Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 12, 1993 TAG: 9312120104
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It must be an Ohio thing. We wouldn't understand.
But then most of us left the Stagg Bowl at halftime, our civic duty to help fill up Salem Stadium fulfilled.
As soon as the halftime gun sounded, you could pick out the locals in Saturday's wind-whipped, snow-blinded, 30-degree weather - they were the ones streaming out of the stadium, their teeth chattering apologies about how they didn't care that much who won the Division III college football championship.
So it's almost impossible for us warm-blooded Southerners to comprehend the behavior of the Mount Union College fans for whom a gusty blast of arctic weather was but a fresh breeze from home - and for whom a football game is akin to a tribal gathering.
Take Joe Letterhous and Chris Snay (Joe's the one yelling "We bleed purple!" at the top of his lungs), two Mount Union students who found themselves without tickets when the Stagg Bowl unexpectedly sold out last week.
Clearly, there was only one logical, rational response.
They drove here from Ohio Friday, curled up on the concrete, and spent the night sleeping in front of the stadium's ticket office so they could be first in line to buy the standing-room-only tickets that went on sale Saturday morning.
"I had that blanket," Letterhous said, pointing to a frail piece of cloth, "and one pillow. We shared it."
"We'd just stopped shaking," Snay said, when a police officer came by and told them they'd have to move their car.
But then they went back to sleep.
Didn't they freeze? Sure. "But we're from up there in the snow belt," Letterhous explained. Cold, schmold. "If we were playing in Alaska, we'd have slept out in Alaska."
Don't believe it?
His brother, John, paraded around the stadium bare-chested for most of the game. So did a buddy, Chip Battles. Well, they weren't entirely bare-chested. They had slathered themselves in purple paint to proclaim their allegiance: "Raiders."
Juvenile behavior?
Why, John Letterhous is a role model-in-training. He's student-teaching this semester. "I told my kids to watch me on TV," he said.
The sports fans might have pegged Mount Union, armed with a pro prospect at quarterback, as the favorite over Rowan College on the field. But you didn't have to know a touchdown from a first down to figure out that Mount Union had Rowan beat in the stands - and in the tailgate parties beforehand.
True, Rowan grad Dan Ryan, who played on the school's 1991 team, donned his old helmet and tried to whip up the crowd by recalling bitter defeats the school had suffered in the past and now needed to purge. But the most outlandish Rowan fan in sight was Tom Welsh, and all he did was pull on a scraggly-haired wig he found in a friend's car.
Even then, Welsh spent most of the pregame pep rally quietly nursing a bottle of what purported to be pink grapefruit juice. "I transferred to Rowan just to have a football team," he said. "That's my idea of college, coming out and tailgating on a cold Saturday."
But while that's his idea of college, this is the Mount Union fan's idea of life.
While Rowan brought fans by the hundreds from New Jersey, Mount Union disgorged them by the thousands. "Ten percent of our city is in Salem today," said Wendy Fox, a real-estate appraiser from Alliance, Ohio.
Looking at the crowd, it was easy to believe.
She came down with seven friends stuffed into a camper painted - in purple, of course - "Stagg Bowl Bound." For the occasion, she'd baked up cookies with purple icing. Just in case they weren't enough, she stopped by an Alliance bakery selling doughnuts with purple icing.
But get this: Neither she nor any of her companions had any connection with Mount Union; they just happened to live in the town. "Northern Ohio is just good for football," said her husband, Hugo.
With respectable citizens of Alliance acting like that, it's easier to understand then why so many Mount Union students felt compelled to show their school colors . . . by saying to heck with exams on Monday and driving all night to get here . . . by emptying cans of purple hair spray . . . by painting their faces purple . . . or, at the very least, applying rub-on Raider tattoos to their cheeks.
As for the weather, was there anyone wishing the Stagg Bowl had stayed in Bradenton, Fla. (where the skies Saturday were clear and the high was 65)?
The Roanoke Valley fans may have been apologetic - "it was 60 degrees here on Tuesday," they were telling every stranger in sight - but the folks who came in from Ohio and New Jersey could not seem to have cared less.
"This is good football weather," said Bill Gough, a Mount Union grad. "We never expected it any other way."
Ed Miller, a Rowan fan, went one better: "This is great football weather. This is the way it ought to be played."
Well, only for a while.
The souvenir stand did a brisk business in sweat shirts, many of which were put to immediate use.
And as the game wore on, even the bare-chested John Letterhous swaddled himself in a banner before putting on a coat. "I got kind of chilly," he said sheepishly.
But his brother, Joe - flushed with victory, if not the temperature - was undeterred.
"I'll sleep out here naked to get to this game again."
by CNB