History of the Arena Football League in Miami
In 1996, Miami acquired the AFL team the Sacramento Attack, which was renamed as the Miami Hooters (due to its association with the Florida-based Hooters restaurant chain), and it played from 1993 to 1995. In 1996, the association with the chain was completed, and the team moved to West Palm Beach and renamed as the Florida Bobcats.
Miami Vise (1987)
The Miami Vise were an arena football team formed by Arena Football League (AFL) founder Jim Foster for the purposes of playing a "showcase game" on February 27, 1987 at the Rosemont Horizon against the Chicago Bruisers. Chicago's Eddie Phillips scored three touchdowns, including one in the last minute, but the Bruisers fell to the Vise by a score of 33–30. Today, this contest is known as the "showcase" game, as it had far more prestige and fanfare than the original 1986 test game between the Rockford Metros and Chicago Politicians.
This was the only game the Vise (whose name was a take on the popular TV series Miami Vice) ever played, and Miami didn't get a team in the AFL until 1993. The Vise weren't even a Florida-based team to begin with, as they were created out of Foster's imagination and consisted mostly of former college players located in the Midwest. At the time, the players were sworn to secrecy so fans would believe the team was located in Miami.
Miami Hooters (1993–1995)
After their inaugural season in Sacramento, the team relocated to Miami, Florida. They took the name Miami Hooters in an unusual marketing arrangement with the Florida-based restaurant chain Hooters, which was ordinarily more noted for its buxom waitresses than feats of athletic prowess. Naturally, the team adopted the restaurant's owlish logo and trademark colors as its own for three years, until this unusual arrangement terminated after the completion of the 1995 season. Desirous of staying in the general South Florida area, the team relocated to West Palm Beach as the Florida Bobcats. Subsequent linking of team names with products was to occur, notably the AFL's own New Jersey Red Dogs and the Toronto Phantoms (named for Phantom Industries, a manufacturer of women's hosiery), and the Detroit Neon of the Continental Indoor Soccer League. Originally the team was to be named the Miami Toros or Miami Bulls, with a similar logo for each name having been created.
Bobcats) and a new color scheme involving teal and black as opposed to the former orange and brown associated with the restaurants. It also moved north to West Palm Beach in an attempt to reduce overhead. This proved to be a mixed blessing at best, however, as the relatively tiny seating capacity of the West Palm Beach Auditorium (ca. 4000) made profitable operations essentially impossible. In the 1997 and 1998 seasons the team played a total of five official league games (and several exhibition games as well) at what were charitably called "neutral sites", lesser venues in what were at best secondary markets, where, however, even a less-than-capacity crowd could result in greater revenues from ticket sales than would a home game sellout — were there to be one. This development led to them being referred to by some of the league's pundits as "America's Team", a not-unironic comparison to what was then the National Football League's premier organization, the Dallas Cowboys. This situation was used to an advantage by the league to determine support for the sport in parts of the country where it had previously had little exposure, and should be credited at least in part for the development of the sport's minor league, af2.
