Showing posts with label 1970's Miami. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1970's Miami. Show all posts

Saturday, June 18, 2016

My Muhammad Ali update, with great insight into him from two longtime favorites of mine, Roy Firestone and Maureen Dowd; @RoyFirestone @NYTimesDowd



#MuhammadAli thru prism of an avid, teenage sports fan in 1970's #Miami. #transcendent #SoFL
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2016/06/remembering-muhammad-ali-thru-prism-of.html

 I have seen and read so many great and inspiring things about Muhammad Ali since my initial blog post of June 3rd about him and my memories of him from the 1970's while I was growing-up in Miami and South Florida, where he spent so much time -inc. the time I actually received an award from him- that I initially thought I'd have a lot of trouble deciding what to be sure to include in any update I ever did.

 In the end, though, I decided to keep it simple, something that I don't always do here on the blog.

 I decided to include the contributions from two hyper-observant people that I've both long admired and have come to know to a small extent over the intervening years since first leaving South Florida for college in Bloomington and my life thereafter.
Each person, uniquely, with their own personality clearly shining through, shares some insight and reflections about Ali and what to me made Ali such a unique character in American and world history: Maureen Dowd and Roy Firestone.

 I really encourage anyone who has NOT read my earlier post to do so first, since they'll gain some very useful context on me and my observations about Ali that I think will well serve you to better appreciate the three of them. Trust me, you'll be glad you did!

 That June 3rd post of mine also includes a great video of Roy talking about Ali that as I have said and written elsewhere, has the great advantage of not only being funny and sweet, but 100% true.
#perceptive doesn't even begin to describe it.
I've posted it below, too.

 Ironically, as it happens, I also once shared an early film review of Will Smith as Ali with Maureen Dowd in the lobby of the NY Times Washington bureau, where she works as a columnist.
That's the same lobby where for SO many years during the 15 years I lived and worked in the D.C. area, until 2003, that I used to spend a LOT of time after work with friends who not only worked upstairs at the Times, but also well-informed media-centric friends who worked nearby in downtown D.C., right around the corner of the Baltimore Orioles team store, another longtime haunt of mine.

 (For those of you who are new to the blog, the Orioles store is where, on 9/11, hours after it happened, I first saw video of the Twin Towers coming down, after my colleagues and I were ordered to evacuate earlier that morning from our office, then located across the street from the FBI and Dept. of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue, due to growing concern about the exact location of a "missing" airplane. The airplane which we subsequently came to know and grieve for which carried the very brave passengers and crew of United #93. 
Knowing that one of the planes that hit the Twin Towers that morning had originated out of Boston had filled me with dread all day because... on 9/11, one of my former Arlington housemates was a flight attendant who worked out of Logan Airport, so...) 

 There in the lobby of the Army-Navy Building on Eye Street is also where, as I have blogged about previously, Maureen Dowd and I picked up our respective copies of Variety's Daily Gotham edition, Monday thru Friday. That edition is the one seldom seen in 99% of the country, and has the green masthead on the top to differentiate it from its much-larger weekly edition with the red masthead.

 Even in a large and important city like D.C., there was a very tiny delivery window for the handful of people who subscribed to Daily Variety and could get it hand-delivered on a same day basis, at no extra cost, and luckily for me, 1627 Eye Street was one of them.
It helped enormously that the Motion Picture Association of America, MPAA, the U.S. film industry's trade association has its lobbying HQ in D.C. just down the block on Eye Street, which is how it came to be so many times over my 15 years there that I saw and even had a chance to talk sometimes to its iconic leader Jack Valenti, often while he was making his way down to the nearby CVS.

 Sometimes, in her haste to get upstairs, depending upon who swung by the concierge's desk in the lobby first that particular morning, Maureen would grab my copy by mistake, so I'd have to take the copy with her name on the mailing label.
Which, as I've remarked here previously, occasionally, got me some pretty quizzical looks on my Metro ride home later to Arlington. :-)











Roy Firestone remembers Muhammad Ali on Good Day LA. with hosts Steve Edwards and Maria Sansone. He talked about his first interview ever, and it was interviewing Muhammad. He was only 21 years old.
FOX 11 Los Angeles YouTube Channel video, Uploaded on June 10, 2016
https://youtu.be/NKguJRUCIx0
Muhammad Ali's Procession
The New York Times YouTube Channel, Uploaded on June 10, 2016
https://youtu.be/G5ZDZMLfgqY


Muhammad Ali's Funeral
The New York Times YouTube Channel, Uploaded on June 10, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bYFb97j7Ro




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Saturday, June 4, 2016

Remembering Muhammad Ali thru the prism of an avid, teenage sports fan in 1970's South Florida. To me, for so many reasons, Ali truly was "The Greatest"


As a kid with a Sports Illustrated subscription starting when I was ten in 1971, I can definitely say today, just as I could ten years ago, that this is my favorite Sports Illustrated cover -EVER.
December 23, 1974 Muhammad Ali, Sportsman of the Year




Remembering Muhammad Ali thru the prism of an avid, teenage sports fan in 1970's South Florida. To me, for so many reasons, Ali truly was "The Greatest"
This has been a very sad day for me that I've been dreading for a very long time.

Since at least the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, when Muhammad Ali lit the Olympic Torch, and so many Americans who hadn't thought of him or seen him in years, suddenly saw how Parkinson's Disease had begun to rob us of a transcendent and uniquely American personality who was both the source of so many shared joyful moments, as well as the subject of so many heated political arguments over kitchen tables and airwaves from coast-to-coast for years.


















Muhammad Ali, Miami came of age together in the 1960s

Growing-up in South Florida in the 1970's, because of my interests and personality, I was fortunate enough through circumstance and by taking full advantage of opportunities I created to be able to talk fairly regularly to South Florida sports reporters and columnists of the era, many of whom spoke to and interviewed Muhammad Ali regularly whenever he was in Miami, especially those times when he was training at the Fifth Street Gym on South Beach, which was later named for another native of Kentucky who left her positive mark on Miami, Elizabeth Virrick.

A 1982 photo of Elizabeth Virrick and Muhammad Ali in a gym named in her honor.

The following video is a combination of genius and heart and will make you laugh AND cry!


(As some of you readers know, I've long thought that Roy Firestone was a genius, but then, I'm biased on that score. I first met Roy when I was a twelve-year old kid in 1973 at the Bob Griese-Karl Noonan boys summer sports camp in Boca Raton, the first of my three summers there, when Roy was one of my camp counselors while still attending the University of Miami, later becoming a friend and common sense sounding-board of sorts.
Roy is someone I've long been planned on writing about here on the blog, with several great anecdotes including a few of the "Only in Miami" sort that South Florida residents can especially appreciate! 
Roy is also the first person to ever explain to me what makes the the film The African Queen magical, before I saw it for the first time more than forty years ago in Boca Raton. 

Years later, when he was doing the Noon and Weekend sports at Miami's WPLG-TV, the ABC-TV affiliate in South Florida, before he left for LA, when it came time for me to consider where to go to college, Roy urged me to go to Syracuse instead of Indiana University, where I eventually went, or USC, which I had always planned on attending all throughout my days at North Miami Beach Senior High School. That is, until Christmas of my senior year, when the reality of the gap in money needed for making that trip across the country to USC and my dreams of living and networking in LA, an unreachable goal. :-(
Roy suggested Syracuse in part due to the growing prestige and dynamism being attached to what was going on at the Newhouse School of Communications there, which in 1979, was before many of the more-recent but well-known grads there were actually attending. 
Perhaps if I'd gone there, I'd personally know all the very annoying Syracuse grads we all see at
ESPN and the nets, the ones who always want to tell you about how they used to make audition tapes when they were kids. Yes, we know, we know!)

What those journalists shared with me always stayed with me over the years, but I often was able to tell them a thing or two that they didn't know or were unwilling or unable to publicly acknowledge about the reality of the South Florida we lived in, as well as share Ali anecdotes that ABC Sports TV sportscaster Howard Cosell had written about in his own books, which I'd read over-and-over so much that I could practically quote entire paragraphs, to the eternal frustration of my friends and family. (Cosell's account of his times is still great books to read, all these years later.)

But then for people my age, it was hard to think of Muhammad Ali without also immediately thinking of Howard Cosell, the most popular TV sportscaster of his era, to the chagrin of many print reporters and his detractors, but the one person that well-informed sports fans like me could always count on to have the ability to make an #event a #happening -and later tell you why.








I still recall how over-the-top and angry the Miami supporters of the Nation of Islam (NOI) were regularly portrayed by the South Florida news media -esp. Miami TV stations- in ways that would 
be considered completely unacceptable now, even if what they reported then was factually true.
There'd be lots more use of "allegedly"!

It seems like a couple of times a year I'd hear my Dad, a longtime Dade County police officer, say something to the fact that they'd heard some rumors about the NOI Mosque on 7th Avenue & 53rd Street -the Mosque that Ali worshipped at when in Miami- and it was seldom something positive.

Though the powers-that-be in Miami may well deny it now, the truth is that there was always LOTS of concern among the Police and the Miami Establishment of the time that something bad would happen to Ali whenever he was in Miami, due to the myriad NOI personality/turf/power wars, which were generally acknowledged by people who knew the facts, though NOT for public attribution, of course.

My understanding was that very possibility, however remote it may seem now to us from a distance, really ate at some people within Metro Police who had to think about such things, and be prepared to deal with it. As if that were even possible.
Given Miami's unique and unfortunate history with riots, and its multi-ethnic populace's complete willingness to take to the street at the drop of a hat without waiting for all the facts to come in on a situation, something I have been witness to myself, you can well understand why that was a concern.

There were also always plenty of rumors sprinkled with facts about the NOI's involvement with organized crime, their curious easy access to weapons, as well as concern about how frequently NOI members in South Florida seemed to manage to get out of trouble at the last minute, just like in a film, where the audience always knows something the Police don't.
There were, therefore, concerns about possible "leaks" within Metro Police, which were not nearly as unfounded as you might imagine, given the facts-on-the-ground at the time.

In 1975, when I was in Eighth Grade at JFK Junior High in North Miami Beach,  one Spring night, just a few months after the Sports Illustrated cover above, I was surprised to receive a Dade County (Junior High) Track & Field Championships ribbon -Second place- from Muhammad Ali at a Dade County Schools sports award ceremony in downtown Miami, where Ali's appearance came as a complete thunderbolt to everyone -especially the kids! 
And my Dad, who drove me there.

People were, quite literally, in hushed tones in that small auditorium all night, anxious that they would not miss anything Ali said or did, and it will probably not surprise you to learn that the number of the people in the auditorium only increased at the night went on, as word about who was there, in-the-flesh, continued to circulate.
Pre Cell phone, pre-Twitter.

Trust me, if I'd known in advance that Muhammad Ali would be there, me being me, I'd have made plans to have LOTS of photos of that moment! 
Even if by now they were largely faded Polaroids! 

Every year in August on my way to the Cream and Crimson of IU in Bloomington, I'd drive and drive and drive by myself from Miami north to the Midwest, but no matter how much I knew to expect it, every time I first saw the highway signs letting me know that I'd soon be near Muhammad Ali Boulevard in Louisville, it always caught me by surprise.
I'd immediately think back to that surprising and amazing moment in 1975 when I met him in person for the first time, and shook his hand.
Calm when I did it, but slightly abuzz once back in my seat.
Just like all the other kids there, but probably the only one there who, pre-VCR, could name whom Ali had fought and where going back for several years, since retaining information and trivia of that sort was seemingly hard-wired into my brain.
Still is, if you hadn't noticed.











Muhammad Ali , coming and going...



#MuhammadAli #transcendent

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Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Important questions are NOT being asked in South Florida: With President Obama coming to South Florida today re his immigration/amnesty plan, when was last time you heard an honest public discussion in South Florida about African-American unemployment rates in Miami? I think Obama's amnesty plan makes that worse. Much worse!

Important questions are NOT being asked in South Florida: With President Obama coming to South Florida today re his immigration/amnesty plan, when was last time you heard an honest public discussion in South Florida about African-American unemployment rates in Miami? I think Obama's amnesty plan makes that long-term problem worse. Much worse!












The news that President Obama was coming into South Florida today got me to wondering and musing over the weekend, and not surprisngly, some of this sentiment clearly echoes things I've asked and answered in this very space many times over the past 8 years.

 Simply put, have any of you attended a public meeting anywhere in South Florida in the last two years where, either together or individually, Representatives Lois Frankel, Debbie Wasserman 
Schultz or Frederica Wilson have spoken about immigration issues and attempted to make the case that President Obama's immigration plan for amnesty for up to 5 Million people would NOT 
negatively hurt long-term unemployed workers in South Florida, esp. African-Americans?
Or seen a similar public discussion in your area? 
Why do you suppose that is?
And why fdo you suppose that the local news media ignores that obvious question, just as supposed South Florida-based public policy groups do as well?

When I was a kid growing-up as a news and politics junkie in 1970's South Florida, on the day that unemployment rates came out of the Dept. of Labor Statistics in Washington -i.e. the BLS- I seem to recall that it was usually the case that then-WTVJ anchor Ralph Renick -when he was the dominant media voice in all of South Florida- would make a point of mentioning not only the national and state numbers, but the ones for Dade and Broward, too, along with the local unemployment rate for Blacks.
And those numbers would usually appear on screen, along with a very simple graph that would be embarrassing to put up these days.

The idea being that accuracy mattered, of course, but also that it's important to have useful context and nuance to draw upon before making any reasonable conclusions about what was happening with unemployment and the economy.

That seems like such a simple thing, but before I left the area last June for an extended period of time, I can't think of the last time I actually heard the long-term unemployment levels for African-Americans in Miami getting either mentioned in print or on TV or brought into the larger discussion about their relative economic standing only getting worse if that action took place.

Especially since I think it's fair to say that based on my living in South Florida again for the past 11 years, there are many less Black adults or children in South Florida who can speak even passable Spanish, compared to when I was a kid growing-up taking Spanish for 6 years and French for 4.

 Those Latin American entrepreneurs coming to Miami that seemingly everyone in South Florida's incurious media horde likes to make a fuss over in often over-the-top sycophancy, with some TV stations being especially egregious about making no pretense of being anything but Chamber of Commece cheerleaders, are NOT going to be hiring people who are NOT bilingual, except for low wage jobs.

 So what group is that going to be in Miami-Dade County?
Precisely, but instead, everyone just pretends they don't know what the logical result of this will be.
#Despair

I guess we'll all have to just wait until after the next riot and have yet more foreign and out-of-state reporters fly into the area to comment again on the self-evident short-term attention span of reporters that is actually much worse than South Florida residents as a whole.
Which is why those out-of-towners will again be speaking about South Florida reporters continuing to ignore the legitimate concerns of Black Miami, preferring to do ponintless stories about breast surgery, food fads and fashion and crime lowlights among visiting celebs and rappers on South Beach.

But then isn't that lack of energy and foresight the same reason why local news media don't exert any energy at all in pressing local South Florida Congressional representatives on policies that are harmful to such a large share of the populace?
Their own constituents!

Recently, Rasmussen Reports released a national poll on the Obama Amnesty plan.
Guess what it said

Voters Weigh Costs of Obama's Amnesty Plan
Voters still view President Obama's order exempting up to five million illegal immigrants from deportation as illegal and tend to think Congress should try to stop it. But they're evenly divided over whether a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security is the way to do it.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/february_2015/voters_weigh_costs_of_obama_s_amnesty_plan
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Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Insight into my varied soccer resume and "expertise," gleaned first-hand from the sidelines & seats watching Pelé, the NMB Chargers, Miami Toros, Ft. Lauderdale Strikers, Indiana Hoosiers and Premier League; Insightful observations and good questions from @TimothyJPratton on soccer development in the United States


@TimothyJPratt  My first story w/the Guardian asks: Are European giants exploiting US soccer or improving it?









Me, I'm the sort of soccer fan who got up very early last October to watch SkyTV's EARLY morning reporting, via my desktop, on the new English National Team football HQ at St George's Park, in Staffordshire.

The cameras literally showed the sun rising on beautiful-but-dewy empty pitches that Prince William later came by to offically christen.
So, yes, with that said, I think this article is very timely.

When I was a kid growing up in South Florida in the 1970's, my Mother worked as a secretary for Pavarini Construction as part of the Pavarini Gerrits team involved in constructing One Biscayne Tower on the corner of Flagler Street and Biscayne Blvd, the heart of what was Miami for most people I knew at the time.

 One Biscayne Tower in Miami, 39 floors, 1973 Pavarini Construction, 
http://skyscrapercenter.com/miami/one-biscayne-tower/4008

That mammoth construction project was just across the street from where the office was located until the bldg. was finished in 1973, which at 39 stories, made it the largest building south of Atlanta until some time in the '90's, when I was already working up in D.C. area and not quite so aware of what new taller buildings were going up.

Their whole office could bring their families in late in the afternoon on New Years's Eve since one of the perks of that location was we could all watch the Orange Bowl Parade from their second floor balcony as it made the turn onto Flagler. That was back when NBC aired that LIVE every year across the country but the local NBC affiliate in Miami aired it the next morning, because they wanted bodies on the streets, not ratings, at the behest of the Miami business community and powers-that-be tried to put on a good face for the rest of the country.

Mr Stass had all sorts of pull and despite the great competition to get them, managed to get some tickets for the January 1975 Orange Bowl Game between Bear Bryant's Alabama squad and Notre Dame in Ara Parseghian's last game as Irish head coach. 
And he gave some of them to my Mom!
We sat in the East (open) End Zone of The Orange Bowl and we were surrounded by the extra Alabama cheerleaders, pep team, and marching band. 

For a big sports fan like me who'd grown-up watching Lindsey Nelson's ND highlight show on Sunday mornings in the fall, it was like heaven, since by then I'd already been going to U-M home games for years when Chuck Foreman and Burgess Owens played for some truly terrible U-M teams. Teams which drew so poorly that I'd often have that end zone all to myself.

Years later I often wondered whether one of the cheerleaders near me whose good looks and sweet Southern accent made me melt in my seat might've included Sela Ward.

In those days, Sela dated future Dolphin 'Killer B' defensive star Bob Baumhower. 
The romantic in me likes to imagine that Sela was sitting there, somewhere, in that row behind me, so I'd like to think that game was where I first heard and saw the wonderful Sela, whom I've admired and adored since first seeing her on the big screen in Chicago at the theatre at Water Tower in 1986's "Nothing in Common," starring Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason. Ironically, a film set in Chicago. 

My mother's boss, Frank J, Stass was also a public policy, civic-minded type -back when Miami
had more of them them- who was always willing to do his part to help local Miami businesses.
When the NASL came to Miami as the Gatos, he bought some season tickets for the games at the Orange Bowl, for employees and they were excellent seats!
Right in the middle of the stadium and about 15 rows up, back when the Tampa Bay Rowdies and the Cosmos were their biggest and most bitter of rivals.

I first started going when they were the Gatos in 1971, as a ten-year old, and kept going after they were re-christened the Toros. Before the Robbies moved the Toros up to Fort Lauderdale and they become the Strikers, they played the Cosmos in Pele's first game in Miami his first year in the NASL.

For some reason that I don't quite recall, they played the game out on the VERY NICE soccer field out at FIU which later became the FIU football team's many, many years later once they got D-1 football and expanded the facility. 

(That was the best soccer field in South Florida outside of Lockhart Stadium, where my junior year at IU, 1982, we beat Duke there for the NCAA championship on the 2nd or 3rd day of my Christmas Break, which created an awesome scene back at the Yankee Trader Hotel hotel afterwards with all my close friends on the team -and their parents and the whole IU and Hoosier sports administrators, plus Indy media.)

Team photo of 1982 NCAA Champion Indiana Hoosiers coached by Jerry Yeagley

But for the Pele first match, the capacity was just over 10,000 and since we were season ticket holders of a sort, we got first dibs and I was even able to persuade my non-soccer loving father to come long. He'd come to some of my youth games once in a while but he was not someone who was a natural fan 

Yes, I think it's fair to say that from 1971 to 1976, there were few people in South Florida who 
attended more Miami Gatos/Toros NASL soccer games at the Orange Bowl than yours truly.

I witnessed all their great FEISTY and bitter games against their arch-rival Tampa Bay Rowdies back when that was the only pro team Tampa had, and their fans WOULD travel in droves and tailgate HERE. I even witnessed their heart-breaking loss on penalty kicks in the 1974 NASL title game at the Orange Bowl -televised by CBS- to the Los Angeles Aztecs. AFTER two over-times on a hot and humid afternoon! 

Somewhere, I still have the Toros game programs, esp. the ones that on the cover proclaimed Kyle Rote, Jr. of the Dallas Tornadoes as "the American Pelé." 
As many of you may recall, Rote was a tremendously talented player who understood his unique role as an ambassador for the sport, but even though I was a kid at the time, I thought that putting things like that on the cover of game programs was FAR TOO MUCH pressure for a kid just barely out of college!

Because of our location and demographics, I was fortunate to play for some very talented Optimist teams in North Miami Beach -after football and baseball season were over- that had a mix of styles and lots of telnted kids from lots of different countries, esp. Latin America.
After that,  was fortunate to go to North Miami Beach Senior High, a high school in South Florida with a great soccer reputation, despite it being only a few years old, thanks entirely to the devotion, dedication and hard work of our head coach Victor "Vic" Cappillo, who also drove the team bus to all points on the compass. 
(Coach Cappillo later wrote a letter of recommendation for me to IU.)

While I was still in eight-grade at JFK Junior High, with my personality, nose for news and media inclinations being roughly the same as they are now, just less developed, in part because I was already known to most of the players, and a friend to many, I persuaded Coach Cappillo to let me be the Team Manager, attending all home and away matches and handled calling the two Miami newspapers afterwards to drum up support in getting us some publicity.
And I was very successful.
But our great talent on the field certainly helped!

The following year, 1975-76, when I was a freshman, this good relationship continued and thanks to a historic Ciro Martinez-led last-second Charger win at arch-rival North Miami, a game whose last two minutes seemed to go in slo-motion, we eventually won the 1976 Florida high Scool soccer championship.
Days afterwards at a team dinner to honor the team and its supporters, I unexpectedly received a blue Varsity Letterman's jacket that quickly became my most valuable possession for years afterwards, despite how impractical a jacket is in NMB for most of the year because of the weather.
I'd wear that jacket every chance I had whenever it got under 50 degrees.

In 1977, with most of the team returning, one of our two arch-rivals, nearby Miami Norland Senior High School, inflicted a painful loss on the Chargers, knocking us out of the Florida state playoffs at Lockhart Stadium and ending our hope of winning back-to-back Florida state soccer championships. The Norland Vikings eventually finished as the state runner-up that year.

When Joe and Elizabeth Robbie relocated the team to Ft. Lauderdale and Lockhart Stadium for the 1977 season, much closer to my friends and I in North Miami Beach, we were ecstatic. The drive to Lockhart up I-95 was so much quicker, as we joined other "Striker Likers," eager to literally yell ourselves hoarse watching their exciting brand of soccer, esp, against the dreaded Rowdies and Cosmos! 
Oh, did we ever hate them!

(This happened to coincide with a time period when the Dolphins were less successful due to the reign of the Steelers and Raiders and the rise of the Bert Jones-led Baltimore Colts, so it was great to be able to cheer in-person at a home game and not have it be sarcastic.) 

When the NASL folded and then went indoor via the awful MISL, I never looked back at pro soccer teams in the U.S. because at the time it meant that my IU friends -and neighbors like Mike Hylla and Dave Boncek, who were always doing impressive skill and control drills in front of the swimming pool at out apt. complex- could never play for teams outdoors in their own country, as soccer was clearly intended to be played.

Even now, after all these years and all the effort they've put into trying to make it palatable, I've NEVER watched even one minute of the MLS on ESPN. 

To me, it's largely unwatchable, so I just stick to English Premier League games. 
I did go see some of the WUSA games, though, while I was in DC when Mia Hamm played for the Freedom.

I will be updating this post over the next few days, looking to include some photos.
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