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Miami Dolphins might never have happened if not for the 1950s friendship of two legislators from the capital halls of Pierre, South Dakota.

Robbie and his celebrity partner, Thomas, bought the franchise for $7.5 million, a sum that today is less than current quarterback Ryan Tannehill makes in one year.

The team was named “Dolphins” in a write-in vote of fans. Little known is that the second-place nickname suggested was the rather politically incorrect “Missiles,” with the Bay of Pigs invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis from the early ’60s still fresh on South Florida’s mind.

Those early expansion years were a different time.

Royal Castle, the iconic hamburger chain, handed out player cards. The influx of Cuban exiles via U.S.-sponsored “freedom flights” had just begun. The “Jackie Gleason Show” began broadcasting from Miami Beach. Gas was 32 cents a gallon.

Football players in the 1960s and even into the early ’70s often had second jobs in the offseason to augment modest salaries.

“Most of the fans then made more money than we did,” said Jim Langer, the 1970s Dolphins center.

The team arrived on a barren South Florida sports landscape compared to today. Miami Beach had famously hosted the first Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight in 1964, but the city wasn’t much for big team sports. Miami Hurricanes football was closer to extinction in the ’60s than to the swaggering dominance that began two decades later. The baseball Marlins and hockey Panthers were decades away. Miami had an American Basketball Association team, the Floridians, from 1968 to ’72, but the far more

prestigious NBA and the Heat were not even on the horizon yet.

The Dolphins were the big thing in town almost by default, but the stadium rarely was ever close to filled in expansion years 1966-69 as the team slogged to records of 3-11, 4-10, 5-8-1 and 3-10-1. Some of those early-era, late-’60s Dolphins teams included future stars such as quarterback Bob Griese, running back Larry Csonka, guard Larry Little, safety Dick Anderson, defensive end Bill Stanfill and linebacker Nick Buoniconti, but nothing really clicked — took off — until 1970.

It wasn’t the leagues’ merger that did it in elevating Miami from the “junior” AFL into the far more prestigious, established NFL.

No. It was Don Shula who did it.

Robbie hired the great coach, then only 40, away from the Baltimore Colts to replace expansion coach George Wilson, and the change was immediate and dramatic.

Wilson was an aging coach playing out the string, one who was lax with his players, smoked cigarettes on the practice field and enjoyed long, cocktail-fueled lunches with his staff.

Shula was an energetic, tough, granite-jawed rising star determined to make his mark.

The Dolphins were found guilty of tampering to get Shula and had to give their 1971 first-round draft pick to Baltimore after then-commissioner Pete Rozelle ruled that Robbie had improperly used a third party — Miami Herald sports writer Bill Braucher — to contact Shula and gauge his interest in Miami.

It was the best penalty the Dolphins franchise would ever pay. A bargain.

I asked Csonka once the difference effected by the coaching change.