Greeley
With the click of handcuffs on a man guilty of wielding a knife that threatened to tear them apart, the Northern Colorado Bears were free at last to be a football team whose biggest worries are wins and losses rather than bloodshed or paranoia.
“To be honest, I got famous in a way I never wanted,” punter Rafael Mendoza said. “Maybe in the future, I’ll be able to see my name on ESPN because of my football achievements.”
It felt good for Mendoza to kick a football, watch it arc across the blue Colorado sky and envision a time when his nightmare ceases to be entertainment for rubber-neck gawkers, oddly entertained by what certainly qualifies as one of the most bizarre, nasty, violent battles for a starting job in sports history.
Justice is slow and loud and rarely clean on the soul.
Convicted for attacking his punting rival with a knife in a desperate act to get playing time, 22-year-old Mitch Cozad shook his head Thursday, when a jury found him guilty of second-degree assault, but acquitted him on an attempted-murder charge.
His fiancée sobbed from deep in a sickened heart as the cuffs were slapped on Cozad, and his mother defiantly shouted to prosecutors: “You all know he passed the polygraph, you all know it.”
It was a bad scene, full of the queasy comfort that results when a jury of our peers decides football in America might foster the blind ambition that provokes bloodshed, but stops short of murderous intent. Maybe that’s as close to a happy ending we can have in an ugly sports story that has been stinking and festering for nearly a year.
“It’s not the outcome I wanted, but it’s a big weight off my shoulders,” said Mendoza, who stared silently at Cozad as the verdict was read.
During the six-day trial, Mendoza testified he was in fear for his life while being stabbed in his kicking leg last September in the parking lot outside his apartment, in an ambush that lasted maybe 90 seconds but could haunt the victim for the rest of his life. While listening to the replay of his 911 call to police from his cellphone, Mendoza had fallen apart emotionally in the courtroom.
Those tears revealed the heavy price to play the victim in a cautionary tale of how winning can become the only thing that really matters, to the scary extent some success-hungry athletes will stop at nothing to get ahead, whether their twisted ethics include sticking a steroid-filled syringe into themselves or plunging a cold, sharp blade into a competitor.
Nobody deserves to go through life as Nancy Kerrigan in a football helmet.
Fifty years from now, will Mendoza be able to bounce a grandkid on the knee of his kicking leg and tell about his football career without wincing?
“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied, a wry smile probably betraying the real answer.
Although the physical and emotional scars remain on Mendoza, the law has locked Cozad behind bars. His attorney vowed to appeal. The legal system could impose up to 16 years in prison as punishment.
Maybe soon, and none too late, the only noise made by these Bears will again be shoulder pads popping, rather than the shocking headlines that screamed for too long across a never-ending scroll of bad news on televisions across America.
“After last year,” said Scott Downing, whose 1-10 record in his rookie season as Northern Colorado coach was the least of his tribulations, “nothing shocks me.”
Afraid of the dark since the attack, Mendoza has packed a big stick in his car to protect himself against the paranoia that follows him whenever he walks to his front door at night.
“This whole time, he was out, and I didn’t know where he was,” said Mendoza, who constantly fought the compulsion to have one eye peeled behind his back while Cozad awaited trial. “Now I know where he is. In jail. And I’m not worried about it.”
Sports as meaningful escape rarely seems more valid than when Mendoza feels a football fly off his foot with a thump.
“It’s amazing how when I step on this field, my mind goes blank, and there’s nothing in the world that can touch me or bother me,” said Mendoza, who recovered from the gash in his leg to kick for the Bears last fall. “Football is all I think about.”
Hours after justice finally caught up with his attacker, sweat poured from the punter’s temples after a dog-day August afternoon practice.
Mendoza walked past the shade cast by the bleachers. He stood in the sunshine, feeling free.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
