Greeley
Maybe the first hint football had gone stark-raving mad at the University of Northern Colorado was when somebody stabbed the punter. You think?
Something has died. Football killed it. The Bears lost 54-3 on Saturday in their last game of the season, but a fine school has lost so much more.
Thank goodness the madness did not kill punter Rafael Mendoza, a 21-year-old from Thornton.
He put a face on how dangerously sports-crazed we can be. Mendoza was attacked Sept. 11, smacked in the neck and stabbed in the thigh. Police arrested Mitch Cozad, now accused of first-degree attempted murder. Cozad also played for Northern Colorado. Cozad was a punter, described as a jealous understudy to Mendoza and, as the theory goes, willing to try anything to win the starting job.
“It was my teammate who did this to me. And that’s what is so hard to handle,” Mendoza said. “I don’t have nightmares every night. But I’m scared every time I go home. I double-check every lock. As far as playing football, I try to pretend nothing happened. Because, if I think about it too much, I keep having flashbacks.”
The Bears should not stop playing football. But Northern Colorado must quit pretending to be something it’s not, before the school kills its reputation in the process.
After Mendoza was ambushed outside his apartment, anyone would have understood if he spent the whole autumn under the bedcovers. But football gave him sanity, and as the 5-inch-deep gash in his leg slowly healed, Mendoza resumed punting, including five times against Northern Arizona on the final afternoon of a lost season for the Bears.
Mendoza is as brave as any son of Northern Colorado could ever be. He’s everything right about the school. But what’s wrong is an athletic program in a dangerous state of denial.
UNC president Kay Norton wants you to know the Bears are good sports, not cheaters or criminals.
The sad part? Once upon a time, it was true.
Outside the entrance to the president’s luxury box atop Northern Colorado’s home stadium hang two photographs the size of small billboards, with players from the 1996 and 1997 squads wearing the wall-to-wall smiles of champions. The football team won the Division II national title in consecutive seasons. The Bears had a nice little dynasty going.
But, no, that wasn’t good enough.
In pursuit of the higher profile that membership in the Big Sky Conference and Division I-AA status could provide, these Bears have instead become the dirtiest little secret in college football.
After a ruckus at a February party where a head got cracked with a bottle and a knife blade was flashed, four players were dismissed from the team. A UNC co-captain was arrested during a bar fight reportedly fueled by racist taunting. An assistant coach quit in midseason. Not only did the Bears lose eight conference games, they were drubbed by an aggregate score of 280-80.
Growing pains are what first-year coach Scott Downing, the poor guy who stepped in this mess, calls the fiasco.
Quitters never win, sports preach to us. But shouldn’t somebody at Northern Colorado call the whole thing off? In a state where sports pages are ruled by the NFL, NBA, major-league baseball and hockey, can the bad news Bears really be so desperate to make headlines?
If Norton had the nerve, she would call the embarrassment big-time football has brought to a fine educational institution for what it really is: A badly conceived experiment that should be scrapped, scaled back and cleaned up.
“It’s hard to see the team suffer,” Bears running back Andre Wilson said.
When it was over, the last lousy game as well as his athletic career, senior safety Matt Thomas unabashedly wept.
“These guys are my brothers,” said Thomas, one of many fine students undeservedly slimed by the scandal.
Ambition is almost never its own reward. Anything worth doing in the United States is worth super-sizing. That’s how football, envy and infamy can grow larger than life. When it all goes wrong, somebody smarter than I said the American dream is nothing except the same misery in a bigger house.
Driven by ambition, the Northern Colorado football program suffered its first 10-loss season since beginning play in 1893. When a visitor can count 848 spectators in the bleachers during the second half of the final home game, is that the big time anyone had in mind? An attempted murder trial awaits, while Geraldo and every tabloid news organization in America salivates.
“My friends see me on TV and ask, ‘What’s it like to be famous?’ This is not how I wanted to be famous. I wanted to earn my fame,” said Mendoza, who trusted the world was inherently good, dug scary movies and never felt a whisper of paranoia until he was stabbed in the back of his kicking leg. It gave him the creeps to see Cozad again, when the accused recently entered a courtroom to hear charges of attempted first-degree murder.
“When I testify at the trial, it will be way beyond anything I’ve ever felt on the field. When I punt, my heart’s beating and I’m a little nervous. But when I went to court a couple weeks back, I couldn’t breathe,” Mendoza said. “I couldn’t handle it. It was anxiety. It was fear. It was the first time I’d seen the guy since it all happened. And I could not look him in the eye.”
Yep. The Bears are living the dream.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
