COMMENTARY : Shula’s Substance Not Stylish Enough

Don Shula has left the NFL and taken much of its backbone with him, but the mind is blitzed with memories:

--Long rides across real grass fields on the shoulders of crooked-nosed champions.

--Clunky black shoes, an out-thrust jaw, thick arms folded across his stomach. The sideline pose of a simple man staring over the end of his back porch, announcing with a nod that he is home.

The visions are of strength in a world of 300-pounders that is strangely devoid of it. The sounds are of honesty in a game riddled with deceit.

Why is it, then, that all you can think about are painted footballs?

And why is it that all you can hear is an early-morning phone call?

Three years ago, you were sitting outside Shula’s office in Miami when he stuck his head through the doorway, his face strangely bright.

“Come in here,” he said. “I want you to see something.”

Inside his office, above his desk, were footballs painted in various shades of orange and blue.

“Super Bowl balls, huh?” you said.

“Not quite,” he said.

You look closer and realize that the dates listed on the balls are not just during the winter, but also spring and summer.

“Birthdays,” Shula said. “My grandchildren’s birthdays. This way, I can look up there and never forget.”

A year later, you were sitting in the office of his son, Dave, the struggling coach of the Cincinnati Bengals. It was 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday.

There was nobody else at the Bengal complex. Low, wintry clouds formed on nearby fields, making it appear as if there was nobody else awake in the world.

The phone rang, and both you and Dave Shula jumped.

“Yes?” he said tentatively into the receiver. His eyes widened. He asked if you could excuse him for a second.

As you were leaving the office, you heard his voice brighten.

“Dad!” he said into the phone. “How ya doin’?”

A proud grandfather. A concerned father. A football coach who was not reluctant to act like one.

In so many things, as they seem to be today, Don Shula was hopelessly outdated. And so Friday he officially said, “Enough,” walking away from a league that more and more promotes style over substance, noise over quiet integrity.

Shula didn’t quit coaching because he could no longer coach.

He quit because he could no longer cope.

He knew the strategies. What he couldn’t quite figure were the stars, the salary cap, the Sunday morning pregame TV babble, the static of sports-talk radio.

In the three years since the new labor agreement, professional football has created a new landscape.

With year-round interest and high-priced player movement, it is a setting of excitement and wonder.

But it is also dotted with traps that can be deadly for those unable or unwilling to quickly adjust.

Consider Shula the first major casualty.

“Congratulations, I guess,” someone said to him after it was formally announced Friday that he was retiring to become a member of the Dolphins’ board of directors.

“I guess,” he said quietly.

In a Friday press conference, the telecast of which preempted all local programming in South Florida, Shula said he retired only after team owner Wayne Huizenga had offered him a one-year contract extension.

If only he had sounded as though he was telling the whole truth.

Sources say that basically he was asked to fire all of his friends on the coaching and personnel staffs. He knew he couldn’t do that and hire more good people, even if he was given an extra year.

Nobody will work at a place where the owner can sneak around behind the back of the coach and stick a knife in your neck.

So Shula let Huizenga win, which was obvious because never before has Shula sounded so much like a loser.

“This is not a pleasant day,” Shula said. “I’m just trying to get through it.”

Not many days in the final three of his 33 coaching years were pleasant.

As he fought to compete in the new NFL, he discovered that his strengths had become as useful as a TV antenna.

He used to thrive on shared loyalty. With free agency forcing ever-changing rosters, there was no more loyalty.

He used to survive on discipline. But with a salary cap forcing the Dolphins to keep high-priced duds so they could avoid absorbing huge bonuses immediately, he couldn’t fire anybody.

“In my day, I was worried about keeping my butt off the waiver wire every year,” said Glenn Blackwood, former Dolphin safety for Shula. “Then once I made the team, I knew I would be with the organization forever.”

Today, Blackwood said, the opposite occurs.

“Don has to deal with players who know he can’t fire them, but know that they can leave any time they want,” he said. “The game hasn’t passed him by. He’s still technically one of the best. It’s the business, that’s what’s gotten him.”

Shula also used to succeed with patience. He didn’t win a Super Bowl for the last 22 years of his career but he appeared in six of them, more than any other coach. Fans always believed another championship was just around the corner.

Then, South Florida became gripped, like every other place, with New York-style sports-talk radio. The few negative voices that have followed him throughout his career soon became the loudest.

“Everything is just so negative, and it spread everywhere,” Shula said Friday. “The negative stuff is part of everything now.”

Shula might have been the winningest coach in NFL history, but patience was suddenly for losers.

Jimmy Johnson became available, and Shula’s team suffered an embarrassing playoff loss in San Diego last season, and soon Shula was hiring talented players of questionable fortitude in hopes of winning now.

“He had talk-radio people--people acting solely on emotion--howling at the moon, barking at his heels,” said Jim Miller, a New Orleans Saint vice president. “He had all these problems with the salary cap, free agency, with the Jerry Jones mentality of success, all this new NFL landscape to deal with.

“It changed everything for him.”

Should Shula have quit? Certainly.

That several of his players were late for a meeting before his final playoff loss in Buffalo--and were not disciplined--is reason enough.

Has the NFL lost a bit of its soul, not to mention its conscience? Just as certainly.

Shula said he would like to be remembered simply as a coach, “whose team played within the rules.”

And who quit when they changed them on him.