Dan "my man" Marino

Last weekend was the NFL hall of fame weekend. Apart from signalling the start of the 2005 NFL season, this HOF ceremony was also special because my favorite NFL player was being enshrined in the Hall - Dan Marino. I caught bits and pieces of the ceremony and the whole Marino clan conducted themselves with great class as always. I wanted to capture an excellent article By Greg Cote in Miami Herald. It's reproduced here in it's entirety. Enjoy.

A memorable toast by Marino in an unforgettable setting

GREG COTE

gcote@herald.com

CANTON, Ohio -- A proud franchise quiet for too long rose up and roared here Sunday, toasting its better days, toasting its best man. Dan Marino had asked Dolphins fans to flood this place for his Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony, and it may as well have been God speaking.

The people appeared from all over in impassioned droves, and most wore No. 13 jerseys -- a roiling aqua sea of them, thousands upon thousands -- and so stunning was the sight you'd have not believed it if you weren't seeing it for real.

''Overwhelming,'' was Marino's word for it, and the way he worked to hide the emotion from his voice, you knew he wasn't lying. ''I challenged Dolphins fans to overrun Canton,'' he said, to a swooning eruption, ``and you know what? We've taken it over!''

More than 20,000 people, a record, packed the bleachers and field seats of this high school stadium next to the Hall, and Dolfans dominated the day as unsubtly as Marino used to dominate a defense, back when Miami was electric with the ball, and everybody knew from whence the lightning came. I'd have thought it impossible, but Marino jerseys had to outnumber those of fellow quarterback-inductee Steve Young by 100-to-1. At least. No lie.

It was heart-rending and comical, all at once, to see five or six guys all in matching aqua Marino shirts spill out of a rented SUV parked (for a reasonable $5) on somebody's front lawn. And to see them fall in with their clones in a mass pilgrimage through tree-lined neighborhoods toward the spot where their hero was about to step into sporting immortality.

You'd have been longer finding a grain of sand on the beach than finding a Dan Marino disciple on this day, in this place.

PLENTY TO REMEMBER

It reminded you that what this one player did, maybe above it all -- even above the NFL-record 420 career touchdown passes and 61,361 yards -- was turn the Dolphins into a national team. And it verified that the durable memory of Marino alone makes him the franchise's greatest asset, by far, to this day and beyond.

I'd witnessed that phenomenon covering the Dolphins fulltime, in 1990-91, in a hotel lobby in, say, Indianapolis. The team wasn't arriving. Marino was.

Rare magical players can do that. They have that power. And if they have that power despite the absence of a Super Bowl, it just means their magic is all the greater.

Marino flat-out made it a Dolphins home game here Sunday, circa mid-'80s, when anything was possible because the football was in the right hand. Other Miami Hall of Famers introduced were received heroically in the partisan lovefest. Coach Don Shula stood and waved as the stadium chanted his name.

If this 40-year-old franchise has celebrated a single greater day than Sunday since those back-to-back Super Bowl titles in halcyon 1972-73, I must have forgotten it.

Tonight may have a decided back-to-Earth quality, when the latter-day Dolphins, the ones coming off a 4-12 record and predicted to spend a fourth straight season out of the playoffs, compete in the Hall of Fame game.

Sunday, though? Better days, oh yes. The kind of memories you hope you dream about tonight.

Can you feel ebullient and wistful all at once? Cry while you cheer?,

Marino has that power. To make fans miss him so much, they cry.

It isn't just the rifle arm they are missing. It is the aura, the command. The way he swaggered standing still. The way his eyes breathed. The way anything was possible.

But it is more than that, too. Much. And this particular more is why No. 13 jerseys dominated Sunday with such enormity.

Steve Young? Great QB, but not even most beloved by his own 49ers fans, to whom Joe Montana is eternal saint.

Marino? Way different. He was preceded into the Hall by another Miami passer, Bob Griese; Griese, who wears a Super Bowl ring. No comparison, though. None. South Florida lived Marino's career-span, raised him in a way, from the cocky, curly-haired kid out of Pitt to the aging, limping warhorse whose decline somehow spoke of our own mortality. Our golden child, this one. Ours, fiercely.

SWARM OF FANS

''Oh Danny Boy,'' one of the myriad home-drawn signs bobbing in Sunday's crowd read simply.

Fans flocked in from South Florida, obviously, but more remarkably from . . . everywhere.

Teddy Schnurr drove in with a buddy from Raleigh, N.C., and traipsing up to honor No. 13, said, ``He was a gunslinger, man. Pop, pop! He was your fantasy QB before they invented fantasy football.''

A handful of Brits, reformed soccer fans evidently, caromed past holding aloft a British flag on which they'd written, ``Dolphins U.K.''

Behind them, four guys in yellow Pitt hardhats. Soon after, Marino jerseys in odd colors, blue and gold. Central Catholic. His old high school.

I stopped a woman because her No. 13 Dolphins jersey looked like it might have been 20 years old. Like she'd invested in this day. She turned out to be Jen Langrishe, who drove up with her husband from Tampa.

''We've been Dolphin fans from the beginning,'' she said. ``But, at some point, it was like you were Marino fans, mostly.''

Marino's oldest child, Danno, 18 and headed off to college, interested in theater, not sports, gave a great presenter's speech for his dad Sunday, emphasizing his father was a great father to him more than a great football star, which was saying something.

Marino did great, too, on this day he must have privately prepared for since the late'80s, when it must have been obvious to him he wasn't just pretty good, but history-book good. Even a calloused, ostensibly neutral journalist had to fight his own tears when the man at the lectern thanked his wife of 21 years, and Claire hitched, and reached under her sunglasses with a handkerchief.

Whatever Marino said on Sunday, though, it won't resonate, for me, as much as the frozen snapshots of the people who came to hear him, that mass, that irrefutable evidence of the depth and breadth -- and durability -- of the adoration one man inspired.