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Best Career Move

Leonard Hamilton

After taking the University of Miami's men's basketball team to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA tournament (the most successful season in the program's history), Hamilton had the opportunity to bolt to Georgia Tech, a school with a longer basketball tradition in a stronger basketball conference. He chose to remain as head coach of the Hurricanes basketball program he built from an afterthought into a perennial contender in the Big East. We don't mind saying this was the right decision. Here's hoping Hamilton, a stand-up guy in addition to being a great coach, sticks around until he can bring UM men's hoops to the legendary status of the school's football and baseball squads.

Best Trade

Radek Dvorak for Mike Vernon

Panthers general manager Bryan Murray knows how to cut a deal, as he proved last year with the acquisition of Pavel Bure. This year he executed another shrewd move by swapping Radek Dvorak for Mike Vernon. In some ways the exchange looked less than sweet. Dvorak is young, fast, and talented. Since the trade he became a star on the Rangers' best offensive line. Vernon, in contrast, is a 37-year-old goalie who had been languishing as the backup in San Jose. But as Murray calculated, Vernon has a strong upside. In Detroit he twice played in the Stanley Cup finals, once winning the playoff MVP award. After arriving in Sunrise, he capably filled in for injured starting goalie Trevor Kidd, so capably, in fact, that he effectively outshone him. Vernon is always strongest in the playoffs. And in hockey, one offensive superstar and a hot goalie can win a championship. Thanks to Murray's maneuvering, the Panthers had both Bure and Vernon. Pretty sweet indeed. Now if only Murray had found a defense...

Best Theater For Drama

GableStage

The newly created GableStage arrived with a bang on the staid landscape of South Florida theater last season. To be precise the company started off with a muscular production of David Hare's Skylight, only to follow it up with the most compelling combination of programs and performances in the region. Ranging from the familiar (Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men) to the spanking new (Patrick Marber's Closer, in its first production outside New York), artistic director Joseph Adler's choices of material, production standards, and the crackerjack performances he gets out of his actors are consistently engaging and becoming more exciting all the time.

Best Theater Road Show

The Gin Game

There's plenty of choice horseflesh in South Florida each winter, but the most appealing thoroughbreds to pass through the region were Julie Harris and Charles Durning. The two arrived as part of the National Actors Theatre's touring production of The Gin Game, directed by Charles Nelson Reilly. This sentimental piffle of a play by D.L. Coburn won the Pulitzer for drama in 1977, but it's the actors who have aged well. They portrayed Weller (Durning) and Fonsia (Harris), two geezers abandoned by their families and dumped into a second-rate nursing home. Blending their disparate acting styles into a kind of demonic waltz (imagine a brainy spider battling cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn), Harris and Durning turned all dramatic expectations on their heads. In their hands even a piece of dramatic dross can seem like gold.

Best Local Sports Coach

Jim Morris

So Miami had this one coach with interesting hair, who is a legend, who succeeded a legend, then didn't succeed. Miami still has this other coach with interesting hair, who is a legend, who succeeded a very nice man named Alvin Gentry, but this guy hasn't succeeded either. Granted it's tough to make any judgments about Jim Morris's hair, seeing as he wears a hat to work and all. But in 1993 he did succeed a legend by the name of Ron Fraser, who had led the University of Miami Hurricanes baseball team to two national championships during his legendary career. The proverbial tough act to follow. But Morris has pulled it off, skippering Bobby Hill, Mike Neu, Kevin Brown, and company to the program's first College World Series championship since 1985 (earning his second Collegiate Baseball National Coach of the Year award in the process). UM baseball: under new management, but the legend continues.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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