There is a generation of football fans, as well as a non-sports audience, more familiar with Don Shula’s name on a chain of famous steakhouses and burger joints than the career that made him the NFL’s winningest coach.
His success as a businessman and influence as a motivational speaker and endorser of products and causes added depth to the Hall of Fame legacy built on the gridiron.
While he was an active and effective pitchman throughout his career, Shula followed a reluctant path that led to his second significant career achievement.
Initially he had misgivings about putting his name on a struggling restaurant by the golf course near his Miami Lakes home. He finally relented at the urging of members of former Sen. Bob Graham’s family, and opened the first Shula’s steakhouse in 1989.
“I resisted for quite a while,” Shula said in a 2012 interview. “We tried it, and the sales jumped immediately about four times what it was. I said ‘This is not a bad deal.’”
The Shula touch proved to be as much of a winner in the restaurant business as in football. Operating under the Shula’s Restaurant Group umbrella, the chain has 21 restaurants in six states, offering five different concepts from formal to casual, according to the company website. There’s a Shula’s Steakhouse at Walt Disney World. Two Shula Burger outlets are located at Hard Rock Stadium, home of the Dolphins, and at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
His role in the business was largely as a promoter and frontman. The chain took off after son Dave left coaching and assumed leadership in 1997. He also credited wife Mary Anne, who chairs Shula’s Restaurant Group and served as CEO through early 2019, as a driving force in the success of the operation, including initiating the Shula Burger spinoff fast-casual chain.
But it was Don Shula’s name on the marquee and his reputation at stake. He demanded that the same work ethic and attention to detail be applied to serving steaks as in pursuing victories in football.
“I think the name might help get them in the door, but the service and the dining experience are what’s going to bring them back,” he said. “I think that’s been the biggest thing in our success story.”
The impact of the Shula name not only has endured in the nearly two decades since he left the sidelines, it has grown in stature with his record 347 victories and the Dolphins’ 1972 perfect season seeming more unattainable with the passing years.
Shula’s public visibility, though diminished in his latter years, and the growth of the restaurant chain also kept him a readily recognizable and respected figure.
Long after he retired, Shula ranked among the top four coaches on the Davie Brown Talent Index, which measures attributes such as appeal, trust and awareness to help companies choose celebrities to promote their products.
Shula always put a premium on the value of his good name in selecting endorsement opportunities.
“I don’t do anything just for the sake of doing it,” Shula said in a 2012 interview with the Sun Sentinel. “If it’s something I feel fits into my personality, what I feel is important and what I actually do, then I’ll do it. It’s all things that I enjoy doing and take a lot of pride in representing.”
That perspective sprang from the experience of the first television commercial he did after becoming coach of the Baltimore Colts in the early 1960s. It involved him pushing a lawn mower in front of his house, and the ad took on a life of its own.
“I had this lawn that needed mowing, so I’m out there pushing that mower and they’re filming,” he recalled. “After four or five years they kept playing it. I said, ‘When’s the end date on that thing? I want it off the air.’ The contract I signed didn’t have any end date. So they kept playing that thing over and over of me pushing that lawn mower.”
While coaching the Dolphins, Shula had a long run as spokesman for South Florida Ford dealerships. His Ford spots included Spanish versions that appeared during soccer games on Miami’s Spanish-language television.
Even during a down year for the team, in 1986, a supervisor for the ad agency that handled the Ford account, attested to the power of Shula’s endorsement, saying, “We’ve had people walk in, and we say, ‘how did you hear about this car?’ and they say, ‘Don Shula sent me.’”
In 2008 he took the pitch to the luxury auto market for the Miami-based Warren Henry group.
“He appeals to a very wide audience of people, and deservedly so,” Warren Henry Zinn, the company CEO, said during a 2012 commercial filming. “An icon is an icon.”
Shula’s product pitches often were built around the premise of winning teams and striving for perfection. Approaching his 80th birthday, he was spokesman for four companies and also maintained an active speaking schedule for corporate audiences and universities.
He also spearheaded a charity golf tournament and other fundraising efforts for his Don Shula Foundation in support of breast cancer research. His first wife, Dorothy, died of the disease in 1991.
Then there was the unlikely collaboration in a 2007 Super Bowl commercial for Budweiser Select, when Shula played a holographic table football game against rapper Jay-Z.
But in later years, many of Shula’s commercial endorsements were directed toward an elder demographic focusing on health care and insurance. He did an extensive campaign for Humana Florida Senior Products including TV, radio and billboards. He promoted hearing aids and high blood pressure awareness.
One of his best-known pitches was in teaming up with wife Mary Anne as company spokes-couple for the NutriSystems weight loss program. Adding validity to the endorsement, he shed 32 pounds, she lost 23.
Shula joked that all of his commercial endeavors began to overshadow the source of his fame, telling the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 2007, “When people come up to me or come up to my wife and I to talk about NutriSystem or HEARx or something, I’ll kiddingly say, ‘I used to coach football, too.’ “
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