PRO FOOTBALL ’93 : Papa Dolphin : For Miami’s Don Shula, Who Needs Only Seven Victories to Break George Halas’ Record, Family Now Ranks Far Above Football

The man on the verge of becoming the winningest coach in the history of professional football is padding around this office in his socks. He is clutching wire-rimmed glasses in one hand, a torn-open greeting card in the other hand.

“Come on in here,” Don Shula tells a visitor. “I want you to see something.”

Shula had spent the last 30 minutes on the Miami Dolphins’ practice field and in the cafeteria, talking football as if he were playing it.

He had stroked that famous jaw, glared with those bottomless eyes, barked about 6 a.m. meetings and midnight film sessions.

While shoveling down a bowl of vegetable soup as if it had an expiration date, he had explained 30 years worth of digging in your cleats.

Seven victories short of breaking George Halas’ record for an NFL coach, Shula often sounds like every coach you’ve ever known.

But now, after walking into his office and slipping out of his athletic shoes, something has changed. His shirttail falls out of his waistband, he tangles his graying hair with his hands, he smiles.

He points to the top of the cabinet high behind his desk. It is lined with five engraved footballs. This is what he wanted the visitor to see.

So these must be the balls from the 1972 perfect season. Or maybe the three consecutive Super Bowl appearances, or. . . .

“Aren’t they something?” he says. “David fixed them for me. That way, I wouldn’t forget anybody’s birthday.”

The footballs aren’t about games, they are about family.

On each ball is written the name and birthday of each of Shula’s five grandchildren: Danny, Alex, Chris, Lindsey and Matt. The oldest is 9, the youngest 4. The spoiled one is Lindsey.

She is the only girl among them and, even though she is only 6, she controls Don Shula as Larry Csonka never could.

Whenever she sees him, she shouts: “Fireball, fireball.” Shula grabs her by the arms and flips her into the air. By the time she lands, she is shouting for him to do it again.

Her kindergarten class staged a play with an “Aladdin” theme last year. Shula arrived early and sat on a folding chair in the audience like every other proud grandparent.

Once the school principal dispersed the long line of autograph-seekers, Shula laughed and applauded through the entire performance.

Shula looks at Lindsey and the four others and sees life. He also sees Dorothy, his wife, who died two years ago after a long battle with breast cancer.

“That is my big unfulfilled dream, that Dorothy could not enjoy the grandchildren,” Shula said, his voice slightly breaking. “She lived for those grandchildren. If ever a woman deserved to be able to enjoy them. . . .”

So Shula has taken her place, as a mother and father, as a grandmother and grandfather, as a 63-year-old man who wouldn’t miss a little girl’s recital for the world.

“I always knew football but, over the years, I suppose I’ve also learned a lot about life,” Shula said.

And what an interesting twist that life has taken. On the threshold of football immortality, Don Shula shows us he is human.

*

The best way to describe Don Shula’s accomplishments is to let his son David, second-year coach of the Cincinnati Bengals, describe them.

“When I became a head coach last year, I was 306 wins behind Dad,” David said at a speech this winter. “Today, I am 313 wins behind him.”

The entire football world is continually losing ground as Shula bears down on a record that might never be broken.

With a 318-151-6 record, he could pass Halas (324-151-31) by Halloween, when the Dolphins play host to the Kansas City Chiefs in the seventh game of the season.

The nearest active coach is Chuck Knox of the Rams, who ranks sixth on the all-time list with 184 victories.

If Shula retired today, Knox would have to average 10 victories a season for the next 14 seasons to catch him. By then, he would be 75.

After Knox, there are only two other active coaches in the top 20, and Dan Reeves and Marv Levy are each more than 200 victories behind Shula.

And Shula has not just been killing time. He is the winningest active coach, with a .676 percentage.

He ranks just behind John Madden (.731), George Allen (.681) and Joe Gibbs (.683) on the all-time list of coaches with at least 100 victories.

He is the only coach to appear in six Super Bowls.

“When you think about it, the record becomes unreal,” said son Mike Shula, who coaches tight ends for the Chicago Bears.

Here’s how unreal:

--Shula has more victories than the Dolphin franchise, which entered into the league three years after he did.

--Shula has more victories than 16 of the other 27 NFL franchises.

--He has spent the equivalent of three full seasons just coaching against the Buffalo Bills. He is 33-15 against them.

--He has a losing record against only one team, the Raiders, who have beaten him 11 times in 16 games.

--Nine of Shula’s assistant coaches have become head coaches. But he has showed them no mercy, beating them in 19 of 29 meetings.

--Shula has coached 12 Hall of Fame players.

--When Shula began coaching in 1963 for the Baltimore Colts, the rest of today’s top coaches were somewhat preoccupied.

George Seifert was in the Army. Jimmy Johnson was a junior at the University of Arkansas. Bill Cowher was in second grade.

And that Cincinnati Bengal coach with the distinctive profile? He was 4.

*

The public softening of Don Shula began at one of his most difficult moments. It was on a sound stage in south Florida last summer, while he was filming a United Way commercial in hopes of raising money for cancer research.

The commercial featured Shula’s relationship with Dorothy, who had died about a year earlier. He did several takes, then asked to be excused.

He walked behind the sound boards and cried.

“Throughout my mother’s illness, he changed,” said Donna Jannach, the oldest of Shula’s five children. “When he used to spend a lot of time with the family, he would be real edgy. Now, sometimes, it seems like it’s hard for him to get back to work.”

Although his current players will speak in little more than generalities about Shula--Mark Clayton once called him “the fat man,” and today finds himself in Green Bay--there are also noticeable differences on the field.

There is less hitting in practice. During training camp this year, players were actually given Sundays off. He rarely scolds players while they are still on the field anymore.

Sometimes, he looks more like a distinguished CEO than a man whose constant prodding once caused Johnny Unitas to suddenly halt a play.

Unitas turned, handed Shula the ball and said, “Here, you be the quarterback.”

“You can tell, he contains a lot of things within himself now,” said Earl Morrall, a former quarterback who still attends some practices. “He is much more analytical. You can see it on the sidelines. Certain things that would bother him years ago, he handles differently today.”

Jim Langer, Hall of Fame center during the 1970s, said: “The guys who play for Don Shula today, they don’t see the same Don Shula we saw.

“I remember that my main goal every day in summer practice was not to make the team, but to keep Shula from chewing me out. I would do anything to keep him from yelling.”

Langer remembers the only day of practice he did not have to worry about that.

“That’s the day he threw me out of practice,” he said. “I was a rookie, I pulled the wrong way, ran into the other guard, and I was gone. Just like that.”

During his seven years in Baltimore and 23 in Miami, Shula has never cared much about the identity of the person he was yelling at.

He once threatened to punch out Joe Robbie, the Dolphins’ owner, for humiliating him in front of friends.

He once yelled at Csonka for lining up one step too wide as a dummy blocker during a passing drill. Shula was 40 yards away at the time.

He once released a player immediately after learning that the player had challenged an assistant coach on an airplane trip.

Even touchdowns weren’t always enough for him.

Morrall still remembers his first start with the Colts. He had moved the offense to the San Francisco 49ers’ 12-yard line when he called a pattern for Ray Perkins.

“Ray was double-covered, but I didn’t recognize it, so I threw to him anyway,” Morrall recalled. “Somehow, he was able to slide around his man and caught the ball for a touchdown.”

Morrall jogged happily toward the sidelines when he was met, five yards before he left the field, by an angry head coach.

“Shula yelled: ‘What the hell were you doing?’ ” Morrall said. “He yelled: ‘You were supposed to go to the flanker on the other side of the field! You threw to the wrong man!’

“I thought to myself, ‘Didn’t I just throw a touchdown pass?’ ”

Instead of alienating the players, though, Shula’s behavior drew them closer. That has always been his strength, teaching people that winning at all costs is always a good buy.

“The man still gets after it when it comes to mental mistakes,” said running back Tony Paige, who retired this spring. “One thing that hasn’t changed is that he expects his players to perform at their highest level. Every day. It’s something you never forget.”

That was illustrated this winter in Miami during a 20-year reunion of the players from the 1972 team, the only NFL team to go unbeaten.

Only three of 47 did not show up. Many of them are successful business executives and entrepreneurs who will never forget where they first learned about dedication.

“I don’t think anybody who has played for him has not walked away from the game with a different sense of what focus is,” said Langer, a wholesale manufacturing representative. “Winning was important to Don. . . . But it was how we won that mattered.”

Even if it meant watching stacks of game films for hours at a time, something today’s Dolphins still do.

“The record for showing a film over and over is still 72 times,” Langer said.

One game?

“One play,” Langer said.

*

Ask Don Shula about growing up, and he will point to a scar on the right side of his nose.

As a junior varsity football player in Grand River, Ohio, a tiny fishing community near Lake Erie, Shula suffered a serious cut there while making a tackle.

His mother ordered him to quit football. He forged a permission slip and played anyway.

“I guess I got away with one,” Shula said.

It was the last thing he ever got away with.

Growing up as one of six children, Shula learned hard work from his father, Dan, a Hungarian immigrant whose family name of Sule was changed to Shula by a first-grade teacher.

His father worked in a nursery and dreamed of starting his own business raising roses. But then a business deal soured, the family grew, and soon Dan was a commercial fisherman making $5 a week.

Don would watch his father leave the house at 3 a.m. and return home 12 hours later.

The family had to deal with the loss of an older sister who was killed in a freak bicycle accident two years before he was born, but Don saw them embrace the triplets that were born six years after him, all three of whom are still alive.

Don might have spoke Hungarian as a child, but he soon figured out the American dream.

“Things were really tough sometimes, but Don was always strong, always truth and justice,” said young brother Jim. “He was the one stopping fights. He was the realist.”

Don was also the one who would carry a football while running a mile down Richmond Street on the way home from football practice, stiff-arming the trees.

He was the one who would draw pictures of football players and hang them in the room he shared with Jim in their small, two-story frame house.

And he was the one who would carry the ball two dozen times for his high school team on Friday, then report to work as a welder in a nearby mill at 7 a.m. Saturday.

“Don has faith in himself and faith in God, and everything somehow always seems to work out for him,” Jim said.

That faith has become a big part of Shula’s life, as consistent as his weekly schedule. Just ask Father Edmond Whyte of Our Lady of the Lakes Catholic parish in Miami Lakes.

Nearly every morning at 7 for the last 23 years, Shula has attended Mass at a small stone chapel there. He can be found in the eighth pew.

“Don could live anywhere, he could go to church anywhere, but he stays here because he wanted to give his children an identity,” Whyte said.

Shula shrugged.

“No big deal, I just think church is the thing to do,” he said.

Dorothy, who attended morning Mass with Don during her final years, had her funeral in that church in February of 1991.

“It was so tough to deal with, to see her go through such a devastating battle,” Shula said. “It taught me so much.”

At the time, Shula had taken the Dolphins to the playoffs only once in five years. He was under fire for trying to be general manager and owner as well as coach.

The Dolphins’ draft record had been miserable, free-agent signings weren’t working out, people started wondering if this wouldn’t be a good time for him to retire.

Shula didn’t listen. With emotional help from son Mike, who moved home after his mother’s death, he adjusted and burrowed ahead.

“It wasn’t an easy road, but Dad was still sharp, still hungry,” Mike said. “He knew he could still be successful in what he believed in. And everybody in the family stuck together.”

Today, expectations are higher in Miami than they have been in a decade. And Shula is the reason.

He was not afraid to rid the team of veterans Mark Clayton, Mark Duper and punter Reggie Roby. He added top receivers Irving Fryar, Mark Ingram and Keith Byars.

Tom Braatz, a highly respected scouting director hired from the Green Bay Packers, provided Shula with rookies O.J. McDuffie and Terry Kirby.

And then Shula has stood back and allowed his coaches, considered among the best in the business, to do their coaching.

“I didn’t think Don could do it, but he has made me eat my words,” said Joe Rose, former Dolphin tight end and local radio-television personality. “He has redistributed the power. He has placed trust in his good people. He has made the adjustment.”

Donna, his daughter, looks at that adjustment in different ways.

“It’s funny some of the things that you can talk to him about now,” Donna said. “Things like your personal relationships, things you would never dream of telling him before. He is more accepting of things. He is more understanding.”

Shula said he really understands only one thing.

“You’ve got to have the courage of your convictions,” he said. “Mentally, physically, morally, you’ve go to have the courage. . . . Somehow, some way, you’ve got to get the job done.”

*

Inside Don Shula’s Hotel, a quaint 201-room retreat near the coach’s Miami Lakes home, there is a huge photo of his famous profile.

One day this summer, his jaw was smudged with lipstick.

“At times, it can be an embarrassment,” a smiling Shula said of his involvement as an equity partner in the hotel, restaurant and nearby golf club and athletic facility.

Embarrassment? Who wouldn’t want their photo on a hotel key and in each room? Who wouldn’t want a drawing of their profile on the stationary, the soap, the matchbooks?

Now, putting Shula’s face on the toilet paper might have been a bit much, but. . . .

In the year that Shula has been involved with the hotel, occupancy has increased 30%. Sales in the adjoining bar have increased 70%.

In his restaurant, which includes football-shaped menus, sales have increased 200% since he became involved.

‘The guy is an icon here, he took this town through its best times ever,” said David Younts, an executive with the Graham Cos., the property owners. “He gives us an association that is not normally associated with Miami. He is solid.”

Shula doesn’t even shake when you talk about George Halas and the record. The only thing that worries him is breaking that record with a loser.

“Sure, some day I want to be able to say I won the most games; I would hate to get this close and not get it,” Shula said. “But I want to do it with one of my most productive teams.”

In other words, more than anything, he wants to return to the Super Bowl for the first time in nine years.

“Going back to the big one, that’s what my dad really wants,” Mike said. “In football, that is all that has really mattered to him.”

In life, it has become a different story. Granddaughter Lindsey can tell you all about that.

When she can’t see Shula during the season, she talks to him on the phone. She picks up the receiver and refers to him by a nickname she invented while looking out the window of Shula’s vacation home in North Carolina:

“Hello Grandfather Mountain.”

Perhaps nobody ever said it better.

Tracking Papa Bear

NFL coaches with most wins in their careers:

Coach Seasons Record George Halas 40 324-151-31 Don Shula 30 318-151-6 Tom Landry 29 270-178-6 Curly Lambeau 33 229-134-22 Chuck Noll 23 209-156-1 Chuck Knox 20 184-135-1 Paul Brown 21 170-109-6 Bud Grant 18 168-109-5 Steve Owen 23 154-108-17 Joe Gibbs 12 140-65-0

Totals include playoff games.