draft, that man devotes every waking moment to football."

After a game, Shula relaxes briefly at his home in the upper-middle-class suburb of Miami Lakes, has a steak and takes a few quiet moments with his wife Dorothy. More often he and Dorothy will take the assistant coaches and their wives out to dinner. A devout Catholic, he arises promptly at 6:30 a.m. to attend 7 o'clock Mass in the white chapel at nearby Biscayne College. (The president, Father John McDonnell, accompanies the Dolphins on road trips to celebrate morning Mass for Shula and other Catholics on the team.) After a brief breakfast of sliced grapefruit and coffee, while looking over the Miami Herald in the college cafeteria, Shula arrives at his office at 7:30, a full 30 minutes before his six assistant coaches are due to arrive.

The day after a game (Monday, unless the Dolphins are playing in the Monday night Cosell Bowl) is spent entirely in the film room. Every few hours the coaches emerge squint-eyed to fill their cups from an endless river of black coffee and scan their dog-eared yellow pads with notes spilling off the edges. On Tuesday the players come in to watch the films, then get off with a light one-hour practice. Not so Shula and his staff. They order sandwiches and start working out next Sunday's game plan, a process that usually lasts until 11 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are mere twelve-hour days for Shula, with the offense in full gear on Wednesday, the defense on Thursday and both units on Friday. His practice sessions are noted for their meticulous planning. Says Offensive Line Coach Monte Clark: "Everything is laid out to the minute, like 4 1/2 minutes here, 18 minutes there."

There lies the bedrock of the Shula style: a passion for detail and thoroughness that could become maniacal if Shula did not have such complete, rational control of himself and his job. Even as a workout progresses, a detailed log is being made for post-practice skull sessions with the players. The logs are reviewed regularly during the season to see if a man is having any trouble breaking bad habits or proving to be a slow learner, a shortcoming with which Shula has little patience. At times Shula's zeal for precision does seem a bit extreme. Clark recalls that once, when he first joined the Dolphins, "before the players got here, Shula took the coaches out on the field and made us go through all the warmup exercises just the way he wanted the players to do them. He had an exact spot planned for each man to stand." Adds Clark: "I've been around organized teams before, but Shula gives the term another dimension."

All of this may smack of order-of-battle procedures up at headquarters. Yet Shula is more master architect than the martinet commander; out of his drive for slide-rule excellence has come the firm shape of a once shapeless team. Although the Dolphins have more than a few free spirits on the roster, they have every respect for Shula's tactics--winners always respect whatever has made them win. Says Running Back Kiick: "Before, I was just a football player: I ran here and caught passes there. I used to run right into the defensive coverage; he taught me to read them." Adds Receiver Twilley: "Don's a great technician, but what makes him a great coach is his ability to size up a situation and then get his players ready to handle it."

Some are even more impressed with Shula's nontechnical capacity to impart a sense of cohesion, and his own indomitable positivism. Says Place Kicker Yepremian: "He's the kind of guy who knows when to pat you on the back and when to put you down. Even if I miss a kick he says, 'Keep your head up. You'll get the next one.' But one day he caught me doing something I shouldn't have, punting on the practice field, and he got on me quick." Adds Csonka: "He doesn't give you big fines if you're late or something. He humiliates you a little bit, makes you feel as if you've let the whole team down. But he also creates great fellowship on this team by treating everybody alike. He's fair, but he's going to pressure you into being the best." Buoniconti, the defense leader, sums up, "He made us into a family."

Winning ways, iron discipline, devotion to excellence, a strong sense of religion and family, all this suggests another famous football coach. In fact, Don Shula has more than once been compared with Vince Lombardi, late mentor of the Green Bay Packers and Washington Redskins. There are, as it happens, other traits the two men had in common: an incandescent temper and a penchant for chewing out miscreant players, often in front of their confederates. While Shula is every bit as consecrated as Lombardi was to the idea that "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," he leans harder on quiet attention to detail and less on histrionics. Lombardi taught his men to hate their opponents so much that they occasionally came to hate him even more. Shula tends to think of his opponents as chess pieces to be eliminated.

That professorial attitude makes him more the spiritual son of the strict constructionist of football coaches, Paul Brown, formerly of the Cleveland Browns, now coach of the Cincinnati Bengals. Although Shula says that "I've never tried to pattern my style after anybody," he also admits, "Paul Brown was the greatest influence on me, especially in the teaching aspect of coaching. In football, it's not what you know but what your ballplayers know that counts. We make it as much like a classroom as possible, using all sorts of teaching aids, followed by practice on the field, followed by going over mistakes and improvements in the classroom." Shula, though, is generally more flexible than Brown. He believes that "the key to coaching is to do what your personnel dictates, not try to force your system on them." Also, Shula's pupils get to graduate: Griese and Morrall call their own plays, something not even the great Otto Graham in his heyday as quarterback for the Cleveland Browns could persuade Brown to let him try.

Prayer. Shula is not likely to run up against Brown in this year's playoffs. In the five years since he returned to active coaching, Brown has transformed the Bengals from a woeful expansion team into a tough title contender. Nonetheless, Cincinnati has dropped two games behind Cleveland and the newly tempered Pittsburgh Steelers in the A.F.C. Central Division. It is quite possible, however, that Shula may once again meet Tom Landry and his mechanical Cowboys in the Super Bowl. It is even more likely that he may have a different and perhaps more interesting sort of rematch with Coach George Allen of the Washington Redskins, who have won the N.F.C.'s Eastern Division title. In 1967, Shula's Colts and Allen's Los Angeles Rams had identical 11-1-2 records; the Colts lost the division title because of an arbitrary decision by the league office.

In their own special ways, Landry and Allen rival Shula for pre-eminence in the delicate art and imperfect science of team building. It may be no coincidence that all three men are particularly respected in the trade as coaches of defense rather than offense. Allen's method, which has its living embodiment in the Redskins' Over-the-Hill Gang, is to trade away draft choices and promising rookies for the experienced veterans who can play his brand of hit-and-run, no-mistakes football. Landry, whose emotional range makes Shula seem almost like a stand-up comic, believes in the power of pre-game prayer; to play it safe, he also has the most carefully structured, highly computerized organization in the N.F.L.

While Allen would appear to have a Machiavellian streak, and Landry tends to sound as if he were Billy Graham with a game plan, Shula is a positive thinker in the mode of a Norman Vincent Peale. He is the son of a Hungarian immigrant who came to Painesville, Ohio, in 1910. As Don remembers, "I always wanted to do anything to the best of my ability. I always got upset, even in grade school, whenever I thought anybody was giving less than full effort." His shyness almost kept him out of the game he loves. He missed the opening football practices as a freshman at Painesville's Harvey High School, because he had the measles and was later too embarrassed to try out for the team. The coach talked him into trying anyway, and he went on to star for three years as a halfback.

At John Carroll University, a Jesuit school in Cleveland, Don took stock of himself and decided, "I was not good enough to become a really good halfback." He concentrated instead on learning how to play cornerback on defense. In part, that experience may explain Shula's knack for getting men to play above and beyond their skills; a mediocre talent himself, he learned early to admit his limitations and make the most of his assets. Although slow and a bit bulky (5 ft. 11 in., 200 lbs.) as defensive backs go, Shula was nevertheless drafted by the Cleveland Browns in 1951. Traded to the Colts in 1953, he soon established himself as one of Baltimore's "main men"; even though he played in the secondary, Shula called defensive signals for the Colts, a job normally handled by the middle linebacker.

Shula played four years for the Colts and one more for the Washington Redskins before hanging up his spikes. After two brief hitches as an assistant coach at Virginia and Kentucky, he signed on in 1960 as defensive coach for the Detroit Lions. Shula's work gained him enough professional notice to get a crack at a head coaching assignment--back on the Colts. There he laid down the guidelines for his highly disciplined style, even as he showed a flair for improvisation. When both John Unitas and back-up Quarterback Gary Cuozzo turned up injured for the 1965 Western Conference play-off game against Green Bay, Shula converted all-purpose Running Back Tom Matte--once a nonpassing signal caller at Ohio State--into an instant pro quarterback. The Colts lost by a slender 13-10 margin--and then only after a widely disputed field-goal call.

Nicknames. Despite his well-respected temper, Shula seldom complains about officiating, a fact that endears him to Commissioner Rozelle's office. But a few Colt veterans had their own complaints about Shula's parade-ground manner. "He was strong, demanding, exact," Matte recalls. "He didn't mince any words. You had to have a thick skin." Another problem, claims Unitas, was that "when he was here he tried to do all the coaching. That put some of his assistants in a difficult position." Some black players charge that Shula would blister them for errors that a white player could make without being scathed. Others suggest that his position with the Colts, including his relations with many of the players, deteriorated after Joe Namath and his upstart A.F.L. Jets humiliated the supposedly superior Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl. Shula even picked up a couple of undignified nicknames, such as "Shoes" (from Shula) and "Chisel Chin" (for obvious reasons). Whatever the situation, Shula had no regrets about leaving the Colts to take on the task of whipping up Joe Robbie's Dolphins.

In all fairness, the Dolphins were probably just about ready. Joe Thomas, then Miami's director of player personnel and now general manager of the Colts, is considered to have one of the canniest eyes for talent in the game. His shrewd drafts had given the Dolphins the beginnings of a potent arsenal: Griese, Csonka, Kiick, et al. Thomas also engineered the trade that brought the incomparable Paul Warfield from Cleveland in return for a first-round draft choice. But as Griese, who finished statistically next to last among A.F.L. passers in 1969, puts it: "We were ready to go, but we needed someone to take us."

When he got to Miami, Shula quickly found he had to build a brick team with no straw: a players' strike left him with but one week to install entirely new systems of offense and defense and get Miami ready for its first exhibition game with Pittsburgh. When the strike ended, the astounded Dolphins were suddenly faced with four practice sessions daily (the pro norm is two) that were filled with terse orders and trenchant criticisms. The players also ran what became known as "gassers"--four successive wind sprints across the 53 1/3-yd. width of the football field. Of course, Shula ran them too, and still does (a standing joke among the Dolphins is that their coach's wife does not come out to practice for fear he would make her run gassers as well).

Gone were the days, the Dolphins soon learned, when they could decide for themselves what their playing weight ought to be. One of Shula's first moves was to order Larry Csonka to trim off 15 lbs. and report in at 235 lbs. "I haven't been that light since high school," the running back protested. Shula's icy, unanswerable reply: "You will play better at that weight." Csonka pared and went on to become the second-leading ground gainer in the A.F.C. Naturally, a lot of players complained about the tough new regime. But after Miami under Shula won its first four exhibition games, Receiver Twilley recalls, "we looked around and said, 'Hey, maybe this stuff works.' "

It certainly has. Blood, sweat and a few tears, Shula-style, have brought Miami to the top rung in pro football in only three years. And the coach is showing no signs of letting up. Aside from an occasional cigar, a Scotch-and-water now and then and a little time snitched for golf matches (sometimes with Vice President Spiro Agnew), Shula still lives and breathes football as if salvation itself were involved. His passion for the game permeates his entire family: one of his two sons is now playing junior-high ball, and two of his three daughters are cheerleaders. Off the field, he is a mite friendlier with his players than he was as coach of the Colts, and he has tried to put something of a check on his temper. Still, it is impossible to imagine that he can or will relax until he wins the only thing that really matters to him: the Super Bowl game ball.

If and when that happens, just watch the vermilion-trousered gents and leopard-leotarded ladies of Miami go gloriously to pieces. It may even be a better show than the day the town's most durable entertainers, Zorita and her dancing boa constrictor, got busted.

*The last two N.F.L. teams to go undefeated in regular season play were the 1934 Chicago Bears (13-0) and the 1942 Bears (11-0). The Cleveland Browns turned the trick (14-0) in 1948 in the weaker, now-defunct All-American Conference. *Despite the Dolphins' delight in the title, it is becoming something of a misnomer: End Bill Stanfill, an All-America at Georgia, and Safety Jake Scott were both all-A.F.C. selections last year, while Nick Buoniconti has long been recognized as one of football's best middle linebackers.

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