U-M President Donna Shalala on move from Orange Bowl

My nephew Mario, who starts his Junior year at the U-M today, thoughtfully sent me this copy of the email that everyone in Hurricane Nation received yesterday about the decision to leave the Orange Bowl for Dolphin Stadium starting next year.
Obviously the U-M letterhead was on the top of the letter, but otherwise it's exactly as it appears in the original letter.
___________________________________
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:09:12 -0400
From: umcommunications@MIAMI.EDU
Subject: A Message from President Shalala

If you have problems reading this, visit http://www.miami.edu/president/dialogue/dialogue_08_21_07.html.

August 21, 2007
To the University Community:
We have an extraordinary history and tradition at the Orange Bowl: The players running through the smoke tunnel. “Touchdown Tommy” and his cannon. The Ring of Honor. An incredible winning streak of 58 consecutive home wins. And three of our five national championships were won on that field. I love the Orange Bowl—we all do!
As many of you are aware, the University has been working closely with the City of Miami to assess the feasibility of making much-needed renovations to the Orange Bowl. It has long been our goal to have a first-class football stadium.The City of Miami has been a wonderful partner with us at the Orange Bowl for many years, and they understand how hard we have wrestled with a very difficult decision. Mayor Manny Diaz has been heroic in his efforts to meet our future needs. After much thought, analysis, and discussions with many, many of our trustees, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and fans, we have concluded that we must move our football games to a better facility. The more than $200 million in renovations that the city has proposed would only provide basic and mostly infrastructural upgrades. A part of those funds are not in hand and may or may not be determined until after the proposed construction would be well underway. Overall, the renovations clearly would not address the long-term needs of our athletes and our fans.
The Orange Bowl chapter of our history—in which we can all take great pride—will never close, and we are confident that the legacy of Miami Hurricanes football will live on and thrive as we move to a new location. After an assessment of all options available to us, we have decided reluctantly and painfully to move to Dolphin Stadium for the 2008 season.
Dolphin Stadium is one of the premier football stadiums in the country. At our new home, our student-athletes will have the opportunity to compete in a first-class facility that plays host to the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, the FedEx Orange Bowl, BCS National Championship Game, and that has been the site of recent and upcoming Super Bowls.
Our fans will experience outstanding amenities including one of the world’s largest plasma TV displays, high-definition video boards, club seating and suites, chairbacks on every stadium seat, approximately 14,000 parking spaces, and a large variety of concessions and restaurants.The end zones will be redone so that our shared home will reflect both Miami teams’ pride. The Dolphins are actively pursuing a corporate sponsor so that by 2010 the stadium will have a neutral name.
I want to assure all members of our University community—students, faculty, staff, alumni, trustees, donors, friends—and the tens of thousands of fans who regularly cheer us on, that we looked exhaustively into every aspect of the choices in front of us, and that your needs figured prominently in our final decision. The quality of your experience at our games is of the utmost importance to us.
As always, we would like to hear from you. Please contact us at an e-mail address we have established for your comments: umfootball@miami.edu. If you have any further questions, please go to the Official Athletic Department Web site at hurricanesports.com or call
1-800-GO-CANES.

Thank you, and Go ’Canes!
Sincerely,
Donna E. Shalala

Office of the President
P.O. Box 248006 Coral Gables, Florida 33124-4600
305-284-5155
Fax 305-284-3768

SouthBeachHoosier Time Machine: Reviewing the Battle of the Orange Bowl

Continuing with the decision by U-M President Donna Shalala and the U-M Board of Trustees to do what's right for the school, the team and the vast majority of South Florida's Hurricane fans by leaving the Orange Bowl in the rear-view mirror, what follows is the March 16, 1979 Miami Herald story by Bill Rose, which ran about two months before the Bill Braucher column that was the basis for my last post.

It traces the history of how Dolphins owner Joe Robbie got the better of Dade County Mayor Steve Clark and Commissioner J.L Plummer by publicly embarrassing them, simply by telling the truth to the gathered NFL owners in Hawaii, which, unhappily for Clark and Plummer, was a history replete with broken promises to Robbie and the Dolphins and real threats for them to move out of Miami if they didn't like it.

Joe Robbie, who'll be the future subject of a South Beach Hoosier post dealing with his role as the Dade County Democratic Party chair, lived long enough to call their bluff and have the last laugh!

Yes, the fights over beer sales, and the fights in court when the Dolphins prevailed and the govt. didn't like it and appealed and lost again, the threat to prevent the Dolphins from actually playing a preseason game in the Orange Bowl, et al.

This as the NFL owners convened to decide among other things, the site of the 1981 Super Bowl, which turned out to be Detroit, even as Miami officials took it for granted that they were in the driver's seat.
(That was Super Bowl XVI, where the 49ers beat the Bengals 26-21, the first of their Super Bowl meetings, with the second coming in SB XXIII in Miami, with the 49ers winning 20-16.)
Just as was the case with the Braucher column post, I'll try to write out the story in the future here in case you can't read it completely.



Reviewing the Battle of the Orange Bowl, Bill Rose, March 16, 1979, Miami Herald

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-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

Correction of the NY Times: Geography Not Our Strong Suit

I've waited patiently since it first ran July 25th in the hard copy of the New York Times, biding my time and thinking every day when I woke up, "Well, perhaps today will be the day that they make that correction to the NYT website.'
Initially, when I first saw it and saw no mention of it anywhere else, I thought that maybe I had imagined it. But there it was in the paper I had set aside in my bedroom, in that pile of stuff to follow-up on.
Then I thought of mentioning this to various media friends, especially as U-M president Donna Shalala seemed to be on TV everywhere for a bit, not just local TV Miami stations but also making headlining appearances on This Week with George Stepohanolpolous, as part of her explaining the findings of her presidential investigation with her co-chair, former Senator Bob Dole, on the deficient health care practices and policies at VA facilities that injured troops have been forced to deal with since returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
But three weeks later, the New York Times has yet to put this correction on their website or the various databases that have access to The Times, so consider it a community service, a personal privilage if you will, for me to be the first one to share the breaking news: the location of the University of Miami.

July 25, 2007 Corrections: For The Record
An article in the special Education Life section on Sunday about the popularity of Southern colleges misstated the name of one in Coral Gables, Fla. It is the University of Miami, not Miami University.

You'd think the national championships and all the press, both pro and con, might've made an impression, eh?

Besides all the other ways of checking the Times site, I even checked their Education webpage and noticed that, perhaps out of fear of embarrassment, they neglected to mention it there as well. C'est la vie.
As you'll see in future posts, geography, as well as the pop culture they pretend to cover, is NOT the strong suit of the New York Times.

University of Miami
News about the University of Miami, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_miami/index.html

"Jobs, Taxes Will Ride on Rapid Transit" Charles Whited, Miami Herald March 18, 1979

Last Thursday morning, I had the rare satisfaction that comes from using your foresight wisely, and was at just THE right time at just the right place.

In my case, I'd made it my business to be at the immigration forum sponsored by the Miami-Dade County Hispanic Advisory Board, which was held at the U-M's Bank United Center, in the Cane 100 Room, on the north side of the arena, not far from the court itself.

It was the first time I'd ever been at the arena, having last been around anything involving the U-M and roundball in the late '80's, when during a Christmas visit from D.C., I saw the 'Canes host the Gators at the Knight Center downtown with my then-brother-in-law, Mario.

Maybe it was because everyone else there knew what to expect and acted so blase, but I have to admit now that I was a little perplexed and thrown off-balance once we got in.

It seemed like we were watching a play or tennis match, since, due to the way the U-M basketball court was set-up, all the fans were on the same side of the court.

(That's definitely something that wouldn't have been safe for an IU-Purdue game, no matter how Purdue or the Hoosiers were, whether at home at Assembley Hall or even up Mackey Arena in West Lafayette, which is raised off the ground, like Vanderbilt's old court.

But it was was what "the U" had at the time, and I had a pretty good time, knowing it was far from what I'd been used to seeing from up-close in Bloomington.)

I'll have some posts soon on the forum itself and what I thought of the proceeding, but today, I wanted to share the first in as series of "golden" newspaper articles I dug up out of the Herald archives from the main Miami-Dade Library downtown's Florida room and that neverending insult to technology, microfilm machines.

I'd originally gone in to the library while waiting for the #93 Biscayne Max to whisk me back up towards the Aventura Mall, without the craziness of the 1,001 stops.

But two 93s in a row broke down, and I was getting pissed off as it looked like it was going to rain and I'd have to fight for space under cover with the crowd the Herald just discovered in their story on the horrendous state of downtown Miami.

I decided to make some good use of my time and try to track down some Herald photos from the late '70's of the All-Dade Gymnastics team, most of whom were friends or friends of friends, with one photo in particular in mind.

That was the one I had right near my dorm desk at Briscoe Quad my first two years at IU -the entire All-Dade team on a kid's playground apparatus.

It sounds dopey beyond belief, but it was cleverly executed by the Herald photographer.

Well, apparently, despite the fact that Doritos continues to be the snack choice of millions daily, Frito-Lay continues to tinker with them so they can be new and improved, something that can't be said for microfilm machines, with their blotchy screens, our link to the Guttenberg Bible, where you take your chances with being able to read something onscreen, much less print it correctly and have it not be all helter-skelter.

The first nugget I found and have placed here -thanks to the great guys at Transit Miami www.transitmiami.com ,for giving South Beach Hoosier some nice pub recently for the Macy's vs. Marshall Fields business, and my sense of how apathetic South Florida was about the name change- was from longtime Herald columnist Charles Whited on the upcoming rapid transit system in Miami!

Well, I rode the Metro for the first time in about 15 years -don't forget, I was in DC from1988-2003, using the DC Metro just about everyday- on the way from Government Center to University Station, opposite the Bank United Center.

I took note of fact that according to the information downtown, the northern route that will link the former Joe Robbie Stadium to the rest of the system will be operating in 2013, so I'll have some posts in a day or two on how that might effect Donna Shalala & Company's
impending decision in Coral Gables on moving U-M home games from the Orange Bowl to the former-JRS.

Frankly, I haven't seen anyone else mention this fact yet with regard to the decision, so if you have, please send me a link to the source, since I think it's an important aspect of the debate.

As time allows, I'll try to retype Mr. Whited's column here in case you can't read it easily from the attachment above, but suffice to say, if we only knew then what we know now...