In the end, after a week that frayed nerves and strained incredulity, a week that shook mountaintops and fractured a state, they danced. Gary Pinkel found himself surrounded by a circle of white jerseys, bobbing and swaying, a grey pebble sinking inside a bowl of undulating cream.
The University of Missouri football coach tensed up at first, briefly, as if to resist the urge to boogie away the blues. Eventually, he wiggled to and wiggled fro, a 63-year-old booty in full, cathartic shake. On a scale of 1 to 10, the judges decided …
“That was about a ‘2’,” Tigers defensive end Charles Harris offered, a mischievous glint flashing from the corner of one eye.
But what about the sense of relief? The tension released?
“Oh, that was a ‘10.’ Yeah. Pure happiness.”
“The dance was a little off,” fellow defensive end Walter Brady added. “But it’s Coach Pinkel. He’s a great man whether he dances or not.”
And maybe, in hindsight, that was what came off as most striking about Saturday night at Arrowhead Stadium: The cool, businesslike dispatch with which Pinkel’s Tigers had rallied to beat favored Brigham Young University, 20-16. Quarterback Drew Lock threw for 224 yards, Russell Hansbrough ran for 117 more, and BYU was held to 46 team rushing yards – 100 fewer than its season average coming into the weekend. You’d almost never have known the tumult in the preamble, never have known that the players had gone on strike on a Sunday and gotten the university president ousted on a Monday, never known that they’d been told on a Friday that their coach had cancer and would soon be leaving them.
“I don’t know if I was sure after [Friday] what was going to happen [on Saturday],” Pinkel said, less than 32 hours after having disclosed to his charges, at a team meeting, that he was battling non-Hodgkin lymphoma. “I was praying a lot.”
“We’re not going to remember this game,” Harris said. “We’re going to remember the moments that led up to this game. That’s the most important thing.”
Black students feeling ostracized, then compartmentalized, then dismissed. Mizzou’s African-American players linking arms with the Concerned Student 1950 movement, steering their team-mates and head coach to join them. A united front to try and end the hunger strike of a black graduate tudent, Jonathan Butler, who had refused to eat until then-university president Tim Wolfe – who avoided public-relations gaffes the way Sideshow Bob avoided stepping on rakes – was out of office.
“You know, a fist is a lot more strong than just a hand that’s open,” Harris said. “So once we all focused on each other, really had each other’s backs throughout the entire time, the entire situation, we learned that [if] we are united, that together, we can fight through anything.”
“It’s not really about power,” Brady said. “It’s about bringing awareness to a cause that plagues our country. And we were able to make some changes. But as far as society goes, we have a big journey ahead of us.”
Don’t coddle us. Don’t baby us. Listen to us. Please. Just listen.
“From my perspective, and a lot of other people’s perspective that I know who have kids, when you send your kids to college, you expect them to be taken care of,” Lamont Cain, a Mizzou fan from Kansas City, told the Guardian as he tailgated with friends in Lot C of the Truman Sports Complex. “And you don’t want your kids to be in a hostile environment, whatever kind it is, because they’re away from you.”
Cain, an African-American, is a lifelong Tigers loyalist, gold-blooded MU through thick and thin. But as surreal as the previous six days on campus had been, he found himself more bothered by Wolfe’s public aloofness in the face of concerns voiced by black students, and the blowback from the more conservative corners of the state on the heels of Monday’s resignation.
“Whether it be sexist issues, or racist issues or whatever race you are, if there’s racism [in] any part, if you’ve never walked in their shoes, you can’t understand that,” Cain said. “There’s people saying, ‘Oh, it’s a bad situation,’ and ‘You shouldn’t be able to force his hand,’ ‘You’re overacting.’ No. That’s like saying, ‘Deal with it.’ You can’t tell them to just deal with it. ‘Slavery’s over, just deal with it. Racism doesn’t exist.’ That’s not true. Because you’ve never walked in those shoes, you can’t say that.
“If someone keeps breaking into your house, you keep telling the police and they never doing anything about it, what do you do? So you’ve got to have someone that’s going to be sensitive to my issues and [not say], ‘I don’t know what you can do about it.’
“To say ‘Deal with it,’ or ‘It doesn’t exist,’ that’s not true. Let’s be real. It’s 2015. It does exist. If you’ve never walked in those shoes, you can’t honestly say in your mind, ‘It doesn’t exist.’ Those [students] they’re obviously going through something to take extreme measures, that’s my point.”
In an adjacent lot, separated by a half-dozen grills and gold “M” flags flailing in the autumn wind, another Tigers fan, an African-American who identified himself only as Joe, recalled his experiences as a relative Mizzou newbie.
“[Columbia] is an awesome place,” said Joe, who noted that he’d only followed the Tigers closely for a few years, a taste acquired through co-workers and friends. “I’ve had a great time at Mizzou. I’ve never had a bad time. I’ve been to basketball games, I’ve been to football games, I love it there. Great city, great town.
“I’ve lived in Missouri the last 10 years; it’s an amazing state. I have no issues with it whatsoever … I know there’s a lot of tension going on. I’m an African-American and I’m completely comfortable being there. I have no worries whatsoever. But I understand that there are some people that feel it. I felt it, too. But I’m more optimistic than pessimistic.”
While homemade signs of sympathy and support for Paris and for Pinkel were flashed by the faithful inside the stadium, a Mizzou fan went to Twitter before halftime and claimed she was told she wouldn’t be allowed inside Arrowhead while bearing a white placard that mentioned the Concerned Student 1950 movement. A spokesman for the Kansas City Chiefs – the NFL team oversaw facilities operations for the event – said it was a mistake and that security was not instructed to ban or confiscate signage relating to recent events, assuming taste, language and decorum were above board.
That aside, the evening was a comparatively muted affair, while Arrowhead at kickoff appeared to be roughly three-fifths full, if that. Official attendance was 42,824, roughly 54% of capacity (79,451) and well below last year’s average crowd of 65,285. Whether the empty seats were because of the unrest on campus, the players’ threat of boycotting the game entirely or something else — Kansas City represents the far western border of Mizzou’s fan base, more than two hours’ drive from Columbia, and a sizeable chunk of the metro area bleeds University of Kansas blue — wasn’t immediately clear.
More clear were the affections for Pinkel, Mizzou’s all-time winningest football coach (118 victories), whose week ran the gamut from bizarre to positively surreal. After backing his players’ alignment with Concerned Student 1950, Pinkel reportedly spent the next few days in public backtrack mode, trying to gently separate himself from the movement a little more each time he was asked about. Regardless, few Mizzou fans were prepared for the news that dropped on the eve of the game: the coach, fearing news leaks of a decision he’d planned to announce later in the month, hastily gathered his team together, revealing plans to retire at season’s end after he was diagnosed with lymphoma in May.
“That seems strange to me,” Cain said, raising an eyebrow. “That’s a little weird to me. I’m wondering about that. That [came] all of a sudden.”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know. It feels like his hand was forced, too. That’s just me.”
And yet, as the hours passed and the Cougars wilted, the locals rose to chant Pinkel’s name. With 9:18 left in the game, during a replay review of Tyler Hunt’s one-yard touchdown plunge, the chants grew louder. As the final seconds ticked off the clock, victory assured, they started up again. All of which led a reporter to ask later where this particular notch happened to rank on the coach’s belt, given the storms that preceded it.
“Because of the week?” Pinkel replied. “It’ll be up there forever, somewhere.”
For one night, at least, Mizzou’s fist transformed into a giant group hug. It was back to football, back to normal. Back to winning, to dancing and, for the team at least, one heartbeat.
