Orlando Sentinel 150: How Orlando willed itself into sports’ big leagues

As part of the Orlando Sentinel’s 150th birthday, on the first Sunday of each month, we will report on a topic that helped shape the Centreal Florida of today and how we covered that topic. Today we look at sports.

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On a bright, beautiful afternoon in 1985 that should have disappeared into Orlando’s endless reel of bright, beautiful afternoons, an NBA executive sat in the back seat of a car and made casual conversation about expansion.

Pat Williams, then the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, was thinking like a league lifer. Florida was booming. The NBA was looking. If you were placing a basketball franchise in this football-fanatical pigskin peninsula, where would you put it?

“Miami, Tampa or Jacksonville?” Williams asked his Orlando friends.

From the front passenger seat, Orlando businessman Jimmy Hewitt turned around and glared at Williams.  Hewitt countered not with a pitch so much as a correction; the kind you deliver when you’re not lobbying but declaring.

“Orlando is the place to be,” Hewitt said sternly.

That six-word sentence, equal parts civic pride and audacity, has become the incantation at the center of Orlando’s sports history. Because the Magic didn’t simply arrive as a team; they arrived as proof that Orlando could build the arena, sell the tickets, command the attention, and keep a major-league franchise anchored in a downtown that outsiders still treated like an interchange on the way to Disney World.

Hewitt’s belief quickly turned into action. The next day, he ran into then-Mayor Bill Frederick while they were picking up their sons at soccer practice. Hewitt rushed over, explained his NBA idea, and asked Frederick to pull political strings to accelerate plans for a new arena. Frederick said yes. The civic wheels started turning. Investors were assembled. Meetings were scheduled. A city that had never owned a major professional team began to behave like a city that could.

“Jimmy Hewitt is the reason the Magic and professional sports exist in Orlando,” Magic CEO Alex Martins has said.

And Williams, who would become the team’s other co-founder, would make it even more absolute: “Without Jimmy Hewitt, there would be no Orlando Magic.”

Orlando’s sports evolution – past, present, future – flows from that moment: one city deciding to will itself into major-league relevance, then spending the next four decades learning what relevance costs, and what it can become.

The early years In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Orlando’s athletic life grew the way young American towns did back then: informal recreation hardening into organized competition.

The region’s first recorded sports events date back to the late 1800s with horse racing at the Orlando Jockey Club. Organized baseball followed, leading to the formation of the minor-league baseball Orlando Tigers in 1919. Professional boxing was also a big draw in Orlando at the turn of the century.

What separates Orlando from many Sun Belt boomtowns is that it learned early how to host. Long before it was a national synonym for theme parks, it was building athletic infrastructure that helped it practice the logistics of big crowds and big moments.

The most important venue in the city’s early history was the football field now known as Camping World Stadium. It began as a Works Progress Administration project in 1936, originally called Orlando Stadium, built for $115,000. The first bowl game would follow in 1947, when the venue became the Tangerine Bowl and hosted the inaugural contest on January 1.

“Before we became one of the top 20 markets in the United States, the bowl game was one of the earliest forms of tourism in Orlando,” says Steve Hogan, the CEO of Florida Citrus Sports.

The Citrus Bowl complex also sits adjacent to what was, for much of the 20th century, the other great shrine of Orlando sports: Tinker Field.

If the Citrus Bowl taught Orlando to host football, Tinker Field taught it how sports can braid together the city’s entertainment, economics, and social history. Tinker Field was named after Joe Tinker, the Chicago Cubs Hall of Fame shortstop famous for the “Tinker to Evers to Chance” double-play trio.

After his Major League career, Tinker moved to Orlando and managed the local Orlando Tigers to a league pennant, invested in local real estate and was the key figure in bringing professional spring training baseball to the city.

For decades starting in 1923, Orlando was a spring training home, first for the Cincinnati Reds, then the Brooklyn Dodgers, then the Washington Senators. When the Senators relocated to Minnesota in 1961, Tinker Field was the Twins’ spring training home for three decades.

From 1936 to 1990, legendary players such as Hank Aaron and Mickey Mantle played spring training games in Orlando.

Even the great Babe Ruth, after his retirement, made an appearance there during a barnstorming tour in 1948.

“Ruth arrived in a Lincoln convertible,” late Twins owner Calvin Griffith told the Sentinel. “He drove it right into the park and through a gate in left field. Then, he drove around the inside of the place. People cheered like crazy. I’ll not forget it.”

Sadly, Tinker Field ended the way so many stadium stories do: with an impasse over public investment. The Twins left for a new state-of-the-art facility in Fort Myers after failing to get Orlando to commit to $5 million in stadium improvements. The departure wasn’t merely about baseball. It was about leverage and urgency – lessons Orlando would later absorb in far higher-stakes negotiations.

“It’s sad, just plain sad,” Jamie Lowe, the Twins’ spring-training coordinator said at the time. “People are going to be sorry to see us leave. We didn’t ask for any more (improvements) than what other teams are getting.”

Tinker Field’s meaning extended far beyond baseball. On March 6, 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke from the pitcher’s mound in what is widely remembered as his only public speech in the city; an “Integration now” rally that drew thousands. In a segregated era, the stadium became both a gathering place and a battleground over civil rights. Baseball barrier-breaker Jackie Robinson played an exhibition game in Orlando in 1950, but not at Tinker Field. It took place at Carter Street Park, a site for Negro League spring training, because Black people weren’t allowed at Tinker Field at the time.

The stadium was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 but was ultimately demolished in 2015 as the Citrus Bowl expanded. Today, the Tinker Field History Plaza stands in its shadow, an attempt to preserve the memory of a venue that housed both America’s pastime and a pivotal civil-rights moment.

Emerging from the desert

Baseball’s demise was, in some ways, tied into the rise of the Magic with much of the city’s public money and attention focused on the new NBA franchise that played its first season in 1989. The Magic didn’t just give Orlando its first major pro franchise, they changed the way the city perceived itself and the way others perceived it.

“We were a sports desert before the Magic came to town,” longtime Sentinel writer and columnist Brian Schmitz remembers.

Orlando transformed into a pop-culture stage in 1992 when the Magic won the draft lottery and selected Shaquille O’Neal. A year later, the Magic miraculously won the lottery again and Penny Hardaway arrived. The Shaq and Penny Show turned Orlando into a basketball destination. The Magic were young, loud, and nationally interesting. The city – long treated as a place people visited, not a place they belonged to – finally had something that belonged to the locals.

By 1995, the Magic had reached the NBA Finals, one of the fastest ascents in league history. Then came the moment that still clenches in Orlando’s collective memory: Nick Anderson missing four straight free throws in Game 1, the kind of sequence that sports cities never fully release. Orlando was swept by Houston.

A year later, Shaq bolted to join the Los Angeles Lakers.

Orlando sports has had many turning points, but few are as foundational as the summer of 1996. Shaq’s departure felt like an early referendum on Orlando itself. Shaq dismissed the city as a “dried-up little pond” on his way out. And Nick Anderson, who lived that era from inside the locker room, still frames it as a stolen dynasty.

“I’m honest when I say this,” Anderson told the Sentinel. “I think we would have won five or six championships.”

Says Schmitz, “To this day, I firmly believe the Magic have still never recovered from Shaq leaving.” .

Knight time arrives

UCF football’s origin story reads like folk mythology. In 1979, the Division III Knights played their first official game in what was described as “a cow pasture during a driving rainstorm at St. Leo” under volunteer head coach Don Jonas. Players arrived for that inaugural season with no scholarships, buying their own shoes and socks and dressing in public bathrooms. One player famously described his “locker” as a hook on the wall in the handicapped stall.

That scrappy beginning matters because it mirrors Orlando’s own trajectory: a place dismissed as too new, too transient, too reliant on tourism. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t.

Over time, UCF went from Division II to Division I-AA to Division 1 and grew into a program that didn’t merely compete; it forced the sport to acknowledge it. Late president John Hitt made the decision that a major university in the South must have a bigtime football program and began investing big money into the program.

Daunte Culpepper’s arrival in 1995 put the program on the map. An on-campus stadium built in 2007 became a statement of identity. Coach George O’Leary’s Fiesta Bowl-winning team of 2013 took the program to another level and then Coach Scott Frost’s 2017 undefeated season and AD Danny White’s self-proclaimed national championship became a cultural event – a point of pride for locals and a provocation for the sport’s established elite.

The transformation became official when UCF joined the Big 12 in 2021, stepping into the Power Four landscape and changing the sports map of Central Florida. It wasn’t simply conference realignment; it was nationwide legitimacy.

Today, UCF is navigating modern college football’s turbulence – NIL, the transfer portal, the weekly weight of a major-conference schedule and trying to gain footing in a new era. The return of Scott Frost gives the program another narrative loop.

Longtime UCF radio voice Marc Daniels says the program literally springing up from the mud of that first game at St. Leo to now becoming one of the state’s “Big 4” has been miraculous.

“A lot of things had to happen for the meteoric rise,” Daniels explains. “Orlando’s TV market, the massive enrollment and the timing of significant events (like the back-to-back undefeated seasons under Scott Frost and Josh Heupel) allowed us to become the youngest, fastest-growing Power 4 program in the country.”

The other football

While college football has given Orlando credibility in the South, soccer would give it visibility around the world. Orlando’s soccer identity is sometimes treated as a recent phenomenon – Orlando City, purple-passionate crowds, Marta and Kaká thrilling fans on those downtown stadium nights. But the city’s relationship with international soccer has deeper roots, and it surged into view in 1994.

In the first World Cup ever hosted by the United States, Orlando kicked it off by hosting five sold-out matches at the Citrus Bowl, welcoming hundreds of thousands of international fans in the process. That World Cup wasn’t just sports tourism; it was Orlando presenting itself as an international city with genuine cultural electricity, powered by volunteers, downtown celebrations, and the kind of hospitality that matched Orlando’s tourism DNA.

Said Joanie Schirm, the World Cup Orlando 1994 Host Committee Chairman, in a guest editorial in the Orlando Sentinel on the 30-year anniversary of the event: “The World Cup ignited a soccer revolution in Orlando, sparking the growth of youth leagues and leading to the establishment of our Major League Soccer team, Orlando City Lions, and the women’s team, Orlando Pride. In 1994, the world fell in love with Orlando.”

Two decades later, in 2013, Orlando City’s  leap from minor-league success to MLS selection felt like the Magic announcement all over again – political leaders leading a civic celebration and asserting that Orlando was now “big league times two.” The symmetry mattered. Much like Jimmy Hewitt and Pat Williams, Orlando City’s founders – Phil and Kay Rawlins, along with Coach Adrian Heath – believed professional soccer would work in Orlando. The MLS announcement was made at the same Church Street location where the NBA once validated Orlando’s dreams.

And when Orlando City played its inaugural MLS match on March 8, 2015, the Citrus Bowl became a purple cathedral: 62,510 fans showed up to watch a 1–1 draw with New York City FC. For a city once known for teams that came and went in anonymous leagues, that crowd felt like a declaration: Orlando wasn’t merely hosting soccer. It was adopting it.

A year later, the Orlando Pride began play in 2016, a franchise that would eventually deliver the milestone Orlando had chased for generations: a true major-league professional championship. On Nov. 23, 2024, the Pride defeated the Washington Spirit 1–0 to win the NWSL Championship. Orlando finally gained what it had imagined through Shaq-era hypotheticals, Dwight-era near-misses, and decades of event-hosting: a title at the top tier.

 The King arrives, others follow

Arnold Palmer first played Bay Hill in the mid-1960s and fell in love with the golf course. The famous line followed: “I’ve just played the best golf course in Florida, and I want to own it,” he told his wife, Winnie. Palmer would eventually take ownership of Bay Hill and make Orlando his winter base, turning the area into one of the sport’s signature destinations.

His impact wasn’t only the tournament. It was the way a global sports icon chose Orlando as a home, not a stopover – helping shift the city’s identity from tourist town to sports town with genuine year-round credibility. Other great golfers followed Palmer’s pilgrimage to Orlando, including Tiger Woods and Annika Sorenstam.

“When Arnold Palmer first came to Orlando and fell in love with it, the area might as well have been the moon,” says renowned Florida-based golf writer and author Bob Harig. “Disney hadn’t even opened yet. Orlando was considered the hinterlands. The idea that a golf icon like Arnold Palmer would decide to relocate there, gave the entire area an identity.”

It’s no secret that Orlando’s identity before (and after) Arnie and before the Magic was as a laboratory for would-be franchises in start-up sports leagues. Some had success, but most were fleeting and doomed by the realities of minor-league economics in a transient market.

Arena football found a home with the Orlando Predators, who managed to build real local loyalty and win championships. Hockey arrived with the Solar Bears, who had moments of glory and reinvention. The Orlando Miracle brought the WNBA to town in its early years.

Spring-football experiments came and went, including the Steve Spurrier-coached Apollos and the Lee Corso-coached Renegades. From 1966-1970, the Orlando Panthers were the most popular sports attraction in Central Florida and made history when Pat Palinkas became the first woman to play men’s professional football, serving as the holder for her husband, place kicker Stephen Palinkas.

These teams matter because they trained Orlando fans. They taught the city what permanence feels like, and what it feels like to lose it. They also sharpened Orlando’s hunger for the franchises that can endure; the teams that become institutions rather than entertainment options.

Home of incredible athletes

Of course, Orlando’s sports accomplishments and accolades aren’t only measured by franchises and arenas. The city’s  local youth and high school sports have also carved out a place in the city’s sports history.

Lake Lorna Doone Park, located near Tinker Field, was the site of the 1955 “Barrier Breakers” game between the Orlando Kiwanis and the Pensacola Jaycees – the first interracial Little League baseball game played in the Deep South following desegregation rulings.

In basketball, Evans’ high school phenom Darryl “Chocolate Thunder” Dawkins became the first player in NBA history to be drafted directly out of high school in 1975.

In football, Eatonville’s David “Deacon” Jones became the most dominant defensive player in the NFL, the anchor of the Los Angeles Rams’ legendary “Fearsome Foursome” defensive line and Central Florida’s first Pro Football Hall-of-Famer. Apopka High’s Warren Sapp became an All-American at the University of Miami and a Pro Football Hall of Famer with the Tampa Bay Bucs. Olympia High School speedster Chris Johnson became one of only nine NFL players to rush for over 2,000 yards in a single season.

In baseball, Sanford Seminole High’s Tim Raines would go on to become one of the best leadoff hitters in history and an MLB Hall-of-Famer. Apopka High pitcher Zack Greinke won Major League Baseball’s Cy Young Award in 2009. Johnny Damon of Dr. Phillips High enjoyed an 18-season MLB career and won two World Series titles.

In auto racing, Glenn “Fireball” Roberts went from being the ace pitcher at Apopka High School to a Daytona 500 winner and one of the early stars of NASCAR before dying in a fatal crash on the track in 1964.

In track and field, Oak Ridge High sprinter Michelle Finn-Burrell would go on to win an Olympic gold medal in the 1992 Barcelona games.

And who will ever forget when Lake Mary Little League defeated Chinese Taipei 2–1 in eight innings to win the 2024 Little League World Series – Florida’s first championship in the event. The on-field drama was memorable, but what made the story travel, what made it linger, was what happened after: Lake Mary’s players and coaches pausing their celebration to console their devastated opponents.

Sometimes, kids become the most revealing mirror of what a sports city wants to be. With world-class facilities such as Disney’s Wide World of Sports, Orlando has become a mecca for youth sports by bringing in mega events such as the 24-day AAU Junior National Volleyball Championships, at the Orange County Convention Center, which last year generated approximately $825.5 million in economic impact, drew over 325,500 attendees, including athletes, coaches, and families. driving significant revenue for local hotels, restaurants, and attractions.

What’s next for Orlando? Magic Johnson holds the MVP trophy after the 1992 NBA All-Star Game at the Orlando Arena in Orlando. Johnson won the MVP award after winning memorable one-on-one showdowns with Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan and then sinking a long 3-pointer to close the game. (Gary Bogdon/Orlando Sentinel)[/caption]

And this is where Orlando’s tourism machine also becomes Orlando’s sports machine: hotels, airport capacity, transportation, event staffing, and a civic ecosystem built to welcome crowds. In 2024, Sports Business Journal ranked Orlando No. 1 in its “Best Sports Business Cities, Event Hosting” list – essentially crowning Orlando America’s premier sports-event hub.

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“We’re a lot more sophisticated of a sports city than when I was growing up here,” says longtime Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer. “I think we’re the best sports city in America,”

And getting better all the time. In 2024, Sports Business Journal ranked Orlando No. 1 in its “Best Sports Business Cities, Event Hosting” list – essentially crowning Orlando America’s premier sports-event hub.

“In the next 10 years, I think the international opportunities will be unprecedented because of the investment in our venues,” says Jason Siegel, CEO of the Greater Orlando Sports Commission.

Orlando’s next frontier is the same one Pat Williams has been chasing in different forms for decades: baseball. Orlando’s pitch is built around the city’s tourism economy and its status as the largest metropolitan area in the country without an MLB or NFL team.

“I’m very confident we’ll have a baseball franchise this decade,” Orlando Dreamers co-founder and businessman Jim Schnorf says. “No, I can’t tell you the path or timing or whether it’s an existing team or an expansion team. But what I can tell you is the market attributes in Orlando are so exceptional and superior compared to any other markets that it’s a no-brainer Major League Baseball will end up here.”

Football will also end up in Orlando – and much sooner than baseball. The Jacksonville Jaguars are expected to play their 2027 home games at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium while their stadium in Jacksonville undergoes renovation.

When the Jaguars play in Orlando, it won’t just be an NFL scheduling solution. It will be a test run of Orlando as a true NFL market: ticket demand, corporate support, weekly operational logistics, national optics. For one year, Orlando will become an NFL town.

Orlando’s sports future – MLB ambitions, NFL auditions, and the next generation of kids learning class and courage on local ball fields – suggests the city is not finished expanding its sports identity. It’s still doing what it has always done best: turning civic belief into civic reality.

It started with a car ride and a bold declaration.

Orlando is the place to be.

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