Ames / Iowa St.

[Blackshirt]

Article Published: Monday, September 15, 2003

big 12 football

Hawk's-eye view

 

First stop in Heartland tame in terms of trash talk, trouble for visitors

 

By Bill Briggs

Denver Post Sports Writer

 

AMES, Iowa - In the muddy flats where charcoal smoke and school spirit hung in the postgame drizzle, two men suddenly cut toward each other in a simultaneous blitz.

 

One, draped in Iowa State Cyclones gear, vowed to de-bone the other, an Iowa Hawkeyes fan who had just been pawing through a truck bed littered with seat cushions, beer coolers and foam fingers proclaiming both schools No. 1.

 

 

"Hey!" the Cyclone hollered between huffs, "you better not let YOUR Iowa stuff touch MY Iowa State stuff!"

 

The two men zoomed closer, watched by an ocean of soggy tailgaters outside Jack Trice Stadium. But at the end of their sprint, the two men skidded, then laughed, then hugged - making sure not to spill their cans of Bud Light.

 

This is Iowa after all, the capital of nice, home of Radar O'Reilly and cornfield baseball, where a modern football rivalry is really nothing personal. Well, not anymore.

 

Iowa State was the first stop on The Denver Post's tour of Big 12 football stadiums. At each venue, I will dress in the visiting team's attire to test the best and worst of home fan behavior, from hospitality to hostility. For Ames, I wore an atomic yellow Iowa sweat shirt and a black ballcap with a gold "I."

 

Happily, there is no "I" in revenge. Although Iowa knocked the DNA out of the 'Clones, 40-21, I didn't hear so much as a, "Yo mama's so stupid, she thought a quarterback was a refund." The only hands laid on me were quiet high-fives from blissful Hawkeyes fans.

 

Even the trash talking was tame, not that I didn't try. The Cyclones fan to my left in the south end-zone bleachers was a 20-something guy named Brian who came with his father. Between the raindrops, I tried to heat up the football chatter.

 

ME: Hey, man, your boys are goin' down today!

 

BRIAN: You may be right. I hate to say it, but you may have the better team.

 

ME: Never mind.

 

This is nothing like the in-state nastiness between Texas A&M and Texas Tech that culminated in a stadium brawl two years ago. When Iowa State is not playing Iowa, Cyclones fans generally pull for the Hawkeyes and vice versa. A fair number of beer coolers are carried into the parking lots with an Iowa State backer on one handle and an Iowa guy on the other.

 

And it's as much about the party scene as it is about the game, dubbed the Iowa Bowl.

 

According to Ames police, thousands of ticketless people rolled onto campus Saturday morning just to munch brats and taste the game-day atmosphere. The public parking lots were full by 9:45 a.m., almost two hours before kickoff. Which is about the time the student section filled up at Trice, booing anything breathing in black and gold. (The only Hawkeyes not razzed by the kids were the Iowa grads piloting two of the fighter jets that roared in formation over the stadium.)

 

Inside the small parking-lot nation of RVs, school flags fly, beer funnels gurgle and Cyclones rooters mix with Hawkeyes fans beneath gold tents and red awnings. The talk is often about consumption rates rather than completion rates.

 

"Yo, check this Iowa State guy out over here!" a young Hawkeyes fan yells in my ear over someone's Nine Inch Nails CD. He's pointing at the boozy guy in a crooked Cyclones hat who's being held upright by his girlfriend. It's 10:53 a.m.

 

"Dude's so drunk he's about to puke," his friend tells me proudly. "Iowa fans can outparty these guys forever!"

 

Familiar foes

By now, they've had a lot of practice. The rivalry dates to 1894. And it was testy from the start. In 1897, Iowa State's Foster Parker ran 40 yards for the winning score, but Iowa's players immediately claimed that an illegal Cyclones block broke Parker loose. When the referee refused to throw a flag, Iowa left in protest and forfeited 6-0.

 

Two hours east in Iowa City - home of the Iowa campus - the local newspaper covered it this way: "The umpire, whose sole duty it is to observe such things, says he failed to see the play. Why? Either because he did not want to see it, or because he was grossly, not to say criminally, negligent."

 

And now, the farming news ...

 

Soon after, things got ugly. Iowa temporarily cut all athletic ties with Iowa State in 1907 after the Hawkeyes' coach received an anonymous tip before the game that his star halfback, Chick Kirk, would be purposely hurt while playing Iowa State. Sure enough, Kirk was injured, tackled while trying to make a fair catch.

 

By 1916, even the federal government had seen enough of the backyard squabble. The U.S. education commissioner urged the two colleges to stop playing football. After two more sporadic meetings, the series ended in 1934. The cease-fire lasted until 1977 when Iowa State convinced Iowa to resume the rivalry, following almost 10 years of peace talks and negotiations.

 

Today, the game is Iowa's biggest sporting event, drawing caravans from the western and eastern parts of the state, which seem largely partial to the Hawkeyes, and from the central towns, which tend to go for the Cyclones. The paid attendance Saturday was 53,488 - a stadium record. About one-fifth of the fans wore Iowa gold.

 

No special events ushered in the game but almost everyone was talking about it beforehand. Iowa, once the winner of 15 straight in the series, had suddenly lost five in a row, including a heartbreaker last year in Iowa City where the Cyclones came back from a 24-7 deficit.

 

"We don't hold any rallies during Iowa week," said Chris Andringa, 25, a senior at Iowa State. "Everybody just knows."

 

"If you're an Iowa State fan, you kind of feel like you're being looked down on by your big brother. So there's a little bit of the chip-on-the-shoulder type feeling," said Eric Heft, the color analyst on the Cyclone Radio Network.

 

Big brother was back on Saturday. As Iowa roared out to a three-touchdown advantage, I left my seat to see if I would draw any verbal fire from the Cyclones student section. Many just glanced at my Iowa sweat shirt, looked at their feet and muttered something about how their rugged team had apparently been replaced by the Backstreet Boys.

 

"Running game? We don't even know how to run out the clock," one Cyclones fan said.

 

"Iowans as a whole are pretty reasonable people with a fairly good perspective on things," Heft said. "Look at the political demographics of Iowa - you've got conservatives and liberals, but they're all concentrated in the middle of the road. There aren't any shrill extremists."

 

Unless you count the X-rated, anti-Iowa T-shirts that were popular in the crowd. They succinctly demanded that the home team do something physical to Iowa, something that is central to the breeding of Iowa livestock, something we can't mention here.

 

"Beat Iowa" is the closest version I can use.

 

Cassie Reinke, 21, from Waukon, Iowa, wore one of those shirts. But she was more offended by the black-and-gold Iowa getup worn by her live-in friend, 22-year-old Neal Corwin.

 

"He won't be staying with me anymore," Reinke said, "unless he takes off that shirt."

 

 

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