Professional Football in Miami:

a Dream, a Dynasty, a Way of Life

Professional football in Miami has become more than a sport or an exhibition, it has become part of the Miami community. For more than twenty-five years, the Miami Dolphins not only enjoyed the distinction of being the only professional franchise in South Florida, they proved to be one of the most successful franchises in the history of the National Football League by winning two consecutive Super Bowls including "The Perfect Season". From 1965 until today, the Miami Dolphins have grown and evolved along with the city of Miami. Together they have formed a relationship that transcends the standard role of any sports franchise and its hometown. The Miami Dolphins have truly become a part of the city of Miami.

The history of professional football in South Florida goes back past the inception of the Miami Dolphins franchise in 1965. The first attempt to establish a franchise in Miami was in 1946 not as part of the National Football League, but rather as part of the All-America Football Conference; a short-lived and ultimately futile attempt to counter the NFL. This franchise, dubbed the Miami Seahawks, existed only for the course of one season, 1946, and disbanded soon after due to a lack of funds, fan support, and an unconquerable opponent, Mother Nature.

The franchise was owned by an Atlanta restaurateur named Harvey Hester. He was an avid sports fan, and had previously been a sparring partner for Jack Dempsey, heavyweight boxing champion. In 1946 he created the Miami Seahawks to be part of the All-America Football Conference. Some members of the Miami Seahawks were their coach, Jack Meagher, who left Auburn to coach the team, the tackle, George Ellinson, a Miami High and University of Georgia graduate and runningback Monk Gafford who also came from Auburn. But talent was hard to come by for this expansion team, for most of the talented players entering professional football were taken by the NFL

Bisher Furman recalls the demise of the Miami Seahawks in an article in the Atlanta Journal, saying "They were the guys who invented Monday Night Football, not ABC The owner decided it would be a great idea to play Monday night, since the biggest game in town was the Miami Hurricanes on Friday night. The first six games [including the opener against the AAFC's only powerhouse, the Cleveland Browns], it rained. The seventh ran headlong into a real hurricane. They finished the season, died quietly, and the first edition of Monday Night Football died with them." (Furman 1) Four years later, in 1949, the entire A.A.F.C. was absorbed by the NFL Most of the teams, excepting the Cleveland Browns, died out in the NFL

Where did the Miami Seahawks go? Jim Murray attempts to explain what the Seahawks evolved into in his Los Angeles Times article, "Back Up the Truck". He says, "The original Dallas Texans became the Baltimore Colts. Actually the Baltimore Colts were a little bit of everything. Originally, they had been the Miami Seahawks who went broke in Miami in 1946 and hit the highway for Baltimore. Even the Dallas Texans' franchise absorbed by Baltimore in 1953 had originally been the New York Yanks, who had previously been the Boston Yanks." (Murray 1)

Although Miami was experiencing great land and population booms throughout the 1950's and early 1960's (respectively), there were no further attempts to bring a professional level sports team to Miami. The Miami Hurricanes had endeared themselves to the city of Miami, and every January 1 the Orange Bowl Classic game turned the eyes of the world upon football in Miami, but only on the college level. On August 16, 1965, a Minneapolis area lawyer named Joseph Robbie in conjunction with television star Danny Thomas secured and purchased an American Football League expansion to begin play in Miami in the 1966 season. Joseph Robbie and Danny Thomas paid the AFL $7.5 million for the franchise. Then Mayor of Miami Robert King High guaranteed Robbie the availability of the Orange Bowl for his franchise.

On January 29, 1966, George Wilson became the first head coach of the Miami Dolphins. Wilson had coached the Detroit Lions for eight years, including winning the NFL championship in 1957. The early years of the Miami Dolphins were lean years, especially the first season in which only 26,776 people watched their first game and the team lost nine straight games.

By 1967 however, the Dolphins enjoyed marked success both within the league and with the community. On March 14, 1967 they drafted Hall of Famer quarterback Bob Griese from Purdue University, the beginning of the compilation of talent that would bring the Dolphins to two consecutive Super Bowl wins. By August 19, 1967 attendance at Dolphins games had skyrocketed to 50,822, almost twice the attendance of their opening game just one year before. Over the next five years, the Dolphins would work to combine the elements that would bring them their two championship rings, including other Hall of Famers such as RB Larry Csonka, C Jim Langer, G Larry Little, and WR Paul Warfield. Probably the most integral person in paving the road to success for the Dolphins was the man who on February 18, 1970 became their second head coach; Donald Francis Shula.

As quarterback Earl Morrall said in the interview, it was the 1972 season that first led the city of Miami to accept the Dolphins as a part of South Florida heritage. Four games into the season, the Dolphins were still undefeated. The combination of Griese's precision arm, Warfield and Jim Mandich receiving and Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, and Mercury Morris comprising the running game, the Dolphins seemed unbeatable. But in that fourth game against San Diego, Griese broke his right leg and dislocated his ankle and was out for the season. Morrall, who had played for Shula when he coached Baltimore, had to step up and take Griese's place at the helm. Morrall stepped up and not only upheld the Dolphins winning tradition, he kept the undefeated streak alive. The 1972 Dolphins accomplished a feat which has not been matched before or since, they won every game that year, including defeating the Washington Redskins 14-7 in Super Bowl VII. Miami's only professional sports franchise had etched his place in history forever.

The Dolphins' newfound and somewhat sudden success proved to be the secret ingredient to cementing the relationship between professional football and the South Florida area. One of the clearest signs of this is the fact that in 1973, following the "Perfect Season", the Dolphins set a NFL record with 74,961 season ticket sales (The Orange Bowl's total seating capacity is 75,206). This was a marked contrast to the community's interest in the team just five short years prior in which the Dolphins rarely attracted more than 25,000 fans. Throughout the rest of the 1970's the Dolphins continued their winning tradition, and more importantly continued their tradition as being part of the heart of the city.

An incidental but important element in the adoption of the Miami Dolphins was Flipper. Flipper was not only the Dolphins' team mascot and emblem, he was a national TV star. Flipper had his own television program (titled, appropriately enough, Flipper), and was seen weekly across the United States. On Sunday he was seen in the end zone of the Orange Bowl doing tricks similar to those he did for his top-rated television show. Flipper was also stationed at the Miami Seaquarium during the course of the week, where much of his show was filmed. The connection between a team named the Dolphins and its city's Seaquarium was now real, although there has been a considerable amount of speculation as to whether the Flipper who appeared on national television, the Flipper who was the Dolphins' mascot, and the Flipper who appeared every day at the Seaquarium were actually the same dolphin. Nevertheless, once again the Dolphins had helped to bring the focus of the country to the city of Miami.

The professional football market in Miami was so favorable to football that in 1983 someone once again tried to establish a franchise in Miami; and just as was the case with the Miami Seahawks, this expansion team in Miami was a member of an organization trying to battle the NFL, the United States Football League. A man named Sanford Weil, owner of the Grand Bay hotel planned to start a USFL team in Miami. The USFL in 1983 was a very promising counterpart to the NFL, coercing some of the better players coming out of college to join the USFL including quarterbacks Steve Young, Warren Moon, and Jim Kelly. The high point in the brief history of the USFL's Miami expansion was when Weil convinced Howard Schnellenberger, who had just led the Miami Hurricanes to a national championship, to coach his team. Miami's USFL franchise was all ready to begin play in the 1983 season when the USFL made a detrimental decision; they decided to move their season from the spring (a relatively inactive time of year in terms of sports) to the fall (where they would be in direct competition with the NFL). Both Weil and Schnellenberger realized this was the beginning of the end for the USFL, and the Miami franchise was grounded before it was even assigned a nickname or team mascot. What little was left of this aborted team has somehow evolved into the Arena Football team, the Orlando Predators.

Another element contributing to the popularity of professional football in Miami is the Super Bowl. Besides the five in which the Dolphins participated, there were seven Super Bowls played in Miami (five in the Orange Bowl, two in Joe Robbie Stadium). The NFL, in recognition of the unfavorable conditions throughout most of the country in mid-January, has made it a policy to hold the Super Bowl in either a warm-weather climate or in a domed stadium. Miami also enjoys the distinction of being the only site to host two consecutive Super Bowls, Super Bowl II (1968) and Super Bowl III (1969). .More than just the favorable weather conditions, the NFL saw Miami as a city that had embraced professional football. One of Miami's many Super Bowls, Super Bowl XIII between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Dallas Cowboys, attracted 79,484 fans (this is an incredible number in relation to the seating capacity of the Orange Bowl, 75,206). One of the things that has led to the success of Miami as a host for Super Bowls is that almost everyone of those seven Super Bowls has been a magnificent game, especially four of those games which were decided by four points or less. The Super Bowls held in Miami, as did the Dolphins time and time again, turned the focus of the nation on the South Florida area and its relationship with football.

Despite two false starts, professional football and the city of Miami have forged a relationship that is truly unique. Just as the face of the city of Miami has grown and changed since the inception of the Dolphins in 1965, so has the team evolved and contoured to support its relationship with the South Florida area, ultimately constructing a new stadium so as to include more of the fans from Broward and West Palm Beach counties. The Miami Dolphins realized that as the greater Miami area extended farther north and west, so would they have to go north and west. This is just another element of how the relationship between the Dolphins and the city has grown and changed.

Now the Dolphins are not only playing football, they are teaching it. The Dolphins welcome dozens of inner-city and otherwise characteristically poor high schools into their new training facilities at Nova Southeastern University, teach them how to improve their game, talk with them about winning and losing, and most importantly convince them to stay off of drugs and to stay in school. It is an attempt by the Dolphins to give back to the community which has given them so much over the last quarter-century, and as was seen in the interview with students from Northwestern, they greatly appreciate this service provided by the Dolphins. To them, the Dolphins mean "hope...it gives us something we can believe in".