THE FRED COLUMN

Fred Martin

You’ve heard, of course, the old wheeze that holds, “There’s one in

every crowd.”

The generally accepted meaning of the phrase is, there’s always at least

one idiot in any mass of people who has the potential to screw things up

for the rest of us.

The more of those fools you have in any given crowd, the worse things can

be. That certainly proved true at the football game between the

University of Colorado Buffaloes from Boulder and the Colorado State

University Rams from Fort Collins a couple of weeks ago.

To put this into perspective, Colorado State football teams had not

emerged victorious over Colorado since 1983. Last year, CU embarrassed

the Rams, 42-14.. Worse, it was on national television and in front of a

record crowd of 76,000-plus at Denver’s Mile High Stadium.

This year, Vegas oddsmakers picked CU over CSU by two touchdowns. But the

bookies had their buns burned as CSU drubbed Colorado, 41-14, before

another huge audience at Mile High.

Unfortunately, Colorado State’s dramatic victory had to share headlines

with the bizarre battle that followed the game.

With about five minutes left in the fourth quarter, a phalanx of SWAT and

riot squads of the Denver police filed out on the field in front of the

CSU rooting section.

To make matters worse, some deep thinker had placed the CSU students

directly above the tunnel assigned to the Colorado football team, band,

cheerleaders and flag twirlers.

After the final gun, the CU forces ran into the tunnel, the air above

them filled with flurries of waded paper. Some of the Colorado State

cheerleaders grabbed their sisters from Boulder and tried to shield them.

The CSU band played the school fight song .

I had been watching the Ram football team through my binoculars as it

gathered at midfield and knelt in thanksgiving.

I heard a chilling mass scream swell up from my right, and turned my

glasses on the source. What I saw just 40 yards away was a surreal cross

between “Clockwork Orange” and the opening scenes of “Saving Private

Ryan.”

The cops had donned gas masks to protect them from the tear-gas smoke

that gushed from the canisters they had thrown into the stands. More

missiles floated toward the field, but they still appeared to be harmless

wads of paper.

However, I did see one policeman pick up an empty plastic water bottle

and hurl it back into the stands. He followed that with an extended

digit. Another cop heaved tear gas into the CSU band!

In perfect close-up, I saw another officer holding what looked to be a

flamethrower. He aimed it toward about a half-dozen Ram fans just behind

the fence. They were hunkered over, trying to find their way out of the

fray as a thick stream spurted from the nozzle.

Whether it was Mace or pepper spray or just water, I don’t know, but it

made the young people scream and fall to the ground. My binoculars are

powerful -- 7 x 50s -- and I could clearly see terror on young faces.

Scenes from the melee are still being rerun on television, still being

argued on editorial pages and in letters to various editors. In simplest

terms, this was a case of a few goons versus the goon squad, and both

sides were way out of line.

All I know is, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

There was the blockhead who put the CU tunnel right under the CSU rooting

section. There was the genius on the Denver police who decided to parade

a legion of black-suited, face-masked riot cops onto the field, making

them a catalyst for trouble, not a deterrent.

And there was the small band of drunken youths who saw the Darth Vader

contingent come onto the field and reacted as the subhuman thugs they had

become during eight to 12 hours of drinking.

Because of television, the kickoff was at 5 p.m. But the student tailgate

parties had begun as early as 9 a.m. And if more beer was still

necessary, there was plenty of it on sale inside the stadium throughout

the game.

With a crowd in the 75,000 range, just one troublemaker wouldn’t be

enough to make a difference. But combine a hundred or so mindless,

mannerless drunks with a small force of reckless cops and that is a

formula for disaster.

It’s really quite frightening that so few can ruin a wonderful moment for

so many.

* FRED MARTIN is a former Newport Beach resident who now writes from his

home in Fort Collins, Colo. His column appears on Wednesdays.