Jimmy Cefalo stepped out the Miami Dolphins radio booth during a break in a game last December, turned to broadcast partner Joe Rose and said he didn’t feel well. The world was spinning.
“I feel so dizzy, if something happens, you’re going to have to take over,” he told Rose.
Cefalo finished the game, but two days later his left hand went numb. Then his left arm and left leg did. He went in for some tests, then some more tests — and by now, all these months later, the tests never seem to end.
He walks with a cane now. His hand shakes. There’s some nerve problem in his brain, and his friends worry quietly, but Cefalo says, “I’m doing fine,” because maybe he is and maybe he just doesn’t want to concern people. Or, worse, get their sympathy.
We look for dignity in sports. We look for modesty. We look for the good guys with a love for the game, the ones who understand the importance of winning and losing — but don’t consider them too important.
We sometimes find all that and more — a gentleman. Cefalo has been one in South Florida since Oakland coach John Madden wrote his name on the Raiders blackboard to take with the 82nd pick of the NFL draft in 1978.
Only Madden wrote it as the Dolphins mulled the 81st pick. Hall of Fame coach Don Shula took Cefalo, Madden threw his chalk across the room, and if that decision might have blessed Cefalo, it sure did South Florida.
He played like a star, catching a 76-yard touchdown to open the scoring in the 1983 Super Bowl. He always saw more to life than third down, though, and told Shula he was quitting after seven seasons. He had an offer to join the national NBC morning show opposite Connie Chung.
Shula, the coaching lifer, asked if something was wrong. Or maybe he wanted to be traded?.
“No one quits,” he said.
Cefalo quit. He went national. News shows. Sports shows. He even hosted Donald Trump’s first game show, “Trump Card.” He has a picture with Trump from those days. Cefalo, a conservative radio host, says with a chuckle, “I have one very liberal kid who said, ‘Dad, don’t show that to anyone.’ ”
And now, all these good years later, there are more health problems. They began in 2015 with a cancer called smoldering multiple myeloma. That typically leads to something incurable. It disappeared in Cefalo, though, after a couple years of treatments with a Harvard specialist, Paul Richardson.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” he said.
Only now it doesn’t seem that way. A stroke was the initial diagnosis said after his dizziness in the booth. That was ruled out. A brain biopsy was performed. A lesion was found, treatment given. The lesion disappeared.
He still wasn’t healthy. He still has no answer. One neurologist said, “If you weren’t sitting in front of me, I’d say you are a 30-year-old woman.”
“Why?” Cefalo said.
“Because 64-year-old men don’t get multiple sclerosis.”
“I have MS?” he said.
It’s not MS, he was told. It’s not Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. But there’s something wrong with his nerve coverings. Something wrong with a side of his brain, causing the dizziness. But the cause?
“There’s no name,” he says of the disease. “But I’m getting better. I’m getting better. I’m still walking with a cane, because if I don’t it looks like I’m drunk.”
He mock-raises his voice. “People, get out of my way, or I’ll whack you with my cane!”
His voice drops down again to the soothing one you hear on radio. “There are things I still want to do,” he says.
Some are everyday things. The son in a family of winemakers wants to be able to taste wine again. The medicine he takes took that away. Others things are part of his life’s fabric, like wanting to keep calling Dolphins games.
He wonders about continuing his morning talk show on WIOD. He’s 65 in October and maybe that’s enough of a four-hour-a-day grind. He says in one breath, “I don’t want to die at the microphone.”
He says in another, “I’m not sure if I’m ready to stop [the show].'”
He’s ready to talk about it all now, he says. He didn’t initially tell his daughters about his cancer back in 2015 so as not to worry them. He didn’t tell anyone except his boss, really, going to Boston regularly for tests or treatment and doing his radio show there.
He helped Richardson with a fund-raiser for pediatric research in Boston called The Jimmy Fund in 2019. The Boston Red Sox are a big supporter of it. Cefalo did a radio interview at Fenway Park. Upon finishing, his old Miami neighbor, Red Sox General Manager Dave Dombrowski, saw him.
“Why are you here?” Dombrowski said.
He told Dombrowski. He spoke of some health issues on his WIOD show last spring after missing several weeks. That’s been about it in public, though.
“It’s time to talk about it now,” he said in a phone interview.
Cefalo and his wife, Janice, are considering their next chapter. Their daughters are out of the home. The twins, Mia and Katie, are in college. Ava, 24, is on her own. Their house of 27 years is for sale.
He’s studying Italian and envisions living three months a year in Italy. He’s looking at places in Napa or the Sonoma Valley to spend three more months a year.
The other six months during football season he wants to be in South Florida. He wants to keep announcing games. That is not something he seems to be contemplating scaling back on. He went to Cincinnati for Sunday’s final Dolphins preseason game, flying commercially and not with the team, due to NFL rules restricting plane passengers in the pandemic.
That added hurdles to a man walking with a cane. He shrugs it off.
“I feel good; it’s going to be fun,” he says of this year.
It’s the edge of a new season, and there are plenty of new names and new hopes to cheer. But don’t forget to cheer the familiar name in the broadcast booth. Hope the voice up there, a gentleman all these years, has the season of his dreams, too.
