Miami focuses on Its sports teams’ playoffs as much as Trump’s indictment

“I don’t care about Donald Trump,” said Hernandez, 33, who moved to Florida from the Dominican Republic about a decade ago and only learned of the former president’s indictment when she asked someone why so many TV news cameras had appeared near her building. “It doesn’t affect me at all. …. A lot more people care about the [basketball] game last night.”

That’s true across much of Miami and South Florida, which are in the grip of a sports frenzy as the region’s professional teams capture the hearts — and strain the nerves — of residents not accustomed to much cheering after a regular season ends.

For the first time in history, both the Miami Heat NBA team and the Florida Panthers NHL team are simultaneously in their leagues’ respective championship finals, though both are struggling to win games. The local sports scene has also been jolted by the news that soccer megastar Lionel Messi plans to sign with Inter Miami, an MLS team that plays in nearby Fort Lauderdale.

It’s not that no one along the emerald shoreline here cares that Trump has been criminally charged for alleged obstruction and mishandling of classified documents and could land in prison for decades if he is convicted. As 31-year-old Nelson Navarro puts it, “50 percent probably care about Trump and 50 percent care about sports.”

Navarro, a native of Costa Rica who settled in Miami full time about a year ago, is in the latter category. “I know a lot of people like drama in general, and I have been hearing co-workers” talk about Trump, he said, “but I know there is a whole bunch that doesn’t care about the drama and prefers sports and beautiful things.”

Given the city’s diligent and highly competitive local television news networks, the indictment and Trump’s first court appearance on Tuesday still leads most evening newscasts. But during its 9 p.m. newscast on Friday, CBS Miami stuck to its format of first focusing on truly local news — stories that summed up what people really are talking about in South Florida.

First came the weather, specifically the current location on radar of those pesky tropical thunderstorms that crimp commutes and dinner schedules. Then came a segment on the Miami Heat game that evening. Then came a segment on the Florida Panthers game on Saturday. The fourth story noted that Miami Swim Week — which CBS4 billed as the “Paris Fashion Week for swimwear” — was around the corner.

The second part of the newscast finally got around to Trump indictment and the 37 counts he faces.

Miami documentary filmmaker Billy Corben considers it fitting that Trump will be arraigned at the Southern District of Florida’s Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. Courthouse.

“The Southern District of Florida is where the biggest names in the world come to get indicted and tried in the federal court system,” said Corben, who directed “Cocaine Cowboys” about the city’s drug wars in the 1970s and 1980s. There was Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega, convicted here in 1992, as well as Fabio Ochoa Vásquez, a leader of Colombia’s Medellín drug cartel, in 2003.

Victor M. Uribe-Uran, a history and law professor at Florida International University in Miami, also thinks it’s appropriate that Trump’s case landed in South Florida. An expert on Latin America, he compared the crimes that are alleged to the “worst behaviors of the worst Latin American leaders.”

Still, Uribe-Uran is not surprised that the city is not captivated by the federal indictment.

“So many of the Latin Americans who reside in South Florida are wealthy Latin Americans who despise leftist guerrillas, leftist leaders, who left their countries because of what they see as an impossible place to live,” he said. “They are used to, more than anybody around, corruption in public life, and perhaps they just shrug it off.”

Indeed, a future trial of a former president seemed the last thing on most people’s minds this weekend. Beyond preparing for Saturday night’s Florida Panthers game, sports fan crammed into bars to watch the Manchester vs. Inter Milan soccer match.

As he visited with a friend in the lobby of the Grand Station apartments, William Perz said he wasn’t going to spend energy thinking about Trump, whom he believes “is going to be president again.”

“I think this is just the Democrats trying to make him not run again because they know the power he has,” said the 23-year-old Colombian native, who moved to suburban Miami in 2017.

A few blocks from the federal courthouse, where customers were puffing on cigars and drinking beer or cocktails at City Cigar Lounge, Dave Bell views the Trump indictment as “beating a dead horse.”

“Why are we going to keep talking about someone who is not even in office anymore?” asked Bell, 27, an investor who splits his time between Boston and Miami.

Instead of chatting about Trump, he preferred to talk about why he still views Boston as a far better sports town — despite both the Miami Heat and Florida Panthers advancing in the playoffs this spring after beating the Boston teams that he had supported. “Up in Boston, Philly, New York, people are still much more emotional and attuned” to professional sports, Bell said. “I feel like Miami has a good fan base, but I feel like there are so many other things going on … jetskiing, the beach.”

As of 3 p.m. on Tuesday, one of the things that will also be happening is Trump’s arraignment.

Will people slow down to soak up the history?

“We kind of make history every day down here so I think it’s going to be another Tuesday,” Corben, the filmmaker, said. “The weight of this moment is not lost on anyone who thinks about it — the first American president indicted under the Espionage Act — but where else would you expect this Third World banana republic to occur other than Miami?”