Thomas gave Fins personnel to succeed
This is the first of a two-part Miami Herald series on how the Miami Dolphins so quickly went from expansion losers to back-toback Super Bowl champions — including the Perfect Season team voted the greatest of the NFL’s first 100 seasons.
Part 1: The remarkable untold story, from the players themselves, of the stunning dysfunction under first coach George Wilson, while the most underappreciated and forgotten man in franchise history quietly was assembling a treasure trove of talent.
Part 2 coming Sunday: How the arrival of Don Shula instantly and dramatically transformed the Dolphins from bums to historymaking champions, including a look at Shula’s life today, at 90, with an exclusive, rare interview with the all-time winningest coach.
The players who formed the nucleus of the NFL’s single greatest team of all time were stunned to learn that their Dolphins head coach was prone to laziness and long, boozy lunches. He was a man who once stood before his team and, slouching, said, “Well, I’m hoping for a 7-7 season” — as his guys looked around at each other, dumbfounded.
This was before the arrival of Don Shula, we must hasten to mention.
The NFL itself anointed the 1972 Perfect Season Dolphins No. 1 among the best teams ever as part of its 100th season celebration that will culminate with the Chiefs-49ers Super Bowl, fittingly in Miami.
But how did a Miami franchise only born in 1966 get from noth
ing, from the comical dysfunction under first coach George Wilson, to being the greatest ever in such short order? It happened because of Shula, who arrived in 1970, but it started before him, during the expansion years.
It started with one man, a man long lost, a man so essential yet so egregiously forgotten in Dolphins history. His name was Joseph Henry Thomas. He left the windfall of talent that Shula spun into historic gold.
Joe Thomas was owner Joe Robbie’s first key executive hire, in 1965, as director of player personnel. Robbie called him “the keenest judge of player talent I have ever encountered.” The cantankerous, mercurial owner would fire Thomas after the ’71 season, so he wasn’t around to enjoy the back-to-back Super Bowl wins he arguably had as much to do with as Shula or any one player.
“He was very overlooked,” says Larry Csonka, the Hall of Fame fullback. “Joe Thomas put together four-fifths of that ’72 team. Shula’s biggest surprise was how much talent [he inherited].”
The treasure trove that awaited Shula included future Hall of Famers Bob Griese, Csonka, Larry Little, Nick Buoniconti and Paul Warfield, as well as future Dolphins greats Jim
Kiick, Manny Fernandez, Dick Anderson, Bill Stanfill and Mercury Morris — among others.
By drafting or trades across a three- to four-year flurry, “Joe Thomas put all that together,” says Anderson.
The Dolphins, for the lack of recent glories to celebrate, have become a franchise that pays inordinate homage to its halcyon days, especially the 1972-73 pinnacle. Even now, nearly 50 years later, “What we have is earmarks from Joe Thomas,” as Morris puts it.
Thomas worked for the Vikings before coming to Miami and toiled with the Colts and 49ers afterward, finally ending his career back in Miami in 1979-82 as the Fins’ vice president assigned not to personnel but to the minutiae of player contracts.
He would die suddenly of a heart attack in his Coral Gables home in February 1983 at age 61, his career never duplicating the lightning he somehow lassoed for the preShula Dolphins, or enjoying the credit for it.
One could argue Thomas should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, as a contributor/executive if only for his work with the expansion Dolphins. One could argue even more forcefully that he should be on the
Dolphins’ in-stadium Honor Roll.
Griese, the Dolphins’ first star, first future Hall of Famer to wear the uniform, recalls how he met Thomas … although they didn’t meet, exactly.
This was Jan. 2, 1967, in the postgame locker room, after Griese had quarterbacked Purdue to its first Rose Bowl title, over Southern Cal. Players, still in uniform, were celebrating. Griese kept noticing a man in a suit watching him from afar. No, observing him.
A few months later the Dolphins made Griese their No. 1 draft pick, fourth overall, and the quarterback learned the man watching him celebrate that day had been Thomas.
“It was part of my study,” Thomas told him. “If I’m going to take a guy in the first round I want to see his attitude and approach after a game. Is he taking all of the credit or is he saying I could have played better?”
Those were different days. It was before the NFL/AFL merger. Dolphins road-trip rooming assignments were still segregated by race. A minimum rookie salary of $9,000 didn’t come along until 1970. Many of the expansion-era Dolphins had second jobs. Anderson sold insurance. [“He had this big Karl Malden car and a phone the size of a suitcase,” says Morris, laughing.]
Csonka first met Thomas
during his senior year at Syracuse. In the winter.
“I said I hate the cold weather,” recalled Csonka. “He said, ‘You know the weather in Miami?’ ”
He was grinning when he said it.
A few months later Csonka, the bulwark fullback, was Miami’s No. 1 pick in the 1968 draft.
“Joe wanted to know about you,” Csonka says. “You can look at the tape, but Joe studied it deeper than that. He had spoken with some of my high school coaches, my junior high principal. Wanted to know my grade-point average and attention span. If I could grasp things. Sometimes he’d get so revved up [talking football] that he almost stuttered sometimes.”
After the ’68 season, in the throes of a terrible concussion, Csonka wondered if he could go on with this fledgling career. Miami’s offensive line was that bad, or, as Zonk put it, “Not necessarily an AllPro entity.”
He was at the old Eglin Buick dealership in Miami one day having work done on a car.
“I open a door and run into a wall,” says Csonka. “The wall was Larry Little.”
Little, a Miami guy from Booker T. Washington High, was a backup guard for the San Diego Chargers at the time.
Csonka left the dealer in a rental car, headed straight to 330 Biscayne Blvd. and up to Thomas’ third-floor office.
“I said, ‘Joe have you ever heard of Larry Little? I can hide behind him!’ ”
Of course Thomas had. He tried to get Little as a free agent only to learn he had signed with the Chargers one day earlier. So Thomas worked a deal.
San Diego got a littleknown and short-lived defensive back named Mack Lamb. Miami got a future Hall of Fame guard who would pave Csonka’s path for years, in one of the most lopsided trades in NFL history.
Back in those few years, Midas wanted Thomas to touch him.
The expansion Dolphins were losing big but stockpiling enormous talent all over the field.
If only the coaching staff knew that, or knew what to do with it.
To be fair, Wilson, who would die at age 64 in 1978, had his day. As a player he had been a fourtime champion as a twoway end for the Bears in the 1940s. His Lions won the 1957 NFL championship in his first year as a head coach.
But the last stop on his career, Miami, found him aging, tired and coasting toward retirement.
“I was so much better prepared in college [at Colorado] than when I came to the Dolphins,” says Anderson, the great safety. “As a rookie I thought to myself, ‘This is professional football?’ ”
Little recalls one especially hot day, “And
George says, ‘Oh what the hell. Go jump in the pool. No practice today!’ ”
“We’d go swimming like it was summer camp!” says Morris.
Once, with the coaches ostensibly behind closed doors in a staff meeting or studying film, a player walked in to find Wilson and his buddies playing cards. Gin was the preferred game. With liquor, it was Manhattans and martinis.
The drinking was an open secret, betrayed with a whiff of breath.
Wilson and his cronyfilled staff would break for lunch “for two or three hours,” recalls Anderson — lunch being a relative term there.
“They were coming and having three or four drinks to have practice,” Anderson says.
Griese recalls Wilson and his coaches making a routine of “lunching,” between practice sessions, at long-defunct Johnny Raffa’s Restaurant & Lobo Lounge on Biscayne Boulevard.
“They’d have a couple of martinis or whatever,” says Griese. “This was George Wilson at the end of his career. We had an expansion team. We weren’t going to win.”
Well, they weren’t going to win like that.
Something had to happen. And something did.
Donald Francis Shula happened.