Perhaps no other stadium got more for its money than the Orange Bowl. Built for less than $400,000 as part of a City of Miami Public Works Department, this was one busy place for the first 50 years of its history. In addition to its known place as a football field, the Orange Bowl was a popular locale for everything from minor league baseball games to boxing matches to soccer to … Monster Jams?
Some of its popularity was due to Miami’s nice weather. (It certainly wasn’t the neighborhood.) Some of it was due to the fact the stadium was built to be flexible. But a lot of the Orange Bowl’s popularity had to do with something that cannot be proven on paper. Athletes simply liked to compete there. It seemed to bring out the best in them. It was the most intimate 70,000 plus seat stadium ever constructed. As a result, this stadium that didn’t look imposing was the scene of some of the most memorable moments in U.S. sports history.
When it was first constructed, the seating was restricted to the sidelines. In the 1940s, end zone seating was added and the stadium’s second tier was built in the late 1950s. (Soon after the Dolphins came to town in 1966, an upper end zone seating area was added. For a while, capacity was over 80,000.) For the first three decades after it was opened, it was mainly a college and high school venue. In 1946, the place was known as Burdine Stadium and it was the home for a team that played one disastrous season in the old All-American Football Conference. The Seahawks had two games postponed by hurricanes, ran up debts of nearly $100,000 and finished with a 3-11 won-loss mark. The locals were unimpressed. The largest reported crowd for a home game was 10,000. The team moved to Baltimore the next year and nobody seemed to miss them.
The stadium remained busy. In addition to the U of Miami games and high school affairs, it began to host the Orange Bowl game in 1938. (The first three Orange Bowls were played at Miami Field.) The early participants were not some of the bigger names in the college world (Bucknell, Catholic University and Duquesne won the first three Orange Bowl games). As time went on, the bigger schools liked the idea of spending the holidays in Miami and began to angle to play in the game.The game increased in popularity so much that in 1965 it became the first Bowl game to be played at night. The players, fans and, yes, the country liked spending New Year’s Night at a stadium that has palm trees swinging behind the end zone scoreboard.
When Miami joined the American Football League in 1966, there was little doubt where they would play their games. (The NFL was already using the place as a site for the Playoff Bowl, a game played between the second place teams in the league’s conferences, thus making it the rare stadium that was used by both leagues in the same year.)
Although it was the only major league franchise in town for several years, the new team was not an instant hit. 36,666 showed up for the team’s first preseason game in 1966 but attendance gradually fell as the season went on. Just 19,274 saw the season’s final game, a 29-28 win over Houston that improved the Fish’s record to 3-11.
The team struggled on and off the field and it wasn’t until Don Shula arrived on the scene in 1970 that the Dolphins’ first 50,000 attendance figure at the Orange Bowl occurred. (1970 was also the year the stadium underwent a major change, becoming one of the first outdoor football venues to install artificial turf.)
1972 was the highwater mark for the Dolphins and the Orange Bowl. The team ran off the only perfect season in NFL history and averaged 79,600 fans per home game. The team was almost always a contender and fans didn’t seem to notice nor care that the Orange Bowl was slowly becoming obsolete.
But the Dolphins and the NFL had noticed. The league played five of the first 13 Super Bowl games there but never returned after 1978. Although the city of Miami had made some changes (it went to Prescription Athletic Turf in 1976 and added some suites), the stadium had some serious limitations. And the team’s rent was going higher each year. In March 1984, owner Joe Robbie announced he had purchased some land in north Dade County and intended to build a multi-purpose stadium. Rumors regarding major league baseball putting a team in Miami had been out there for some time. Although some baseball games were played at the Orange Bowl (57,000 watched Satchel Paige pitch in a 1956 game), it could not be used on a regular basis by a team.
By the start of 1985, Robbie was ready to start work on Dolphin Stadium. By the end of the year, the money was in place and work started on the new stadium. On December 22, 1986, the Dolphins ended their two decades at the Orange Bowl with a loss to New England that cost the team the AFC East title. It was a rare home loss. Miami finished with an all-time regular season won-loss mark of 110-38-3 at the Orange Bowl, a .738 percentage.
Despite the loss of the Dolphins, the stadium soldiered on.There were concerts and assorted soccer games played there. But its regulars were slowly deserting. The Orange Bowl game moved to Dolphin Stadium in 1996. (In an ironic turn, the 1999 game had to go back to the Orange Bowl stadium because of a conflict with a Dolphin game.)
Damage caused by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 renewed concerns the old stadium had outlived its usefulness. The final knell for the Orange Bowl came when the University of Miami announced it was moving to Dolphin Stadium for the 2008 season. There had been some talk about placing a soccer team there but that fizzled. The old stadium had one last public showing in late January when a team of ex-Hurricanes met some ex-Dolphins in a flag football game before 15,000 spectators. The next month, a public auction of stadium memorabilia was held. The stadium was quietly torn in the spring. It has been proposed the new Marlins stadium will be erected on the site. As of now, funding has not been totally approved.
