Seventeen and Oh

Fisher Marshall Jon Fisher

Description

Publishing on the 50th anniversary of that magic season, the definitive chronicle of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only undefeated team in NFL history-from an award-winning literary sportswriter The 1972 Miami Dolphins had something to prove. Losers in the previous Super Bowl, a ragtag bunch of overlooked, underappreciated, or just plain old players, they were led by Don Shula, a genius young coach obsessed with obliterating the reputation that he couldn't win the big game. And as the Dolphins headed into only their seventh season, all eyes were on Miami. For the last time, a city was hosting both national political conventions, and the backdrop to this season of redemption would be turbulent: the culture wars, the Nixon reelection campaign, the strange, unfolding saga of Watergate, and the war in Vietnam. Generational and cultural divides abounded on the team as well. There were long-haired, bell-bottomed party animals such as Jim "Mad Dog" Mandich, as well as the stylish Marv Fleming and Curtis Johnson, with his supernova afro, playing alongside conservative, straight-laced men like the quarterbacks: Bob Griese and the crew-cut savior, 38-year-old backup Earl Morrall. Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick, nicknamed "Butch and Sundance," had to make way for a third running back, the outspoken and flamboyant Mercury Morris. But unlike the fractious society around them, this racially and culturally diverse group found a way to meld seamlessly into a team. The perfect team. Marshall Jon Fisher's Seventeen and Oh is a compelling, fast-paced account of a season unlike any other.

Sujets

• Fútbol americano
• American football
• Florida
• History of sport
• Florida (homonymie)

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 12 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647000059
• Langue: English

Extrait

Also by the author:
A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played
A Backhanded Gift
With David E. Fisher:
Tube: The Invention of Television
Strangers in the Night: A Brief History of Life on Other Worlds

Copyright 2022 Marshall Jon Fisher
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932223
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4850-9 eISBN: 978-1-64700-005-9
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [e-mail] or the address below.
Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
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For Ron and for Dad: quarterback for both teams
CONTENTS
Introduction
Preperfect I: Who Are These Guys?
Preperfect II: No Weakness
One and Oh
Two and Oh
Three and Oh
Four and Oh
Five and Oh
Six and Oh
Seven and Oh
Eight and Oh
Nine and Oh
Ten and Oh
Eleven and Oh
Twelve and Oh
Thirteen and Oh
Fourteen and Oh
Fifteen and Oh
Sixteen and Oh
Super Bowl Pregame
Seventeen and Oh: Super Bowl VII
Past Perfect
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index of Searchable Terms
Introduction
Every football season for the past fifty years, there has come a weekend when the last undefeated NFL team finally loses a game. More than half the time, it s been in the first half of the season. Usually, it s over before Thanksgiving. In 2007, it didn t happen until February of the next year. Whether in early fall or midwinter, though, it always happens. And when it does, there is a group of old football players who can t help but smile. They don t, as rumor once had it, gather together and share a glass of champagne when the final zero disappears from the NFL Standings loss column. But how could they not feel a twinge of satisfaction? They are the surviving members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only team in NFL history to go from opening day to the league championship without losing or tying a game.
The greatest season ever took place in a setting made for Hollywood. Miami in 1972 was a steamy cauldron of politics and sex and culture wars. As both national party conventions came to town that summer, the sidewalks and parks of Miami Beach filled with hippies, Zippies, Yippies, activists, protesters, and tourists gawking at it all. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War raged through the final bloody months of U.S involvement and Richard Nixon spent more and more time at the Winter White House, his modest compound on Key Biscayne, just off the Miami coast.
The relatively new Miami football team, running through its seventh preseason during the conventions, reflected the social dichotomy of the times. There were long-haired, bell-bottomed party animals with historically specific facial hair, like Jim Mad Dog Mandich and Manny Fernandez, along with active liberals like Marv Fleming and Marlin Briscoe-not to mention Curtis Johnson with his supernova Afro-sharing the locker room with quiet, conservative, straight-laced men, such as the quarterbacks Bob Griese and Earl Morrall. But unlike the fractious society seeming to unravel around them, this diverse group found a way to meld seamlessly into a team. The perfect team.
I was nine years old and finally on board with the Dolphinmania rising all around South Florida. My father and brother had gotten interested in the team the past couple of seasons, especially when it won what is still the longest NFL game ever, against Kansas City in the playoffs the year before, and made it to the Super Bowl (where they were humbled by the Dallas Cowboys).
Over the decades since, I have often wondered if it was merely nostalgia that made me think of this team of my childhood as unique, as having some inimitable combination of talent and character that led it to the greatest gridiron achievement ever. But no, after examining it again over the past few years, I believe this was not just another excellent NFL team. It was a rare combination of mental capacity and toughness, discipline and playfulness, youth and experience, that made for the perfect team. Above all, though, this was an unusually intelligent football team. They later became a doctor, a state senator, a mayor, lawyers, successful businessmen. A sports psychologist who tested them declared that no team had ever scored higher in motivation. And one player who was traded to Green Bay the next year recalled, comparing playbooks, that he felt like he d gone from Harvard back to high school.
Not that they weren t tough as nails. During pregame strategy sessions, star fullback Larry Csonka would finally have enough of the subtle strategizing, crinkle his nose, already contorted by a long history of breaks, and say, Let s just line up and knock them on their asses. Another player who was later traded was shocked to find new teammates who wouldn t play with injuries. Our guys would crawl across broken glass with no clothes on to get to the field, he said. That made that team what it was. The Dolphins played the perfect season with chipped teeth, a splintered forearm, a bruised liver, a slipped disc, and broken ribs-and that was just one guy, defensive end Bill Stanfill. Others had broken arms, broken noses, you name it. Time would reveal a dark side to such intrepidness. Middle age and beyond would become a minefield of dementia and other concussion-related brain disorders, not to mention constant musculoskeletal pain to remind them of their old job.
It was a team with the poorest owner in the league, a team composed largely of castoffs and has-beens. One of the greatest offensive lines ever was assembled almost wholly from parts other teams had jettisoned. A number of crucial starters shared the scouts dismissal: too small and too slow. One defensive starter almost went to veterinary school instead; another, the son of physicians, arrived via the unlikely NFL breeding ground of Amherst College. It was a team saved by a thirty-eight-year-old over-the-hill quarterback, coached by a forty-two-year-old wunderkind with a leviathan chip on his shoulder. It s noteworthy how often players echoed a similar refrain: I wasn t a gifted athlete, We weren t the greatest athletes. . . . This wasn t really true, but it reflected an emphasis on intelligence, teamwork, and a work ethic forged in the struggles of many of their parents, immigrants in the American Midwest.
The fruits of that labor unfolded in the unlikeliest of places. The Greater Miami area was a quiet, relatively uncrowded sprawl of communities, a far cry from what it would become in the 1980s and beyond. The name Miami still evoked snowbirds in polyester suits playing shuffleboard on the beach, rather than fashion models and cocaine. Previous attempts at pro football in Florida had failed miserably, and the Dolphins franchise, the state s only major professional sports team, was still so young that most elementary school kids could remember its first season.
Nineteen seventy-two, despite ever-present racial and political tensions and continued national divisiveness about the war in Vietnam, was a simpler time in America. A simpler era in football, too, free of the trappings of a billion-dollar business. Not that the early seventies was a utopia of peace and harmony. The Dolphins marched to perfection in a season of war, political corruption, and barely veiled racism. But Don Shula managed to integrate his team-at least during business hours-and instill a sense of dedication and purpose that blinded them to anything that might distract them from his obsession, which became their obsession: to win every game until it was January 14, 1973, and their Super Bowl debacle was supplanted by triumph.

They went 17-0, and it won t happen again, wrote a prescient Dave Anderson in the New York Times , just days after the Super Bowl. The chemistry is too involved, and impossible to repeat, as if the test tube shattered before Don Shula had time to analyze the formula. Shula s laboratory assistants included offensive and defensive coordinators often compared to college faculty, an offensive line coach who played bass fiddle and taught his men psycho-cybernetics, and a lone-wolf scouting genius who gathered the parts no one else saw the value of. The spark to bring this perfect beast to life came the previous January in the form of a traumatic loss on football s biggest stage. When players and coaches all reassembled the next summer, they were joined in their leader s all-consuming drive to obliterate that failure and replace it with its opposite: ultimate victory. It all began, as every season did, with everyone running for twelve minutes in the sweltering soup bowl of July in Miami. While across the bay, as Neil Young would have it, freaks would soon streak down neon streets, podiums would rock, truth would leak, and even Richard Nixon had got soul.
Preperfect I: Who Are These Guys?
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer . . .
- Richard III
On the morning of July 9, 1972, fifty-four hopeful football players trotted out of the locker room at Biscayne College, a twenty-minute Sunday drive north of downtown Miami. It was the beginning of the seventh annual Miami Dolphins training camp, and these men were mostly rookies and free agents reporting a few days ahead of the rest of the team. Led by their coach, Don Shula, and his assistant coaches, they trotted down the sidewalk from the building to the practice fields, running a gauntlet