SHULA

Well-paced, anecdotal life of the great NFL coach by well-practiced biographer Ribowsky (In the Name of the Father: Family, Football, and the Manning Dynasty, 2018, etc.).

Don Shula (b. 1930) was an examplar of the working-class dream: A self-made, determined young man from the Rust Belt, a first-generation American with no advantages save for his athletic gifts makes good, and in the end, he grows wealthy. In the author’s opening note, he also emerges as a sharp judge of character. Offered a job coaching by then USFL team owner Donald Trump, he declined: “Moral: Shula was a very winning coach, and a very rich one, because he could take the measure of men he respected, and quickly discard those he didn’t.” Score one for Shula, whose early career as a coach was rocky but solid. He made a less-than-laughingstock team out of the hapless Baltimore Colts, for example, turning them into “blue-collar leviathans” but still coming up short come championship time. “Shula has the best winning record in football,” said one critic, “and the worst record in big games.” So it would remain, though Shula made a tough and tenacious team out of the Miami Dolphins, captained by the formidable Dan Marino—who, born at the tail end of the baby boom, is a touch too young to do much hard work supporting Ribowsky’s thesis that Shula flourished during a halcyon time for football, part of the sport’s “greatest generation.” While golden-boy players such as Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas take their places in these pages, whether as heroes or as bêtes noires, the best moments have a kind of workaday North Dallas Forty quality replete with sex, drugs, and ripping Howard Cosell’s toupee off his head. Ribowsky isn’t above a groaner of a cliché (“it was clear that what sustained him for so long wasn’t the sizzle, but the meat”), but for the most part, the prose holds up to gridiron rigors.

Must reading for budding coaches and a solid work of sports biography.