BEST SPORTSCASTER 2002 | Jimmy Cefalo | | WPLG-TV (Channel 10) | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Miami | Miami New Times
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BEST SPORTSCASTER

Jimmy Cefalo

WPLG-TV (Channel 10)

The veteran sports guy has a couple of things going for him: He was a jock -- a star receiver for the Miami Dolphins -- and he's got great hair. But he also seems to know that a good sportscaster ought to do more than just recite the scores. Recent example: The Miami Heat pulled out a February overtime win against the Bucks in Milwaukee after Jimmy Jackson tied the score in regulation on a last-second three-pointer. But Jackson got the ball on a pass from Eddie Jones after Jones committed a blatant double dribble that the refs somehow missed. Television viewers saw it, the announcers announced it, and after the game Jones admitted it. That night some Miami television sportscasters never even mentioned the critical moment on which the game turned. But Cefalo led with the blown call. Moreover on most broadcasts Cefalo looks like he's actually interested in the subject, even when he's just reading hockey scores. And during the winter Olympics he reported the results of the ice-skating competition as if that were a real sport! Whoa.

BEST LOCAL WEBSITE

www.clubhoppers.net

Miami has had its fair share of zines and Websites vying to be the source when it comes to covering nightlife. Clubhoppers comes closest to earning the title. Listing various venues and acts is no difficult task; anyone with e-mail or a fax machine can obtain the info and regurgitate it for the public. Presenting the information with flair, humor, and hilarious photos sets Clubhoppers apart. Its evening guides, accurate and current, are indispensable, but it's the weekly photographs that put this site over the top. Moments of intoxicated bliss, gregarious foreplay, law-enforcement confrontations, and more. Clubhoppers reminds us what going out is all about.

SECOND-BEST LOCAL WEBSITE

www.cooljunkie.com

Yes, another nightlife Website. No surprise, given the pervasiveness of nightclubs and the intense competition among them. But this site has a somewhat different feel to it. A little more comprehensive. A little more complex. A little more commercial. But that's exactly what makes it the one you would recommend when visiting friends ask you for clubbing advice upon hitting South Beach. The love child of British expats Nick McCabe and Sarah Lynn, cooljunkie manages to maintain the pair's enthusiasm for the local dance scene while keeping the fluff factor to a manageable level. All the Beach's hotspots are laid out and evaluated, along with informed DJ interviews, coming attractions, and of course, plenty of party pics featuring clubland's ranks (and quite possibly you) hitting the dance floor.

BEST FILM SERIES

Cuban Cinema Series

Miami-Dade Community College

Who else but MDCC's Alejandro Rios could put together a top-flight, ongoing program of Cuban films -- from islanders and directors in exile -- attract full houses, and yet raise nary a peep from our AM talk-radio friends and their noisy shock troops? Maybe a free series with this kind of quality is just too good (and in this town, too needed) to assail.

BEST TRADE (SPORTS TEAM)

Florida Marlins owner John Henry to the Boston Red Sox

Major League Baseball engineered this deal, allowing Henry to sell the Marlins, then turn around and buy the Red Sox. To Henry, who constantly cried poverty, tried to cajole South Florida taxpayers into building him a new stadium, and then when they wouldn't, orchestrated the $600 million purchase of the Sox by putting up $150 million of his own money, we say good riddance. And we offer one last bit of baseball trivia: Since 1919 the team you sold has one more world championship than the team you bought, chump.

BEST MISSED OPPORTUNITY

Miami Fusion

When Major League Soccer finally catches on in the United States, the decision to fold the Miami Fusion will make America's most apathetic sports town look even more stupid, as if that were possible. (Hello? The Dolphins couldn't sell out a playoff game?) Soccer is followed with feverish fanaticism throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. South Florida has a huge and ever-growing population of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. You do the math. Bad management and inept marketing -- not a starless team with a lousy playoff record -- led to this humiliating loss. But nature hates a vacuum. Professional soccer will return to Miami. It is inevitable.

BEST NEW OLDIES JAZZ STATION

104.1 FM

The seasoned cats who preside over Jazz in the Afternoon play all the cool hits. You know: Kind of Blue, Giant Steps, A Love Supreme (the whole blessed album). This is noncommercial (and unlicensed, meaning "pirate") community radio as it was meant to be. These guardians of the bebop, hard-bop, and post-bop jazz flames liberate the airwaves on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. One way to make a good thing even better would be to extend the holy sounds of Miles, Trane, and Dolphy into weekday evenings, currently the domain of an emcee who preaches to us about things we already know regarding the current state of slavery in America.

BEST METEOROLOGICAL TREAT

Clouds

Miami has no mountains. There are no hills, buttes, or mesas. But there are clouds, and they appear almost daily on the big palette that is South Florida's sky. Our cosmic placement at the tip of a peninsula located to the east of the Gulf of Mexico, north of the Caribbean Sea, and downwind of the jet stream puts us at the crossroads of breezes and moisture that can produce spectacular celestial works. High up are the thin, wispy cirrus clouds, delicate free-form brush strokes of white that flow and curl against the blue of eternity. In the foreground on a fair day the cumulus play, those billowy shape-shifters, puffing effortlessly by on the breeze. Here are our mountains, inspiring and variable, and our view is unobstructed.

BEST BEATLES CORRESPONDENCE

Hard Rock Café

Bayside Marketplace

Before finding happiness in a warm gun, the Beatles found a buddy in a Miami Beach cop. Sgt. Buddy Dresner was assigned to provide security to the Beatles during the group's South Florida invasion in February 1964. The Hard Rock Café has no photos of the screaming female mob that besieged the boys when they descended from their rooms for a dip at the Deauville Hotel pool. But there are shots of them at Dresner's house, where Mrs. Dresner served a nice dinner and Paul read to the couple's children. Back in London several months after the two-week February tour, Paul scrawled a letter to Dresner apologizing for not writing sooner. "I lost your address. I've only just got it again -- from George," he wrote. "We'll be out [again] in America soon. That's if they don't start a war or something. For instance, all this business in Vietnam." (The Beatles indeed invaded the States again in late August, as the U.S. military presence grew and grew in Southeast Asia.) Other historic scrawlings appear on a work of abstract art the Fab Four signed and shipped to Dresner after the February visit. The drawing (by one D. Spence) consists of four splotches of black ink dripping to the bottom of a piece of brown paper. On it one can observe hints of the psychedelic wordplay John later embraced: "To good old Buddy, what is our Buddy, good Bubby (get a job Buddy), all the best and thanks from me." In a separate letter Brian Sommerville, the group's agent, penned a sentiment about our subtropical burgh that many still find apt. "I'll never forget that wonderful place and its people," he wrote.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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