Mike Westhoff opens up about Miami Dolphins and Dan Marino

Most mornings for more than two pandemic-laden many years, Mike Westhoff woke early, ate breakfast and then sat on his bed at 7 a.m. with a pen and yellow legal pad to do one thing he never ever experienced. He wrote for hours each individual working day.

He wrote of listening with a younger New York Giants assistant, Invoice Belichick, as Indiana basketball mentor Bob Knight taught footwork. He wrote of acquiring a chair in his Miami Dolphins office environment reserved only for Don Shula’s Wednesday night time conference.

“What do you acquired?” Shula would say for Westhoff to current his distinctive-groups options.

Westhoff wrote of coaching on a workforce with quarterback Dan Marino (“the knowledge of a lifetime”), wrote how the New York Jets did not use Tim Tebow as planned (a “disgrace and a mess”) and wrote how a friendship with Dolphins government Bill Parcells ended when Parcells despatched a letter to the league accusing Westhoff of violating league guidelines for going to a Dolphins follow in retirement and then re-signing up for the Jets the upcoming week.

“With a depressing, chickens— letter, he destroyed what I considered was a excellent romance,” Westhoff wrote.

Westhoff often was beautifully open and opinionated as a particular groups mentor, and he’s no distinctive with this reserve, “Figure It Out: My Thirty-Two 12 months Journey Whilst Revolutionizing Professional Football’s Specific Groups.” He states Jets (and later on Dolphins) common supervisor Mike Tannenbaum took them, “from a championship-level group to a bulls— operation,” with conclusions like shutting Westhoff out of the 2012 draft process.

Westhoff prided himself on coaching inventive specials teams back before the restrictive principles of nowadays and by supporting discover the talent for them. Acquire rookie Bernie Parmalee. Shula slash him in 1992. The paperwork was to be submitted the subsequent day at 1 p.m.

Westhoff advised Parmalee to come to exercise the up coming morning. He requested Reggie Roby to punt a line drive to ensure a return. Parmalee made a deal with that, “sounded like an explosion,” Westhoff stated, and he performed 9 several years in the NFL.

These are the stories Westhoff tells with him at the middle. He normally had a healthy moi. When Jimmy Johnson retired from the Dolphins following the 1999 season, Westhoff talked about a succession approach in an empty group cafeteria with operator H. Wayne Huizenga.

Westhoff would be head mentor. Marino would play on. Indianapolis assistant Gene Huey would provide the shotgun offense designed for statuesque Peyton Manning to support an motionless Marino.

“Dan could’ve performed two a lot more yrs in the shotgun,” Westhoff reported.

Huizenga selected Dave Wannstedt. Westhoff was off to the Jets a yr afterwards right before ending his job with Sean Payton’s New Orleans Saints. So his reserve is a soccer journey. And additional.

“The Most important Combat of My Daily life,” he titles one particular chapter that began with surgery for back and leg agony at age 40 in 1988. His iliac artery was accidently cut in the surgery. He began bleeding out on the surgical desk.

“They lower me and put a tube right down into my heart, pumping blood correct into most important artery to retain me alive,” he reported.

A doctor entered the home, took in excess of the surgery and saved Westhoff’s daily life. That didn’t solve the back and leg discomfort that was identified as an egg-sized, cancerous tumor in his leg.

Consequently started a different chapter in his everyday living — and his ebook. He went to Boston, where a new treatment meant his leg wasn’t amputated but remade with two metallic plates, 25 screws and 60 staples.

He underwent chemotherapy, coached the Dolphins and threw up on the remote side of the industry. He shed hair, body weight — almost everything but hope. Some thought football lost perspective in that struggle.

“Coaching saved me,” he says. “Coach Shula didn’t see me as a most cancers victim. He observed me as who I could be all over again. He dealt with me like I was not unwell. That authorized me to see myself that way, far too.”

Westhoff started out in an NFL with couple of procedures for specific groups to the position the goal of his punt teams was to block an opponent above the sideline Gatorade desk. His career finished with kickoffs and punts being just about taken out of the video game, as he at the time said to NFL Commissioner to Roger Goodell.

“Mike, you’re the past person who can complain, due to the fact they’re switching mainly because of you,” Goodell explained.

He chuckles, his vocation accomplished, his pen down, his views however potent. He attended a Dolphins minicamp practice in June. His ideas?

“I wasn’t overly impressed,” he stated. “They bought a lengthy way to go.”

As his titles claims, “Figure It Out.”

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