Miami & The Beaches Photo Blog

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 @ 6:30pm

Miami City Hall
3500 Pan American Drive
Miami, FL 33133

See it on the BIG SCREEN — free and open to the public on a first come, first served basis. SO COME EARLY!

THE U: EXTENDED CUT includes nearly 15 minutes of material not seen on ESPN.

Q&A will follow with Director Billy Corben and special surprise guests.

Thanks to Commissioner Marc Sarnoff and his staff for organizing the event.

link:

Closing out the fall slate of ESPN’s “30 on 30″ series, “The U” drew the most viewers ever for a documentary on the sports cabler.

Airing Saturday night, director Billy Corben’s look back at the heyday of the U. of Miami football program drew a record-setting 2.3 million viewers. “The Greatest Game,” which aired last December and examined the 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, held the previous record at 1.8 million.

Our friends at ESPN just passed along the final numbers: The U scored a 1.82 rating overall, topping last year’s post-Heisman doc (and previous record holder) Greatest Game Ever Played.

press release:

ESPN Films wrapped up the fall slate of the critically-acclaimed “30 for 30″ film project with Billy Corben’s The U, Saturday night immediately following the Heisman Trophy presentation, and earned a 1.8 rating. That represents an average of 1.8 million homes (2.368 M viewers, P2+) and is ESPN’s highest-rated documentary of all time (The Greatest Game Ever aired December 13, 2008, and earned a 1.4 rating – 1.369 million households, 1.811 M viewers). For the “30 for 30″ series Fall slate overall, the seven films earned an average 1.0 rating (1,007,000 homes, 1,258,000 viewers).

The Onion A.V. Club:

I still don’t like those old Hurricane football teams, but “The U” at least gave me the context to understand them better and respect the source of their collective rage and swagger.

With his lightning-paced, pulpy documentaries Cocaine Cowboys and Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin With The Godmother, Corben has established himself as an energetic young chronicler of Miami’s criminal underworld. He’s both a hard-working journalist who can connect these vast and dangerous networks while keeping tabs on the city’s history and someone who clearly enjoys a good yarn, even if it tends to glorify some ugly, murderous behavior. (Corben’s inability to grasp the moral dimension of his subject matter resulted in a first film, Raw Deal: A Question Of Consent, that may be the most repugnant, exploitative documentary I’ve ever seen…)

Corben’s abiding interest in Miami’s seething underbelly makes him the perfect guy to tell the story of UM in the ‘80s; the neighborhoods that helped revitalize the moribund program are the very same that were ravaged by the poverty, drugs, violence, and racial animus detailed in the Cocaine Cowboys movies.

Adam Berger’s editorial “Embrace the Past” in the UM Hurricane:

The film was superb and will make any ‘Canes fan proud of the program’s past, which makes the University of Miami’s official stance against the production so surprising and disappointing.

Instead of assisting director and UM alum Billy Corben in the making of the film the university turned a blind eye to one of its own, and in turn to an important era of the school’s history. There was absolutely no promotion for the documentary on campus.

Even the early viewing of the picture that was made available to students at Cosford Cinema spread by word of mouth and Facebook, not by school efforts. No one is saying that the school should have expended all of its resources in facilitating the film’s needs, but some basic mention of its existence would have been nice.

Regardless, Corben certainly proved that he didn’t need any help in creating a powerful window into UM’s past, but for the administration to basically denounce the entire thing as if it were a black sheep is straight up hypocritical.

For obvious reasons however, the University of Miami could not officially endorse the film. There certainly are some things highlighted in the documentary that any school would have a hard time celebrating.

Still, that doesn’t mean the school should have barred Randy Shannon from participating in the documentary. That doesn’t mean the school should have asked former players, coaches and athletic directors not to speak to Corben. And certainly that doesn’t mean that the university should have acted as if that entire era of football and UM history didn’t happen, because it did.

This film is something to be proud of, not ashamed of. Embrace your past Miami.

Glenn Garvin’s review reads like the UM administration’s worst nightmare:

Does the University of Miami offer a degree in cluelessness? Because most of the former players interviewed in ESPN’s documentary The U seem to have majored in it. For two solid hours they brag about their arrogance, their dirty play and even their outright criminality, smiling proudly during every moment.

Former quarterback Steve Walsh seems amused as he recounts bumping into “some pretty prominent players” wearing stocking caps, on their way for a night’s work of burglarizing autos. His teammate Brett Perriman recalls some Hurricane players dealing drugs, then adds unapologetically: “We got to eat. If that means we have to do something illegal, so be it.”

Those kind of disclosures seem almost benign when former center Don Bailey Jr. explains the football skills that made his team so great. “They were nasty,” he recollects jovially. “They’d spit. They’d fight. They’d bite. They’d kick.”

The U is a brilliant and horrifying history of the good-old-bad-old-days of the 1980s and early 1990s when UM — so the joke of the day went — topped all three football polls: AP, UPI and FBI. Filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman, a pair of UM graduates who specialize in documenting the hellacious dysfunction of their hometown (they also made Cocaine Cowboys, a spellbinding 2006 film on South Florida narcotrafficking in the ’80s) offer up a grimly fascinating portrait of a program reeling out of control:

Drug abuse (one assistant coach was arrested for possession of steroids). Embezzlement (nearly a quarter of a million dollars looted from government scholarship funds). Vicious brawls before, during and after games (one at Notre Dame had to be broken up by cops). Cheap shots on the field so pervasive that it was hard to believe the players weren’t coached to deliver them (10 personal fouls and unsporstmanlike-conduct penalties in the 1991 Cotton Bowl alone).

At least as appalling as the team’s literally outlaw behavior was the spineless refusal of UM administrators to do anything about it. As The U recounts, after a national uproar over the team’s behavior at the 1987 Fiesta Bowl — among other things, the players stormed out of a steak fry with Penn State while noisily comparing themselves to the Japanese on the eve of Pearl Harbor) — coach Jimmy Johnson threatened to quit when UM President Tad Foote ordered him to apologize. Foote meekly offered Johnson a new contract. After the infamous 1991 Cotton Bowl game, athletic director Sam Jankovich warned new coach Dennis Erickson that “If you don’t solve this problem, someone is going to solve it for you.” But no one did, until the NCAA slapped UM with massive sanctions in 1994.

Those sanctions didn’t even include one of the worst accusations against the UM football team — that players collected cash bonuses for interceptions, tackles and hard hits, with much of the money being supplied by Miami rapper Luther Campbell, a Hurricane booster who roamed the sidelines on game day with a pass supplied by the coaching staff.

Campbell all but admits to paying players — “Never heard of anything like that,” Campbell gasps in mock surprise, widening his eyes — and even suggests that if he hadn’t, the players would have gone on a crime spree against their fellow students. “Give a kid a hundred bucks to buy some sneakers so he won’t go jumping some other kid’s dorm room stealing his stereo, nahhh, I wouldn’t give a kid any money,” says the smirking Campbell.

It’s recently been reported that current Hurricane coach Randy Shannon, who played for the team during the ‘87 championship season, has welcomed Campbell back into the football family at Miami, allowing him to give talks to the players. So it sounds as if The U, like every good horror movie, will have a sequel.



​Click here to view photos from this event.Last night, Rakontur debuted an extended version of its upcoming ESPN documentary The U inside Overtown’s historic Lyric Theater. Among the …

(check back for updates and changes)

Tuesday – 12/8

8:30pm – Billy Corben on CaneSport PrimeTime – (WQAM 560 AM) LISTEN HERE

Wednesday – 12/9

5:00am – 7:00am (exact time tba) – Billy on WBPF Palm Beach

7:30pm – The U – Miami premiere (invite only) at The Historic Lyric Theater

10:30pm – Afterparty for The U Miami premiere @ Ecco Miami (168 SE 1st St. Miami, FL)

Thurday – 12/10

9:00am – Billy on Paul & Ron (105.9 FM) – LISTEN HERE

9:20am – Billy on The Sid Rosenberg Show – (WQAM 560 AM) LISTEN HERE

1:10pm – Billy on Colin Cowherd (ESPN RADIO) - LISTEN HERE

5:00pm – Billy on Evan Cohen (ESPN RADIO 760 AM Palm Beach) – LISTEN HERE

7:00pm – The U – UM campus screening – Cosford Cinema

Friday – 12/11

8:00am – Billy on Jeff De Forrest (640 AM) LISTEN HERE

2:00pm – Billy participates in an ESPN.com chat

3:45PM – Alfred Spellman on The Dan LeBatard Show (790 AM) LISTEN HERE

Saturday – 12/12

10:35am – Billy on The Footy Show

9:00pm/EST – The U – world premiere on ESPN

Sunday – 12/13

11:30pm – Billy on WSVN Sports Live

Herald sports columnist Barry Jackson says we got it right:

Some sensitive Hurricanes fans surely will not like the rehashing of the trash-talking, the over-the-top celebrations and the off-field scandals that are chronicled in The U, the two-hour University of Miami football documentary airing at 9 p.m. Dec. 12 on ESPN.

But after watching the film, the view here is that filmmakers and former UM students Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman accurately and colorfully capture the program’s glory years — blemishes and all — and strike the right balance between what made UM so dominant and dynamic, and what made it a target for critics.

The film is an enjoyable trip down memory lane, filled with unforgettable game footage, amusing anecdotes and entertaining interviews with more than 30 people who made the program matter.

Corben and Spellman focused mostly on 1983 to 1991 — when UM won four of its five national titles — and allocated only a few minutes to what has happened since. In retrospect, it would have been a good idea if the filmmakers quickly touched on the past few seasons and acknowledged the players’ exemplary conduct in recent years (just one known arrest — Robert Marve — in Randy Shannon’s three years in charge).

Remember, this is not a tribute to UM football. A tribute would only gloss over the negative.

But this is more compelling than a tribute because it gives the full picture of how those teams captured a nation’s attention.

read the rest of the article here

 Sid called me at 8AM yesterday morning, having just read Barry Jackson’s article in the Miami Herald (which is the most viewed and commented on article of the day at their website) and asked me to come on his show on 560 WQAM to discuss our differences with the University of Miami.

Here’s the interview:

One highlight occurs at the 17:02 mark when, as an example of how unsophisticated, clunky and not web-savvy the Sports Information and Communications folks are at the University of Miami, I told Sid that the bio of Rick Korch, the school’s former Football Sports Information Director, who was fired in March 2008 after a UM technician discovered child pornography on his work computer, was still online at Hurricane Sports, the “Official Athletic Site of the Miami Hurricanes” (and the 3rd Google result when you search: rick korch miami) 19 months after his arrest and firing!

Here is a screen cap from 12:30PM yesterday (notice, in the upper right hand corner of the page, the countdown to the UM basketball game vs. Florida Gulf Coast today, 11/25):

Here’s what the page looks like now.