The University of Miami baseball team celebrated a special anniversary on Wednesday. On June 7, 1982, the Hurricanes pulled off one of the great trick plays in sports history.
The ‘Grand Illusion,’ an old hidden-ball trick, helped the Canes beat Wichita State in the 1982 College World Series, a tournament Miami would eventually win.
The play is still replayed during CWS broadcasts and, 35 years later, is still a big part of the Miami baseball tradition.
Yet it isn’t alone in the XX of South Florida trick play lore.
The 1980s were good to South Florida when it came to such trickery, from the famed ‘Hook-and-Lateral’ play the Dolphins pulled off at the Orange Bowl in 1982 to Nebraska’s Fumblerooskie that snookered the Hurricanes on the same field two years (to the day) later.