– and a franchise, and a city — sitting on top of the world.
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Chapter 1
A FRANCHISE IS BORN
Early Years Were Rough
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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.”
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It was a close call as to which the Dolphins would recall less fondly: that field, the cacophony of seals or the motel restaurant’s propensity to serve chicken chow mein.
“If we have that one more time,” linebacker Wahoo McDaniel was heard to bellow, “I’m coming to practice tomorrow in a rickshaw!”
It seemed to be time to find a new training camp.
ST. ANDREW’S SCHOOL, BOCA RATON, AUGUST 1966
“Where the bugs took over,” former defensive end LaVerne Torczon said. “Never forget the bugs in that dorm. Big! Wake up and the floor would be full of bugs.”
Against this backdrop, a sweltering gang of more than 100 anxious players was being gradually winnowed to a final roster.
“Biggest bunch of renegades you could ever put together,” defensive end Whit Canale recalled. “They were giving anybody and everybody a shot. They even tried out a guy from the circus who [in his act] got run over by cars.”
Herald sports columnist Edwin Pope, who was there, recalled the motley team as “suspicious, paranoid guys full of dread they’d be out of football in five minutes.”
Stan Mitchell, a fullback, used to keep all his clothes in his car except the ones on his back, so sure that he was about to be cut.
Remembered safety Bob Neff: “I hid in the closet after every practice. I ran up about $300 in phone bills, telling my wife to get her hair fixed ’cause I’d be home tomorrow.”
Faced with calamity and uncertainty, a sort of giddiness set in.
“Whenever anybody would make a mistake [during practice],” Evans said, “a
bunch of us would start singing, ‘Moon Over Miami.’ ”
Center Tom Goode remembered that Joe Auer had this old dune buggy with rollbars that he’d race around the Boca camp, taking corners too fast. Especially this one time.
“Auer lost part of an ear,” Goode said. “They didn’t want any publicity about it.”
A circus, it was. “Not my vision of what pro football would be like,” as receiver Karl Noonan put it.
And the circus did not lack for acts.
Miami Dolphin Joe Auer before the second season, July 17, 1967. (Bob East/Miami Herald)
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RUNNING BACK COOKIE GILCHRIST
Cookie Gilchrist barreled into Dolphins history driving a long-fin Cadillac on which he had professionally painted: “LOOKIE, LOOKIE! HERE COMES COOKIE!”
He was a star running back who’d been to the Pro Bowl every year from 1962-65, yet was made available in the expansion draft. There was a reason for that.
Apparently, Cookie was nuts.
He rushed for 262 yards that season and was out of football by the next year.
“Probably the greatest athlete I’ve ever been around,” said the center, Goode, “but a bit eccentric.”
“He gave the Dolphins a ton of trouble,” fellow running back Casares recalled. “He was demanding. Difficult about practice.”
Former teammates have only heard rumors of Gilchrist’s whereabouts – none confirmed. A preacher in Wilmington, Delaware? Selling “Cookie’s Cookies” in Pennsylvania? On a mountainside near Denver?
He has a website that was set up in 2000 and answers no inquiries. On the site, it reads that Gilchrist was “stolen by Paul Brown from the 11th grade and induced in signing an illegal contract,” and later “sold to Ralph Wilson, slave-holder of the Buffalo Bills.” [Book editor’s note: Gilchrist died Jan. 10, 2011, at age 75 in Pittsburgh, according to CookieGilchrist.com, which is still active.]
RECEIVER BO ROBERSON
Bo Roberson was a remarkable athlete long before sports became packaged and marketed and anybody had heard of Bo Jackson.
Running back Cookie Gilchrist at practice during his only season with the Dolphins, October 20, 1966. (John Pineda/Miami Herald)
The Original Bo had the Dolphins’ first 100-yard receiving game, and his 161 yards later in that 1966 season stood as a club record for 13 years. He had an Ivy League degree and an Olympic medal. He had a curiosity in Black Panthers-style ideology of the era and a penchant for dressing sharp as a seashell shard in all white.
Roberson left football after that inaugural Dolphins season and all