in a sex movie; failed to pay the lease on the station's broadcast equipment; used his own company to make commercials, competing with WEVU's own advertising department; and hired relatives who were unqualified for their positions, jeopardizing the station's future. In addition, the minority owners of Gulfshore said that by failing to obtain a direct link with ABC, the station had lost $200,000 in advertising business; WEVU obtained its ABC programming off-air from Sarasota's WXLT, leaving it at the mercy of WXLT's own preemptions of ABC network fare. In May 1976, Lundquist sold his controlling interest in WEVU to the other seven stockholders, after his shares were reinstated by an appeals court. With the other members of Gulfshore in control, the company set out to try and get WEVU on the right foot after the station nearly closed; they hired Joe Buerry, one of the founders of WBBH-TV, as the new general manager, and WEVU also restored the local news it had cut back earlier. The station made national news for all the wrong reasons in May 1978, when a film distributor mixup was responsible for the station airing 30 minutes of an X-rated film instead of its intended late feature, Daring Game. Home News era In May 1978, Gulfshore announced the sale of channel 26 to Caloosa Television, a subsidiary of the Home News Company, for a total of $3.3 million. WEVU was the seventh broadcasting property owned by Home News and second TV station. For years, it had been a standing complaint of viewers, and southwest Florida's TV stations, that Miami Dolphins games that did not sell out could not be aired in the Fort Myers–Naples market. In 1979, then-new news director Jack Speiss was surprised when the station did not air a Monday Night Football game because of a blackout; he eventually was able to telephone then-Dolphins owner Joe Robbie, who told him in no uncertain terms, "I'm not going to allow you to broadcast it." Tension over what came to be known locally as the "Robbie Rule" boiled over in 1984 when the Dolphins blacked out WEVU again on Monday night. However, once WEVU's scheduled movie ended, and with the game still going on, channel 26 joined the network telecast in progress, and the general manager issued a statement criticizing the "Robbie Rule" which was read on the station's late newscast. The late 1980s saw two