Miami Magazine: "Playing for JFK"
In the wake of an inconceivable national tragedy, bitter rivals Miami and Florida take to the Orange Bowl gridiron for one unforgettable game.
By Gaspar Gonzalez
Miami Magazine (Summer 2013)
Artwork by Scott Fricker
George Mira, star quarterback for the University of Miami, was in his dorm room listening to the radio when he heard the news. His teammate Pat Ratesic was walking across campus. In a trainer’s room in Gainesville, 350 miles away, Hagood Clarke was getting his bum ankle taped.
It was Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963. John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, had been killed in Dallas. “A girl came running up to me and told me,” remembers Ratesic, B.Ed. ’65. “I couldn’t believe it; I thought it was a joke.”
It wasn’t, of course. As the afternoon wore on, the terrible details unfolded. Kennedy was dead. A worker at the Texas School Book Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been identified as the suspected shooter and arrested. Lyndon Johnson was the new president.
The future had been altered, but there was still the matter of the future as it had been imagined up to that moment, including a full slate of college football games the next day. November 23, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, was rivalry day, with marquee games like Oklahoma vs. Nebraska, Penn State vs. Pitt, UCLA vs. USC—and UM vs. the University of Florida Gators.
“That was the game every year,” says Mira, ’66, speaking from his South Miami-Dade home. Nick Spinelli, B.Ed. ’65, a receiver on the 1963 team, notes, “You started talking about playing that game Day One—and you kept talking about it.”
The Hurricanes had one assistant coach who made sure of that: “Walt Kichefski,” says Spinelli. “It didn’t matter who we were playing. He’d be walking the sidelines every game, talking about beating ‘The Gator.’”
In 1962 the ’Canes had finished 7-4 and Mira, the Key West native known as “The Matador” for his Spanish lineage and gutsy play, had finished fifth in the Heisman Trophy balloting. As a result, Head Coach Andy Gustafson’s ’Canes were expected to do big things in 1963. Instead, they were limping toward their scheduled matchup with Florida with a 3-4 record. That would only make beating The Gator that much sweeter.
If the game happened at all.
“Everything was in chaos,” recalls Mira, “the whole University—the whole country.” That afternoon, dozens of colleges (and most professional sports leagues) announced they would postpone or cancel their weekend games.
Some, notably Oklahoma and Nebraska, said they would play. The National Collegiate Athletic Association told member schools the decision would be left to them.
In Miami there was “a lot of talk about not playing,” says Mira. Miami Mayor Robert King High’s office fielded hundreds of calls demanding the game be canceled out of respect to Kennedy’s memory. UM President Henry King Stanford initially agreed to play the game and then nearly changed his mind at the last minute (under pressure, it was said, from the mayor).
In the end, it was decided the game would go on—as a tribute to Kennedy, who had addressed the Bay of Pigs Veterans at the Orange Bowl in 1962 and attended the New Year’s Day game there in 1963.
“They felt the president would want it that way,” says Mira. “And he probably would have.” He pauses. “It was tough.”
Friday night, as was the custom then, the ’Canes checked into a hotel across the street from campus, “just so no one would go and get themselves in trouble the night before the game,” explains Mira.
The hotel, though, provided no escape from the tragedy in Dallas. “We were in our rooms, watching TV, worried about what might happen to the country,” recounts Ratesic, a retired high school principal. “That’s when our line coach [Ed Kensler] came by and said, ‘Listen, this guy Johnson is going to take over, and he’s a good guy.’”
Clarke, a former running back for the Gators, remembers his team flying down to Miami aboard a DC-6 that night, talking about what had happened and, like many, wondering why. Clarke had actually had a brief encounter with Kennedy at the New Year’s Day 1963 Orange Bowl. Clarke, there to watch Alabama and Oklahoma play, walked over to a refreshment stand near a side entrance. “All of a sudden,” he says, “a limousine pulls up, and it’s President Kennedy.”
What strikes Clarke all these years later was how informal the whole thing was. “The guy holding the Coca-Colas says, ‘Hi, Jack. How ya doing?’ And the president walks past us, smiles, and says, ‘Fine.’ It’s not like he had a lot of people around, protecting him.”
He doesn’t say, “Can you imagine?” But you can hear it in his voice. The days of running into presidents that way were over.
Despite calls to cancel the game, the next night nearly 58,000 fans streamed into the Orange Bowl. It was a decidedly nontraditional start to a rivalry game. The two school bands entered the stadium from the same direction, joined in one formation, and bowed their heads as a priest offered a prayer for the nation’s first Catholic president. Then they played the national anthem.
The game also proved memorable. In the second quarter, the ’Canes ran a fake field-goal attempt with Mira as the holder; when the ball was snapped, The Matador sprung to his feet and delivered a strike to receiver Hoyt Sparks, B.Ed. ’65, for a touchdown.
In the second half, the Gators staged a drive that ended with fullback Larry Dupree plowing into the end zone just before the ball squirted from his hands. “He did not break the plane [before fumbling],” remarks Mira when asked. Nevertheless, it counted.
A short while later, a 70-yard touchdown run by Clarke gave the Gators a lead. “We ran a little inside reverse, and the play was just wide open,” says Clarke.
Down by two scores late in the game, the ’Canes didn’t quit. They staged an 82-yard drive, punctuated by Mira’s pass to running back (and future Oakland Raiders great) Pete Banaszak, B.Ed. ’66, for a 15-yard score. “Everybody on that team busted their butt,” says Mira, who went on to the pros. That made it Florida 27, UM 21.
But from then on, there was only frustration for the ’Canes. Two controversial calls—one on an onside kick, the other on an apparent fumble—allowed the Gators to keep the ball and end UM’s hopes. On a day when it seemed the whole world had stopped, the ’Canes hadn’t so much lost as run out of chances.
After the game, the team gathered in the locker room. Mira, still wearing his uniform and the raw emotions of the past 24 hours, told reporters he would have liked to have written a happier ending. It was not the weekend for it.
