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| Miami Dolphins QB- Bob Griese |
It was on January 9, 1977 that pro football entered my life and I witnessed (from what I can recall) was my first football game and NFL championship (Superbowl XI), and was immediately hooked. Months later I turned ten years old, started the fifth grade, and began rooting for what was then my favorite team, which was not m my beloved Cardinals, but rather the Miami Dolphins.
Why the Dolphins? I honestly have no recollection some 40 years later. It stemmed from a few things I think, I liked their uniforms, a lack of any good football in Chicago, and our family trip to Florida.
With that said though, exactly how it came to be that I became a Dolphins fan I don't really know for sure. They were by then a team on the downward slide, and the only one I really identified with on the team was their quarterback, the by then bi-spectacle Bob Griese, who, as luck would have it, in 1977, was quarterbacking a resurgent offense in the post-Csonka era. I wore the same style glasses that I immediately became a fan. I was such an over eager Dolphins fan that for the remainder of the 1970s I asked for literally every NFL licensed piece of merchandise a boy could find in the Sears and J.C. Penny's Christmas catalogs (more on that facet of football culture in a future article).