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-95
to 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
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