Hall of Fame coach Don Shula, who died Monday at 90, is best remembered as the architect of the Miami Dolphins and their undefeated 1972 season—still the only perfect year in NFL history.

But before Shula won in Miami, he’d burnished a legacy in Baltimore.

The Colts went 71-23-4 in their seven years under Shula. In their 1967 and 1968 campaigns, they lost just a single game each of those regular seasons. The Colts, however, did lose 27-0 to the Cleveland Browns in the 1964 NFL championship. And, of course, they were upset by the New York Jets in the 1969 Super Bowl after winning the NFL title, a game that ultimately forced the merger of the AFL and NFL, as well as Shula’s departure to Miami.

While no cause of death has been announced, the Miami Herald reports that a close associate said Shula was not ill at the time of his passing.

An Ohio native, Shula played seven years as a slow, but smart and hard-nosed defensive back in the NFL, including four for the Colts between 1953-1956 before beginning his coaching career. He was offered the Colts top coaching job at just 33 years old, becoming the youngest head coach in pro football. His reference? None other than Hall of Fame defensive end Gino Marchetti.

From Collision of Wills, Baltimore writer Jack Gilden’s 2018 book on the relationship between Shula and quarterback Johnny Unitas:

In 1963, Gino Marchetti, close to Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom, recommended that head coach Weeb Ewbank be fired from his post and that Don Shula be hired to replace him. Rosenbloom barely remembered Shula even though the granite-jawed young man played for the Colts himself for four seasons, calling all of the team’s defensive signals.
“You mean that guy who played here that wasn’t very good?” Rosenbloom asked Marchetti.

While his relationship with the veteran Unitas was often challenging, Shula was ready for the post. He won The Sporting News Coach of the Year honors in the 1964, his second season. He won it again in 1968 with the Colts. (In a twist of fate, it was Ewbank who directed the Jets to their upset of the Colts.)

“His two most memorable moments in football were losing to Joe Namath and the Jets in Super Bowl III, a painful and colossal upset, and beating the Redskins in Super Bowl VII to cap the undefeated season,” Gilden wrote on his Facebook page yesterday. “Those two games sum him up perfectly. He endured a great deal of humiliation to achieve the most storied accomplishments in his sport. Don Shula was one of the greatest men in the history of the game.”

In Miami, after his relationship with Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom soured following the loss to the Jets, Shula won back-to-back Super Bowls and eventually 347 games, the most in pro football history. The Dolphins offered Shula part ownership of the four-year-old franchise.

“After Super Bowl III, my relationship with Rosenbloom was not very pleasant,” Shula told The Sun in a 2008 interview. “I loved Baltimore—the people, the fans and everything that Colts football stood for. But Rosenbloom’s New York buddies never let him forget [the heavily favored Colts’ loss], and he never let me forget it.
“If we had won that game, and continued to win, I certainly wouldn’t have gone. I’d still be in Baltimore, eating crab cakes.”

Don Shula with Art Donovan during their playing days in Baltimore. (Courtesy of Debbie Donovan)

Sports tend to be a great outlet for a city to express its collective id. And while Baltimore has had plenty of modest, lunch-pail, grind-it-out sports heroes (Johnny Unitas and Cal Ripken, Jr. being the obvious examples), it’s also had more than its fair share of larger-than-life characters.

One of our first great sports celebrities was the Colts’ Artie Donovan, a funny, irreverent raconteur who was as comfortable on The Tonight Show couch as he was on the gridiron. We also had the Orioles’ famously pugnacious Earl Weaver, whose nose-to-nose, spittle-flying, profanity-laced confrontations with umpires, pictured, were the stuff of legends. Weaver often clashed with his gifted right-handed pitcher Jim Palmer, who with his perfect teeth and off-field polish made him a perfect foil to his manager.

The rowdiness of Weaver extended to the fans in the stands, who exuberantly took it upon themselves to improve the National Anthem by inserting a raucous “O!” before “Does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave?”—a tradition that continues to this day. Meanwhile, at Memorial Stadium, Wild Bill Hagy became an icon for donning that ubiquitous cowboy hat and leading the cheap seats in a pantomimed chant of O-R-I-O-L-E-S. (We also like to think that Hagy is the one responsible for “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” emerging as the official song of the seventh-inning stretch.)

Our tradition of eccentric athletes continues into the 21st century with the preacher-warrior linebacker Ray Lewis and his unforgettable “Hot in Herre” pre-game dance; our delightfully geeky, opera-singing, Royal-Farms-pitching kicker Justin Tucker; and the bubble-blowing, food-loving, do-gooding Adam Jones.

Each of our sports heroes tell us a little something about ourselves—what we value, what makes us laugh and cheer, how we choose to be perceived by the rest of the country. And while there will never be another Donovan, Hagy, or Jones, we’ll undoubtedly find another endearingly oddball athlete to idolize. It’s what we do.

When Baltimore lost football great Art Donovan in August at the age
of 89, he was remembered not just as a feisty defensive tackle for the
Baltimore Colts—helping the team to world championships in 1958 and
1959—but as a self-effacing funnyman whose popularity far outlived his
NFL career.

For years after hanging up his cleats, the beefy Pro Football Hall of
Famer, who also spent single seasons with the New York Yanks and Dallas
Texans in an 11-year career, appeared on the talk-show circuit, telling
humorous tales of the NFL’s good old days, as he put it, “When men
were, well, men.”

Donovan’s father was famous fight referee Arthur J. Donovan Sr., who
was in the ring at 19 of Joe Louis’s title fights. When the younger
Donovan left the tough New York neighborhood of his youth, he fought in
World War II and played college football at Notre Dame and Boston
College.

“Baltimore is now without one of its best.” —Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti.