If you watch any Miami sporting event, you’ll likely see a shot of waves and sun. There will be folks in bathing suits and art deco architecture. Those shots will come from South Beach, the southern (get it?) tip of Miami Beach.
Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium is nowhere near South Beach, despite what TV might have you believe
Do not believe the magic of television. There’s a whole lotta land between white sandy beach and green gridiron.
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
ESPN opened its 2013 national championship coverage with an essay about Miami. In it was this:
“Miami is at first sight, a series of islands,” Wright Thompson begins. “As far apart in spirit as they are close in blocks. Most Notre Dame and Alabama fans in town for the national championship game woke up today in the most famous of those islands: South Beach, stepping into a dreamscape of pastel deco and tireless house music.”
The first thing to know about South Florida in general is that it’s pretty big.
When the region is referred to with that broad term, someone is probably referencing anything on Florida’s southeastern coast south of roughly Jupiter, about 90 miles from Miami. It’s the final stretch of three major interstates: I-75, I-95 and Florida’s Turnpike. It’s also home to many of your favorite beach destinations and where your grandparents might have moved to.
Let’s zero in on just Miami.
South Beach is the white arrow, Hard Rock Stadium is the green arrow, and Miami’s main campus is the orange arrow. Miami Beach itself is a separate municipality from Miami on the Eastern side of Biscayne Bay.
Miami students and fans have the East Coast’s second-longest commute from campus to stadium.
At 20 miles, Miami comes in a close second to UConn in this regard. There’s a student shuttle, but it’s quite the trek. It’s a 30-minute drive on a good day. With notorious Miami traffic, good luck.
“The biggest problem is getting the students out there,” Zach Rivera, former football chair of the UM student government’s Category Five in 2011 and 2012, told SB Nation. “Especially when I was a student, is just the drive in the first place, because you’d have to convince the students to give up their weekends essentially to take an hour bus ride all the way over to the game.”
Miami’s Coral Gables campus is about 13 miles from South Beach, and Hard Rock Stadium is 19 miles from South Beach.
From experience, few locations in South Florida or Miami’s sprawling metro area feel like hops, skips, or jumps away from one another.
It’s not hard to understand why cameras show South Beach often.
South Beach is glamorous and sexy. It makes for some good shots of the water, and it’s what everyone thinks of when they picture the area anyway. Of course you want the color of the region that you’re in to show in picturesque HD.
But as Thompson went on to espouse in that essay (as well as what the map shows) Hard Rock Stadium and that famous beach are not nearly neighbors. Miami’s not homogeneous — no city is.
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