MALE MATTERS Where Have You Gone, Dan Marino? South Florida’s Other Teams Emerging I have a friend from Boston who smugly reminds me of how difficult it must be, in this day and age, to be a South Florida sports fan, especially a Miami Dolphins fan. And then he laughs. True, I can’t really blame him. After all, in the past decade and a half, during the era of Tom Brady, Big Poppy, and the end of the Bambino’s curse, you could say Boston has enjoyed a “golden age of sports” while our own sports teams, on the other hand, especially our beloved Dolphins, have just been plain bad or, even worse, borderline irrelevant. Indeed, once the Gold Standard during the long reign of the good king Don Shula, these fish, for years now, have been swimming in an ocean of mediocrity with the rest of the NFL’s bottom feeders. If there is such a thing as karma, that will all change. The Patriots who, in recent years, have won seven straight AFC East titles, not to mention a bunch of Super Bowls, will surely pay a cosmic price for “Spygate” and “Deflategate.” The great Patriot owner Robert Kraft hugging tight end Aaron Hernandez (albeit, before we all knew Hernandez was a coldblooded killer) shouldn’t bode well on the karmic scale either. South Florida’s sports teams, on the other hand, will no doubt eventually rise to the top again even though a young Dan Marino isn’t walking through that door. Actually, things haven’t been all bad. An argument can be made that, since the dawn of the new millennium, we’ve won three NBA championships and a World Series too, actually, if you go back to 1997. But, as my friend from Boston is all too happy to point out, our successes, aside from those of the Miami Heat run by “Godfather” Pat Riley, were the exception rather than the rule. by Elliot Goldenberg either, whether the games were played on the playing field or in the arena. And be aware, New England sports fans: one day Brady, also, will retire. I know, the closest we’ve come, lately, to having our own “golden age” was when the Miami Hurricanes, once college football’s dominant power, hired a nondescript football coach named Al Golden. Pacing the sidelines in his golden neckties, he was justly fired. At the end of the season, Golden was officially replaced by former Georgia coach Mark Richt, an apparent upgrade. With the arrow now also pointing up for the Hurricanes basketball team, the Panthers hockey team, and the promise of the NFL draft, hope once again springs eternal. That being said, for the overall sanity of our own long-suffering sports fans, when will reviled owner Jeffrey Loria finally sell our baseball team, the Marlins? Many have called Loria a carpetbagger, or worse, and he certainly rubbed me the wrong way, at the end of last year, when he jettisoned possibly the team’s greatest asset: longtime TV broadcast color man Tommy Hutton. Firing the outspoken but always entertaining Hutton – whom I assume was too critical of the team on occasion for the owner’s taste – was like telling Santa Claus, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” All in all, though, as I look into my crystal ball I see a positive future for South Florida sports fans. So gloat while you can, New England sports fans, and remember that unarguable law of physics: Whatever goes up, chowder heads, must come down. P Of course, there was a time, pre-Brady and Bill Belichick, when New England wasn’t exactly the center of the sports world 44 MAY 2016
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