The ’72 Dolphins’ 50th anniversary celebration: Five questions with Manny Fernandez

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Dolphins’ Perfect Season, The Miami Herald is running weekly conversations with members of the 1972 team that went 17-0.

Five questions with former two-time second team All-NFL defensive lineman Manny Fernandez, who had 17 tackles in the Super Bowl to cap the perfect season and now lives in tiny Ellaville, Ga., where he hunts deer and turkey:

▪ You have a good reason for not remembering the end of the Super Bowl win to cap the perfect season. What happened exactly?

“I got a concussion at the beginning of the fourth quarter and don’t remember anything after — not leaving the field or the party afterward.

“I was tackling Larry Brown on a swing pass and I got to him first and got a hand on his jersey and swung him around. As I swung him around, Nick [Buoniconti] finished him off, and Nick’s helmet got me on the temple.

“I was spinning into Nick and he missed and hit me. I don’t know if he ever knew he did that. I finished the game but that was the last of my 17 tackles that day. Nobody knew I had a concussion.

“Somebody noticed I had gone into the Redskins huddle after that play. Nick had somebody radio down to [defensive coordinator] Bill Arnsparger that I was dinged and ‘we better get him out of there.’”

But coach Don Shula didn’t want to remove him from the game, Fernandez said.

“Shula said I’m going to stay in there, finish out the game, which I was OK with. I don’t remember that play until watching it on film. It would have been nice to remember what happened the rest of the day after that play.”

▪ How has being on that ‘72 team enhanced your life?

“No question it has. I was vice president of marketing/sales for several national underwriters, national insurance companies. [Being an NFL player on a Super Bowl champion] presented entrances into several large firms that other people did not enjoy. It got my foot in the door.

“Who I was and what I had done tended to make people trust me. I was the top salesperson for the Southeastern United States for each company I worked for, all in title insurance and real estate. I was getting hired with major pay increases.”

▪ How did you thrive as a 250-pound defensive lineman?

“That was my weight limit imposed by Shula,” he said. “I would need to watch my weight on Wednesday night before the Thursday weigh in.

“My rookie year I made the All-AFL rookie team playing against guys who were 340 pounds. I wore Bob Brown’s butt off and he was 305 pounds. I was lining up against 295-pound guys. Most guards were 265, 270.

“The key was being stronger and quicker. Just because they were big doesn’t mean anything. And being a little smarter helped. They weren’t bench pressing at 500 pounds and running 4.7 40s like I was. I had a 22-inch neck, 22-inch biceps, 38-inch thighs.”

▪ What bothers you about the ‘72 team?

“It bothers me that my teammates have been so terribly ignored by the Hall of Fame committee, and it’s a complete affront to the talent they were. Bill Stanfill had [18.5 sacks in 1973 and 69.5 in his career] and he did it in a 14-game season.

“That fellow he tied for sacks in a season [Jason Taylor] is in the Hall of Fame. Why isn’t Bill Stanfill in the Hall of Fame?”

(Taylor had 18.5 sacks in 2002 and 139.5 in his career.)

“Why isn’t Dick Anderson in the Hall of Fame? Why hasn’t Jake Scott been mentioned? We were the best defense in the NFL for a five-year run, and nobody in our secondary was ever nominated for the Hall of Fame. Nick Buoniconti would have been ignored had it not been for him being on [HBO’s] ‘Inside the NFL’ for 20 years.”

Buoniconti is the only defensive player from the undefeated team to be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Offensively, Larry Csonka, Bob Griese, Jim Langer, Larry Little and Paul Warfield are in the Hall of Fame, as is Shula.

Guard “Bob Kuechenberg should be in the Hall, too, no question,” Fernandez said. “He was tougher to practice against than anyone I played against.”

▪ What’s a fun or quirky memory of that season?

“I’m a crossword puzzle guy — New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald. I used to mess with Vern Den Herder about that; I called him ‘Rookie’ his whole career.

“I would do the crossword puzzles first thing in the morning. I’d get a newspaper on the way to breakfast at training camp and go back to the room and do crossword puzzles while drinking my last cup of coffee before going to get taped.

“So I would get these three newspapers and when I got over to the locker room, we always had down time. I would give Vern one of the crosswords and I would take one and I would tell him, ‘Let’s see who can get it done first.’

“But I had already done my crossword puzzle and he didn’t know that. Years went by like this. At one of our reunions years later, I let him in on that. He said, ‘you son of a [expletive]!’ I said, ‘Once a rookie, always a rookie.’”