Dave Hyde: My phone has become a cemetery I scroll through

Dave Hyde, South Florida Sun-Sentinel on Nov 11, 2025

Published in Football

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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Paul Tagliabue died this past weekend. The former NFL commissioner was influential and successful in helping America’s favorite league navigate enormous change with profitable leaps and bounds.

It’s necessary to say that here, at the top, because this column isn’t an ode or obituary to Tagliabue. This is about an admittedly trivial, personal and recurring question that comes in the aftermath of some sports figures’ deaths:

Do I keep his name on my phone?

My cell phone is a graveyard as I grow older. Tagliabue is a swipe from “Shula,” the Miami Dolphins legend who also never needed a first name on my phone. Don Shula also is another swipe from a couple of other Dolphins of different eras, safety Jake Scott and coach Tony Sparano.

They’ve all been gone for years, meaning these phone numbers serve no purpose. There are some people’s numbers you haven’t tried in so many years you’re not sure if they’re good anymore. That’s not the case here.

Still, I don’t delete them. I keep them for some reason. And sometimes scrolling through my phone is like strolling through a cemetery.

I see a name and remember sitting with Shula at his home office talking about the alligator that players put in his office shower or sitting beside Scott at a bar in Kauai with two native Hawaiians, who sat in those same seats a few years later for the George Clooney movie, “The Descendants.”

“They didn’t call me for the movie!” Scott said.

Such stories come from the phone. Sparano, who died in 2017, called me a couple years after he left the Dolphins when he was the Oakland Raiders’ line coach.

“Dave, where’s the game film?” he said.

“Tony, what?”

“The game film,’’ he said.

I said who he’d called. He asked once more for the game film. Then it hit him. He typed my name by mistake on the phone

“We had a late game last night,’’ he said, before adding, quietly, “How’re you doing?”

There are 23 numbers I carry around in my phone that can’t be called anymore. Some, like Miami Marlins pitcher Jose Fernandez, I never called, because his tragic fatal boat crash came before a call was ever made.

Others, like former Florida Panthers president Bill Torrey or football coach Howard Schnellenberger, lived long and successful lives in the sports they loved and were nice enough to share their wealth of information.

“Let me help educate you …” Torrey would say.

When I was young and just beginning, I figured the sports world would be full of people like Torrey and Schnellenberger and Shula. But you realize at some point they’re the rare ones you were lucky just to pass in the hall.

“You don’t miss someone until it’s too late,’’ my first Sun Sentinel sports editor, Fred Turner, would say.

His lines remain in my head, like his number in my phone nearly 15 years after his death. Same with another former colleague, Juan Rodriguez. It’s not like their names are a daily sight. How often do you have to scroll through your listings to find something? Every few months? Maybe twice a year?

Maybe this why these names were never deleted. Maybe these occasional walks through the graveyard matter, even if their numbers don’t. It’s not like the phone will light up with their name calling me as they once did, either.

“I’ve got a story for you,’’ Dolphins great Mercury Morris said in one of his final calls. He didn’t just want to clear his name from a drug charge decades earlier. He wanted to expose the legal officials who brought the charges.

He died last year before we talked fully about it. Many were just part of the job, like the number for Tagliabue. I introduced myself after he talked at a Super Bowl. He gave his office number, and we talked a few months later about a project that never happened about running a sports league.

“Every day behind that desk brings something you didn’t expect,’’ he said at one point.

That’s why I don’t delete his or any names from my phone. It’s an odd and trivial issue with age. But my phone is a cemetery I occasionally visit.