It was exactly this time 31 years ago, in mid-October 1993, and Bernie Kosar and the Bill Belichick-coached Browns were getting ready to host Dan Marino and the Don Shula-coached Miami Dolphins at Cleveland Stadium.
It was a Wednesday, which meant it was conference call day. A player, most times the quarterback, and the head coach from both teams would make themselves available to be interviewed by media members covering the opposite club. For those following the Browns, it meant phone calls from Marino and Shula in the tiny media workroom overlooking the practice fields at Browns Headquarters in Berea.
Dan Coughlin was working for Cleveland’s Channel 8, which was then still a CBS affiliate. It would move to the newly-created FOX family a year later in 1994. His job was to get sound for the sportscast that evening and throughout the week leading up to the game. He would lug this big tape recorder to the facility and turn it on at the appropriate times. When Shula called, Coughlin put his recorder next to the phone receiver, got it going and walked away.
It was a great interview. The line of questioning centered around Shula and how he ranked the three iconic quarterbacks he had coached in his then 30-year head coaching career, John Unitas with the Baltimore Colts and Marino and Bob Griese with the Dolphins. He picked Marino, who had been with the club for a decade, over Unitas. “They were both great, but Marino is more dynamic. He can do more,” Shula said.
Shula, of course, had grown up in Grand River and played for Painesville Harvey High School and as a safety for John Carroll University and, for the 1951 and ‘52 seasons, with the Browns before going to the Colts in a multi-player trade.
Coughlin told the story of, when he was still working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer before his move to TV, he covered the Colts locker room when the Browns delivered them a stunning 27-0 upset loss in the 1964 NFL Championship Game at Cleveland.
“Today they put the head coach and the top players in a big press conference room after games,” Coughlin said. “But they didn’t have all that back then. Shula sat on a team trunk in that tiny visitors locker room and me and a couple writers from Baltimore stood around him and interviewed him. That was it. Can you imagine that?”
No, I can’t. We can’t.
With all this history, and Shula’s place even then as possibly the greatest head coach in pro football history, it was going to be a great interview for the Channel 8 viewers hearing the coach talk about Unitas, who had quarterbacked the Colts 30 years earlier in that title, and Marino, who would suffer a ruptured Achilles tendon against the Browns four days later.
When the interview ended, Coughlin, who had been meandering about the room sipping coffee and kibitzing with other media people, returned to his tape recorder to turn it off.
Then came a shriek of a profanity at a blood-curdling from Coughlin.
“My tape recorder never came on!,” he said. “I missed the entire interview! I got nothing, absolutely nothing!
We all turned away and hid our faces to keep him from seeing us busting out laughing. The man who laughed at everything wasn’t laughing this time. But his media brethren were. We loved the guy, and the fact he was so fun-loving only served to make the situation just that much funnier.
Dan Coughlin shockingly and sadly passed away in his sleep the other day at the age of 86.
He would not have wanted any of us to be maudlin about his death. One of the best storytellers ever, and a man whose writing and voice made his words dance and brought a smile to your face, he would have wanted to exit with a humorous story.
And so he has.
Dan Coughlin was one of the best sports journalists in the history of this region. That greatness was heightened by the fact that his approach to the sports media job stood out. He never took himself too seriously and he realized, correctly so, that while these sports and games he was covering were certainly important and really meant something to Northeast Ohioans, they weren’t the be-all and end-all of life and, no matter the outcome the sun would come up the next morning and the world would go on. And anyway, the best part of sports was not the stats but the stories, so he made it a point to bring them to life, and light, every day. We are so blessed that he did just that for decades.
He was always full of the energy to tell those stories with the requisite emotion, enthusiasm and arm-flailing. It was an art form, really.
So, then, as much as we all want to tear up, we have to laugh. Dan Coughlin, I am sure, is laughing with us even now for as a man of great faith — he seemed to know all the priests in the Cleveland Catholic Diocese — he has all the answers to the questions that matter.
Steve King
