Once upon a time, I made the mistake of asking Don Shula if the 1998 New York Yankees qualified as a perfect team. Those Yankees won 114 games in the regular season and swept San Diego in the World Series to finish 125-50 overall. Since it was clearly impossible for a baseball team to go undefeated over seven months, well ...
"Perfect?" Shula barked incredulously. "I have a lot of respect for Joe Torre and the Yankees, but who said what they did last year was perfect? I mean, perfect is perfect."
Staggered and scrambling for my dislodged mouthpiece, I felt like Shula had just run me through the Oklahoma drill. So a little more than a decade later, when talking again to the most prolific winner in pro football history and the only man to steer an NFL team through a flawless season, I tiptoed into a conversation about Shula's most devastating defeat, a defeat that helped shape the sport into the runaway monster it is today: losing Super Bowl III to Joe Namath and the New York Jets.
Turned out I didn't need to show up in full pads on this day. Shula, then 80, relaxed his granite jaw and benched his famous temper and pride and agreed to relive the pain of January 12, 1969, when the NFL champion Baltimore Colts were expected to put the unwashed AFL champion Jets in their place. Namath had guaranteed victory, of course, and even his coach, Weeb Ewbank, feared his quarterback's public pledge would inspire the heavily favored Colts to play with an underdog's abandon.
"It made headlines," Shula recalled of the guarantee, "and I tried to use that as a motivational tool with my team.
"It didn't work."
Shula had turned 39 just before Super Bowl III, yet had already coached 88 games for the Colts, winning 65 of them. He had beaten the Cleveland Browns for the NFL championship, a victory that meant the world to him. Shula grew up in the Cleveland area and said he learned more football from the coach of that team, Blanton Collier, his former boss at Kentucky, than anyone.
The Colts were charged with protecting NFL supremacy over the AFL; the leagues were still another full season away from the official merger. "But Namath was the quarterback of the Jets for four years going into that game," Shula recalled in our 2010 interview, "and Earl Morrall was our quarterback for only four months."
Morrall had gone 15-1 in place of the injured Johnny Unitas, including the postseason, and yet everything went wrong against the Jets in Shula's future home, the Orange Bowl. Baltimore even ran a flea-flicker to perfection, at least up until the point when Morrall was supposed to throw the ball.
"I can still see Jimmy Orr all by himself, waving his hands," Shula remembered through a sigh. "Earl didn't see him because the band had come onto the field and was standing behind the back line of the end zone, waiting for halftime. Earl looked down there and saw a mass of people in uniform and didn't find Jimmy."
Morrall found a different Jimmy -- Jim Hudson of the Jets, who picked off the Morrall pass that was intended for Jerry Hill. As a result, New York carried the momentum and a 7-0 lead into halftime.
The Jets were up 13-0 in the third quarter when Unitas relieved Morrall, who had thrown three interceptions, and that old Johnny U magic was nowhere to be found. The Jets ultimately won 16-7, turning their quarterback into a prophet and leaving Shula to address the broken men in his locker room.
"I really was devastated," he said. "We were 19-point favorites, and the first team from the old league to lose to the upstart league. It was a very difficult time after the game, a disappointment of that magnitude. I just told my players, 'We're all disappointed, but no matter what we're not going to be able to change the score. It's something we're going to have to live with and face up to. The most important thing is what we do from here on out, how we atone for it.'"
Shula atoned for it like few coaches have ever atoned for anything, although he had to leave Baltimore after one more season to do it. He fell out of favor with Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom, who was embarrassed by the Jets loss and forever reminded about it by his friends in New York. "When somebody called and asked about the Super Bowl," Shula said, "he'd pass the phone to me."
The Miami Dolphins had won 15 games in their first four years and were coming off a 3-10-1 season in 1969 when Shula was hired. Two years later, they advanced to the Super Bowl. The following year, with a 15-0 record, they actually had to play the AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh (the Steelers had three losses) on account of the league's bizarre home-field rotation system at the time. "We got lucky," Shula said, "because the sun was out and it was 65 degrees in Pittsburgh in December. I said, 'This is a Miami day.'"
It wasn't the last one. In a separate interview, I once asked Shula how he overcame Super Bowl III. "Super Bowl VII," he said of his breakthrough 14-7 triumph over Washington on January 14, 1973.
Shula would win back-to-back titles. He would make it to six Super Bowls in all. He would win playoff games in four different decades. He would coach for 33 NFL seasons, and avoid a losing record in 31 of those seasons.
Shula also won 31 consecutive games in the Orange Bowl, the scene of that haunting demise.
"We're still talking about it today," the then-80-year-old Shula said of Super Bowl III. "It still happened. It's something you'd like to erase from your memory, but you can't.
"It happened to me, and there's nothing I can do now to change that. So you have to live with it, and that's what I've done."
Until his death Monday at age 90, Shula lived and relived Super Bowl III with profound dignity and grace. As much as that game made Namath a cultural icon, it could have destroyed a young coach still trying to figure out how to win the big game.
Instead the late, great Don Shula handled his worst defeat like he handled the 1972 season. Perfectly.