Kim Bokamper has a story to tell, and is it a whopper. To reveal the ending upfront isn’t a spoiler, it’s an enhancer, serving to intensify the head-scratching that will accompany every turn of the tale.

The story dates back to Thanksgiving Day 1977. It comes to mind because this year, the Dolphins and Jets will play on Black Friday. This will mark the NFL’s first foray into such a time slot. It therefore threatens the time-honored tradition of shoppers scratching and clawing for the last discounted video game console at Walmart.

As for Bokamper’s story, the promised ending is that it involves a man whom he considers a “pretty good friend” and golfing buddy. The man is Conrad Dobler. If you’re a longtime Dolphins fan, you’re already in disbelief. The last time these two were linked in the public eye was that 1977 Thanksgiving game between Bokamper’s Dolphins and Dobler’s St. Louis Cardinals.

When the two men seemed intent on tearing each other apart.

If that doesn’t sound like the kind of Rockwellian Thanksgiving story you may have expected, have no fear. We’ll get to the time Chris Chambers had his breakout game on Turkey Day, and the time Joey Harrington cooked up crow for Detroit, and, of course, when the only stuffing Leon Lett managed involved a figurative foot in mouth 30 years ago.

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First, 1977. A game in which the Dolphins pulled off an upset — by 55-14, no less — and may have managed to come out of it in an even fouler mood than when they arrived in St. Louis. It was bad enough that players were mocked by a South Florida columnist leading up to the game. In the end, they took care of him, all right. But the lid came flying off when Dobler, an offensive lineman known as the dirtiest player in the league, was blamed for knee injuries to two key defensive players: Vern Den Herder and Steve Towle. Benches cleared. Fists and F-bombs flew. A huge chunk of players on both teams ended up getting fined.

And yet: “That’s the only game I played on Thanksgiving,” says Bokamper, a defensive end/linebacker turned sportscaster. “I thought it was great.”

Great?

“When I came into the league, I wanted to play in Shea Stadium because Joe Namath played there, I wanted to play Memorial Stadium because Johnny Unitas played there, and I wanted to play at Lambeau in the snow,” Bokamper says. “And I wanted to play in a Thanksgiving Day game because you know, growing up, all you did — I remember waking up to Lindsey Nelson on Thanksgiving Day and knew it was a special day.”

The Dolphins have been featured in seven Thanksgiving Day games, all on the road, meaning players have either uprooted their families or had to work around the game for family get-togethers. A drudgery? Chambers, for one, sides with Bokamper. Chambers called it “the closest thing to playing in a playoff game” and a chance to showcase your skills to the country. That’s exactly what he did in the Dolphins’ 40-21 victory over the Cowboys in 2003 when he had 96 yards receiving and three touchdowns.

“I was born in Ohio, from Cleveland,” Chambers says. “Ohio is a big football state. I was brought up with the Cleveland Browns, which probably never played on Thanksgiving, but yeah, it was always a great day with the family and football. We really enjoyed that as a family, to sit down and watch two or three games and kind of take all that in, and at the same time you’re enjoying each other and eating some great food.”

Before the notorious ’77 game, turkey was served up by Ed Plaisted, columnist at the now-defunct Hollywood Sun-Tattler newspaper. Had Yelp existed at the time, the Dolphins wouldn’t have given it one star.

“He wrote an article that day before we were going up there and said: ‘I don’t know why the Dolphins are even bothering getting on a plane and going up there. They’re going to be Thanksgiving dinner for the St. Louis Cardinals,’ ” Bokamper says. “And they put an illustration there with a turkey, with necks, and all of our faces on the necks.”

Bokamper said offensive linemen Bob Kuechenberg and Jim Langer addressed the team before the game, warning everyone, “When we beat this team today, I don’t want anybody in here talking to Ed Plaisted, because he (expletive) on us pretty good.”

Not every player realized this wasn’t just a request.

“Back in those days, coach Shula would just stand against the wall and do his (postgame) press, no podium,” Bokamper says. “So he’s standing by him, there’s a door to the showers right there. And all of a sudden they’ve got Ed Plaisted — and he was a big man. Carried him through, put him in the shower and wouldn’t let him out. Every time he tried to get up, they’d push him back down. He came out drenched, like a drowned rat.”

Bob Griese threw three touchdown passes to Nat Moore and finished with six total TD passes, setting a team record since matched by Dan Marino and Tua Tagovailoa. Today, Moore is a senior vice president of the Dolphins and as mild-mannered a man as you’ll meet. But then?

“Went out and started throwing punches like everybody else,” says Moore, who estimates he was fined “a lot of money back then,” $250. Moore adds: “You know what? The way we felt, we’re going to win the fight, too. And that’s what we did.”

Even Dolphins A.J. Duhe and Bob Baumhower were having it out

The fight between the Dolphins and Cardinals couldn’t have been a surprise to anyone within earshot of the field because the Dolphins were even having it out among themselves in the buildup. The defense included end A.J. Duhe and nose tackle Bob Baumhower, Miami’s top two picks that year who went on to earn Pro Bowl status in Miami.

“A.J. is coming back after every play, and he was a talker,” Bokamper says. “And he’s going, ‘Hey, Dobler, this (bleeping) rookie’s kicking your ass.’ ”

Baumhower (the rookie Duhe was referring to): ‘Shut the (expletive) up, A.J.! Shut the (expletive) up!”

Duhe: “What? What?”

Baumhower: “(Expletive). Every time you do that, they double-team me and triple-team me. Shut the (expletive) up!”

Bokamper: “So it was brewing.”

Bokamper said when Den Herder injured a knee in the second half, players assumed Dobler was the culprit. When Towle also injured a knee, the Dolphins lost it.

“The trainers are just dragging him off the field and he tells them to take me by the huddle,” Bokamper says. “So they drag him by the huddle and he sticks his head in and he goes, ‘It was (bleeping) Conrad Dobler.’ ”

Two plays later, Wally Pesuit stuck his face in Miami’s defensive huddle.

“He was an offensive lineman, and he was a nut,” Bokamper says. “We said, ‘Hey, Wally, what the (expletive) are you doing in here?’ He goes, ‘Coach Shula wants me to line up over Conrad.’ So he lines up over Conrad. I was playing linebacker at the time. I dropped back into coverage and all of a sudden, I looked inside of me and I see Wally. He’s got Conrad by the face mask and he’s going backwards and just jerking him. He’s by me and I’m 10 yards deep. He’s going down the field.”

The brawl was on, costing Bokamper about $2,500.

“Only two guys not on the field were Garo and Griese,” says Bokamper, of kicker Garo Yepremian. If that weren’t enough, Bokamper spotted equipment man Danny Dowd scooping up random Cardinals gear “because we didn’t have very much equipment.”

As Plaisted was taking his unscheduled shower, Langer spoke to reporters about Dobler, saying, “I think it’s time that the national and local media stopped making a hero out of him and exposed him for what he is — a cheap-shot artist.”

Bokamper still calls Dobler a player of limited skills who needed cheap shots to survive … even though the two were brought together on the links by Dolphins running back Jim Kiick, who, like Dobler, attended Wyoming.

“I met him afterwards and became a pretty good friend of his,” Bokamper says.

Back in the postgame locker room that day, Shula — speaking either right before or after Plaisted was hauled into the shower — was more concerned with the team’s performance: “I told the squad after the game that, as far as putting it all together, they played as good a game today as I’ve ever been around.”

By halftime, the Dolphins were up 28-7 on the strength of Moore’s TD receptions of 4, 9 and 28 yards, earning him the label “unstoppable” in a highlight clip narrated by the legendary John Facenda.

“One of those magical days where everything just seemed to — how would I say it? — come to fruition,” Moore says. Best of all, it came when the national spotlight was on, he adds. “To have a Thanksgiving game, to be playing a team like the Cardinals at that time, was really big. They were one of the marquee teams.”

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That clearly was not the case for the Dolphins’ opponents in 2006. They traveled to Detroit to face a Lions team performing like a Lions team in that era, which is to say en route to a 3-13 record. One of the few storylines was that the Dolphins’ quarterback was Joey Harrington, selected third overall by the Lions in 2002 before joining a long list of Lions casualties.

It was well-known in Detroit that Harrington played the piano, a skill, Lions fans were convinced, exceeded those he exhibited on a football field. So during warmups, as video board cameras zeroed in on Harrington, the public address system played “Piano Man,” the iconic hit by Billy Joel. Harrington threw three touchdown passes to lead the Dolphins out of a 10-0 hole in a 27-10 victory.

Years later, Harrington revealed that upon returning to Miami, he received a note from Joel, suggesting that “Piano Man” become his entrance music.

“He also wrote, ‘P.S. Maybe the Lions should play my song, ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’ ”

On an individual level, Chambers’ fire burned brightly on Thanksgiving Day 2003. Chambers had been drafted in the second round by the Dolphins in 2001 and made the Pro Bowl in 2005, but his clash with the Cowboys remains a career highlight. He scored three touchdowns in a 40-21 blowout.

“For me, it was kind of like a coming-out party, to have an opportunity to make some plays,” Chambers says. “I’ve never been a guy who’d get like 10-12-13 targets a game.”

Seven did the trick on this day. Problem was, quarterback Jay Fiedler went 16-for-20. The network airing the game decided Chambers and Fiedler would have to split MVP honors but not the trophy.

“I gave it to him because he was a lot older than me,” Chambers says. “So I was like, ‘Hey, man, you can take it home but we will always share that memory throughout our entire life.’ ”

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Some memories stick no matter how hard you try to forget. Such was the case in the infamous 1993 game in which the Dolphins beat the Cowboys 16-14 on a gaffe by Cowboys defensive tackle Leon Lett.

The Cowboys had victory in hand when they blocked a 41-yard field goal try by Pete Stoyanovich. At most, all that remained was a (sorry, Mario Cristobal) kneel-down for a 14-13 Dallas win … except Lett scrambled for the blocked FG in the snow and touched the ball, making it live once again. When Dolphins offensive lineman Jeff Dellenbach recovered with three seconds left, Stoyanovich was granted a mulligan from 19 yards out, which he converted.

While Lett's role in the ending was unpredictable, Dellenbach's was not. He admits the intricacies of special teams rules aren't sexy topics. But if you played on a Don Shula team, there was no excuse for not knowing them.

"It just so happens that either that week or the week before, we were talking about what about if the ball gets tipped — you know, when's it live?" Dellenbach says.

So in the heat of the moment following the tip, Dellenbach remembers thinking: "OK, we need to wait. The emotions were, 'Damn, we just lost this game' to 'Can I find somebody to push into the ball?' to 'Well, wait! Who's that? Live ball!' It just all happened."

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In 2002, Lett told NFL.com: “I don’t know why I did it. It was just one of those things where I said to myself, ‘Go get the ball.’ I had so much fun playing that game. I was running around out there, making all kinds of plays. I made one mistake. Hey, people make mistakes. Unfortunately, it gets blown out of proportion.”

The play followed an even more infamous Lett blunder, when he was stripped of the ball (and denied a sure touchdown on a fumble return) by Buffalo's Don Beebe in the Super Bowl.

"It was tough on him for quite a few years," Dellenbach says of Lett. "He hid and he didn't want to be out there and he really didn't talk about it. But after a few years of us giving him a hard time and having some fun with it, he kind of let it go and he has some fun with the jokes."

So much so that Dellenbach and Beebe teamed with Lett to make joint appearances.

"We would do some autograph/charity-type functions and different things kind of tied into the Leon Lett plays," Dellenbach says.

Jimmy Johnson: Don't blame Leon Lett for blunder

But how much fault does Lett deserve? Last year, Jimmy Johnson, who coached the Cowboys at the time, pointed a finger at himself.

“Leon had never worked on special teams before,” Johnson told USA Today. “We put him in the lineup for the first time to block field goals. In some ways, I blame ourselves, the coaching, for putting him in that unit because he hadn’t done it before. I don’t blame Leon. I blame us as coaches. I outsmarted myself on that one.”

That’s the thing about being involved in a Thanksgiving game. Football fans will be watching because it’s what football fans do. So will relatives who are forbidden from touching the remote. Even shoppers looking for bargains on flat screens will be drawn to the Dolphins vs. the Jets.

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“We all enjoyed and looked forward to those type games,” Moore says. “It’s a national spotlight.”

That's why Dellenbach and every other ex-player interviewed said they enjoyed such games.

"Once you start playing in the NFL, you give up your Sundays," Dellenbach says. "You don't have holidays. On Christmas Day, you're practicing. Even Thanksgiving, if you're not playing the game, you're going to practice. So it's a different mindset. You find other ways to celebrate."

Or, sometimes, those "other ways" find you. Take the Leon Lett moment Dellenbach thinks about each November.

"It's pretty much every Thanksgiving Day, it definitely comes out," he said. "There's a lot of times, especially with the Dallas fans, I can have fun with them because Dallas fans will remember that day very well. So I like bring it up that I was the one that ruined their Thanksgiving."

And then?

"They usually pretty much laugh and go, 'Oh, I remember that day. I didn't even eat the turkey afterwards.' "

Dolphins reporter Hal Habib can be reached at hhabib@pbpost.com. Follow him on social media @gunnerhal.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Miami Dolphins playing New York Jets on Black Friday of Thanksgiving Week