A Time For Navel Gazing

DEATH IS never pretty, but sitting in a condemned stadium is like watching a great man in his last throes. You can't believe it has come to this. On Saturday the University of Miami football team will play its 473rd and final home game at the horseshoe-shaped hulk known as the Orange Bowl, trading its creaky confines for the antiseptic squareness of Dolphins Stadium. Demolition looms. No one can argue that it's not time. Yet as Miami city commissioner Tomas Regalado says, "The Orange Bowl is part of our soul." When that's lost, a bit of attention must be paid.

Understand: Miami is a fever dream of a city, built on sand and swamp. Its fabulously tortured growth has had but two constants— the ocean and the Orange Bowl, which began in 1937 as a 22,000-seat facility and blossomed into a national championship game, a parade, a cheery signal sent to the winter-bitten masses up North every Jan. 1 that, in at least one hot corner of America, someone was downing daiquiris poolside and hoping to score. One New Year's Day, 1940, an 11-year-old boy sat in his Athens, Ga., home soaking up the broadcast and banging out play-by-play on his Christmas typewriter; he biked it to his local newspaper and got a job as a reporter. In 1953, Edwin Pope went to his first game. "I thought I'd gone to heaven," he says, and as The Miami Herald's great and graceful columnist, he's been there ever since.

"So many great memories," says former Dolphins coach Don Shula. Yet none meant more than his worst: Without that loss to Joe Namath's upstart Jets in Super Bowl III, Shula might never have clashed with his Baltimore Colts boss, then fled to Miami and football immortality. "In the Orange Bowl fans were right on top of you," he says. "That's where they first realized they could affect the outcome, by making it tough for the opposing team to hear signals. And on bad days they worked me over."

But the Orange Bowl spawned more than just local heroes. As the site of 14 national championships and five Super Bowls, it served as a national proving ground. Namath became a New York legend, Doug Flutie a Boston legend, Bear Byrant an Alabama legend, Tom Osborne a Nebraska legend, Barry Switzer an Oklahoma legend, Kellen Winslow a San Diego legend—all because of their exploits in the neighborhood now known as Little Havana.

The Cuban influx transformed Miami, of course, and remade the Orange Bowl into more than just a big-time sports venue. Not a few who fled Fidel Castro survived by hawking sodas at UM games; current Miami mayor Manny Diaz bashed baseballs off its walls as a kid. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy stood on the field with the flag of Brigade 2506—the band of Cuban exiles who fought at the Bay of Pigs—and promised that "this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana." The Cuban-American vote has gone Republican in nearly every election since. When Castro hovered near death last year, city officials designated the stadium as ground zero for the celebration. "But now," Regalado says, "I guess that s.o.b. is going to outlive the Orange Bowl."

Ghoulish, sure, but that's the nature of a deathwatch. The Dolphins fled the Orange Bowl in 1986; the postseason college football game left in 1996. Still, so long as the Hurricanes played there, even an outdated O-Bowl retained its aura. The Hurricanes won an NCAA record 58 straight home games from 1985--94, team and field and city fused into a hard-bitten whole.

Now that's over. The Hurricanes have slipped out of the elite; the Orange Bowl is crumbling. A few Saturdays ago UM entered the fourth quarter trailing Georgia Tech by a touchdown. The 52,416 in attendance held up their traditional four fingers—We own the fourth quarter—Mayor Diaz stood on the sideline barking at officials, players from the glory years tried to impart some magic. Nothing helped. The Yellow Jackets ran over the UM defense in a way unthinkable once.

Time ran out. A fan held up a sign reading, GOODBYE ORANGE BOWL. The losing team gathered in a corner and the band played the alma mater like a dirge, players pledging with fans to "stand forever, on Biscayne's wondrous shore." The air was humid and still; hurricane weather, they say. But it felt only like the end.