McEnroe Plays at Bayfront, 1/20/84

In the days leading up to Super Bowl XVIII twenty-five years ago, some of the biggest names in sports came to the Tampa Bay area. One athlete in particular had nothing to do with football, but was more well-known than game participants Joe Theismann, John Riggins, or Marcus Allen combined.

Known just as much for his on-court temper tantrums as his serve-and-volley prowess, John McEnroe had no equal in all of tennis in terms of star power. McEnroe brought his larger-than-life personality to the Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg as part of the “Tennis over America” tour for a match against Guillermo Villas on the evening of January 20, 1984.

Although he only captured six singles titles in 1983 -- including one Grand Slam (Wimbledon) -- McEnroe stormed into 1984 with a major victory over one of his biggest rivals. Earlier in the week, McEnroe officially claimed the No. 1 ranking in men’s tennis with a 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 victory over Ivan Lendl in the final of the Volvo Masters championship at Madison Square Garden.

Vilas, in the meantime, spent the days prior to the event appealing his suspension by the Men’s International Professional Tennis Council. The first South American male to win a Grand Slam title (the 1977 French Open), Vilas was charged with accepting an illegal $60,000 guarantee to play a tournament in the Netherlands. The council slapped Vilas with a $20,000 fine and a one-year suspension from the tour.

Vilas lost his appeal as the council review board found him guilty of soliciting and accepting guarantee money to play in the tournament, a violation of rules which only allowed players to compete for prize money. The council lifted his suspension, however, citing a career of “exemplary” conduct as part of their decision.

The words “exemplary” and “conduct” were two words rarely used together in any sentence written about McEnroe. As he neared his 25th birthday, the star sometimes known as the “Super Brat” hoped to shed his rambunctious reputation.

“My 1984 resolution is to get away from that (controversy) a little bit,” McEnroe said. “I have a hot temper and I know it. It’s really pretty difficult to turn it off and on at will, but I’m trying.”

McEnroe seemed to try pretty hard to control his temper and concentrate on his tennis during the match against Vilas. The two players had participated in the on-and-off traveling show together since 1981 and had faced off in over 40 such events. The evening, after all, was just as much about putting on a show for the crowd nearly 5,500-strong than anything else. To that end, disco lights and a fog machine provided the special effects as McEnroe and Vilas took the court to the song “Eye of the Tiger.”

Perhaps in a relaxed mood early on in the match, McEnroe played to the crowd throughout the first set. Ever the showman, he mixed an assortment of pantomimes and facial expressions with feigned outrage at line calls that went against him.

After jumping out to an early 3-1 lead, Vilas rallied to take five of the next six games to capture the first set. As if realizing he needed to shift to another gear, McEnroe broke Vilas’s serve twice in the second set en route to winning the set 6-2.

The third set proved to be a repeat as McEnroe held serve and again broke a worn-down Vilas twice to capture the set and win the match 4-6, 6-2, 6-2.

The evening continued with a special celebrity doubles match with Tom Cousineau of the Cleveland Browns and, a slightly lesser known celebrity in Phil Scott, the manager of the Bayfront Center. Scott filled in at the last minute for Hugh Green of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

In the end, the crowd enjoyed the exhibition, got three quality sets from two of tennis’s best players, and saw McEnroe receive a wristwatch for winning the match.

After leaving St. Petersburg, McEnroe went on to have the most successful year of his career, compiling an 82-3 record. McEnroe won a career-high 13 singles titles in 1984, including Wimbledon and U.S. Open championships.

Towards the end of the year at a tournament in Stockholm, Sweden, McEnroe uttered the now infamous line directed at the chair umpire, “Answer my question, jerk!” before dramatically slamming his racket into a courtside juice cart. Despite an unprecedented run of success in 1984, alas, McEnroe could not keep his New Year’s resolution to shy away from controversy.

Suncoast Suns Burn Out, 12/19/73

In 1992, the Tampa Bay Lightning began their inaugural season of play in the National Hockey League. One might naturally assume that the Lightning were the pioneers of ice hockey in the Tampa Bay area. Incredibly, professional hockey was being played in St. Petersburg a full two decades earlier.

Long before the Lightning's founding father, Phil Esposito, ever imagined bringing hockey to Tampa Bay, the minor-league Suncoast Suns patrolled the ice of the Bayfront Center in downtown St. Pete. Founded in 1971, the Suns played in the Eastern Hockey League during the 1971-72 and 1972-73 seasons. The Bayfront Center, with its intimate environment and clubby post-game atmosphere, was the place to be seen, and even actor James Garner got involved in the action by purchasing a small share of the club.

In February 1973, the Suns, along with teams based in North Carolina and Virginia, voted to leave the EHL and form a new league, the Southern Hockey League. Neither the EHL nor the new Southern Hockey League would be considered anyone's idea of world-class hockey -- imagine the Paul Newman film "Slap Shot" to appreciate the "rough and tumble" product on the ice.

The team hoped to benefit from playing in the new league in several ways. Travel expenses, for one, would be reduced considerably without trips to the northeast. The league would also form a relationship with the burgeoning World Hockey Association, which would supply the SHL with some of their minor leaguers.

Ed Rood, a prominent Tampa attorney as well as the Suns secretary and treasurer, felt this arrangement would bolster the league's reputation.

"We're pleased about being able to join a league such as this," Rood said. "It will only help to make hockey more popular in the South, and here in the Bay area."

The Suns, with a sluggish 9-22 mark on the ice, were just two months into the 1973-74 campaign when things started to unravel for the franchise off the ice. Rood and other Tampa-based investors in the team, who hoped to lure the New Jersey Knights of the WHA to Tampa, began pulling their financial backing for the team. Hemorrhaging money, the team's remaining owners, led by Steve Kirby and Chuck Mackey, were forced to find someone willing to buy the franchise.

As the Suns prepared to host Roanoke for a two-game series, the deal that would have transferred ownership of the team fell through. On December 18, Suns general manager Paul Caron announced in a news conference that the Suns needed an economic bailout -- $30,000 by 9 p.m. the next night -- or would face having to cease operations.

"Raising $30,000 will allow us to sustain our operation an additional 30 days," Caron said. "This 30 days will allow us the necessary time to locate long-range investors."

The team called on the public to save the team, providing phone numbers for fans in Pinellas, Hillsborough and Pasco counties willing to lend a hand.

"We're calling our fund 'S.O.S.,' Caron said. "That's 'Save Our Suns.' "

Apparently, a 7-year-old girl even called to donate $2.50. It wasn't enough. The Suns were able to raise a little over $18,000, well short of the amount needed to sustain the franchise.

On December 19, 1973, the SHL announced the dissolution of the Suncoast Suns. T. David Lamm, executive secretary of the SHL, called the announcement "a tragic thing for hockey and for the West Coast of Florida." The SHL had its own financial mess and were in no position to take control of the franchise. The league, therefore, had no choice but to fold the team.

League president Norman Curtis blasted Suns fans, saying in a statement that the team's failure could be attributed "due to the lack of interest by fans in the St. Petersburg area in hockey, at least in a non-contending (hockey) team."

Curtis wasn't entirely wrong in his assessment. Support for the Suns waned considerably during the season. The team struggled to win games, and often looked bad trying. Fans were bitter that crowd favorites from prior seasons, such as Cliff Pennington, Andre Lajeunesse and Marty Desmarais, were not brought back. Attendance at the Bayfront Center dipped below 1,000 for the last eight home games leading up to the team's death knell.

Lamm believed, however, there was plenty of local support given that the team managed to solicit more than $18,000 in a day's time.

"It shows that there is interest in the area," Lamm said. "I'm sorry the Suns couldn't have been a contender. It might have been different."

Tampa Tribune columnist Tom McEwen accurately predicted in his postmortem on the Suns that hockey would someday return to the Bay area - bigger and better than ever.

"The hockey playing Suns were a little before their time in our place," McEwen wrote. "In time, they'll be regarded and recorded as the pioneer hockey team in an area, that when that chronicle is written, will again have its own, prosperous, major league hockey team."

It took almost 20 years for hockey to return, but return the sport did. Now 35 years since the demise of the Suns, the area can claim its own prosperous - though presently victory-challenged - NHL team in the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Traveling Through Time, 9/26/83

This week, we travel back in time 25 years to September 26, 1983, to try and warn the people of Pinellas County about the folly of building a stadium in St. Petersburg …

Greetings,
I am from the year 2008 and you should heed what I say. Where I come from, Vice President Bush’s oldest son has been president for the last seven years, gasoline hovers near $4 a gallon, and football no longer comes to mind when someone mentions O.J. Simpson. Ignore my warnings at your own peril!

I would like to take this unique time-traveling opportunity to ask -- or if that is not a strong enough sentiment -- beg you not to build a baseball stadium in St. Petersburg. There’s a misguided belief in your time that by one-upping Tampa, you’ll somehow gain an edge in the quest to land a Major League Baseball franchise. Please think again.

In years to come, teams such as the Rangers, Twins, Mariners, White Sox and Giants will all tease you with the allure of relocating to St. Petersburg as leverage to get new stadiums or favorable leases back in their own cities. You will be told outright by the commissioner and various owners not to build a stadium, but you will ignore their warnings. Fools! The financial consequences will be felt for decades to come by the citizens of your county.

Expansion won’t even come around until 1991, and at that point, Miami and Denver will be the cities to land teams. Denver’s team will play in Mile High Stadium until their state-of-the-art stadium is built. Miami’s team will be forced to play in an unpopular, multi-purpose stadium more suitable for football. Around here, our version will be in St. Pete and it will be called Tropicana Field.

The coming years will see the end of multi-purpose stadiums and a renaissance of “retro stadiums” that incorporate elements of classic ballparks with modern amenities. Your barbaric, traditional domed stadiums are a thing of the past as well. Twenty-five years in the future, stadiums will be built with retractable roofs that can open and close in a matter of minutes. The dome you hope to build will be like Chevy Chase and the VCR: obsolete by the end of the century.

What’s that, you say? This area's hunger for baseball will triumph over any odds? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it seems the hunger you speak of was highly overrated. It turns out that what this area loves is Spring Training, and that most of the transplants from the Northeast and Midwest will be unwilling to support the local team.

The group trying to attract an expansion franchise to the Tampa Bay area will tout a season-ticket waiting list of over 27,000 people. The majority of games, however, attract only half that number.

Reasons for refusing to attend games are numerous. The drive is too far. The economy stinks. This thing we call global warming. If excuses were wins, this area would be the equivalent of the 1927 Yankees.

The bottom line is that you should never build the stadium where you do. Don’t get me wrong, downtown St. Petersburg will be on the upswing for years and put downtown Tampa to shame. The problem, however, is that the location of the stadium will not be easily accessible to the majority of people in the greater Tampa Bay area.

Sprawl will cause this community to grow in leaps and bounds that should have been predicted in your day. The lack of mass transit in this area, coupled with congested roads, will make the prospect of driving to St. Pete in rush-hour traffic less appealing than a striking air traffic controller to Ronald Reagan. Sorry, too soon?

In the year 2008, all of the excuses will be stripped. We finally will have a winner – a playoff team -- that makes us all proud. This season will be the greatest in team history. Just one year after finishing with the worst record in baseball, our team will be on pace to finish with at least 30 more wins. Still, attendance has lagged during the playoff run and we will be mocked by the rest of America. It has never been more obvious that baseball will never succeed in St. Petersburg, no matter how well the team plays on the field.

It is very possible that the Tampa Bay area can support baseball, given a stadium in a central location accessible to all the people of Polk, Pasco, Manatee, Sarasota, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties. Because of your decisions, however, the chance of that happening, or of baseball having long-term viability in this market, will dwindle faster than Gary Hart’s presidential prospects. Trust me on that one, you’ll see.

As I bid you farewell, I ask that you do what’s right. Forget about baseball and worry about the more pressing issues of the day. Leave the quest for a Major League franchise to the people of Tampa. They’ll figure it out and probably get it right, too. Oh, and one more thing. In a few months, a boy with a golden arm named Scott Kazmir will be born in Houston, Texas. On behalf of the Tampa Bay area, please send his mother and father our most sincere thanks.

Forgotten Bay Area Stadiums, 1/26/83

The Tampa Bay Rays’ plans to build a new, $450 million stadium in downtown St. Petersburg should come as no surprise to longtime residents of the area.

Designing baseball stadiums and then debating suitable locations for them is as much a local pastime as the game itself. Only twenty-five years ago this month, rival groups representing Pinellas and Hillsborough counties pitched their designs for stadiums that would serve as home for a to-be-determined team.

On January 26, 1983, the city of St. Petersburg and the Pinellas Sports Authority held a symbolic groundbreaking ceremony at the corner of 16th Street and Third Avenue South. The 66-acre site, known as the Gas Plant, eventually would be developed into Tropicana Field. But on that day, the PSA announced the facility would be called Pinellas Suncoast Stadium. An artist’s design of that stadium evokes the current model being trumpeted by Rays management.

Bill Bunker, executive director of the PSA, touted the stadium’s tent-like covering as being more economical than a traditional dome. And much like the current plan that features a lightweight synthetic polymer sail, it would protect fans from the rain but not the heat.

Earlier that week in 1983, the Tampa Bay Baseball Group unveiled their design for a 46,000-seat stadium on the site of Al Lopez Field next to Tampa Stadium. Like the stadium design on the other side of the Bay, the Baseball Group also envisioned a fabric-covered – but not domed – stadium.

Within six months, however, both groups would alter their plans and opt for covered stadiums. The Baseball Group’s design called for a Teflon roof that would reflect solar heat while relying on open sides for ventilation. The Pinellas group opted for a fully-covered, air-conditioned facility. The debate currently going on in St. Petersburg over open-air versus domed stadiums is clearly nothing new.

So while concepts that were quickly discarded two decades ago are being recycled today, we should fully expect to see the Rays’ current plans in another 25 years – much like the stadium plans of January 1983 – located on the scrap heap of history.