Читать книгу FINS AT 50 - Greg Cote - Страница 14
Оглавление13
FROM THE GROUND UP
Sunday, September 4, 2005
Greg Cote
These are the originals. These are the 1966 expansion Miami Dolphins. A cavalry of legitimacy was fast on the way. Bob Griese arrived the next year. Then Larry Csonka. Don Shula. The Super Bowls. Dan Marino. And then the Dolphins were a national team, a franchise with heft and shine.
NOT IN 1966 THOUGH – NOT EVEN CLOSE
These were the castoffs, has-beens, rookies and malcontents who formed the unlikely foundation of the pro football club starting its 40th anniversary season.
This was a team that opened its first training camp on a practice field that left players lacerated from shards of crushed seashells.
The budget was so thin that guys had to trudge the half-mile from camp headquarters – a small motel called the Dolphin Inn – to the field and back and launder their own uniforms in sinks.
Barking seals from Sea World, next door, serenaded players all evening.
“AAOOWWF! AAOOWWF!” said former tight end Dave Kocourek, in his best seal imitation. “All damn night long.”
Things got so bad the team relocated its training site after a month. Now the
Dolphins were housed in dormitories overrun by thumb-sized bugs.
But it was OK. The players were compensated for their aggravations with a flat camp salary of $50 a week.
Those first Dolphins would finish with a 3-11 record.
In retrospect, it might have been a miracle.
BOCA CIEGA HIGH SCHOOL, ST. PETERSBURG, JULY 1966
Roughly translated, boca ciega means “mouth of the blind.” It was as good a name as any for the Dolphins’ maiden camp.
New turf in the approximate shape of a field had been laid over a bed of stiletto-edged shells. The grass soon surrendered.
“Sod over oyster shells,” former tackle Norm Evans recalled.
Said charter running back Rick Casares: “The toughest competition we had was that field. We tried to not hit the ground, because you’d get cut up from the seashells.”
“We’d wade into the Gulf salt water to heal ourselves,” kicker Gene Mingo said.
In time, the city gave up altogether on the disintegrating turf.
“The Dolphins cut [the caretaker’s] kid,” Kocourek remembered, “and he stopped watering the field.”