Don Shula drives past Don Shula's Hotel in Miami Lakes, Fla., past the outdoor tables at Shula's Steak II and into the parking lot of Don Shula's Golf Club. He walks into the pro shop -- where you can purchase footballs signed by Don Shula (price: $295) in addition to your green fee -- then sticks his head into the adjacent Shula's Steak House (the original) to see who's around.
"Hey, coach!" people shout at him.
"Hey!" he shouts back.
As he hits balls at the driving range, a dozen people gather around to watch. It's the same way as he steps to the first tee. Don Shula playing golf at Don Shula's Golf Club.
Isn't it weird, he is asked, to play golf on a course with your name on it?
"Yeah," he says, a big grin creeping across his face. "People think you're supposed to be good."
Don Shula may not be good -- he's a 19 handicap -- but he's getting better. Since stepping down from the Miami Dolphins after the 1995 season as the winningest head coach in the history of the National Football League, he has gotten serious about golf.
Here, at the first tee of Don Shula's Golf Club -- formerly Miami Lakes Golf Club until five years ago, when Shula signed an agreement with owner Bill Graham to lend his name to the course -- Shula gets ready to hit. True to the football theme of the course, the tee markers at Shula's are football kicking tees painted red, white, blue and gold. Orange pylons -- the kind that mark the corners of the end zones -- serve as 150-yard markers.
Shula locks that famous square jaw in concentration, his legs tanned and sturdy, gray chest hair sprouting beneath his golf shirt. Then he swings, taking the club back slow and low before jerking it up at the last minute and releasing it back down.
The ball drifts right and comes down at the edge of a grove of trees. He is offered a mulligan but declines. (Do you think Jimmy Johnson would turn down a free mulligan?)
"Ah, well," he says in his deep voice, "it's just the first quarter."
This whole year has been like a first quarter for Shula. A brand new ballgame. And he has taken the opening kickoff and is marching down the field.
Now he's faced with a third-and-long, but it is not a problem. He punches out short of the green and gets up and down for par.
He admits this feels strange, life without football. Here it is January, with pro football's playoffs in high gear, and Shula finds himself playing golf three times a week like all the other retirees in South Florida.
There are differences, of course. How many of those retirees won a record 328 regular-season NFL games? How many of those retirees went 17-0 in one season as his Dolphins did 25 years ago? And how many of those retirees are playing on a course that bears their name?
"This is the first year in at least 43 years that I've played golf in August, September or October," Shula said. "Until this year, it was a ritual: As soon as training camp opened, I'd put away the golf clubs in the garage and not touch them again until the season ended. Sometimes I'd drive by a golf course during football season and say to myself, 'Don't those people have anything else to do?' "
Now, it's Shula who has nothing else to do but tool around Indian Creek Country Club in Miami Beach or Linville Ridge Country Club in North Carolina, the two private clubs where he is a member, or the public course that shares his name.
Like many golfers from his generation, Shula was introduced to the game by caddieing. Shula looped at Black Brook Golf Course in Mintor, Ohio, where he grew up. Always a natural athlete, Shula played golf only when he wasn't playing something else.
But as football began to dominate Shula's life, first as a player then as a coach, he was afflicted by the malady that is probably the No. 1 cause of frustration among amateur golfers: lack of time. Shula's case was especially acute. During the season, he worked seven days a week, usually 12 to 16 hours a day. For 40 years.
Not once in his coaching career did he take so much as one day off during the season to play golf.
"The tough thing for me in golf was, I'd play a couple of good rounds in the summer, then I'd have to put my clubs away for six months," said Shula, now an executive with the Dolphins. "I never took time off once the season started. I was either working or thinking about work."
But things have changed. These days, Shula is either golfing or thinking about golf.
One of the first things Shula and his wife, Mary Anne, did after he left his head coaching position was fly to Hawaii as guests of the Floyds, Raymond and Maria, for the Senior Skins Game. The Floyds and Shulas are close friends and neighbors in the exclusive Indian Creek area of Miami Beach; in fact, it was Maria Floyd who introduced Shula to Mary Anne.
Shula got to play with Floyd during a practice round, and it was there Shula experienced his greatest moment in golf.
With Jack Nicklaus playing one group ahead and Arnold Palmer one group behind, Shula holed a 4-iron for an ace. Shula, who used to be known for keeping a stoic face on the football field, nearly jumped out of his shoes.
"I've never seen someone his age jump that high," Floyd would joke later.
Shula gets excited just retelling the story. "So when the ball goes in, Raymond yells over to Arnie, 'Hey, Arnie, coach just made a hole-in-one!' " Shula says. "I said to myself, 'Am I dreaming?' "
The ace was actually Shula's second. The first came five years ago at Indian Creek -- with the same 4-iron.
"For a guy like me, a bogey golfer, to have two holes-in-one is kind of strange," he says. "But they were both good golf shots."
So how does it feel to see the ball disappear in the cup like that? "It's like winning the Super Bowl," Shula says almost wistfully, "or going 17-0."
Shula doesn't often compare football and golf. They're seperate entities in his mind -- "Football has always been my work," he says. "Golf has been my pastime" -- but he does believe that experience in one can help you in the other.
"The way (Dan) Marino plays quarterback, his concentration, his focus," Shula says. "Or the way Garo (Yepremian) kicked. That's something you can apply to golf. . . . And obviously, the pressure -- as the game winds down in football, and as you come to the last hole in golf. I think that's why a lot of pro athletes are good golfers."
Golf can also be of practical assistance in football. Shula remembers once when Dolphins kicker Uwe Von Schamann was going through a protracted slump, pro golfer Bob Toski, who had noticed Von Schamann hooking the ball, offered to come out and work with him.
"I told (Toski) I didn't think that was the best thing to do," remembers Shula. "But I could see where he was coming from."
Having a golf buddy like Raymond Floyd has its benefits, and we're not just talking about taking trips to Hawaii. Floyd is one of the universally acknowledged masters of the short game, and some of it has rubbed off on Shula.
"Raymond has helped me some," Shula says. "But the main thing I've picked up from him is how much you need to practice your short game. He's always practicing his own."
Shula doesn't study with anyone formally, but he has had a few lessons. When you're as famous as Don Shula is around South Florida, everybody wants to help you with your game.
"The first time I saw my swing on videotape, I was horrified," he says. "But I've never been one to take too many lessons. You get too many people trying to help you, and all it does is mess you up."
"He's come a long way," professes Jeff Wilson, the director of golf at Shula's Golf Club. "He's improved dramatically."
Wilson knows whereof he speaks. He remembers caddieing for Kathy Whitworth during a pro-am in the early 1970s at Inverrary Country Club in nearby Lauderhill, Fla., and Shula was the celebrity in the group.
"I remember his caddie was trying to teach him on the course," Wilson recalled. "I said to myself, 'Oh, God, it's just going to make things worse.' I wanted to go over there and tell (Shula) not to listen.
"He's very tight in his upper body, probably from all those years of weight training for football. He doesn't have tremendous flexibility. So there's a little tilt in his swing. He keeps the club on a good plane, but he tends to tilt in his backswing, so it's difficult to make a proper weight shift. His swing is 55 percent upper body and 45 percent lower body, and ideally you want 50-50."
Shula plays a little fade off the tee, usually drives the ball in the 210-to-220 range and rarely gets himself in big trouble. Accuracy is perhaps his best attribute.
"His backswing is not real long," Wilson says. "His swing is very compact. He cuts across the ball the majority of the time, so he's losing 20 percent of his distance. If he ever learns to hit it on the inside of the ball, he'd gain 20 yards."
Perhaps Wilson's comments are echoing in Shula's head, because he hits a few duck-hooks during the course of his round (mostly with fairway woods).
He also misses a lot of greens, but his Floyd-esque short game gives him quite a few chances at par. At the fifth hole, he nearly holes out a bunker shot, instead tapping in for an easy par.
His goals are modest ones. "I'd like to shoot in the low 80s consistently," he says. "A lot of people don't understand that to shoot 90 on a good course, that's not easy to do."
Shula thinks he has the potential to trim his handicap quite a bit, perhaps down to a 12 or 13.
"I've always had a decent short game," he says. "But now I'm hitting more good shots than I have in the past. I want to simplify my swing. It's amazing -- the simpler your swing, the better the shot. The good thing about golf is you know you can do great things because you've done them. You just have to practice and do them more often."
On this particular day, Shula plays like most bogey golfers. He does a few great things and a few not-so-great things. He shoots a 91 -- playing to his handicap exactly. There were no aces, but the sun shone all day, and Shula took five bucks off his opponent. It was a good day.
-- Dave Sheinin
