2004 Football Reunion
May 4, 2004
by Tracy Gale
Coral Gables, Fla. (www.hurricanesports.com) – In the spring of 2003 Hurricane football alumni Gerard Daphnis, Tony Coley and Twan Russell were driving back together from teammate Booker Pickett’s wedding in Tampa. Reminiscing about the good times they shared as ‘Canes, the drive back to Miami became a sweet trip down memory lane instead of a monotonous five hours on I-75. Once home the guys agreed their mini-reunion was so much fun that they needed to make sure they got together again soon.
Daphnis, a Miami native and four-year letterman (1993-96) at tight end, decided to ensure their car trip reunion wasn’t in vain. A successful entrepreneur, Daphnis would see former players during the course of running his businesses and when he’d go to the occasional ‘Canes game at the Orange Bowl.
“Being local, I’d see guys in passing,” Daphnis says. “I’d run in to one and we’d be like, ‘hey let’s catch a game.’ A lot of the guys, for a variety of reasons, don’t want to take that first step back into the Hurricane fold. It’s hard for some former players to come around, to feel like they belong. Sometimes, though, it’s just a matter of having one of your boys-your brothers-to go with you to the OB. You don’t want to go it alone. Now that we’re older we have family responsibilities of course, and career responsibilities too; so sometimes it’s just a matter of priorities–you just don’t have time on Saturdays to go to a game, or catch up with former teammates. But if you have someone to go with then it pushes it up on the priority list.”
The week after the 2003 season’s big opening win against the Gators, Daphnis went to the football offices and met with Coach Coker.
“I told Coach I wanted to get guys involved, get some of them past any issues that might have kept them from coming back,” Daphnis remembers. “Coach and I talked for a while and he said, ‘as far as I’m concerned, everyone here is family.’ So I told him I would make a valid attempt to contact as many former players as possible, to get them to come back and let them know they are always welcome here, regardless of their status in life.”
And contact he did. Daphnis, with the help of Myrna Schneider, the long-time personal administrative assistant to Miami’s head football coaches, compiled an address and phone list of over 600 Hurricanes. Almost immediately after UM beat FSU for a second time to win the 2003 Orange Bowl, Gerard Daphnis was dialing phone numbers.
“As soon as Jeff [Merk, Director of Football Operations] set the spring football schedule I started calling,” Daphnis says. “Basically, my approach to contacting players was the ‘tag team’ approach. On my own I had the phone numbers for about 30 guys, teammates I kept in touch with. After I talked to them and told them the plans for the reunion weekend, I asked them to call the guys they knew. It snowballed from there.”
The 2004 football reunion started out with a low key plan: it was set for April 16-17 and provided the opportunity for alumni to attend the final spring practice and stay for a get-together on campus. It worked in years past and was on tap for this year as well. But Daphnis remembered the intensity of his feelings that day driving back from Tampa with the guys…and he didn’t want the player’s reunion to be without those family feelings. Daphnis focused his energies on making this year’s events something really extraordinary.
“Once I started calling former players from Myrna’s list, the response was overwhelming. I would call a player from the 1970s or the 1960s and he would be like, ‘I haven’t heard from anyone at the athletic department in 20 years.’ They were so touched. Some of the phone calls got really emotional. I realized how important that personal contact is, and how special it is for some of these guys to be remembered and thought of as still a part of the Hurricane family.”
Hundreds of phone calls later, Daphnis had so many responses that the reunion’s game plan needed to be changed. The players were originally going to get together on campus after the final practice ended, but once the RSVPs started piling up a new venue had to be found.
“A number of the players have catering businesses and restaurants,” Daphnis says. “To keep it fair we were going to hold the reunion at UM and order catering from the campus vendor, which is Chartwells. But then one of the players made the suggestion to Jeff [Merk] to have it at Bernie Kosar’s new restaurant, which is close to campus and full of UM football memorabilia. So we had a new venue.”
Kosar’s restaurant is called Bernie’s Steakhouse, and is located inside the Best Western Hotel in South Miami, just a long spiral pass from the Hecht Athletic Center. With each passing day the reunion got bigger and bigger, with more players coming from farther and farther away. The Best Western set up a special hotel deal for Hurricane alumni, and the football office helped by providing a special price on rental cars. It was decided that along with meeting Coker and the current ‘Canes after practice, there would be a full-on cocktail party and dinner at Bernie’s, all free of charge for the alumni. The Friday night event at Bernie’s was a players-only affair. Saturday was family day, with the players bringing their families to the Orange Bowl for the Athletic Department’s annual ‘CanesFest’.
To save his voice Gerard set up a special “Hurricane Alumni Hotline” phone number at his own expense, so guys could call in and get all of the facts about the reunion.
“I was saying the same things over and over, all day,” laughs Gerard, ” and there was so much information to give out…I needed to set up a special phone number so I could stop repeating myself!”
Myrna prepared the reunion weekend “All Access” passes, which alumni picked up prior to attending practice. The personal approach and all of the planning worked, because the 2004 football reunion weekend was a huge success. Daphnis said the events got off to a great start at practice.
“At the final spring practice all of the alumni mingled together. You’d turn around when you saw another alum come in. Guys were constantly arriving. First the guys all huddled by position–all of the tight ends got together, the O-Line huddled up, etc. Everyone was laughing and catching up. It was good to see the ‘old’ meeting the ‘new.’ Then Coach Coker came over and talked to us and pointed out former players to the current guys.”
Another familiar face came to practice: former head coach Jimmy Johnson. Johnson attended with former offensive line coach Tony Wise and friends who drove up with him from Islamorada.
The event at Bernie’s Steakhouse was set up around the outside bar, which overlooks the Best Western Hotel’s pool. Alumni who had to work or had later flights in and couldn’t make it out to spring practice met up with the rest of the players there. It was constant laughter and smiles as players who hadn’t seen each other in many years got reacquainted with their former roommates, line-mates and partners in the trenches. Long after the announced ending time of the event, Hurricane alumni were still ‘huddled up’, carrying on inside the hotel and catching up on each other’s lives. That special feeling that Daphnis, Coley and Russell had the year before while driving back to South Florida was realized: Hundreds of ‘Canes players had connected once again.
Players from five decades of Hurricane football attended the 2004 reunion weekend, including Larry Wilson (1959-61), a two-sport star and UM Sports Hall of Fame member, was thrilled to see old friends at practice. Wilson played tight end and defensive end for the Hurricanes. After playing pro baseball he returned to UM as the wide receivers coach from 1968-70.
“Bill Diamond was there. He was an offensive guard and middle guard. Bill and I go back to our days as members of the Archbishop Curley High School state champions! His older brother Charlie was out at practice too, and so was Tom Pratt, another great Hurricane football player from the 1950s. It was great also to see Bill Brickman again, who played center and linebacker when I played.”
Kenny Calhoun (1983-86), who batted away Cornhusker QB Turner Gil’s 2-point pass attempt to seal Miami’s first national championship win, says coming down to Miami is important to him.
“I got down for all of the home games last year except one,” Calhoun says. We had the 20-year reunion for the ’83 title last year so a lot of guys from that team came back. But I’ve never seen more guys from more eras at one event like there was this year. It was great to see [former UM running back and NFL great] Chuck Foreman there, along with the older guys. And seeing my teammates like Darrell Fullington and Daryl Oliver was great. Gerard did a bang-up job getting the message out to everyone and stressing how important it was to come back.”
Calhoun lives in Lakeland, Florida and is a detention sergeant with the Polk County Sheriff’s Department.
“It’s about a 3 ˝ to 4-hour drive for me to come down. I bring as many people to home games as I possibly can. Whether my son wants to come or I bring friends down with me, I always have people in the stands. I check in with Myrna each week. She is just the world’s greatest-wonderful to deal with and great to all of us former players.”
Another Hurricane who reconnected with teammates was former defensive back Dennis Scott, a member of Coach Dennis Erickson’s teams of the early 1990s.
“It felt good coming back and seeing some of the fellas again,” Scott says. It was great, especially from a business standpoint. There were guys talking about what they did for a living and finding out that they could help each other. There was some real networking going on.”
“Some guys have really changed,” laughs Scott. “There were guys who used to be really big but they’ve become really small. We joked about that-instead of some of them looking like offensive linemen they looked like basketball players!”
Asked why he had committed so much time and energy into making this year’s reunion into something really special, Daphnis, in a reflective mood, says connecting a player to his UM ‘home’ is the reason for it all.
“There are guys who, for a number of reasons, have left the Hurricane football family. Maybe they don’t feel like their football careers were complete, they got hurt, or there was a coaching change and in the upheaval their opportunities changed. Here we are right now, sitting and watching the NFL Draft and you know, it can be really hard for a former player to even watch this. It can be depressing if it didn’t happen for you. If football is over then it’s over, do you understand? But UM football is more than just football. It’s your family. Even though we know it, sometimes you need to hear that your family still loves you. Things can be rough in life at times but it’s like I said at the party at Bernie’s: we came to UM and we gave it our all. We didn’t have a chance like other students to join a college fraternity-Hurricane football is our fraternity. We are brothers, we are family and we always will be. I asked the guys to carry the feeling we were all having at that moment with them, and to make sure they let players know who didn’t attend how positive this experience was. I said, ‘let’s not get too far apart ever again.’ Whatever it takes, just get here next time-there’s no hidden agenda and no restrictions; your family wants to see you.”
In 1979 the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl and the Pittsburgh Pirates, on their way to winning the World Series that same year, adopted Sister Sledge’s song “We Are Family” as their theme. With all due respect to Terry Bradshaw, the Steel Curtain, Willie Stargell, Dave Parker and sports fans in the Iron City, that song and family feeling now resides with just one athletic program, located 1,170 miles south of the Monongahela: The University of Miami Hurricanes.
