after the ’99 season as perhaps the most accomplished athlete in any sport to not win a championship, personifying the history of a franchise that saw its victory parades early and has spent what must now seem like forever to its fans trying to make new memories.
Shula and Marino head an honor roll of Dolphins in the Pro Football Hall of Fame that includes Buoniconti, Csonka, Griese, Langer, Little, Dwight Stephenson and Paul Warfield. At least one more recent player, Jason Taylor, built a résumé that suggests a bust in Canton waits for him, too.
From Garo Yepremian to the Marks Brothers to Zach Thomas, the franchise timeline has been filled with players who’ve helped make the first 50 seasons memorable.
It’s down to memories, though, isn’t it?
The franchise that was born in the 1960s and reigned in the ’70s stayed exciting and relevant in the 1980s and ’90s thanks largely to Marino. It is the new century that has grown barren, made the fandom increasingly impatient and put the onus on the current and future teams to make Super Bowls something Miami plays in again, not merely hosts.
If the Dolphins have been an enduring timeline for many in South Florida, then it is fair to say we have grown old, quite literally,
waiting for the franchise to reprise its 1972-73 Super Bowl triumphs.
Perspective: Seventy-five of the 122 franchises in America’s Big Four sports have won a championship since the Dolphins were born, but only three of them have kept their fans waiting for another one longer than the 43 years Dolfans have now been waiting.
It has been a long, long time since Joe Auer magically returned that opening kickoff and Danny Thomas sprinted for joy and Flipper flipped — long enough that an 11-year-old boy who was hugging his dad that night might be thinking of retirement now.
It has been almost as long since nothing less than Perfection defined the Miami Dolphins, and since an iconic snapshot frozen in time found a coach – and a franchise, and a city — sitting on top of the world.
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Chapter 1
A FRANCHISE IS BORN
Early Years Were Rough
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FROM THE GROUND UP
Sunday, September 4, 2005
Greg Cote
These are the originals. These are the 1966 expansion Miami Dolphins. A cavalry of legitimacy was fast on the way. Bob Griese arrived the next year. Then Larry Csonka. Don Shula. The Super Bowls. Dan Marino. And then the Dolphins were a national team, a franchise with heft and shine.
NOT IN 1966 THOUGH – NOT EVEN CLOSE
These were the castoffs, has-beens, rookies and malcontents who formed the unlikely foundation of the pro football club starting its 40th anniversary season.
This was a team that opened its first training camp on a practice field that left players lacerated from shards of crushed seashells.
The budget was so thin that guys had to trudge the half-mile from camp headquarters – a small motel called the Dolphin Inn – to the field and back and launder their own uniforms in sinks.
Barking seals from Sea World, next door, serenaded players all evening.
“AAOOWWF! AAOOWWF!” said former tight end Dave Kocourek, in his best seal imitation. “All damn night long.”
Things got so bad the team relocated its training site after a month. Now the
Dolphins were housed in dormitories overrun by thumb-sized bugs.
But it was OK. The players were compensated for their aggravations with a flat camp salary of $50 a week.
Those first Dolphins would finish with a 3-11 record.
In retrospect, it might have been a miracle.
BOCA CIEGA HIGH SCHOOL, ST. PETERSBURG, JULY 1966
Roughly translated, boca ciega means “mouth of the blind.” It was as good a name as any for the Dolphins’ maiden camp.
New turf in the approximate shape of a field had been laid over a bed of stiletto-edged shells. The grass soon surrendered.
“Sod over oyster shells,” former tackle Norm Evans recalled.
Said charter running back Rick Casares: “The toughest competition we had was that field. We tried to not hit the ground, because you’d get cut up from the seashells.”
“We’d wade into the Gulf salt water to heal ourselves,” kicker Gene Mingo said.
In time, the city gave up altogether on the disintegrating turf.
“The Dolphins cut [the caretaker’s] kid,” Kocourek remembered, “and he stopped watering the field.”
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It was a close call as to which the Dolphins would recall less fondly: that field, the cacophony of seals or the motel restaurant’s propensity to serve chicken chow mein.
“If we have that one more time,” linebacker Wahoo McDaniel was heard to bellow, “I’m coming to practice tomorrow in a rickshaw!”
It seemed to be time to find a new training camp.
ST. ANDREW’S SCHOOL, BOCA RATON, AUGUST 1966
“Where the bugs took over,” former defensive end LaVerne Torczon said. “Never forget the bugs in that dorm. Big! Wake up and the floor would be full of bugs.”
Against this backdrop, a sweltering gang of more than 100 anxious players was being gradually winnowed to a final roster.
“Biggest bunch of renegades you could ever put together,” defensive end Whit Canale recalled. “They were giving anybody and everybody a shot. They even tried out a guy from the circus who [in his act] got run over by cars.”
Herald sports columnist Edwin Pope, who was there, recalled the motley team as “suspicious, paranoid guys full of dread they’d be out of football in five minutes.”
Stan Mitchell, a fullback, used to keep all his clothes in his car except the ones on his back, so sure that he was about to be cut.
Remembered safety Bob Neff: “I hid in the closet after every practice. I ran up about $300 in phone bills, telling my wife to get her hair fixed ’cause I’d be home tomorrow.”
Faced with calamity and uncertainty, a sort of giddiness set in.
“Whenever anybody would make a mistake [during practice],” Evans said, “a
bunch of us would start singing, ‘Moon Over Miami.’ ”
Center Tom Goode remembered that Joe Auer had this old dune buggy with rollbars
