The Miami Floridians

One day, during the fall of 1968, I picked up the newspaper and saw a funny cartoon drawing of a man dressed up like a stereotypical Florida tourist with sunglasses, dribbling a basketball with a big grin on his face. It was the announcement that, yes, the Miami Floridians had come to town! In the American Basketball Association’s inaugural season, 1967-68, they were originally the Minnesota Muskies and did rather well on the court (50-28) and rather poorly with their attendance. The Muskies had hired for their coach the old Minneapolis Lakers star Jim Pollard, and had assembled an impressive lineup, headed by Mel Daniels and Donnie Freeman, to represent their entry in the ABA’s bid to compete against the National Basketball Association on a major league level. The ABA became noted for its innovations, such as the three-point shot (not yet allowed in the NBA) and its red, white, and blue basketball. In spite of this, I was completely oblivious to the existence of the ABA during its first season; actually, come to think of it, I really wasn’t aware then of the NBA, either!

The Muskies’ owner decided, after one season, to pack up his team and send them down to Miami. Why they picked such a ridiculous name as “Floridians” is beyond me (can you imagine calling a team the New York New Yorkers? Wait a minute, the NFL has the Houston Texans!). But that’s what we were stuck with. I suppose that if enough people in South Florida had risen up in objection to it, it might have been changed. But there were very few down there who even knew of the Floridians’ existence, much less cared about them. I started following the Miami Floridians in the 1968-69 season almost from its beginning, which was a slow start for the team. They had dealt away Daniels to the Indiana Pacers, one of the four franchises that would survive to finally become part of the NBA. I was just fiddling around on my AM radio one evening and tuned in to 1450-WOCN in Miami, a weak 250-watt station usually devoted to playing “elevator” music full-time. But that night it was doing play-by-play of Miami’s game against Connie Hawkins and the Minnesota Pipers. The Pipers, it seemed, weren’t too happy with their location the previous year in Pittsburgh, so they moved right in to Minnesota as soon as the Muskies cleared out. But that didn’t work out either and they eventually moved back to Pittsburgh as the Condors. The Pipers started the season hot, just as they had ended the first season, and beat the Floridians that night. As the season wore on, I became more aware of Miami’s stars: Donnie Freeman, Skip Thoren, Les “Big Game” Hunter, Don Sidle, and Willie Murrell. And Coach Pollard, of course. It was hard sometimes to find articles about Miami’s game the previous day in its own hometown paper. They tended to be buried away in small spaces deep in the Sports section. The Floridians continued their slow start until they fell into a deep slump and found themselves in last place at 9-17. Then, seemingly out of the blue, they caught fire and went on a 23-8 run, finding themselves in first place at 32-25. The remainder of the season saw both ups and downs. The Miami Floridians finished second in their division (behind Indiana) with 43 wins and 35 losses, a standard they would never remotely approach for the rest of the franchise’s short existence. Miami beat the slumping Pipers in the first playoff round, but were creamed by Indiana, who went on to lose to Rick Barry’s Oakland Oaks (who moved to Washington, D.C. the next season) for the league’s championship. The next year, the Miami Floridians were promoted heavily in the local press, broadcast their games on powerful 50,000 watt 710-WGBS, and fell flat on their faces, finishing dead, dead last in the league. Coach Pollard was fired early that season and then hired to coach basketball at a small Ft. Lauderdale college. A few years later, in 1974, I began my first term at Broward Community College. To help fulfill my physical education requirements there, I took a conditioning class, knowing that I’d be doing a lot of running in it (I was heavily into running at the time). Guess who my instructor was in this class? Coach Pollard!

For the 1970-71 season, the ownership of the Floridians decided to fire the whole team and bring in players from other teams. Mack Calvin and Larry Jones made them more competitive than the previous year, but they never again had a winning season. Fan apathy in Miami, coupled with the lack of a decent place to play, gave impetus to the “next big thing”: the Floridians would play some of their home games in Tampa and elsewhere; henceforth the franchise would drop “Miami” and only be known as “The Floridians”! The only change in fan apathy that I noticed was my own increasing apathy toward them. The fact that none of their games were televised didn’t help, either.

So, my hometown franchise did not survive the ABA merger with the NBA. Only four franchises made it: the New Jersey Nets (formerly the New York Nets, formerly the New Jersey Americans), the San Antonio Spurs (formerly the Dallas Chaparrals), the Denver Nuggets (formerly the Denver Rockets), and the Indiana Pacers. I was glad to see these teams make it, but I was also saddened to see the Kentucky Colonels, a franchise with a history of exciting, winning basketball which had great fan support, relegated to a fond memory. They would have been my first choice for an ABA franchise to be assimilated into the NBA. This on top of the fact that they gave themselves a great nickname!

Nowadays, things in Miami have changed. The NBA’s Miami Heat has an adequate place to play in as well as decent media coverage and fan interest. But I moved away from that area many years before that franchise began and feel no loyalty at all to it. You would think that I’d be a big Orlando Magic fan because that’s the closest NBA city to Gainesville. But instead of that, in the last couple of years, I’ve become a fan of the Phoenix Suns with their exciting brand of offense under players like Steve Nash, Amare Stoudemire, and Shawn Marion. I don’t know whether they’ll win a championship anytime soon, but they are fun to watch! Alas, if only the Colonels had made it into the NBA instead of those obnoxious Spurs (who keep beating my Suns) …