SouthBeachHoosier Time Machine: The Orange Bowl Isn't Worth Drive to Dade
Well, given both the inevitability and the finality of the news coming out of Coral Gables today regarding the future of the Hurricanes playing at the Orange Bowl, I've been waiting to share the following 1979 archive with you for months, keeping it in my blogging holster, ready to fire when the time was right. That's today.
Miami Herald: UM says so long to the Orange Bowl http://www.miamiherald.com/598/story/210237.html
South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Hurricanes leaving Orange Bowl for Dolphin Stadium
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/college/hurricanes/sfl-canesmove082107,0,5652498.story?coll=sofla_tab01_layout
Let me share a piece of SBH trivia so that you have some historical context for understanding my context regarding the Orange Bowl as an institution and the U-M, so you where I'm coming from.The first time I was ever in the Orange Bowl was the last game of the Dolphins 1970 season, a 45-7 victory over the Buffalo Bills that propelled the Dolphins to their first playoff game, a loss to the Oakland Raiders in the muddy slop that was the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum.My very first U-M football game in the Orange Bowl was in 1972, when I saw the famous U-M vs. Tulane "Fifth Down" game, which U-M won in Coach Fran Curci's last year.
(This was back in the day when North Miami Beach had lots of Tulane and Newcomb alums, many of whom were parents of my friends.)
I'd gone to the game because Mrs. Wharton, the beloved libararian at Fulford Elementary School in North Miami Beach, where I was an eleven-year old 6th grader, told me one day that as the school sponsor for the Fulford safety patrol, she'd gotten word from the U-M that all South Florida kids in the safety patrol wearing their orange/red safety sashes would get into the game for free. (That's how desperate the U-M was for fans back in the day!)I knew Mrs. wharton pretty well since I was one of the 4-5 boys at Fulford who had A/V privileges, essentially kids who did well enough in school that if it was okay with my other teachers, if Mrs. Wharton needed help, we'd get out of class and rig up the film projector for her and run it for the younger kids.
She knew I was a devout football fan in general, from my always talking about the Dolphin games -I was a Dolphin season ticket holder for the first time in '72, the Perfect Season, and still recall getting the package in the mail from the Dolphins' then-HQ at 330 Biscayne Blvd., opening it carefully and and staring at all the interconnected, colorful football tickets like they were treasure, too nervous to actually separate them until the day of the game- she thought I'd probably be interested in seeing the Hurricanes.
Mrs. Wharton was 100% right, of course, so I suspect it was a rhetorical question, since she was always joking about my listening and re-listening to an NFL Films record in the library -with huge elementary school-type headphones- that featured all sorts of great play-by-play material, including a snippet of the Don Meredith-led Dallas Cowboys calling a play in the huddle, which I still recall. Since you asked it went exactly like this: "Brown right up, 13 take left, on one, ready, break!"
She said she'd dig up an extra safety patrol sash for me to wear, and about two hours before the game, I and a few other interested prospective U-M fans met her and her husband next to Fulford, giddy about going to the Orange Bowl.
I don't recall all the particulars in great detail, but I do recall that she told us that she and her husband were both U-M alums.She'd even gone to the trouble of making us a copy of the lyrics to the U-M alma mater song for us to practice in the car drive down to the Orange Bowl, because she said that at some point, the crowd would stand up and sing and she wanted us to be prepared.
Believe me, by the time we got there, we knew the first verse!Oddly enough, a friend of my father had gone to a U-M vs. Alabama game in 1968, the first year we lived here, and bought a game program for me -the first of my collection- so I actually had looked at the lyrics a few times before as I had perused the program over and over again.It was the first of dozens and dozens of U-M games I'd see over the years before leaving for IU in August of 1979, whether by myself or with friends, often via the Dade County buses that ran from the Levitz furniture parking lot west of the Golden Glades interchange, straight down I-95to the ballgame, the same ones that I usually used to get to Dolphin games.I saw teams that were both known and unknown, ranked and unranked, from UNLV and College of the Pacific, and thanks to Woody Thompson, to the huge upset over Texas the week Sports Illustrated picked them first in their annual college football issue in 1975.I saw many games against Notre Dame over the years, from the fight-marred game in 1974,Ara Parseghian's last year at ND, when they really got the huge OB crowd into a frenzy by calling a timeout with just seconds left, so they could score another meaningless touchdown to impress the AP football writers who voted in the AP Poll. (This was back in the day when the syndicated Notre Dame football program with veteran broadcaster Lindsey Nelson was telecast locally every Sunday morning, right before the NFL pregame shows, so I knew the ND players as well as I knew the U-M players, if not better."We pick up the action later in the third quarter at the Purdue 20-yaard line...")On a trip back from Evanston, I even was able to see the shutout shellacking administered to the ND team led by Heisman trophy winner Tim Brown.the highlight of all those games was being at the 1984 Orange Bowl Classic victory over Nebraska, when I was literally touching the railing behind the team bench seconds before running out onto the field with thousands of other delirious U-M fans as the gun sounded, giving them their first national championship.
This Bill Braucher story is an insightful piece of South Florida history which, to me at least, speaks volumes for all manner of current and past public policy problems/govt. projects that have beset South Florida for the past forty years: inertia, apathy, incompetency and finances.
I've been keeping it at the ready since first having it printed out at the Miami-Dade County Main Library downtown, and seeing the downtown's myraid problems "up close and personal" for the first time in months.
I knew something was askew when all the library restrooms were closed and patrons were instructed to use a public facilty in the plaza that was the haunt of the homeless and the inebriated.
Lets' just say that you could smell it a block away.
(I'd stopped at the library on my way back up from attending a fascinating immigration forum at the U-M in May, itself a microcosm of the South Florida that wants to cling to the comfortable past and those who want a future built on logic and reason.
Using my power of persuasion, mastery of facts and a general willingness to really grill some of the forum participants, I was able to get some people at the table, one in particular, to admit that perhaps -definitely!- their own personal and professional immigration policy prescriptions have created painful costs for the country as a whole, ones they seem to consciously prefer to ignore.
The result of that kind of thinking was the public's overwhelming rejection of, hate for and the defeat of President Bush's comprehensive immigration package in Congress, despite how the skids were greased, even while the public was kept in the dark about its various provisions .
Okay, since you asked, the one in particular I refer to was Cheryl Little, Executive Director of the Florida Immigration Advocacy Center, http://www.fiacfla.org/index.php who since then has been on TV as much as ever calling for immigration policies that rely too much on the heart and not enough on the head.
Convenient for her but not so much for the rest of the country who want policies that aren't completely ad hoc but which are based on the law, reason, logic and predictbility.
Which reminds me, I'll finally get around to describing that whole morning there at the U-M's BankUnited Center in an upcoming post, months overdue, complete with a copy of the program, so you know who all the players were.)
This March 18, 1979 Bill Braucher column below, which ran on the front page of the Sunday Broward news section, serves as a painful reminder that even when or IF you were to eliminate all the current incompetent people in the City of Miami responsible for the disgraceful current condition of the Orange Bowl -and have you seen the city's website for the OB, which seems like something a junior high school kid did over a weekend, with none of the sorts of historical photos that you'd expect to give it context, http://www.orangebowlstadium.com/pages/- it's important to keep in mind that, just like cholesterol, it's not just environment, it's genetics which determines a patient's health. The City of Miami has very recessive genes.
Logical result: The Orange Bowl has been sick for decades!
To read this column from those pre-cable, pre-internet days is to be reminded all over again of the sorts of half-assed things that were commonplace back in 1979, when Dolphins owner Joe Robbie was getting screwed over once again by the kangaroo court that was Miami's powers-that-be, principally Dade County mayor Steve Clark.
To date myself, yours truly was then a senior at North Miami Beach Senior High School, a true-blue fan who never missed a Dolphins or Hurricanes home game.
Titled Orange Bowl Isn't Worth Drive to Dade, Braucher, the Herald's former Dolphin beat writer -who later became their Broward editor- when I was growing up as a kid in the '70's , mentions some very telling anecdotes that perfectly illustrates that the City of Miami's bad attitude isn't just a recent phenomena, rather it's a living, breathing entity that's been around for decades, regardless of its core competency to solve the problem either intelligently or in a financially prudent fashion.
At a future date, I'll try to write it out for those who can't read it completely when you capture it with your computer mouse.
Orange Bowl Isn't Worth Drive to Dade, Bill Braucher, Miami Herald, March 18, 1979
The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpts from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987,
Simon & Schuster:
In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country,
el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in
Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of
South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when
Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities
Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the
Floridas, thought I,"
John James Audobon wrote to the editor of
The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the
Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administations now have found
South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to
Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.
At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accomodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accomodated...
Hallandale Beach Blog
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent. Sadly for its residents, Hallandale Beach is where even the easily-solved or entirely predictable quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and the unsatisfactory management and coordination of resources and personnel.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Of cheerleaders past and present
Given South Florida's unique version of the melting pot -con salsa- demographics and mindset, these women in the photo above are surely what most South Floridians would consider attractive women. But for this observer, who's spent hours & hours at IU cheerleader tryouts and who has known dozens of cheerleaders -and wannabes- in North Miami Beach, Bloomington, Evanston and Washington, D.C., the whole time I was watching these members of the Dolphins' squad perform, I couldn't help but compare them and their routines to those of some IU friends of mine who ALWAYS showed true Hoosier spirit & enthusiasm.
Sitting at my table right near the stage and still later, while watching the long lines of Dolphin fans of all ages waiting to snap photos of themselves with the cheerleaders, I couldn't help but think about those friends who always left me and other Hoosier fans feeling positive & optimistic.
Was there anyone I saw in Davie who possessed these valuable intangibles: the dancing precision of IU Red Stepper -and Captain- Gail Amster, my talented and spirited Phi Beta Kappa pal from Deerfield (IL), who always sat next to me in our Telecom. classes as we took turns entertaining the other; the ebullient spirit & energy of two Hoosier cheerleaders -and captains- from Bloomington, Wendy (Mulholland) Moyle & Sara Cox; the hypnotic, Midwestern, girl-next-door sexiness of Hoosier cheerleader Julie Bymaster, from Brownsburg; or, the adorable Southern girl-next-door appeal of former Hoosier Pom squader Jennifer Grimes, of Louisville, always such a clear distraction while sitting underneath the basket?
Nope, not that I could see. But then they were VERY tough acts to follow!!!
And that's not to mention my talented & spirited friends like Denise Andrews of Portage, Jody Kosanovich of Hammond & Linda Ahlbrand of Chesterton, all of whom were dynamic cheerleaders -and captains- at very large Hoosier high schools that were always in the championship mix, with Denise's team winning the Ind. football championship her senior year when she was captain -just like in a movie. That Denise, Jody & Linda all lived on the same dorm floor, just three stories above me at Briscoe Quad our freshman year, was one of the greatest coincidences -and strokes of luck for me!- that I could've ever hoped for.
You could hardly ask for better ambassadors of IU than THESE very smart, sweet and talented women. In a future SBH post, I'll tell the story of one of the greatest Hoosiers I ever met, the aforementioned Wendy Mulholland, the Bloomington-born captain and emotional heart of the great early '80's IU cheerleading squads, and the daughter of Jack Mulholland, IU's former longtime Treasurer. The acorn doesn't fall far from a tree built on a foundation of integrity & community service!
(After he retired, Mr. Mulholland was the first executive director of the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County. I used to joke with Wendy that her dad's name was the one that was permanently affixed to the bottom of my work-study checks for years, while I worked at the Dept. of Political Science's Library, first, at the Student Building in the old part of campus, and then later, after it was refurbished, in magnificent Woodburn Hall, my favorite building on campus.)
In that future post, I'll share some reflections on Wendy's great strength of character and personality; my intentions of returning to Bloomington a few weeks before Fall '82 classes started, so I could help Wendy train and work-out to rehab her knee, so she'd feel confident in trying-out for the squad again, following a bad knee injury that'd left her physically-unable to try-out for the squad the previous spring, a big disappointment to those of us who cared about both Wendy and the team; my incredulity at, quite literally, running into Wendy while walking down a sidewalk one afternoon a few years later in Evanston, IL, when we were astonished to discover we were both living there, with me trying to hook on with a Windy City advertising agency, and Wendy then-attending Kellogg (KGSM) at Northwestern, right when the WSJ had named Kellogg the #1 Business School in the country.
I'll also share a story about Wendy performing a true act of kindness towards me in 1982, when I was having a real emergency, and she went above-and-beyond what I had any logical reason to expect. Yet, Wendy, along with her very helpful dad, Jack, came through for me when I was in a very bad time crunch. I've never forgotten Wendy's kindness towards me, and her true Hoosier spirit.
There's NOTHING I wouldn't do for Wendy Mulholland.
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