Before meeting Mike McDaniel, the smallest, funniest and most over-educated Miami Dolphins coach, you need to walk down a hallway. It’s in his great-grandmother’s home.
Family photos line its walls, dozens of smiling faces through the years at picnics or school events, the kids becoming adults as you walk the hallway, the years turning into generations. McDaniel passed these photos hundreds of times until one day when he was 5. He stopped then and studied them.
“Wow, this is odd,” he thought. “I look different than everyone else.”
That set off a chain of events in which his 5-year-old mind couldn’t answer the most fundamental of questions: Who am I? It did, however, explain why his father’s family used different combs — picks, they were called — compared to ones with more teeth in his mother’s family.
Soon, some of his white mother’s family refused to see him for part of his youth — “a hiatus,” as he calls it — until realizing, as he says, “I was light enough for them.” It was a similar, if contrasting story on his Black father’s side, exacerbated after his parents’ divorce when he was 3. Visits with his father decreased after that. By McDaniel’s high school years, they saw each other only a couple of times. He last saw his father while in college, two decades ago.
So McDaniel grew up with the self-awareness he wasn’t a cookie-cutter fit, even in his family. What’s more, he never felt the need to be the same, thanks to his mother’s encouragement and own strong mind.
“As opposed to making me feel inferior about being different, I thought, that, ‘OK, maybe I can be special,’ ” he said. “Not limiting myself to anything. Determining my own territory.”
He went through phases finding that territory. He joined the skater crowd in middle school with a bowl hair cut. He pierced his ears and grew his hair at Smoky Hill High School in Denver. He hung with the brain-iacs, considering he was one of them, taking advanced placement and International Baccalaureate classes. He also was a jock, an accomplished wide receiver on the football team — “a leader, someone people gravitated to,” as coach Dan Gallas remembers.
If McDaniel fit nowhere as a biracial, only-child, single-parented, money-challenged, smart and at
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