Miami's exhaustive search for a football coach ended with a man who'd been there all along: assistant Randy Shannon, a loner with a mysterious, tragic past

University of Miami Hurricanes' coach Randy Shannon. Walter Iooss Jr./SI

By Gary Smith

The athletic director gazed across the coffee table. In his hand were the keys to college football's most dominant and most vilified program of the past quarter century. In his suite sat a head-coaching candidate unlike any he'd ever seen.

The man had never packed his bags to climb the coaching ladder. He'd never attended a coaching clinic or read a coaching book. He had no mottos to sell. He had no sell in him at all.

He was something else that few big-time college football coaches and none at Florida's three empires had ever been. He was black.

No one knew much about the man's earlier life. That's how he'd kept it. But the AD was a lawyer, and he knew how to craft the question that had to be asked to cover him and his university. He called it the Eagleton Question, the one that George McGovern hadn't posed to Tom Eagleton before naming him as his running mate on the 1972 Democratic presidential ticket, only to learn later that Eagleton had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment and undergone electroshock therapy.

"Is there anything about your past, Randy," the AD asked, "that we should know?"

The past was the problem. It wasn't the problem of Miami athletic director Paul Dee alone, of course. It was the sport's problem. It was the culture's problem. Even the strongest and fastest athletes in the country, being taught on the most privileged campuses by the finest coaches, couldn't seem to shed it. Just when they seemed free of the troubled homes and streets they'd come from, their pasts would catch them from behind, drag them, their teams and universities to their knees. Guns, drugs, robberies, assaults. All the old and easy answers had vanished. Paul Dee was staring at a new one.

For a century football coaches had taken kids through the tunnel from boyhood to manhood. The Pop Warners and Knute Rocknes in the game's first generation, the Bear Bryants and Woody Hayeses of the second wave. White men who as boys had chopped wood and pushed plows to help their families survive, who'd endured wars and economic calamity, who could drop a bucket into the well of personal experience and drench a boy in the ethic of git-yer-ass-back-north-o'-yer-heels when he'd been laid flat by linebacker or life.

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