My first encounter with Dan Marino, the quarterback, went roughly like this:
“Uh, Dan . . . “
“Not yet,” he said.
Marino was 22 then, his face as smooth and shiny as the bottom of a bedroom slipper. He was still damp from a shower. He had won his first football game as a rookie starting quarterback. I was one of a clump of us there at the beginning of what we all knew would be a great career, a Hall of Fame career, a multiple Super Bowl career.
“Uh, Dan, what . . . “
Marino dropped his towel and used it to blow his nose. Whooonk! He emptied a nostril. Whoooonk! The other one. A television light popped on. Marino frowned. The light went off.
Marino rummaged among his personal utensils, found a comb and pushed it through his wet hair. His hair, like the rest of us, obeyed his commands. He turned to meet the rest of his life.
“Now,” Marino said. “What can I do for you?”
Fame always waited for Marino until he was ready for it. It took five games of his rookie year to arrive in the NFL and it moved in with him for the next decade and a half. He quit football the other day because the team he had commanded for all that time did not want him anymore and because he did not want football without it.
There is honor in the choice, dignity in the decision, but it was time to go, and if Marino did not know it, he would, as did Joe Montana, as did John Unitas, when they moved behind a different center.
Dave Wannstedt has taken a lot of grief for being in the middle of the inevitable, the bad cop to Jimmy Johnson’s weasel, but it would have been worse if Marino had stayed.
Owner Wayne Huizenga gushed coyly that they will be building a statue of Marino outside the stadium, naming a street for him, treating him with greater reverence even than Don Shula, who essentially established and sustained the Miami Dolphins as winners. They have not even retired Larry Csonka’s number yet.
But it is Huizenga’s team for now and he can erect all the memorials he wants, like a southern town building statues to Stonewall Jackson or to Robert E. Lee, honoring a favored son for the fight and not for the victory.
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Why do I remember that first impression of Marino so clearly when thousands of others have muddied in the same puddle of memory? This is what I saw and what I wrote at the time.
“If Marino showed up at the opera in an aloha shirt, everyone else would feel overdressed. He has the sort of charm Albert Camus defined as `a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.'”
Marino was special and it was obvious. It always had been obvious from the time he threw his first football for the St. Regis Vikings, his peewee team in Pittsburgh. Life occasionally will reveal its plan early to a valued few, those gifted with peculiar talents that exist for no other reason than by inspired accident. Edison always knew he would be more than a tinkerer, Baryshnikov more than a dancer. Marino knew he would be a famous quarterback.
“I could always throw the ball,” he said at his retirement announcement, bemused there was any question about it.
I posed to Shula the proposition Marino would be the Dolphins’ first transcendent star, a truly national celebrity, larger than the team, larger even than Shula himself.
“What a horsebleep thing to say,” Shula said.
We were right about Marino, those of us there at the beginning. His greatness was assumed and it was confirmed by the most productive individual career of any quarterback in the history of the NFL.
But here at the end, Marino must fight against pity, not the proudest sentiment. Marino never won the big one.
In college, his Pittsburgh team lost one game and the national championship. His best year, as a junior, coincided with Heisman winner Herschel Walker’s junior season.
Marino thus always will have to be ranked somewhere behind Montana, who mastered a system but had not the raw gifts of Marino, and behind John Elway, who was a more prominent failure even than Marino until the very end.
Marino will be lumped in with Sonny Jurgenson or Roman Gabriel, those greatly talented passers who never managed to accommodate their superior skill with team success.
Not a bad legacy, just not what we all thought, not what we expected at all.