Twinkles in Two Men's Eyes

By Tom Callahan

Miami's coach and quarterback have now won ten straight

When Don Shula was a rookie player in the National Football League, he was the only one who made the Cleveland Browns, a commentary on the quality of competition then and now. His John Carroll University classmate Carl Taseff made the cab squad. "Nice tackle, Taseff," Paul Brown observed at practice one day. "The name is Shula," he replied squarely, like his jaw, like everything about him, in a manner that chilled the veterans. But it actually warmed Brown, who was attracted to the twinkle in this young man's eye, which begins to describe Shula's instant affection for Dan Marino.

"He just had a twinkle in his eye," Shula says. In fact he has a twinkle all about him. He stands 6 ft. 3 in. but is made even taller by an eruption of sprung curls that overflow his football helmet in nervous homage to a bald father. Dan Marino Sr. drives a newspaper truck in Pittsburgh, and a charming tableau of their autumns at Pitt shows a man getting up at 3 every morning to deliver personally news of his boy in the Post-Gazette. The Marino home is not far from downtown, the beery old neighborhood of the steely old prizefighter Billy Conn, so Dan comes from the same state and state of mind as Johnny Unitas, George Blanda, Joe Namath, Joe Montana and possibly the quarterback position itself.

"Maybe they know about ups and downs there," Shula speculates. As a for mer defensive back, what does he really know about quarterbacks? "I used to call defensive signals, and was always trying to get into the quarterback's mind. What? How? Why? Where?" In Baltimore, Shula's second stop, Weeb Ewbank even required him to prepare for emergency ser vice behind Unitas and George Shaw. When at 33 he became the Colts' head coach, youngest in the history of the league, Shula never tried to be Brown, Ewbank, Blanton Collier or any other coach of his experience. "The players can sense a copy," he thinks, and this has also been his view of quarterbacking. "I didn't try to jam Johnny Unitas' style down Bob Griese's throat. I never expected David Woodley to be Griese."

The season before last, at 24, Woodley returned the Miami Dolphins, Shula's charges these past 15 years, to the Super Bowl. If the results against Washington were more than turned-around from what they had been in the undefeated season of 1972, Shula and the Dolphins plainly were on a bright course again and did not plan to draft a quarterback. But, because of his senior slump, and the seamy rumors that have become football's automatic ex planation for any irregularities, Marino was still bobbing in the pool after five quarterbacks had been fished out: John Elway, Todd Blackledge, Jim Kelly, Tony Eason and Ken O'Brien. To Shula, it was an irresistible 27th pick. "Some people were saying that Dan had been 'pushing' the ball instead of throwing it, but all I could see was how quickly he let go of it, and how tremendous his peripheral vision seemed to be. Look at him on the practice field: always listening, thinking, never distracted." Preposterously, Marino put Shula in mind of Nick Buoniconti, the little Italian linebacker of the '70s. "The way the message didn't take long to go from Nick's brain to his feet, it didn't take long to go from Dan's brain to his arm."

It didn't take long for Shula to go from Woodley to Marino. At the sixth week of last season, the quarterback with the twinkle in his eye lost his first start in such an entertaining style that the coach was moved to murmur later, as he had never muttered after a victory, "The thrill is back." Three and three then, the Dolphins finished the regular season 12 and 4 before losing a playoff to Seattle, and Marino was the first rookie quarterback ever anointed to open the Pro Bowl. He began this second year with five touchdown passes against the Redskins, and after ten successes in ten games, the rest of the season may amount to Marino against the league. In a 31-17 victory over the New York Jets this week, he appeared fallible and yet passed for 422 yds. Such is the extent of expectations now. His 3,094 yds. passing have already outdone Griese's best year, while 29 touchdown passes imperil the 21-year-old N.F.L. record of Y.A. Tittle and the 23-year-old A.F.L. mark of Blanda, 36 apiece.

Marino is also 23; if he seems older in the games, the impression off the field is emphatically of youth. His Corvettes change colors with the leaves, a gold one first, a blue one later, a white one now, and his nighttime running mates include Burt Reynolds. At Pitt, Marino was as cocky as Namath (and "better looking," as he said himself). But after he was so badly wounded there, his smile and the look in his eyes are nearly all that remain of arrogance. "Playing in the N.F.L., just competing against the best in the world, gets me excited," he says respectfully, but not breathlessly. "You know it in your mind--they're the best. But then you feel inside yourself: 'I'm good enough.' You can learn certain things from people" (the generosity of veteran Reliever Don Strock has touched him especially) "but in general you have to do it your own way. I never looked at anyone and said, 'Hey, I'm going to throw the football like this.' I throw it my own way." As for perspective, the usual casualty of celebrity, he reasons, "All you have to do is try not to change. But I wouldn't know how not to be myself."

Somehow Miami has avoided an identity as death's favorite team. For the third year in four, there is a different black-numbered square decorating the back of the Dolphins' helmets, this time No. 20 for Running Back David Overstreet, killed in an automobile accident last June. "This team doesn't dwell on being 10-0 or look back much at all," says Shula, who isn't certain of the reason. For himself, he says, "I think I've learned a lot from my early years, when I was so quick tempered and did things at home and work that I wasn't very proud of." At 54, his game is in pretty good order. One of Shula's co-workers is Carl Taseff, his old friend, and another is David Shula, 25, who caught a few Colt passes of his own and, by sharing the delight of youth with his father, kept him open to young delight, and maybe just kept him young. Anyway, Shula has an unbeaten streak of ten, for the sixth time now, four more times than anyone else. --By Tom Callahan