Team is a paradox. They win, but not enough
There are times when I can close my eyes and imagine the Dolphins winning their first Super Bowl since 1973. My nose begins to sting as tears form. My chest fills with pride, like a parent watching its child graduate from college. I always stop myself short of getting fully emotional about it. I want to save that moment in the event that it should actually take place.
I know when it finally does happen, I’ll just smile, feel happy for a second and then I'll experience emptiness. My contribution to the team’s success will have been zero and I will realize how futile all this has been.
But, I’ve always been a big fan of visualization. It helped me as a hockey player and in other aspects of life. So, why can’t visualizing your team winning the Super Bowl somehow work?
I realize that I sound like a maniac and a big, gigantic loser. I am both. People tell me that at 38, I need to get a life or that having kids and raising a family would make me care less about something as trivial as a football team. I somehow think that by doing that, I’d only create more victims of my mania and more people who don’t understand. My dad, who isn’t a sports fan, never could and still doesn’t get it.
Over time, people have stopped trying to understand and just deal with the situation. Perhaps the only person who hasn’t learned to deal with it is me.
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These years of longing and torment started on December 21, 1974. It was, by no means, a Christmas gift.
The 1974 playoff game in Oakland marked the end of the Dolphins three-year run as AFC Champions and their two-year run as NFL Champions. Since that time they have returned to the Super Bowl twice, losing a winnable Super Bowl XVII, 27-17, to Washington before getting crushed, 38-16, by San Francisco in Super Bowl XIX.
The Super Bowl loss to San Francisco was expected at the time. Many Dolphins fans, me included, saw that loss as a minor hiccup on the road to an eventual championship because, after all, the Dolphins had Dan Marino. Disappointingly, Marino and the Dolphins haven’t been to the ‘Bowl since.
And that is part of the trouble of being a Dolphins fan. They are a paradox. They are a tease. They entertain and they build you up only to let you down. Most times, they do both in spectacular fashion.
So that Raiders game in 1974 was a perfect introductory affair. The Dolphins actually took the lead when Benny Malone scored on a 23-yard run to make it 26-21 with 2:08 to play. You had to figure the No-Name Defense could hold a team for two minutes. At the time, I was eight years old and not yet cynical. So seeing my team take the lead, I breathed a sigh of relief and figured they had the game won.
Imagine my horror and disappointment when they did not; feelings I've experienced over and over again since.
When the game ended and the Dolphins were done, my thoughts immediately flashed back to November 24 of that season. I was sitting in Shea Stadium watching my first pro football game in the flesh. It was a gray day and it was getting dark and cold.
My face was growing warmer. The tears were welling up. I could feel them streak down my hot cheeks and grow cold. My father, seeing that I was upset tried to comfort me.
“The Dolphins aren’t going to win the Super Bowl this year,” I said. I knew that this was the first and last time I would be seeing Jim Kiick, Larry Csonka and Paul Warfield in Dolphins uniforms. They had already announced they were jumping to the new World Football League, following the crazy cash that was starting to hit the marketplace.
That small, child-like statement - “The Dolphins aren’t going to win the Super Bowl this year” -- sounds innocent. Thinking back on it, it was the first -- at least from what I can remember – cynical remark I would make in my young life. The next 30 years would be filled with enough cynical remarks to make it to Pluto and back. Most of them based on deserved circumstances surrounding the Dolphins.
My words were, if nothing else, prophetic. The loss to the Jets was the third and final defeat the Dolphins would suffer that season. They finished the year at 11-3, but the Oakland Raiders finished 12-2, giving them home field advantage in the playoffs and setting up the Dolphins for an ill-fated trip to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.
Against the Jets, Bob Griese threw a six-yard touchdown pass to Kiick with 6:30 to play in the game. That gave the Dolphins a 14-10 lead. I figured the No-Name Defense, an institution that represented a stout, unassailable wall in my little mind again would hold. But the Jets, under the guidance of Joe Namath -- a man I hated from the moment I became aware of professional sports - connected with Rich Caster on a 45-yard touchdown pass with five minutes to play.
Forty-five yards!
Shock.
Shea Stadium exploded. It was pulsating around me. I felt so totally alone, like a dust mote floating among airplanes, all I wanted to do was just curl up into a ball and cry. My father’s friend, the man who got us the tickets, rubbed my head. He wasn’t being sympathetic. He was rubbing it in.
The Dolphins fumbled three times that afternoon and Griese was picked off on the team’s final attempt to stave off a loss.
My journey as a tormented Dolphins fan was underway.
January 14, 1973. That’s the day I made a conscious effort to become a Miami Dolphins fan. Many people have asked me how a native New Yorker, a kid who was born in the city and raised in the sticks of the northern suburbs, could follow a team roughly 1,200 miles from home. All I can say is that it was a religious kind of thing.
I remember it was an early Saturday morning. The sun was still coming up. I was huddled in my neighbor’s Volvo station wagon with Ronnie Littlejohn my friend from down the street. We were waiting for the neighbor’s daughter, who was a year younger than us. We were going to the equivalent of Sunday school.
The neighbor, Ernie, turned to us in the backseat and said: “Who do you think is going to win the Super Bowl tomorrow?”
Now, I was seven years old at the time. I knew about the New York Giants and Norm Snead. We had picked up this metal wastepaper basket at Sears that was called “The Players of the New York Giants.” It had a round headshot of every player by position on both defense and offense.
I was confused over the fact that Norm Snead was the Giants quarterback at the time and not Fran Tarkenton, who was pictured on my trash can. There were also shots of Ron Johnson, Spider Lockhart, Tucker Fredrickson and Fred Dryer, who would go on to become a successful television actor.
The other things I knew were nicknames. I knew about the Purple People Eaters and the No-Name Defense. But, these are the names I knew from the neighborhood and my friends talking about them as we played sports or sat on the steps reading the local newspaper.
My friends grew up in households where their fathers were sports fans and they watched sports on television. I did not. My father was athletic - a black belt in karate, a good swimmer, a body builder -- but he never sat around and watched sports.
At first I was fascinated by baseball. The Yankees were the team in my neighborhood and so they became mine. I was a little over a year in getting to understand sports. So football wasn’t at the top of my mind when Ernie turned around and asked us the question, “Who’s gonna win the Super Bowl?”
Ronnie responded right away, “The Dolphins,” he said.
“The Dolphins,” I repeated.
I didn’t even know who was playing or that the Dolphins had a chance to go undefeated. I remembered that I should watch the game.
The day of the Super Bowl I had the entire downstairs to myself. There was the old Sylvania color TV on its stand in the corner, the dark wood paneling, the big green area rug covering beige tiles and the furniture given to us by my grandfather - a big orange monstrosity of a sectional couch.
I watched as the Dolphins took a 14-0 lead. The one play that stands out in my mind - the one that got me so excited - is the play that everyone remembers - the Mike Bass interception. There was Garo Yepremian, the Dolphins little field goal kicker trying to make up for a botched field goal by attempting a pass and placing it in Bass’ hands.
Of course, that would be the only touchdown the Redskins would score that day.
I remember Jake Scott’s interception that virtually sealed the game before Yepremian's field goal attempt. Scott was named MVP.
I remember watching Dick Anderson hit Larry Brown so hard his helmet came off.
And I remember Don Shula on the shoulders of his team being carried off in triumph.
I was hooked.