lost part of an ear,” Goode said. “They didn’t want any publicity about it.”
A circus, it was. “Not my vision of what pro football would be like,” as receiver Karl Noonan put it.
And the circus did not lack for acts.
Miami Dolphin Joe Auer before the second season, July 17, 1967. (Bob East/Miami Herald)
15
RUNNING BACK COOKIE GILCHRIST
Cookie Gilchrist barreled into Dolphins history driving a long-fin Cadillac on which he had professionally painted: “LOOKIE, LOOKIE! HERE COMES COOKIE!”
He was a star running back who’d been to the Pro Bowl every year from 1962-65, yet was made available in the expansion draft. There was a reason for that.
Apparently, Cookie was nuts.
He rushed for 262 yards that season and was out of football by the next year.
“Probably the greatest athlete I’ve ever been around,” said the center, Goode, “but a bit eccentric.”
“He gave the Dolphins a ton of trouble,” fellow running back Casares recalled. “He was demanding. Difficult about practice.”
Former teammates have only heard rumors of Gilchrist’s whereabouts – none confirmed. A preacher in Wilmington, Delaware? Selling “Cookie’s Cookies” in Pennsylvania? On a mountainside near Denver?
He has a website that was set up in 2000 and answers no inquiries. On the site, it reads that Gilchrist was “stolen by Paul Brown from the 11th grade and induced in signing an illegal contract,” and later “sold to Ralph Wilson, slave-holder of the Buffalo Bills.” [Book editor’s note: Gilchrist died Jan. 10, 2011, at age 75 in Pittsburgh, according to CookieGilchrist.com, which is still active.]
RECEIVER BO ROBERSON
Bo Roberson was a remarkable athlete long before sports became packaged and marketed and anybody had heard of Bo Jackson.
Running back Cookie Gilchrist at practice during his only season with the Dolphins, October 20, 1966. (John Pineda/Miami Herald)
The Original Bo had the Dolphins’ first 100-yard receiving game, and his 161 yards later in that 1966 season stood as a club record for 13 years. He had an Ivy League degree and an Olympic medal. He had a curiosity in Black Panthers-style ideology of the era and a penchant for dressing sharp as a seashell shard in all white.
Roberson left football after that inaugural Dolphins season and all but disappeared. Bo knew privacy.
Roberson was inducted into Cornell’s Hall of Fame in 1978 but did not attend; even his mother could not locate him.
He died in 2001 in Pasadena, Calif., at 65, decades removed from all hint of public life.
16
LINEBACKER WAHOO MCDANIEL
Wahoo McDaniel had Choctaw blood and once swore he would have worn a fully feathered Indian headdress in games if the league had not demanded he wear a helmet instead. He later wore such a headdress (and war paint) as his signature in the ring during decades as a barnstorming professional wrestler.
The Orange Bowl announcer would call, “Tackle by whooo?” And McDaniel would preen and shout on the field along with fans: “WA-hoooo!”
“The Chief” was a wrestler first. Recalled linebacker Frank Emanuel: “He’d always say, ‘Heck, I make more money wrestling than I do playing football.’ ”
Goode remembered McDaniel being up for any challenge, and that teammates would take advantage. He might run 20 miles to win a $10 bet.
Former teammate Bob Neff, a safety, drove to Tyler, Texas, to see McDaniel wrestle just a few years before he died in 2002. Torczon saw him “at this big rasslin’ deal at the county fair” in Columbus, Nebraska, a few years before that.
Wahoo still wore that big headdress, right to the end.
KICKER GENE MINGO
Eerily, Gene Mingo refers to himself in the third person.
“Nobody knows Eugene Mingo,” he said. “Gene was the first American-born black field goal kicker to play in the NFL.”
Mingo recalls only eight or nine other blacks on that first Dolphins team and nearly 40 years later told the story of his wife – apartment hunting in Miami – being
turned away by a white landlord even though a vacancy sign hung in the window.
Still, Mingo said, he loved Miami and fishing off the 79th Street bridge.
Post-football life was not so good for a while.
Many players on that ’66 team were on friendly terms with alcohol. The drug of the time, at least on that first team, was amphetamines. (“Reds,” one said. “Uppers.”)
Coach George Wilson ran a loose ship that did not discourage nightlife and its pleasures. He would drink in front of his players. Once, on the bus ride home from an exhibition game in Jacksonville, Wilson ordered the team bus steered into the parking lot of a bar to the delight of players.
For Mingo, several years of cocaine abuse nearly killed him. And his wife.
“I was in jail in ’86 in Denver for nearly killing my wife while under the influence of drugs,” he said. “I shot her in the arm. She was critical for three days.”
Mingo said he had a religious epiphany while in jail: “I believe I looked into the face of God. A vibration walked from the tip of my toes to the top of my head on Sept. 10, 1986. I have not had alcohol or drugs since.”
SIGNS OF THE TIMES
A first-class stamp cost a nickel in 1966. Then again, player salaries were modest on their face – not just in comparison to athletes’ modern-day riches. Very few guys even had agents then. Most held offseason jobs.
“My top dollar was $14,000 a season,” Torczon recalled. Mingo made nine grand.
17
Everything connected to a dollar sign seemed shrunken that first AFL season.
The dozens of players spoken to for this story found myriad ways to point out that original club owner Joe Robbie (the Minneapolis lawyer who’d begged, borrowed and borrowed more for the $7.5 million franchise fee) held onto money as if it held the secret to all eternity.
Once during the season, Auer was asked to pick up the team’s uniforms from a Coral Gables dry cleaner. They hadn’t been prepaid, so he ponied up the $150.
“I had a struggle getting my money back from the Dolphins,” he said.
Once,
