COLUMN: Lessons from Don Shula
This year seems to be destined to be remembered as a time of great loss. A global pandemic is claiming far too many lives, bringing the issue of our own mortality into an uncomfortably sharp focus.
Earlier this month I had to endure a bit of personal grief when a man I’ve looked up to since childhood passed away. Don Shula, the winningest coach in NFL history and one of the most respected men to ever work in his profession, died at age 90 on May 4.
His cause of death was not reported but was not believed to be COVID-19 related. Nevertheless it came at a time when I was already in a rather somber frame of mind, and I’ve taken it pretty hard.
Football has always been my favorite sport, and when I began to develop a passion for the game as a resident of the southeast in the 1970’s there were only four professional football teams in the area. Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and New Orleans were all kind of terrible back then, so it’s not surprising that my interest was drawn to Shula’s Miami Dolphins.
But it wasn’t just the winning that drew my interest to the Dolphins of that era, it was also the character displayed by their coach. When the people who played for him and competed against him are asked to give one word that describes Coach Shula, the word “integrity” comes up most often. Winning was always the goal, but respecting the rules and the game were just as important to him.
One of my favorite stories about Shula was the time one of his players found a copy of their opponent’s playbook on the day of their game against that team and gave it to an assistant coach. The Dolphins lost that day, and when the player asked the assistant coach what Shula did when he showed him the playbook he said Shula told him to throw it away.
Shula himself said if he was going to be remembered for anything, it was that he always played within the rules, and that his teams showed class both in victory and defeat. It sounds like an old-fashioned, outdated attitude, doesn’t it?
It was, apparently an outdated attitude even before Shula ended his career. After a decade of winning records but no Super Bowl appearances fans and media types began to suggest the game had passed him by and calls for his replacement grew louder and louder.
So Shula stepped down after the ’95 season and he was replaced by Jimmy Johnson, another coach with a winning track record but without the gentlemanly demeanor and high character expectations for his players that Shula demanded. But he knew how to win, and that was all that mattered.
It didn’t work out. Johnson lost interest in the job after three years without sniffing a championship and the team hasn’t done a whole lot of winning in the last 20-plus seasons since he departed. Karma, maybe.
As the sun set on Shula’s career, Bill Belichick was just getting started on his own historic winning streak, and he has a decent chance of eclipsing Shula’s record 347 career wins if he is able to stay in the game a few more years. But Belichick, whose team has been caught cheating more than once, is no Don Shula.
But he is, perhaps, an accurate reflection of what it means to be “great” in this day and time as Shula was in his. We don’t value integrity the way we used to. Winning is truly all that matters now. How you “play the game” and how much character you show both in victory and defeat don’t count for much.
So I mourn Don Shula not just because of the enjoyment I got watching his teams pursue victory with honor, but also because we lost something even more important with his passing – and example of what it means to be a good man.
Bill Ferguson is a resident of Warner Robins. Readers can write him at fergcolumn@hotmail.com.