Don Shula is one of the NFL’s legendary coaches, deservedly placed alongside greats like Lombardi, Landry, Walsh and Belichick. His phenomenal 33-years as head coach included five Super Bowl appearances (two wins), two NFL Championship appearances (one win), and more career wins (328) than any other head coach.

Oh, and there’s the perfect season: Shula’s 1972 Miami Dolphins won all 14 regular season games and three playoff games, culminating in the Super Bowl, to become the only team in NFL history to complete an entire season without defeat.

Mark Ribowsky, whose books are divided between pop music and sport, turns to Shula for his third football book. Shula, the son of Hungarian immigrants, grew up in a small Ohio town, destined for the priesthood until a last-minute change, and a lucky encounter at a gas station, put him on his football path. After a college career that doesn’t seem to merit much discussion in the book, Shula played for the Browns, Colts and Redskins, before retiring at age 28 and immediately moving into coaching.

He became head coach of the Colts in 1963, aged 33, where he had a difficult relationship with future Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas. In 1969, Shula was poached by the Dolphins, where he remained until 1995, amassing the aforementioned Super Bowl titles on the way.

Ribowsky covers Shula’s difficult relationships with Unitas and Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom, as well as his sense of humiliation at losing Super Bowl III to the Jets – coached by his former head coach at the Colts, Weeb Ewbank. In his early days at the Dolphins, Ribowsky explains, Shula had a to navigate a generational clash with his young, Baby Boomer, players. Their disregard for authority, long hair and – later – taste for drugs, were a problem for Shula, who was a stereotypically taciturn member of the Silent Generation.

The book questions how much Shula knew about the cocaine problem that later developed within the Dolphins, and whether he could have done more to address racial tensions within the team. Shula wasn’t interviewed for the book so we can only guess at the answers but it feels like Ribowsky gives Shula too much leeway. As, effectively, general manager of the Dolphins and its head coach, Shula surely carries more responsibility for team culture than a typical coach.

That also applies to the team’s decline through the 1980s. Dan Marino’s arrival looked like it would keep the Dolphins among the NFL’s super powers. The team made the Super Bowl, and lost to the 49ers, in Marino’s second season. They never made it back. After that Super Bowl, Shula coached for 11 more seasons, with a playoff record of four wins and five losses. Ribowsky quotes one observer who says that Shula got carried away with excitement at having a quarterback of Dan Marino’s talent and leant on him too heavily. But, whatever the reason, Shula never capitalised on Marino’s potential.

Shula comes across as a decent, stoic man, prone to petty grudges and occasional emotional outbursts. However, he is frustratingly hard to pin down beyond that. There’s not much here about his philosophy as a coach – how he prepared for teams and developed ways to beat them. The bulk of the book is a season-by-season chronicle of Shula’s Dolphins career. It’s comprehensive and well-told but not very deep. We know what Shula did but we don’t often know why, or what he felt about it.

After the mid-1970s, and Shula’s great Dolphins teams, the book starts to drag. That’s mostly because Shula isn’t a controversial figure. He gets frustrated about how often his teams come up short, he struggles with the team’s owner and deals with contract disputes but there are no great feuds, no big emotional burdens. He mostly gets on with the job quietly, as you’d expect a member of the silent generation to do.

Ribowsky has done a solid job with the material available and this book will undoubtedly be a good read for Dolphins fans. More general readers are likely to find it unsatisfying, however. Whatever mysteries lie in Don Shula’s head and heart, however, remain there still.

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission.

When Don Shula was in junior high school, his hardworking Hungarian-immigrant parents refused to let him play football after he tore his nose open in a game. Undeterred, Shula forged his parents' signatures on the permission slip, and kept playing. The determined 11-year-old didn't become the priest his family hoped he would, but not even he imagined playing and achieving Hall of Fame status as a coach in the National Football League.

Mark Ribowsky, biographer of sports and music personalities (Dreams to Remember), details the "lantern-jawed" stalwart's five decades of football in Shula: The Coach of the NFL's Greatest Generation. Shula's career had more than adequate peaks to overshadow the valleys, but Ribowsky does not gloss over the "failures" that provided grist for the success mill and forged Shula's process of gritty, old-school discipline and grinding. An undefeated season coaching the Baltimore Colts went famously sideways in Super Bowl III, when the heavily favored Colts fell prey to Broadway Joe Namath's outlandish guarantee that his Jets team would win.

After losing another championship coaching the Miami Dolphins in 1972, Shula finally got a Super Bowl ring, and an as-yet-unmatched perfect season, in 1973. Ribowsky provides superb particulars about that game (and many others), including Shula's wife cold-cocking a rude fan and his watch being stolen off his wrist as his players hoisted him in victory. Comprehensive and straight-shooting about Shula's persona and career, touching on cultural influences of race, drugs and politics, Shula is a treasure trove of insight on one of the game's greats.

STREET SENSE: I love a biography that doesn't universally glow about the subject. We all have our shittiness. Ribowsky does a great job of that here. Shula was a big part of the football I watched as a kid and back in my day we rarely saw or knew much about the "off-the-field" persona (at least vastly diminished from today). I came away from this book with mixed feelings about Don Shula. His was a different age in so many ways, making it hard to "judge" by today's standards. No one can doubt he was driven and to many a great coach. I balked at some of the religion and (of course) resultant hypocrisy. But complex human beings are fascinating and Ribowsky kept me fairly riveted.

COVER NERD SAYS: Simple, but I like it. When you have a face as recognizable as Shula's you don't have to get very fancy to hit/find your audience. A good, old-timey photo and font in Dolphin colors. Done. If there's any doubt, the well-placed yet still unobtrusive subtitle does the trick (even though I take issue with the subtitle's text, which doesn't really compute when you sit and think about it - so don't).