Taking in Miami and Orlando was just the right thing to do. It would not have been fair to choose between two equal Florida applicants.”
Those words, spoken by National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern at a Manhattan press conference last April, seemed innocuous enough. Wasn`t Stern simply explaining why the NBA had decided to expand by four teams rather than the three it had initially planned, creating new professional basketball teams in Miami and Charlotte, N.C., in 1988 and Orlando and Minneapolis in 1989?
Well, yes, he was doing that-plus a lot more. He was also performing at least two gigantic services for the State of Florida: At once, Stern heralded the prospect of an intrastate Miami-Orlando basketball rivalry nearly certain to draw large crowds while, in the same breath, he defused-at least, temporarily-a volatile and escalating offcourt rivalry between those same two metropolitan areas.
It was fitting that the NBA commissioner conciliated here by swaddling both cities in the adjective ”equal” because it was the NBA`s initial intent to choose one city over the other that brought their latent dislike for each other into open hostility-Sneaker Wars, if you will-in the first place.
Competition can be healthy. There are 17 separate tourism councils each promoting its little piece of Florida, and state Secretary of Commerce Jeb Bush, son of Vice President George Bush, says that is ”fine and good, and compatible with what we`re trying to do” via a statewide tourist commission. He downplays the Orlando-Miami rivalry by saying, ”I`d rather have them competing than nothing happening at all.”
This competition has gnarled and ugly roots, however, grabbing deep into Florida`s history as an American resort paradise and its substrata of escalating crime, drug problems and assorted headaches from population growth and Latin American immigration.
This competition has strayed into unhealthy tactics. As Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen put it, ”Everybody in both cities knows we`ve been bad-mouthing each other, especially when we were fighting for a pro basketball team. They were talking about Miami`s crime and Hispanics, and we were talking about their redneck backwater town.” Orlando`s Mayor Bill Frederick opened an old wound by noting that Miami`s basketball arena is being built close to where blacks once rioted. One of Orlando`s basketball entrepreneurs accuses a Miami counterpart of calling Orlando a ”second-rate” city. Miamians are upset that a top-ranking Chamber of Commerce executive in Orlando described his city as heaven and Miami as hell. An official of Orlando`s Citrus Bowl charges that Miamians influenced the University of Miami football team, involved in the nation`s top New Year`s Day bowl matchup last year, not to play that game in Orlando. Some locals recall, and Mayor Frederick denies, that he derided Miami years ago as home to ”drug-crazed Cuban refugees,” a volatile mix of two sensitive subjects. Although none will say it publicly, many in both image-conscious cities say privately that Orlando is thriving on being more and more perceived as ”Anglo,” clearly a euphemism for white non- Hispanic, while Miami is more and more burdened with a ”foreign” image, meaning Hispanic and, to a lesser extent, black.
Even the normally sanguine Jeb Bush-a Miamian who now labors in the state capital, Tallahassee, far from both squabbling cities-becomes irked at the mention of the latter phenomenon.
”Yes, I`ve heard the talk about Anglicized Orlando and Hispanic Miami,” says Bush, who speaks fluent Spanish and whose wife, Columba, is a Mexican native. ”I`m always troubled when ethnicity gets involved in boosterism. People are speaking garbage when they do that.
”You hear these kinds of things typically from people outside the tourist industry. Even the most competitive tourist councils wouldn`t do that to one another.”
Miami versus Orlando. It will be two years before players don uniforms and sneakers and take the floor as the rival Orlando Magic and Miami Heat pro basketball teams. But long before then, prospective fans on both sides know the elements of competition are firmly in place in the two cities-veteran tourist-haven Miami, pastel port of cruise lines, luxury hotels and beaches, versus upstart vacation-destination Orlando, mecca of Mickey Mouse and a
”kingdom” that includes EPCOT Center, the Magic Kingdom and Sea World, Florida`s three top tourist attractions.
Florida has always been part of the American Dream, part of our daydream of sunny vacations or our sweet reverie of winter-free retirement.
For most of this century, Florida dreaming has been synonymous with Miami and Miami Beach. ”Long before Orlando, Miami lured tourists with its beaches. People came, visited, played in the sun, and then many retired there and told their friends how great it was,” explains Professor Abe Pizam, who teaches courses in a hospitality-tourism curriculum at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. ”Miami and Miami Beach became a paradise for retired Americans and their friends. Then it became a banking center and foreign-visitors center-most everything on the upswing except, unfortunately, a growing reputation as the narcotic-drug center of America.
”Throughout those years, until the early 1970s, Orlando was basically a cow town.”
Actually, it began as a cow town named Jernigan, for pioneer settler Aaron Jernigan, who arrived with his family and 700 head of cattle in 1843. Orlando grew from a railroad shipping center for neighboring citrus and vegetable growers into a respectable business community, far from the beaches and the crowds of tourists.
That all changed Oct. 1, 1971, when a human-sized Mickey Mouse led the first official visitor through a turnstile into the Magic Kingdom, Phase 1 of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) envisioned by Walt Disney. A subsequent phase, EPCOT Center, opened on Oct. 1, 1982.
Realized five years after Disney`s death, his American dream has been nibbling at Miami`s cheese ever since.
”With Disney World and, subsequently, Sea World and EPCOT Center and a host of other attractions, Orlando grew as a center for family vacations,”
Pizam relates. ”Meanwhile, Miami began having big-city problems-blacks rioting, the Mariel boatlift. People began saying things like, `If you go to Miami, you need a visa.` With that kind of talk and grisly reports and rumors about drug-related crime, negative words about Miami began spreading. All the while, Orlando kept adding attractions.
”Florida`s tourism image changed from Miami, the land of the three S`s-sea, sun and sand-to Orlando, the land of the three A`s-attractions, attractions, attractions.”
As recently as 1977, the Miami area of Dade and Broward Counties drew some 4.2 million tourists, 1.2 million more than the Orlando area of Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties. But by 1986 the most recent statistics of the state Division of Tourism show that the Orlando area had fully erased that gap, drawing 8.7 million tourists, compared with the Miami area`s 7.9 million. Viewed from the perspective of the international accounting, business and real estate consulting firm Laventhol & Horwath, only two American cities have more hotel space than Orlando. With 62,000 hotel rooms, Orlando has only 2,000 fewer than New York City and 1,000 fewer than Los Angeles. It has 13,000 more hotel rooms than convention-rich Chicago. And Miami-Miami Beach, despite the new downtown Omni, Marriott and Holiday Inn entries and the legendary strip of beachfront giants like the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc, has 19,000 fewer hotel rooms than Orlando.
The Florida tourism division`s list of the state`s top 10 attractions in 1986 included only one from Miami-Seaquarium, in 10th place.
Walt Disney World, including EPCOT Center, with 22.4 million visitors in 1986, is No. 1 on the most recent list of the nation`s top 40 amusement parks, as compiled by the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. Sea World, with 4 million visitors, is in third place, behind Anaheim, Calif., Disneyland`s 12 million. Busch Gardens places eighth, with 2.87 million, edging out a handful of attractions including Illinois` only entry, Six Flags Great America in north suburban Gurnee, with 2.7 million. Cypress Gardens is in the top 40. No Miami attraction is on the list.
Orlando`s gains on Miami have not been limited to tourism. The Miami area`s moviemaking ambitions-symbolized by Hollywood, Fla., founder Joseph Young`s ill-fated plan to create an East Coast version of Hollywood, Calif.-never materialized. Now that the industry has reached Florida, ”Orlando is taking the moviemaking business,” says Hank Fishkind, chief economist with M.G. Lewis Econometrics investment banking firm in Winter Park, Fla. He cites MGM-Disney and Universal opening movie-TV studios in Orlando within two years. Although Miami`s 1.78 million population and 1 million jobs are twice those of Orlando`s, the latter has grown twice as fast in population and three times as fast in jobs since 1970, according to the National Planning Association, a nonprofit research group. Further, association Vice President Nester Terleckyj projects that Orlando will experience an 82 percent job growth between 1985 and 2010, the largest growth rate of any major U.S. metropolitan area.
But talk about population and jobs in these two cities frequently goes beyond numbers. It gets into race and ethnicity, as in the oft-spoken slur,
”Will the last American out of Miami please bring the flag?” The commonly held notion that whites are fleeing Miami as its black and Hispanic population grows is more than myth.
”White flight became a reality after 1980, when Miami suffered an incredible one-two-three punch-race riots, the Mariel boatlift and the onset of a worldwide recession that hit particularly hard here because of the city`s interdependence with the economies of Latin American countries,” says planner Oliver Kerr of the Metro Dade Planning Department.
Using Internal Revenue Service figures and local school board and election commission records, county planners find that Dade County underwent a ”remarkable decline in white population” from 1980 to 1985, Kerr says.
Qualifying that those figures are ”reasonable but not exact,” he says they show that Dade County`s white population decreased by 115,000 during those five years at the same time that its total population increased by 145,000.
The county`s ethnic ratio virtually reversed during that period. Its 1.63 million population in 1980 was 48 percent white, non-Hispanic and 35 percent Hispanic, Kerr says, while its 1.77 million population in 1985 was 43 percent Hispanic and 37 percent non-Hispanic whites.
There was also a third category for blacks, and Kerr notes that some 26,000 residents were listed in 1985 both as Hispanics and blacks. Even if they are excluded, however, Dade`s 341,000 black population in 1985 was up 61,000 from 1980. A significant factor was the gradual flow into Miami of some 35,000 Haitians of French Creole background, Kerr says.
Looking to the future, he says both the influx of Latin Americans and the exit of whites should slow. Projecting to 1990, the planning department estimates Dade County will have a population of 1.88 million, of which 854,000, or 45 percent, will be Hispanic; 658,000, or 35 percent, will be white; and 395,000, or 21 percent, will be black.
”We feel the white-flight phenomenon is over. Whites who were planning to leave have done so. The rest are either stuck here, or they kind of like it here,” Kerr says.
It is, of course, not that simple. People of all races and national origins move into and out of Miami, Miami Beach and Dade County every day, and Kerr explains how Miami`s ethnic mix can remain static numerically while such human dynamics are occurring: ”This community is changing from a retirement and resort community to a business and international exchange center. Economic growth in areas like banking, insurance, import-export and shipping brings younger whites here for jobs, while elderly whites are retiring to counties like Broward, Pinellas and Palm Beach that are more affordable or are perceived as being safer places to live.” In one of its studies, the Metro Dade Planning Department found that the number of Social Security recipients age 65 or over in Miami Beach dropped from 49,200 in 1980 to 38,700 in 1984.
Although Miami`s ethnic makeup may hold steady, stereotypes about it are changing, insists Tony Villamil, who came here from Cuba with his family in 1960, when he was 13. ”The myth that Hispanics here don`t speak English is not true,” he says. ”There are more and more Miamians from Latin American families who have had multicultural orientation in the U.S. for all or most of their lives. They are proud of their ethnic heritage, but they are proud to be Americans, and they have assimilated into American society.”
At age 40, Villamil speaks from personal experience. His 27 years in the U.S. include a college education at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and employment as an economist with the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago, Crocker National Bank in San Francisco and Southeast Florida`s largest bank, Southeast Bank in Miami, where he is now senior vice president and chief economist.
Now that Miami and Orlando have been awarded NBA franchises, it is easy for both cities` boosters to speak benignly of one another. But when it appeared that one city would get a major sports team at the other`s expense, acrimony abounded. And the Sneaker Wars were laced at times with the kind of stereotyping that Bush and Villamil decry and most would now like to pretend never happened.
”There is an intense rivalry built in here way before basketball. You can feel it,” says Pat Williams, vice president-general manager of the Orlando Magic. Coming here last year after 12 years as general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers pro basketball team, Williams is a newcomer to the Florida fray. But he has learned the jargon:
”For many years, Miami was Florida. Miami had an elevated, lofty position from which it could look down on the rest of the state as a land of swamps, alligators and snakes.”
With Walt Disney changing the face of Florida ”so that nobody has to go past central Florida anymore to vacation,” and with ”an influx of Cubans into Miami making it and Orlando two different worlds,” Williams assesses,
”tension grew between the two areas. It mostly smoldered . . . until basketball became the spark that touched it off.”
Last April 2, when an NBA Expansion Committee made a progress report after a year of deliberation, recommending Charlotte, Minneapolis and a third city, either Miami or Orlando-saying it would announce its decision by October-Williams recalls, ”the tainted peace between the two cities revved into open warfare.”
Although no one is certain who uttered the first insult, both sides agree that the derogatory ”shot heard `round the state” was fired by Frank Kruppenbacher, outgoing president of the Greater Orlando Chamber of Commerce, on the very afternoon of the NBA committee`s progress report.
”Anybody that thinks about putting an NBA franchise in Miami ought to have their head examined,” Kruppenbacher said that day. ”While Miami might be a larger city, Orlando`s got far more style and class.”
Then came his zinger, the quote that got everyone`s attention: ”It`s the difference between heaven and hell.”
”No, I don`t regret saying that,” Kruppenbacher insists in retrospect, contending that his words were a catalyst for positive action. ”I think somebody had to push the NBA, throw down the gauntlet, make headlines, get those basketball people to say, `My God, we really have something going down there.` It ended well for both cities.”
Despite his sunny assessment, some in Miami remain offended and cite his words as a prime example of Orlando`s ”Miami-bashing” to impress the NBA.
”Kruppenbacher talked about style and class but showed he doesn`t have either,” says Miami Herald sportswriter Bob Rubin. ”Miami is, despite its problems, a world-class city. Orlando isn`t and never will be. Some here know it as Bore-lando. It suffers from classic Second City syndrome, envy of Miami.”
It is just the other way around, Kruppenbacher says. ”They`re jealous in Miami that our tourism is so incredible. They have problems we can hardly contemplate.”
After insisting he would never ”raise the racial issue because that would be in bad taste, offensive,” he goes on to say, ”We don`t feel the effects of the Cuban boatlift, which the U.S. allowed but didn`t provide Miami funding to handle. We don`t have the volume of crime, drugs or traffic Miami does. We have more of an upbeat, small-town atmosphere.”
He admits his perception benefits from a very pleasant personal situation. He lives in Orlando`s downtown Lake Davis neighborhood, less than a mile from his law office. ”Even in rush hour, I can leave the office at 6:24 p.m. and be home by 6:30 p.m.,” he says. ”I know few people have it that good.”
Pat Williams concedes that ”what`s thrown in my face most often as us badmouthing them is Kruppenbacher`s `Orlando is heaven, Miami is hell`
quote.” Yet Williams says as far back as a year earlier, mud was flung in the other direction.
He recalls when NBA owners went to Phoenix on April 21, 1986, to discuss expansion; it was then and there, he says, that a member of the Miami Heat`s top brass stated that he couldn`t fathom the NBA not picking Miami over Orlando, ”which he called a `second-rate city.` ”
On Miami`s side of the fence, Heat general manager Billy Cunningham says, ”I don`t remember anybody from here bad-mouthing Orlando. We`ve tried to be very diplomatic.” Rather, he recalls Orlando barbs against Miami, including one from Williams, his former associate with the 76ers. Cunningham was a player and coach with the 76ers during Williams` stint as general manager. After Williams reportedly made disparaging remarks about Miami last summer, Cunningham says, ”I called him and told him there was so much work to be done by both cities to get a pro basketball franchise that it wasn`t helping anybody to be throwing rocks at one another.”
For his part, Williams remembers catching flak from a Florida press conference he held even before he had officially moved down from Philadelphia: ”I was asked by a TV reporter from Miami, `If you were the NBA, why would you pick Orlando over Miami?` I answered by extolling the upbeat attitude of Orlando, its rapid growth, good people-pretty harmless stuff. The last thing I said was, `And we all know the problems Miami has.`
”I thought I had been pretty diplomatic. But headlines in the Miami papers the next day read something like `Williams Mocks Miami.`
