Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 19, 1994 TAG: 9411210050
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For weeks, Mike Jones has been drawing up his game plan for what promises to be the goal-line stand of the year in Blacksburg.
Come game time today, he'll be doing all the usual football things: scouting the opposition, running the two-minute drill at game's end.
But no matter how many X's and O's he puts up on the chalkboard during his locker room sessions, eventually Jones' defensive scheme will come down to sheer brute force and intimidation. Mano-a-mano, right there in the end zone.
What's the matter, sports fans? Can't find Jones' name in your program?
That's because he's Virginia Tech's police chief, and the prevent defense he'll run today is designed to keep rowdy fans from rushing onto the field and bringing down the home team's goal posts.
Back in the Dark Ages, when victorious warriors sacked a city, they really knew how to throw a victory celebration. They'd tear down the statues to the local gods, decapitate the leaders of the rival army, then stick their heads on pikes and parade the souvenirs around town to impress the locals.
Nasty practice: dulled the pikes something awful.
A few centuries or so later, we've gone from the Huns sacking Rome to Hokies and Wahoos sacking each other. Not much difference: Our young scholars today, gripped by the ecstasy of victory, still feel that primal need to tear down something and haul it around like a trophy of war.
Usually, it's the goal posts.
When college police chiefs get together for happy hour at their conventions, that's often what they jawbone about - all the ways they've seen students clamber onto the goal posts and all the ways they've tried to prevent it.
"Some of the funniest stories you've ever heard are about goal posts," Jones says. "I've heard of athletic directors putting Vaseline on the goal posts so you couldn't catch hold. One college pulled vehicles in and put 25 people around a goal post just to protect them. The list of antics with goal posts is never ending. Everything has been tried. Some work; some don't."
Earlier this season, Roanoke County's Cave Spring High School found something that worked: It stationed dogs around each goal post at game's end.
National Goal Posts Inc. in Stratford, Conn., one of the nation's Big Three goal-post companies, once shipped out a can of STP motor oil treatment with each set of goal posts and guaranteed that if the school slathered the uprights and crossbar with STP, they'd be too slippery to get a grip on.
"Then all of a sudden, Andy Granatelli [the race car owner and STP boss] gets fired, they change their formula and now it's not the same," company President Joel Rottman laments.
Stories abound, too, about what happens to goal posts after they've been torn down.
When Northwestern University prepared to take on archrival Illinois in 1991, the school president admonished students to behave in the event of victory. Naturally, the students responded by not only tearing down the goal posts - they dumped the remains into Lake Michigan. "The spirit moved those kids and there it went," philosophizes Northwestern spokesman Greg Shea.
In 1983, when Virginia Tech stomped Virginia 48-0 in Charlottesville, a group of Hokies hauled down the goal posts and proceeded to use the uprights as a battering ram against the door of the Tech locker room. (There's that Dark Ages thing again). Tech coach Bill Dooley was not amused. (UVa officials probably weren't, either. Usually it's the home team that does the honors.)
Virginia fans finally got their chance in 1990, when the Cavaliers broke a long losing streak against dreaded Clemson. That year, "they carried the goal posts a mile away and dropped 'em in some fraternity's lawn," says Eric Snyder, sports editor of the student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily.
At Tech, there's even a mystery that has grown up over the years. Just what happen to the goal posts of 1990? Don Perry, the associate athletic director for facilities, has been at Tech for 30 years and can remember the goal posts being torn down only twice. The most recent case was on the final game of the 1990 season, when Tech walloped Virginia. Tech was going to change goal posts after the season, anyway, so campus police didn't interfere with the mob. "They just helped the physical plant," Jones says.
Did they ever. "After it came down," Perry says, "the last I saw it, it was going up over the hill and down Washington Street. They not only took it down for us, they hauled it away for us."
Where'd it go? Who knows? "Some fraternity could have it in their back yard, using it for a flagpole," Perry says. "It's hard to say where it is."
Clearly, unauthorized goal post disassembly is a cherished college tradition. And yet we have cause to lament the sad decline of standards at even our most prestigious universities. Time was, bringing down the goal post was an act reserved for championship games - and then only the most passionate ones. You've heard of grade inflation? These days, we've got goal post inflation. Every time you turn on ESPN, it seems, there's another goal post coming down.
In Charlottesville, UVa has had two sets come down already this year. The first came when the Wahoos knocked off Clemson. That was justified, Cavalier Daily sports editor Snyder insists, because it proved the 1990 win wasn't a fluke. Of course, Snyder was out there helping to bring it down, so he may not be the most objective commentator on the subject. When UVa students brought down the goal posts after the win over North Carolina, that was going too far, he says. "They're making a mockery of tearing goal posts down," he says. "I think it's been trivialized."
In Chicago, Northwestern's teams have been so bad it's become tradition that any victory justifies disassembly - or at least an attempt. This year, Northwestern even poked fun at itself in a series of television commercial hyping season ticket sales. The coach glowers into the camera, while behind him, a lone student vainly rocks the uprights back and forth. "When I came to Northwestern, we had a tradition of tearing down the goal posts," Gary Barnett declares. "That gets expensive. This year, we've sunk our goal posts 16 feet deep in 6 foot of concrete. See, we're planning on winning some football games."
Goal posts have been coming down so often lately, it's spawned the sports equivalent of an ambulance chaser.
At National Goal Posts, the company president makes a list of "emotional" games each weekend and tracks the result: not the score; whether the goal posts came down. Every Monday morning, he's on the phone to the victimized schools, pushing his brand. Many colleges have been losers that haven't had goal posts come down in so long the athletics director has no idea where to buy them, Rottman says.
Of course, declining moral standards isn't the only reason we've seen more goal posts tumbling. The switch from steel to aluminum has accelerated the process, too. Goal posts are lighter now. (Anyone catch Monday Night Football a few weeks ago? An exuberant Alvin Harper celebrated a touchdown pass for the Dallas Cowboys by "dunking" the football over the crossbar. The thing was so flimsy, it bent.) They're also cheaper than they used to be - so athletic departments aren't as concerned about the cost as they once were.
That means college police departments are no longer under orders to hold that goal, no matter what. Truth is, Tech Police Chief Jones says he's not going to make any heroic efforts to defend the Hokies' goal posts today.
"I can't get too worked up about two pieces of metal that run straight up in the air," Jones says. "If students decide they want 'em, there's little we can do. ... Let 'em run down the field for 20 or 30 minutes until they've run out of steam."
Better to let 'em run amok on the football field than go rampaging into downtown, where they might do some real damage.
"Our main concern is that no one gets injured," Jones says. "At a certain level, you accept it."
by CNB