Читать книгу FINS AT 50 - Greg Cote - Страница 17

16

LINEBACKER WAHOO MCDANIEL

Wahoo McDaniel had Choctaw blood and once swore he would have worn a fully feathered Indian headdress in games if the league had not demanded he wear a helmet instead. He later wore such a headdress (and war paint) as his signature in the ring during decades as a barnstorming professional wrestler.

The Orange Bowl announcer would call, “Tackle by whooo?” And McDaniel would preen and shout on the field along with fans: “WA-hoooo!”

“The Chief” was a wrestler first. Recalled linebacker Frank Emanuel: “He’d always say, ‘Heck, I make more money wrestling than I do playing football.’ ”

Goode remembered McDaniel being up for any challenge, and that teammates would take advantage. He might run 20 miles to win a $10 bet.

Former teammate Bob Neff, a safety, drove to Tyler, Texas, to see McDaniel wrestle just a few years before he died in 2002. Torczon saw him “at this big rasslin’ deal at the county fair” in Columbus, Nebraska, a few years before that.

Wahoo still wore that big headdress, right to the end.

KICKER GENE MINGO

Eerily, Gene Mingo refers to himself in the third person.

“Nobody knows Eugene Mingo,” he said. “Gene was the first American-born black field goal kicker to play in the NFL.”

Mingo recalls only eight or nine other blacks on that first Dolphins team and nearly 40 years later told the story of his wife – apartment hunting in Miami – being

turned away by a white landlord even though a vacancy sign hung in the window.

Still, Mingo said, he loved Miami and fishing off the 79th Street bridge.

Post-football life was not so good for a while.

Many players on that ’66 team were on friendly terms with alcohol. The drug of the time, at least on that first team, was amphetamines. (“Reds,” one said. “Uppers.”)

Coach George Wilson ran a loose ship that did not discourage nightlife and its pleasures. He would drink in front of his players. Once, on the bus ride home from an exhibition game in Jacksonville, Wilson ordered the team bus steered into the parking lot of a bar to the delight of players.

For Mingo, several years of cocaine abuse nearly killed him. And his wife.

“I was in jail in ’86 in Denver for nearly killing my wife while under the influence of drugs,” he said. “I shot her in the arm. She was critical for three days.”

Mingo said he had a religious epiphany while in jail: “I believe I looked into the face of God. A vibration walked from the tip of my toes to the top of my head on Sept. 10, 1986. I have not had alcohol or drugs since.”

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

A first-class stamp cost a nickel in 1966. Then again, player salaries were modest on their face – not just in comparison to athletes’ modern-day riches. Very few guys even had agents then. Most held offseason jobs.

“My top dollar was $14,000 a season,” Torczon recalled. Mingo made nine grand.