New Dolphins book...
- Thread starter Dolfan28
- Start date
Aussiefinfan54
Pro Bowler
nah man sorry havent seen it
Roman529
Moon Runner / The 3 AM Crew
I have heard about it but haven't read it. The Phin's fans remind me a lot of Boston Red Sox fans.....for many years the team was always a contender but they could never win the whole thing. We have had the best record in the AFC since the merger, and I believe the Dolphins have the highest winning percentage of any team in NFL history, but we have nothing to show for it the past 30+ years. The Red Sox finally got their title....so hopefully it is also the Phin's turn to win it all within the next few years. :tongue:
BigTallChris
Jason Taylor's Illegit White Brother
Roman529 said:
Don't ever, ever, EVER compare me to a Boston Red Sox fan!!!:fire:
Don't mean to hate on you, fellow Phin Phan! I'm just a die-hard Yankees fan also!
Oh yeah, it sounds like that book might be a good read. I may have to pick it up!
Dolfan28 said:
How big is the book? Is it just a cutesy book or is it worth reading?
phinatic8818
long live the fins!!!!
Dolfan28 said:
sounds like a must read
Red Sox fans could only have hoped it would`ve been a mere 30 yrs between titles. How long was it for them...80 yrs? Miami isn`t going to have wait much longer for its next SB win, besides 30 yrs isn`t all THAT long...hell I was 5 and 6 when won our two rings and I can still remember everything about watching those games.Roman529 said:
Gardenhead
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fish fan 4 life
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Never heard of it but i dont need to read it.Ive lived it.
fish fan 4 life
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The Yankee's buy everything.Baseball needs a cap.Im not a Yankee hater but IMO they should be the best team every year with the names of there roster.If a good player becomes free the Yankee's buy him up and why not they have all the money.If they did cap baseball the Yankee's wouldnt be the power house they are year in and year out.If we didnt have a cap in football the Redskins would be the Yankee's and would buy many superbowls.I feel every team should have a fair chance and that cant happen without a cap in baseball.BigTallChris said:
Not the same as the Red Sox
The Dolphins aren't the Red Sox...they are more like the Braves of the 1990's.
Lots of wins and little titles here and there, but no success when it counts.
But, I don't know if Braves fans are as passionate as we are.
Found this sample chapter online:
These years of longing and torment started on December 21, 1974. It was, by no means, a Christmas gift.
January 14, 1973. That’s the day I made a conscious effort to become a Miami Dolphins fan. Many people have asked me how a native New Yorker, a kid who was born in the city and raised in the sticks of the northern suburbs, could follow a team roughly 1,200 miles from home. All I can say is that it was a religious kind of thing.
The day of the Super Bowl I had the entire downstairs to myself. There was the old Sylvania color TV on its stand in the corner, the dark wood paneling, the big green area rug covering beige tiles and the furniture given to us by my grandfather - a big orange monstrosity of a sectional couch.
The Dolphins aren't the Red Sox...they are more like the Braves of the 1990's.
Lots of wins and little titles here and there, but no success when it counts.
But, I don't know if Braves fans are as passionate as we are.
Found this sample chapter online:
Chapter 1
Snake bitten
Ken Stabler fades back.
He’s starting to scramble. Oakland Raiders and Miami Dolphins are jockeying for position in the Miami end zone. The Raiders are just a few yards from goal.
There’s less than 30 seconds to play in the game.
It looks as though The Snake is finally going to be stopped.
Vern Den Herder is closing in from the left end position.
Den Herder dives and grabs Stabler by his right ankle -- The Snake lunges forward and lofts, no, shot-puts the ball…
The ball miraculously lands in the hands of Clarence Davis who just so happens to have broken loose for a split second in the end zone. The Raiders have just taken a 28-26 lead.
The 1974 AFC Divisional Playoff Game in Oakland was my first taste of bitter defeat as a Miami Dolphins fan.
I know there isn’t much sympathy for fans of a team that almost every year is above the .500 mark and, at the start of the 2002 season, has qualified for the playoffs five years in a row. If you’re a fan of another team - a team with a history of losing - I’ll tell you the same thing my parents used to tell me: “I don’t care what the other kids are doing.”
Zach Thomas summed it up quite nicely after the Dolphins suffered a 21-17 loss to the Jets after leading the game 17-0 at halftime. "Everybody wants to win,” Thomas said. “I want to win to get to the playoffs and the Super Bowl. Some guys around here, they want to win, but they're satisfied with the winning season. That's not me. I'm tired of the 'winning season.' “
If you’re a fan of some loser organization like the Jets, Bengals, Lions or Falcons, that’s your problem. The Dolphins, they are my problem. And, considering they consume so much of my emotions and thoughts, they are a huge problem.
I have zero connection to the team, the city of Miami or the players other than the fact that I read about them every day, go out of my way to watch them every Sunday, travel to one game a year and am surrounded by items decked in aqua and orange colors. I’ve punched holes in walls, wrecked my bedroom several times and ended relationships with girlfriends because they simply couldn’t understand my passion.
I am relieved to know that there are fans out there that are worse than I am. But, like I said earlier, this is my problem.
There are times when I can close my eyes and imagine the Dolphins winning their first Super Bowl since 1973. My nose begins to sting as tears form. My chest fills with pride, like a parent watching its child graduate from college. I always stop myself short of getting fully emotional about it. I want to save that moment in the event that it should actually take place.
I know when it finally does happen, I’ll just smile, feel happy for a second and then I'll experience emptiness. My contribution to the team’s success will have been zero and I will realize how futile all this has been.
But, I’ve always been a big fan of visualization. It helped me as a hockey player and in other aspects of life. So, why can’t visualizing your team winning the Super Bowl somehow work?
I realize that I sound like a maniac and a big, gigantic loser. I am both. People tell me that at 38, I need to get a life or that having kids and raising a family would make me care less about something as trivial as a football team. I somehow think that by doing that, I’d only create more victims of my mania and more people who don’t understand. My dad, who isn’t a sports fan, never could and still doesn’t get it.
Over time, people have stopped trying to understand and just deal with the situation. Perhaps the only person who hasn’t learned to deal with it is me.
The 1974 playoff game in Oakland marked the end of the Dolphins three-year run as AFC Champions and their two-year run as NFL Champions. Since that time they have returned to the Super Bowl twice, losing a winnable Super Bowl XVII, 27-17, to Washington before getting crushed, 38-16, by San Francisco in Super Bowl XIX.
The Super Bowl loss to San Francisco was expected at the time. Many Dolphins fans, me included, saw that loss as a minor hiccup on the road to an eventual championship because, after all, the Dolphins had Dan Marino. Disappointingly, Marino and the Dolphins haven’t been to the ‘Bowl since.
And that is part of the trouble of being a Dolphins fan. They are a paradox. They are a tease. They entertain and they build you up only to let you down. Most times, they do both in spectacular fashion.
So that Raiders game in 1974 was a perfect introductory affair. The Dolphins actually took the lead when Benny Malone scored on a 23-yard run to make it 26-21 with 2:08 to play. You had to figure the No-Name Defense could hold a team for two minutes. At the time, I was eight years old and not yet cynical. So seeing my team take the lead, I breathed a sigh of relief and figured they had the game won.
Imagine my horror and disappointment when they did not; feelings I've experienced over and over again since.
When the game ended and the Dolphins were done, my thoughts immediately flashed back to November 24 of that season. I was sitting in Shea Stadium watching my first pro football game in the flesh. It was a gray day and it was getting dark and cold.
My face was growing warmer. The tears were welling up. I could feel them streak down my hot cheeks and grow cold. My father, seeing that I was upset tried to comfort me.
“The Dolphins aren’t going to win the Super Bowl this year,” I said. I knew that this was the first and last time I would be seeing Jim Kiick, Larry Csonka and Paul Warfield in Dolphins uniforms. They had already announced they were jumping to the new World Football League, following the crazy cash that was starting to hit the marketplace.
That small, child-like statement - “The Dolphins aren’t going to win the Super Bowl this year” -- sounds innocent. Thinking back on it, it was the first -- at least from what I can remember – cynical remark I would make in my young life. The next 30 years would be filled with enough cynical remarks to make it to Pluto and back. Most of them based on deserved circumstances surrounding the Dolphins.
My words were, if nothing else, prophetic. The loss to the Jets was the third and final defeat the Dolphins would suffer that season. They finished the year at 11-3, but the Oakland Raiders finished 12-2, giving them home field advantage in the playoffs and setting up the Dolphins for an ill-fated trip to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.
Against the Jets, Bob Griese threw a six-yard touchdown pass to Kiick with 6:30 to play in the game. That gave the Dolphins a 14-10 lead. I figured the No-Name Defense, an institution that represented a stout, unassailable wall in my little mind again would hold. But the Jets, under the guidance of Joe Namath -- a man I hated from the moment I became aware of professional sports - connected with Rich Caster on a 45-yard touchdown pass with five minutes to play.
Forty-five yards!
Shock.
Shea Stadium exploded. It was pulsating around me. I felt so totally alone, like a dust mote floating among airplanes, all I wanted to do was just curl up into a ball and cry. My father’s friend, the man who got us the tickets, rubbed my head. He wasn’t being sympathetic. He was rubbing it in.
The Dolphins fumbled three times that afternoon and Griese was picked off on the team’s final attempt to stave off a loss.
My journey as a tormented Dolphins fan was underway.
I remember it was an early Saturday morning. The sun was still coming up. I was huddled in my neighbor’s Volvo station wagon with Ronnie Littlejohn my friend from down the street. We were waiting for the neighbor’s daughter, who was a year younger than us. We were going to the equivalent of Sunday school.
The neighbor, Ernie, turned to us in the backseat and said: “Who do you think is going to win the Super Bowl tomorrow?”
Now, I was seven years old at the time. I knew about the New York Giants and Norm Snead. We had picked up this metal wastepaper basket at Sears that was called “The Players of the New York Giants.” It had a round headshot of every player by position on both defense and offense.
I was confused over the fact that Norm Snead was the Giants quarterback at the time and not Fran Tarkenton, who was pictured on my trash can. There were also shots of Ron Johnson, Spider Lockhart, Tucker Fredrickson and Fred Dryer, who would go on to become a successful television actor.
The other things I knew were nicknames. I knew about the Purple People Eaters and the No-Name Defense. But, these are the names I knew from the neighborhood and my friends talking about them as we played sports or sat on the steps reading the local newspaper.
My friends grew up in households where their fathers were sports fans and they watched sports on television. I did not. My father was athletic - a black belt in karate, a good swimmer, a body builder -- but he never sat around and watched sports.
At first I was fascinated by baseball. The Yankees were the team in my neighborhood and so they became mine. I was a little over a year in getting to understand sports. So football wasn’t at the top of my mind when Ernie turned around and asked us the question, “Who’s gonna win the Super Bowl?”
Ronnie responded right away, “The Dolphins,” he said.
“The Dolphins,” I repeated.
I didn’t even know who was playing or that the Dolphins had a chance to go undefeated. I remembered that I should watch the game.
I watched as the Dolphins took a 14-0 lead. The one play that stands out in my mind - the one that got me so excited - is the play that everyone remembers - the Mike Bass interception. There was Garo Yepremian, the Dolphins little field goal kicker trying to make up for a botched field goal by attempting a pass and placing it in Bass’ hands.
Of course, that would be the only touchdown the Redskins would score that day.
I remember Jake Scott’s interception that virtually sealed the game before Yepremian's field goal attempt. Scott was named MVP.
I remember watching Dick Anderson hit Larry Brown so hard his helmet came off.
And I remember Don Shula on the shoulders of his team being carried off in triumph.
I was hooked.
I loved the Dolphins.
I thought Don Shula was God.
I guess you could say I was baptized that day.
