FINS AT 50. Greg Cote

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      Robbie released veteran running back Casares on the spot after three games because of an ankle injury. Casares had just been named Dolphin player of the week in a weekly award.

      “Cut me so he wouldn’t have to pay me,” Casares said. “As I rode out of Miami, I looked at the billboard, and my picture was up.”

      Claimed Goode, the old center: “On the road for an exhibition game, they told us we couldn’t turn our covers back [on the beds] because they might charge us extra.”

      (Sometimes truth and humor arrive at the same point, don’t they?)

      Robbie used to party, man. A fawning, drinking entourage would accompany him on team flights. “A bunch of damned people who shouldn’t have been on that plane,” recalled guard Billy Neighbors, the team’s union rep. “Robbie was a damn nut. Just weird as hell.”

      With his players, though, frugality reigned. Said receiver Frank Jackson:

      “Robbie was concerned about going broke weekly.”

      TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

      The Originals went every which way, just like the rest of us.

      Many have impressive titles now, like Doug Moreau, district attorney of Baton Rouge Parish, and Billy Hunter, director of the NBA Players Association. Most are long out of the spotlight, retired with grandkids.

      The Originals carry their 1966 distinction differently.

      To a few, it is so distant or was so fleeting as to be nearly inconsequential, half a lifetime later. Former safety Willie West said, “It was a job. It’s a forgotten part of my life. I don’t reflect on it at all. It’s a non-entity.”

      Most, by far, feel differently.

      Linebacker Tom Emanuel, then the only rookie starter on defense and now 63, appeared on the front of Sports Illustrated – the franchise’s first coverboy.

      “That season and team is always in back of my mind. It was a great honor,” he said. “I always tell people, ‘I played with the Dolphins before Don Shula.’ We were very much forgotten. I’m proud to say I’m one of the originals.”

      Safety Bob Neff: “When people find out I played ball, first thing I say is that I was on the original Miami Dolphins. It means something to me.”

      And Maxie Williams, an original offensive lineman: “I’ve always thought, ‘Hey, I helped start that.’ You always carry a little piece of the franchise.”

      LaVerne Torczon, almost 70, is nearly blind from pituitary tumors. But when he

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      closes his eyes, he can see 1966. “Gives you a little pride,” he said.

      Tom Goode, the old center? He’s come in from clearing up hurricane damage off his farm in West Point, Mississippi. He is a ’66er at 66. Limps like most aging football men.

      He can’t complain, though. The town named a street after him a while back. He lives in the same house in which he was raised. At 9190 Tom Goode Road.

      He was still in Miami the next season, when somebody let an armadillo loose in Griese’s motel room, and Griese leaped for safety onto his bed, waving a golf club.

      But ’66 was special. You can only be first once, after all.

      “Think about it all the time,” Goode said. “It’s always there.”

      THINGS FAIRYTALES ARE MADE OF

      Joe Auer doesn’t happen. Not in real life. Never. Going on 40 years later, it still seems a bit surreal to him.

      A kid from nearby Coral Gables High runs the opening kickoff in franchise history 95 yards for a touchdown against the Oakland Raiders in the Orange Bowl?

      Get me rewrite. Who’d believe that fairy tale?

      “I’m having a tough time living that one down,” Auer said, chuckling.

      The Dolphins’ first hero is 63 today, living in Winter Park, anything but retired. He owns a computer consulting and training firm, and – remember that dune buggy with the rollbars? – fledgling NASCAR team.

      He’s not sure even his racecar driver knows his background.

      “I don’t make a practice of telling people.”

      History somehow has passed down only one indelible snapshot of that first Dolphins year, and it is Auer’s improbable fireworks that launched a franchise. Forty years on, it’s as if everything else about 1966 has disappeared, except that.

      “A storybook thing,” Auer called it.

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      1965

      March 3:

      American Football League Commissioner Joe Foss meets with Minneapolis lawyer Joseph Robbie in Miami, and Foss encourages Robbie to apply for an expansion franchise in Miami.

      August 16:

      AFL awards its first expansion franchise to Joe Robbie and TV star Danny Thomas for $7.5 million.

      November 27:

      Miami picks Kentucky quarterback Rick Norton and Illinois running back Jim Grabowski in the first round of the AFL’s college draft.

      Timeline 1965-1969

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      DOLPHIN TRIVIA:

      DOLPHIN TRIVIA:

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