locate him.
He died in 2001 in Pasadena, Calif., at 65, decades removed from all hint of public life.
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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.
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Everything connected to a dollar sign seemed shrunken that first AFL season.
The dozens of players spoken to for this story found myriad ways to point out that original club owner Joe Robbie (the Minneapolis lawyer who’d begged, borrowed and borrowed more for the $7.5 million franchise fee) held onto money as if it held the secret to all eternity.
Once during the season, Auer was asked to pick up the team’s uniforms from a Coral Gables dry cleaner. They hadn’t been prepaid, so he ponied up the $150.
“I had a struggle getting my money back from the Dolphins,” he said.
Once, a National Airlines team charter was held up on the tarmac because Robbie owed the airline $10,000.
Robbie released veteran running back Casares on the spot after three games because of an ankle injury. Casares had just been named Dolphin player of the week in a weekly award.
“Cut me so he wouldn’t have to pay me,” Casares said. “As I rode out of Miami, I looked at the billboard, and my picture was up.”
Claimed Goode, the old center: “On the road for an exhibition game, they told us we couldn’t turn our covers back [on the beds] because they might charge us extra.”
(Sometimes truth and humor arrive at the same point, don’t they?)
Robbie used to party, man. A fawning, drinking entourage would accompany him on team flights. “A bunch of damned people who shouldn’t have been on that plane,” recalled guard Billy Neighbors, the team’s union rep. “Robbie was a damn nut. Just weird as hell.”
With his players, though, frugality reigned. Said receiver Frank Jackson:
“Robbie was concerned about going broke weekly.”
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
The Originals went every which way, just like the rest of us.
Many have impressive titles now, like Doug Moreau, district attorney of Baton Rouge Parish, and Billy Hunter, director of the NBA Players Association. Most are long out of the spotlight, retired with grandkids.
The Originals carry their 1966 distinction differently.
To a few, it is so distant or was so fleeting as to be nearly inconsequential, half a lifetime later. Former safety Willie West said, “It was a job. It’s a forgotten part of my life. I don’t reflect on it at all. It’s a non-entity.”
Most, by far, feel differently.
Linebacker Tom Emanuel, then the only rookie starter on defense and now 63, appeared on the front of Sports Illustrated – the franchise’s first coverboy.
“That season and team is always in back of my mind. It was a great honor,” he said. “I always tell people, ‘I played with the Dolphins before Don Shula.’ We were very much forgotten. I’m proud to say I’m one of the originals.”
Safety Bob Neff: “When people find out I played ball, first thing I say is that I was on the original Miami Dolphins. It means something to me.”
And Maxie Williams, an original offensive lineman: “I’ve always thought, ‘Hey, I helped start that.’ You always carry a little piece of the franchise.”
LaVerne Torczon, almost 70, is nearly blind from pituitary tumors. But when he
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closes his eyes, he can see 1966. “Gives you a little pride,” he said.
Tom Goode, the old center? He’s come in from clearing up hurricane damage off his farm in West Point, Mississippi. He is a ’66er at 66. Limps like most aging football men.
He can’t complain, though. The town named a street after him a while back. He lives in the same house in which he was raised. At 9190 Tom Goode Road.
He was still in Miami the next season, when somebody let an armadillo loose in Griese’s motel room, and Griese leaped for safety onto his bed, waving a golf club.
But ’66 was special. You can only be first once, after all.
“Think about it all the time,” Goode said. “It’s always there.”
THINGS FAIRYTALES ARE MADE OF
Joe Auer doesn’t happen. Not in real life. Never. Going on 40 years later, it still seems a bit surreal to him.
A kid from nearby Coral Gables High runs the opening kickoff in franchise