Last February, Eugene “Mercury” Morris walked from his home office, where legal papers covered his desk, out to his garage in South Miami where two framed jerseys hung on the wall. One was his No. 22 Miami Dolphins jersey that he wore in one of his three Super Bowls.

“We should have won all three,” he said.The other frame held his faded blue prison shirt.

“That part of the story isn’t finished,” he said.

No one wants to be defined by the worst chapter of their life, and Morris certainly wasn’t when he died at 77 as his son announced Sunday. He was defined, as the lead paragraph of his obituaries read, as a two-time Super Bowl champion. He was defined, as the TV commercials showed in recent years, as a loud voice of the 1972 Perfect Season.

Morris was defined, too, by a private business and private acts no one knew, like regularly visiting Jim Kiick, the running back he competed against all those Dolphins years, as Kiick slipped further into dementia before dying in 2019. Dinner dates. TV dates. Morris once was late for a Christmas show at Kiick’s assisted living facility, and was met by Kiick tapping his wristwatch.

“That’s what (Don) Shula did to us if we were late,” Morris said.

Few will define Morris by that prison shirt on his garage wall, though, and that’s a shame because Morris defined himself by it in one rigid respect: It represented the last big fight for a man who considered his life one big fight.

He dated white women in college at West Texas State in the 1960s, got death threats, and laughed at them. He was told not to return any kick in the end zone before his first Dolphins game, caught it five yards in the end zone and returned it 105 yards.

“I returned it because they told me not to do it,” he’d say.

That’s who he was, how he defined himself. Shula, decades removed from behind his coach, asked him, “not to a cause a scene of any kind,” before the 1972 team met President Obama in 2013. Morris chuckled, saying of Shula, “He knows me.”

That was always it. Morris knew he was a handful, even laughing at himself sometimes for being so. When the NFL offered an injury settlement of $160,000, Morris wanted none of it. He was his own lawyer — “I taught myself law in jail,” he said — and negotiated a settlement check of $295,000.22.”

“That twenty-two cents was a nice touch,” he said.

That framed prison jersey was the fight he never finished, though. He was jailed in 1982 on four counts of trafficking cocaine. He sat in Cell Block 5 of the Miami-Dade jailhouse, less than a mile from the Orange Bowl as the 10th-year reunion of the 1972 team was celebrated.

“The Dolphins announced every player but didn’t mention your name,” someone jailed with Morris said.

Morris said he wasn’t trafficking anything. He was using. That much is backed up by Stu Weinstein, the former Dolphins head of security who worked in NFL security during Morris’ case.

“He wasn’t Tony Montana,” Weinstein said, referring to Al Pacino’s drug-pedaling character in Scarface.

What legal officials really wanted, Morris said again in his office last winter, was for him to serve up other Dolphins who used drugs. He refused. “Their whole idea of arresting me was for me to cave and give up others,” Morris said.

He said Sports Illustrated then was brought in to offer $200,000 for a story about naming players who used drugs.

“All five players they asked me about were Black players,” he said.

So, Morris went to jail for 34 months before the Florida Supreme Court overturned the ruling. He was freed. He was angry ever after, too. Over next the several years he wrote 120 letters to legal and political officials targeting U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, whose Miami-Dade office prosecuted Morris’s case.

He attended public hearings to speak against prosecutors who he felt wronged him. He once set up a caller to phone in the Larry King Show when Reno was a guest to ask a pointed question about his case.

“I’m obsessed,” Morris once told me. “I used to be obsessed with scoring touchdowns. It would be third-and-1, and I’d be thinking, ‘Touchdown.’ They’d say, ‘Merc, we just need a yard.’ I’d say, ‘Hell with that, I’m going to score a touchdown.

“Now I’m obsessed that same way clearing my name.”

That was why he invited me to his South Dade home last winter, why he took me to the garage and showed the prison shirt. He was beyond clearing his name by this point, too.

“I’m on a quest to clear my mind,” he said.

He wanted to track down the legal authorities who put him in jail on charges that didn’t stand up as the Florida Supreme Court ruled. He was going to get names, facts and the legal points where they broke the law.

“It comes out like a play in my mind,” he said. “It’s like watching ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ where justice really prevails.”

Those legal papers on his desk were a start. But it was an involved story. I got sidetracked. He got sick. We talked this summer about meeting again. And now, as news comes of his death, I’m listening to his recorded voice, five miles from where he served most of his time, say last winter, “I just (want to get) this story out there,” and “You know what I’m going to call the chapter they released me? ‘Halftime.’"

His second half ran out Sunday, too soon to get the justice he wanted. Sometimes an obituary isn’t all nice and tidy and putting a bow on a person’s good life. Mercury Morris’s life was complicated and full of conflict, just like the man who lived it, the champion running back who spent so much of his a life running after the kind of justice he’d never see.

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