Читать книгу FINS AT 50 - Greg Cote - Страница 8

7

tickets. He’d been a carpenter at the old and long-since demolished Everglades Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard, where the newborn Dolphins had held their “touchdown club” rallies to drum up interest. We didn’t lack for elbowroom that evening. They said later the crowd numbered 26,776 curiosity seekers, filling only about one-third of the stadium despite the newborn team’s papering the town with free tickets. In that respect only, it proved an inauspicious debut.

Everything else was magical.

It didn’t matter that the expansion Dolphins would lose the game, as expected. The franchise known for the Perfect Season was about to experience the Perfect Start.

The kickoff fell to Joe Auer. You pronounced his last name “our,” and fittingly so. He was from nearby Coral Gables High. He caught the ball at the five-yard line and didn’t stop until 95 yards later. You wouldn’t dare write such a thing in a script. Too corny. But it happened. A local kid, a hometown hero, returned the opening kickoff of the opening game for a touchdown.

I remember my father and I standing, cheering and then hugging. (The high-five and fist-bump hadn’t been invented yet.) Half a century later that memory is kept like a family heirloom. Doesn’t sports hold that power over us? It was the first time in pro football history a franchise had been christened with a touchdown on the first play of its first regulation game.

Everybody was watching Auer, of course, but if you were looking at the Dolphins sideline you saw the oddest sight. Sprinting the length of the field along with Auer, raised arms flailing, was Amos Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz, a Lebanese entertainer better known as Danny Thomas, then a

major American television personality and one of the Dolphins’ original part owners.

As Auer crossed the goal line and a huffing television star followed, a live dolphin rose majestically in acrobatic leaps from a large tank in the open east end zone. “Flipper” was the team’s mascot from 1966 to ’68, trained to perform whenever the Dolphins scored. (The mammal actually was a female dolphin named Patty who was transported from the Miami Seaquarium to the Orange Bowl for every home game).

And so, with a hometown hero scoring, a famous TV comedian sprinting, and a dolphin flipping in midair for an exclamation point, the Miami Dolphins were born.

The city had had pro football before, though fleetingly, and now a nearly forgotten footnote. The Miami Seahawks played in 1946 at Burdine Stadium (not yet called the Orange Bowl) in the inaugural year of the All-America Football Conference, but that team folded after one season, and the league did three years later.

Two decades later Miami’s entry into the American Football League was bigger, much, because a merger with the NFL was coming. It was approved soon after the Dolphins’ first game, and would happen in 1970.

The seed that became Miami’s flagship sports franchise had been planted in early 1965 because Joe Foss, then the AFL commissioner, happened to be a close friend of Joseph Robbie, a Minneapolis lawyer. They’d met a decade earlier in South Dakota political circles.

Foss confided that the AFL (with the encouragement of the NFL) wished to expand to the South, including Miami, and suggested his old friend apply for the franchise. Imagine the serendipity of it: The