True Crime Campfire - Stranger Than Fiction, Vol VI: Sportsball Edition

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

If there’s one thing that gets people’s blood pumpin’, it’s sports. All over the world on any given day, you can find people getting into passionate arguments about whose team has a better chance of making the playoffs, or the finals, or the World Cup or whatever. Sometimes there are fisticuffs involved! There are pubs in Scotland where you’re not allowed to wear your football team colors, for fear of a brawl breaking out. In my hometown, when our college team won a big basketball game, people would celebrate by turning over cars and setting stuff on fire. Parents often treat their elementary school kids’ Little League games like the fate of the free world is at stake. My point is, people get INTENSE about this stuff. And things can get real, real weird. This week, we bring you two stories that exemplify that weirdness.Case 1: The Wild Lies of Kevin Hart. Case 2: The Cleveland Ten-Cent Beer Night Riot.Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRESources:https://www.espn.com/espn/eticket/story?page=kevinhart&redirected=true https://www.espn.com/college-sports/recruiting/football/story/_/id/7525340/kevin-hart-recruit-lied-california-golden-bears-sign-missouri-western-stateCleveland Magazine Archives: https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/terminal/articles/1974-cheap-beers-cause-mayhemCleveland Magazine: https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/sports/articles/10-cent-beer-night-an-oral-history-of-cleveland-baseball's-most-infamous-nightNew York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5528679/2024/06/03/cleveland-10-cent-beer-night-50-anniversary/YouTube Channel Kristian Crow, "The Absolute Chaos of Ten Cent Beer Night" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2ZTGtMFVT8Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. If there's one thing in this world that gets people's blood pumping, it's sports. All over the world on any given day, you can find people getting into passionate arguments about whose team has a better chance. of making the playoffs or the finals or the World Cup or whatever. Sometimes there are fisticuffs involved.

There are pubs in Scotland where you're not allowed to wear your football team colors for fear of a brawl breaking out. In my hometown, when our college team won a big basketball game, people would celebrate by turning over cars and setting stuff on fire. Parents often treat their elementary school kids little league games like the fate of the free world is at stake. My point is, people get intense about this stuff, and things can get real, real weird.

This week, we bring you two stories that exemplify that weirdness. This is Stranger Than Fiction, Volume 6, Sportsball Edition. So, Campers, for this one, we're in Fernley, Nevada, a small town in the middle of a whole lot of dry nussin about 30 miles east of Reno. Anyone who grew up in a small town will know that there's no shortage of normal human dramas and wonders, but something really big hardly ever happens. When it does, people will talk about it for decades. Infernly, the big thing happened in February of 2008,

when an enormous high school senior named Kevin Hart announced he'd just been recruited to play football for UC Berkeley. For our listeners who might be more familiar with the round ball kind of football, this was a huge deal. Cal are a division one team and play in front of 63,000 people. Winning a chance to compete for them would be a dream come true for thousands of sporty teenagers. It was certainly a dream come true for Kevin Hart. His family moved to Nevada when he was 14 years old, but before then, Kevin had grown up in Oakley, California, and he'd rooted for the Bay Area teams, including Cal.

Kevin liked baseball, and he absolutely loved football. But if anything, he had too much potential to play as often as he liked. By the time he hit high school, Kevin would be 6'4 and over 300 pounds. He was always a big kid, too big for the weight limit on the Pop Warner Youth Football League, and had to play YMCA flag football instead. His coaches loved him. Not because he was a spectacular young athlete. Kevin's granddad George described him as just a big old mom.

marshmallow. But Kevin followed sports obsessively and already had a vast knowledge of plays and strategies. He was popular too, a wisecracking kid who liked to have his teammates over to watch college games on TV. This is the kind of kid coaches dream of, someone that eats, sleeps, breathes the sport. You can't coach passion. His mom and dad were less happy in Oakley. They were respectively an elementary school teacher and an estimator for an auto repair shop and they had four kids. Money was tight, and Oakley wasn't cheap. So when they heard about a little town four hours away on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a place where houses were cheap and the economy seemed solid, they decided to make a big change and move. It's not easy being dropped into a new

town at the start of high school, and although Kevin was a wise ass with his buddies, he was kind of shy with new people. In his freshman year, he was a big, awkward loner. He made the football team as a lineman, but due mainly to size, not skill. He was still a big old marshmallow, slow on his feet, and much easier to push back than his bulk suggested. Fernley High had a popular easygoing coach, Dave Hart. There are lots of areas of life where being easygoing is a definite plus, but coach in football isn't really one of them.

If you're asking people to do unpleasant, painful stuff, there's usually got to be some yelling somewhere along the way. Dave Hart didn't lose his temper, didn't press his players to hit the weight room or work out hard, so the players loved him, and the team kept losing. Fernley High School had been around since 1928, and no player from there had ever won a Division I football scholarship. The school changed things up with a new coach, Mark Hodges, who was young, high energy, and detail-oriented. The summer before school started, he spotted Kevin playing summer league baseball and gave him a detailed weight. weightlifting routine. Really, the first time someone had decided they could make something out of

Kevin. He stuck with the program, and after a few weeks discovered he had biceps he could actually feel. With an organized training program, the team did well. But sometimes when you make winning so important, weird things happen. Five of Coach Hodges' players had transferred down from Oregon with him and turned out to be ineligible, and he was also holding full Sunday practices, which you aren't allowed to do. The Fernley Vaccaros were investigated and made to forfeit the whole season. Youch. And people take sports, and especially high school sports, too seriously.

In my opinion, anyway, don't come for me. Especially in towns where there's not much else going on. Coach Hodges had the windows shot out of his car after the forfeiture. Good God, people have no chill about this shit. And I am like 89% sure it wasn't the kids that were doing this. It was their parents.

Yeah. Something happens in a parent's brain when little Billy puts on a uniform. They lose all sense of self and sense and become the Terminator. And then I have to tell them to shut up because we're ranked 75th and no one is winning a championship today

and they're yelling at a 12 year old. So I don't know what happens. It's crazy. It's like, like, they're yelling at a line judge and I'm like, it was one point and we're down by 10 and your daughter has tanked five points into a net. So like, let's not get, let's not get that serious, okay? We could have a conversation, but I don't think you're going to like it. Anyway.

Regardless of his first season ending in a debacle, the coach had the team in good shape, especially Kevin Hart, who lost weight, put on muscle, and rediscovered his wise crack inside. The big old introverted marshmallow was now a popular jock who could squat lift 500 pounds. Holy shit. At the end of the season, he was named an all-state player, which is not easy to do. Something like that puts you on the radar of college football programs. In April 2007, Kevin started getting recruiting letters from Division I, schools like the universities of Oregon and Nevada, and even a couple from Ivy League

schools. These were about a thousand miles away from being actual scholarship offers, just programs doing their due diligence and making first contact with someone they knew next to nothing about. For example, they didn't know about Kevin's GPA of 1.8, which is, well, it's not good. Okay. Kevin was by no means a dumb kid, but the only part of school he cared about was playing football. As soon as he started at Friendly High School, he found out that all you needed to maintain athletic eligibility was a passing grade. A D average meant he could stay on the field, and that's all he aimed for.

The bar should have been higher. When I was in college, my teammates would tease my coach by telling him that D's get degrees. He was not pleased. We had the highest UP on campus, by the way, of all the sports teams, but he still did not find us hilarious, which I found rude. By the way, the bar was higher for every other high school in the state where you needed to have at least a 2.0 GPA to play. Fernley was kind of a mess during Kevin's time there. The school had two interim principals and three athletic directors. They'd either deliberately

or accidentally misread the GPA statute in the eligibility rules and coach Hodges didn't know or care what grades his players were getting, as long as the eligible box was checked. That was good enough. Kevin's parents worked long, hard hours and had three other kids to look after. When they asked Kevin how school was going and he said, fine, that was good enough for them. No one was looking at his report cards and the letters from the colleges kept coming in. I cannot imagine. My parents were up my ass.

Like the second those report cards came out. I mean, oh, God. And I grew up in the era where my mom could check my grade online anytime she wanted. Oh, so you didn't even have the option of the kids in my era where you could try to change it with a red pen before you gave it to your parents. No, no, no. It was literally any day the bomb could drop. Where is this assignment? Why doesn't it turned in?

I turned it in. She hasn't graded it yet. I don't know. It's a zero. Anyway. These were essentially. just impersonal bulk form letter sent out to maintain a connection with an athlete, but Kevin didn't really know how college recruitment worked. Every time coach handed him another letter after

practice, he became more convinced he was nailed on for a scholarship to a Division I school. And he started to get kind of an ego about it, swaggering around campus, calling himself D1. Oh, honey, honey, no. Yeah, and I, just as a reminder, I have coached at the college level, seen the kind of letters we send out there literally like, hey, if you're interested, please reach out to us. Please fill out these forms. We want to know more about you. They're not, they're not like personalized at all.

They're not like, hey. Dear player. Yeah. To whomever it may concern. It's like, yeah, your stats, basically what it is is like, hey, your stats are really good. You're hitting these, these, like, top, you know, 25 players in the state. You match the needs we will need in the next couple years.

like we'd like to see you play if you're also interested in us like to make it a little bit weird it's a little bit like dating where it's like we're interested in you are you interested at us do you want to come talk to us um do you like me yes check yes or no that's exactly that's exactly how college recruiting works is like because like we're not going to waste our time if like the kids like I never want to leave my hometown and it's like okay well why did I spend $1,000 to come visit you, you know. D1. Yeah.

So, yikes. Yikes. Yikes, yikes. Most high schools are about as careful and nurturing as a pond full of piranhas. So, of course, the more Kevin bragged about his bright future, the more other kids started trying to tear him down, calling him an idiot and telling him he'd never make it. Kevin ignored them and kept all his recruiting letters in a shoebox at his bedroom, which is heartbreakingly cute.

It's really cute. It's so cute. And, okay, I just, I get why they, like, it's, it's so cringe and so, like, full, like, so full of himself to call himself D1. You can't give yourself a nickname, Kevin. Like, that's the number one rule. But, oh, the hope in his, the hope in his heart, it gets me. Because they'd sent him the most letters, he thought the University of Washington were the most interested and asked his parents if he could fly up to Seattle to meet with a school, which is not how that works. His parents couldn't spare the cash, but Granddad George, under the impression that Kevin was going to pre-arranged meetings with actual coaches, paid for a flight and taxis.

So Kevin quickly discovered that Udub were not actually desperately clamoring for his signature. In fact, no one there even knew who he was. So Kevin left, took in a Mariners game, and flew back home. He did what the school had asked and sent them videotape of him playing. along with his academic transcript. That made Kevin nervous, and rightly so, because he never heard from the University of Washington again. Like we said earlier, Kevin wasn't dumb.

He realized his shitty grades had put the kibosh on any real chance of being recruited by a Division I school. He'd just have to face up to the fact that all those kids who told him he'd never make it were right. Ugh. Or would he? Until now, the only person Kevin had been fooling was himself, but he really enjoyed being the big man on campus

and the thought of having that crashing down. The embarrassment of failure was unbearable. I kept it to myself, Kevin said later, to ESPN writer Tom Friend, whose article, The Boy Who Cried Cal was one of our main sources for this story. I was embarrassed because, like, I wanted to live up to everyone's expectations

and couldn't deal with people at the time knowing that I failed. I just wanted to be someone, and when I couldn't be that person, it was tough, and I didn't know how to really explain that to people or tell people that. Oh, y'all hear the thunder rumbling in the background. We've seen this before, haven't we? In the summer, Kevin went to football camps at the universities of Oregon and Nevada, and didn't exactly set any barns on fire. There's a big difference between high school good and college good, and at this level, Kevin was too slow and not strong enough. Both schools considered him a marginal prospect, maybe a walk-on player.

That is, they weren't going to offer him any kind of athletic scholarship. And that was without seeing his shitty transcripts. Kevin just wasn't scholarship material. But Granddad George paid for the Oregon trip and came along, and he heard one of the coaches throw Kevin a non-committal bone. Fill out these questionnaires and we'll see what we can do about getting you up here in a year. Kevin tossed the questionnaires in the trash, figuring they were a waste of time, but George relayed what the coach had said to Kevin's dad,

who told Coach Hodges, and soon, damn near everyone in town knew that Oregon were just dying to sign Kevin Hart. Oh, no. As soon as classes started again, Kevin was playing the big man. He'd hung out with the Nevada players. They were going to send him game tickets, he said. He told the school newspaper, Oregon and Washington had offered him full-ride scholarships. And the type of liar he was, I think maybe he came up with that right

they're on the spot, just freestyle bullshit in himself into a story he'd have to stick with. It should have been obvious, he was lying. There's a bunch of steps involved in college recruiting, not least getting the kid's academic transcript from the school. Kevin told his parents the school and his coaches were handling everything. He told Coach Hodges, his parents were handling everything. If Hodges knew Kevin's grades, he'd have known the whole thing was nonsense, but all he ever did was checked to see if his players were eligible to go on the field. If the leadership at Fernley High hadn't been in such a mess, somebody would have noticed that the kid who was scoring D's and Fs was saying he had a shot at going to Berkeley. But no one did. On the field, Kevin had a great

season being named the state's top lineman. Fernley made the state semifinals. So unless you knew all the details, there was no reason to think a top school wouldn't be after him. In January, the National Signing Day was a month away. Kevin wrestled with the idea of coming clean. But that would be utterly humiliating. Everyone in school would know, and I don't think you can overstate how terrifying embarrassment can be

to a lot of 17-year-old kids. I mean, hell, to a lot of grown-ass adults. So he chose the polar opposite of coming clean. He'd hold a news conference to announce which offer he was going to accept something he'd watched other kids do dozens of times on ESPN. Go bigger, go home, I guess. Dang. I guess. To Kevin, being the high school kid courted by big schools was intoxicating. But he knew it came with a definite time limit. He'd get as

much joy out of it as he could. He asked Coach Hodges to set everything up. And Coach Hodges agreed. Hodges didn't exactly have his eye on the ball right now. He'd been dancing on and sometimes over the line of breaking the rules ever since he'd arrived at Fernley. And now there were questions about whether he'd made a purchase of $26,000 on new uniforms that he was in no way authorized to do. Oh, shit. Yeah. He could see which way the wind was blowing, and he was already making plans for a new job back in Oregon. Still, he figured sending a kid off to a D1 school was a good way to go out. He called Reno TV stations, and made sure the whole school with the band ready to play would be there.

Oh, my God. Kevin had gotten close to his offensive line coach, Chris Cribbs. He told him he'd narrowed the choice down to Cal or Oregon and that he was going to pick Cal because he'd be playing close to where he grew up. Three days before the news conference, Cribs emailed one of the Cal coaches he knew to thank him for offering the scholarship. The reply came back quickly. Chris, I think there is some misunderstanding here.

We have not offered Kevin a full ride. Are you sure he's not going to Oregon? Let me know. You have me wondering. Womp. Womp. So that was it, right? Sharrade over.

But Cribs called up Kevin, and Kevin said that Cal coaches had to say that. They weren't allowed to comment on recruits. Oh, man, come on. Listen, he may have a 1.8 G. GPA, but he is fast on his feet. Oh, he's definitely. Absolutely. He's a clever.

He's slow on the field fast on his feet, okay? Could use some agility ladders, but God, he's clever. Cribbs bought it, or at least bought it enough to keep his mouth shut for now. So then there was the news conference in front of the cameras and 900 people and lots of exciting hoopla. I just wanted to say thank you to my family over there. Kevin's voice boomed over the sound system. Everyone at the school's been so supportive of what I've been doing, and I appreciate all you guys, and I'll never forget where I came from.

It's like he's accepting an Oscar. On the desk in front of him were an organ cap and a cow cap. Kevin, in shirt and tie, pulled on the cow cap, and the cheer started, and the band started playing. Then reporters started asking questions. Like, why had Kevin chosen cow? Coach Tedford and I talked a lot, and the fact that the head coach did most of the recruiting of me kind of gave me a real personal experience with that coach, and we had like a really good relationship. Jeff Tedford at Cal had not only never met Kevin, he'd never even heard of him.

I didn't really have a bad recruiting experience, Kevin said, but like every other guy, I'm glad it's over. I'm glad it'll just go back to normal. Well, good luck with that, bud. Before the end of the day, Cal had called Chris Cribs to tell him there was no scholarship, no recruitment, and no chance of either. Cribs called Hodges. Hodges called Kevin's dad, and his dad drove Kevin over to Hodges' place to figure out what was going on. So that was it, right? Chirade over.

But Kevin, in a panic, kept his wheels of spinning. He'd been duped, bilked by a nefarious middleman he'd hired to handle his recruitment. When asked for this nefarious character's name, Kevin blurted out, Kevin Riley. Kevin Riley was the current Cal quarterback. Dude, what are you doing? Hired? What are you talking about? Oh, my lord. Now, how much anyone believed any of this? We don't know. But the next day, Kevin's dad called the cops to investigate this apparent fraud. and Kevin found out that the limit of his bullshit

was when serious men in uniform were asking him questions. He finally came clean. He'd been living alive for the past ten months. And he was still just an 18-year-old kid. He went to his room, pulled down the blinds, curled up, and cried. The school told him to stay home for a week as the story blew up across local and national news. His teammates worried Kevin might hurt himself.

Granddad George convinced him. Kevin to see a therapist. I love my grandson and I didn't have the vocabulary or background to lead Kevin out of this. Such a wise thing to do, Granddad. His first day back at school, Kevin was terrified and yeah, he got some shit because it's high school. People calling out, where are you going to school now or I choose Cal? But a lot more students gave him smiles and encouraged him to work hard to graduate. Coach Hodges waved junior college brochures under Kevin's nose, yelling, you can still do this. You can still prove what we all thought of you. And he got letters from all over the country, encouraging him to keep his head up. Feather River College, a community college

in the tiny California town of Quincy, decided to give Kevin a second chance. It was a rough adaptation. Unlike Fernley, Feather River didn't let Kevin skate by with bad grades. He missed one season due to academic ineligibility and another after a bad knee injury, but in his final year, he was an all-California junior college lineman, and then was recruited by Division 2, Missouri Western. This was 2012, and Kevin wasn't a kid anymore. After a redshirt season, meaning he could practice with the team but not play in official games to preserve his eligibility, Kevin made a grown-up decision. He was done with football. He moved back to Nevada to be closer to his family, and after that, there's really not a lot more to find on him. Just a normal dude,

living a normal life. There are a couple of things driving this story forward. One, I think, is the weight of expectation and demands of success that we can put on to talented athletes who also happen to be children. High school kids, I'm sorry, are, you know, bless their hearts, idiots, and I can say that because I was one, and I was an idiot. And if you don't have something you did in high school that makes you shudder with horror when you remember it. You've had a very blessed life. I've got loud of somethings. You can't dangle promises of fortune and glory in front of kids and expect their brains to

function properly. And for a lot of student athletes, they forget the first part of that phrase, which is student. Absolutely. And the cold, hard truth is that less than 2% of athletes become professional after their college career. So it makes no sense to waste your time daydreaming about the gridiron when you should be learning about the quadratic equation, especially because even after you become a professional athlete, those athletes sometimes still need to work because they don't make, you know, crazy like Steph Curry money, right? And quite a few of them blow the money

and end up broke, like a large percentage. So, yeah. It's better to focus on your academic. get your degree, and then, you know, go be a professional athlete if you can. But for the most part, you know who's going to be a professional. Like people are talking, we're talking about like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, LeBron James being in the professional athlete world when they were 15. Like that's the, you know who those people are and you also know who they aren't, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that a lot of kids fall into the trap of being a big fish in a small.

small pond. So you might be the best player at your high school and everybody freaks out about you, but then once you get into, you know, a bigger pond, not so big a fish anymore and people can really come crashing down to earth. So there's that. And the other thing I think is the extraordinary links people will go to to maintain a lie they've started and can't see a way of shutting down without humiliation. In true crime, it's a dynamic that often ends in bloody murder. So I guess this is the Disney version. A kid learns the value of honesty and discovers that more people care about him than he knew. Which is really kind of sweet at the end of the day. So now we're moving on to another case.

We're calling this one. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The 10-cent Beer Night Riot. Now for this one, we're in Cleveland, Ohio, also known as Seatown, Forest City, and this is my favorite, The Mistake on the Lake. Oh, God. That's not very nice. Cleveland is the proud home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland Playhouse Square,

the second biggest theater district in the U.S. after New York, I didn't know that. That's kind of fascinating. And the Major League Baseball team, the Cleveland Guardians, who in 1974 went by the name the Cleveland Indians. And in June of 74, the team was on the struggle bus a little bit. They weren't getting the crowds they used to. Attendance had dropped off so much that they started taking weird, desperate stabs at bringing in more fans, like getting the stunt motorcyclist evil caneval to perform. His thing was, jumping ramps on his motorcycle, usually while wearing an outfit fabulous enough to put Liberace to shame. He liked capes. He liked rhinestones. It was pretty rad. Or hiring a circus act called the Flying Walendas to walk a tightrope across the stadium. You know, that whole baseball circus connection.

I guess I can see it, although God help you if one of the poor Walindas fell halfway across, but hey, I mean, whatever you can do to make baseball watchable. I can't. I can't. Kid. I kid. Sort of. I think peanuts? It's peanuts. The baseball. The baseball circus connection is peanuts. Yeah. They'd thrown pretty much everything they could think of at the problem, but it just wasn't working. Attendance was still crappy, so the team's owner, Ted Bonda, came up with a new

idea. How about hosting a cheap beer night? Let's say 10 cents a pop? Ah, beer. Golden and foamy, frost. dusty cold and perfect with pizza, an essential part of baseball, just as much as the vats and the gloves. When taken in moderation, a harmless way to muster up the courage to get up and sing total eclipse of the heart at karaoke or ask your crush out on a date. Yeah, when taken not moderation, though, beer can be an agent of chaos. And the Cleveland team's management really should have given that some thought, like any

thought, really, more than a millisecond, perhaps. Ten cents was dirt cheap. The usual price was 65 cents, and the powers that be were way, way underestimating how much a magnet cheap beer is for the masses. They were hoping to sell more tickets, but, well, have you ever heard the saying, be careful what you wish for? Because you might get it? So, okay, the main theme of this story is that mistakes were made, quite a few mistakes, the most glaring of which was vastly. underestimating the number of people who were going to turn up. But possibly the worst one was this.

To try to limit how wrecked each individual fan could get, the stadium management put a limit on the number of purchases you could make during the game. Sounds reasonable, right? Yeah. The problem was they didn't put a limit on how much you could purchase in one go. So like four beers could count as one purchase. Yeah, yeah. As you can imagine, this didn't do anything to keep the drunkenness down to a shout. If anything, limiting the number of purchases you could make probably inspire people to cram as many beers into one purchase as they could figure out how to carry. The devil's and the details, folks. It's like 7-Eleven on July 11th, like saying like, oh, you can take as much slurpy. in a container as you can and people bring in like buckets, you know?

People get real creative, you know? Exactly. Oh, absolutely. People actually were at one point in this fracas filling hats, shoes, whatever they could find with beer. Nice. We'll get to that. Anyway. The bleachers sold out fast and the crowd kept streaming in.

All told there were over 25,000 people packed into the state. stadium that night. Now, according to Cleveland Magazine, an average crowd would usually polish off about 24,000 beers during a game. But on this night, they drank 65,000. Holy shit. Yeah, especially since only about half the crowd were drinking. That means that the drinkers were knocking back about five beers each. Stroes, if anybody was curious. Some people drank a lot, more. There were a ton of underage kids getting hammered to. And bless their hearts, the stadium's management had decided to increase the number of security guards in the stadium, right? So, good job. From the usual 32 to 48. Oh, you'll be fine. They would have needed three times that

to control the crowd, at least. So as you see, conditions were ripe for a good brouhaha. And the the Cleveland fans were not going to disappoint. So the first thing that sort of kicked it off was when a lady ran out onto the field and started dancing around on the dugout. Topless, of course. And then she buttoned her shirt back up for some reason, ran over to the sidelines and tried to kiss the umpire, Nestor Chilac, who was not amused. Can't blame him for that. Security guards came to his rescue and hauled the lady off the field. A father-son pair ran out, dropped trow and mooned the crowd. Next, Texas Rangers manager Billy Martin disputed one of the umpires' calls. This displeased some of the Cleveland fans and they

decided to express their feelings about it by dumping a shit ton of beer all over him. And let me tell you, Billy Martin must have had the patience of a saint because all he did to retaliate was turn around and blow kisses at him. Y'all, if somebody dumped beer all over me on a hot, like sticky summer day, I go to jail. I definitely wouldn't be blowing anybody any damn kisses. Now, at this point in the proceedings, you could probably classify things as threat-level shenanigans. Nothing too major, just people being silly gooses.

The mood in the bleachers was getting rowdy. Fans were sneaking into better seats, harassing the people in the bullpins, and generally making themselves at home. People were jumping the fence, running onto the field, throwing hot dogs at the rangers, throwing empty beer cups all over the place. The very inadequate number of security guards they did have were busy picking up garbage and kicking people off the field.

And this was the 70s, so the cloud of weed smoke was so sick that according to one guy who was there, you could get high just by breathing in deep. And then came the streakers. Streaking, stripping down to what the good lord gave you and running through a public place, has been around forever,

caught on in the 70s. In two places, especially. College campuses, duh, and sporting events. One of my friends went to a college where they had a streaking tradition that had been around for decades. They called it Running the Flame. Basically, it was getting naked and running from the dorms to this sculpture called The Flame and running back. And they would do it in the winter, too. Those scamps. Streaking was such a popular thing in the 70s that Ray Stevens wrote a song about it called The Streak. Don't look, Athol. I know some of you all heard that song. It's pretty hilarious. My dad used to play that song all the time. So these poor world-class athletes were out there trying to, you know, play the game

while security struggled to keep the drunky drunks off the field. And suddenly, there he was, a streak of pale flesh zipping across the field in front of God and everybody with the most glorious head of 70s air. And he was just the first of many. The literally caught one guy by wrapping him up in a big garbage bag as he was trying to jump over a chain leak fence, which seems like a bad idea to me. Chain link fence plus naked man. Stuff is going to get pinched and poked and possibly puncture. Just, yeah. At this point, I think it's safe to say the crowd was at threat level horseplay. As umpire Nestor Chilak said later, they were uncontrolled beasts. I've never seen anything like it

except in a zoo. Good analogy. I'm actually kind of surprised people weren't slinging poop at each other like spider monkeys by now. Now, in the background of all this, there was actually a baseball game going on and Cleveland was losing.

Some of the fans decided to vent their frustrations and they did this by lighting a bunch of M-80 fireworks and cherry bombs and tossing them at the Rangers' bullpen. Now, have y'all ever heard an M-80 go off? It is no joke. Those poor Rangers players probably thought it was.

the rapture. There's a moment in a situation like this, a big rowdy crowd full of booze and team spirit, where the vibes can shift. Maybe everybody was having a great time 10 minutes ago, but now there's something on the wind. Maybe one guy throws a punch and the aggression just spreads through the crowd like wildfire and now we're all in trouble. This is threat level oh shit, where you're balanced on a nice edge between nervous laughter and everybody going home and pure carnage. Now, here we should stop for a second and give you a little background info.

This wouldn't have been an ordinary game for Cleveland fans, even without the 10-cent beers. See, the week before, Cleveland had played the Texas Rangers on their home turf, and all hell had broken loose. One of the Rangers' pitchers played some slightly dirty pool,

at least in the Cleveland catcher's opinion, so the catcher went up and tackled him, and a fight broke out between the two teams, right there on the field. What is this, hockey? When it broke up and the Cleveland players stormed back into their dugout, the Rangers fans threw beer and insults at them. One player got a beer right in the face,

and he climbed up on top of the dugout to scream at the fan who threw it, and they almost got into a brawl. Cops had to run over with their hands on their guns to diffuse it. And the Rangers won. So Cleveland went home all but hurt. And knowing the two teams were going to play a game, next week in Cleveland this time, the media milked it for all it was worth. Really

stoked the flames. One local DJ referred to in one of their sources as that asshole Pete Franklin kept going on and on about how the next game was going to be revenge against the Rangers and it was going to be all out war, blah, blah, blah.

So everybody was going to be at DefCon 2, just ready to rock. Oh, Lord. The cherry on top was when the Rangers manager, Billy Martin, told the press he wasn't worried about going to Cleveland because, quote, nobody goes to their games anyway. Yeah, Billy, buddy, that's what we call poking the bear.

I mean, was he wrong? Was he wrong? He wasn't until tonight. Another on-air personality told Cleveland fans, come out to Beardite and let's stick it. it in Billy Martin's ear. The paper ran an illustration of the Cleveland mascot wearing a pair of boxing gloves. Probably not a great idea.

So finally, the ninth inning rolled around and Cleveland actually managed to tie the game with the bases loaded in two outs. They were going to win the game. This should have been a good thing, right? Well, by now, the crowd was so drunk you could smell the beer burps from the space station. People don't tend to make the best decisions in that state. And it was at this point that a fan decided he was going to run onto the field and get himself a souvenir. Texas Ranger Jeff Burroughs's hat.

Oh, boy. So he lumbered out there and snatched the hat off Burroughs' head. Burroughs didn't see the guy coming. And when he felt the guy grab his hat, he spun around with his fist. up, thinking he was under attack. Totally reasonable. Mm-hmm, 100%. The guy was already running away, but then he realized he dropped the hat and decided to

lurch his drunk ass back to get it. He grabbed the hat off the ground and looked up to see Jeff Burroughs in a fighting stance with laser beams coming out of his eyes. The fan said, ah, hell. And Burroughs decked him. Oh, Lord. The other Rangers noticed their teammate facing off with this fan and they were immediately alarmed.

The rowdiness had already begun to take on an edge. One guy punched a reporter in the face a couple times. One guy yelled out that he was going to kill one of the Rangers players if he ever came back to Cleveland. A lot of the Cleveland team officials smelled the blood in the water and got the hell out of there escaping to the safety of their offices. The sober fans were leaving the stadium in droves. Yes, and one guy, for some reason, threw a huge knife down onto the field where it just went in the dirt

like right next to one of the players. Yikes. Now, the Rangers players weren't the only ones who had noticed the standoff between the Hat Thief and Jeff Burroughs and now a whole herd of drunk assholes were streaming over the fence

into the field, looking like they were ready to rain down absolute hell on the enemy team. I laugh, but like that would be so scary. So scary. Yeah. Some of them were wielding makeshift weapons or actual ones, and they were totally surrounding Jeff Burroughs.

You've got this one guy in a crowd of, like, drunk, angry dickheads. There were some knives out there, Billy Martin said later. We're fortunate nobody got stabbed. We had now officially reached threat level mayhem. So, seeing their boy in trouble, the Rangers ran onto the field, ready to throw down if they had to. And at this point, it kicked off. A full-blown riot, players versus fans. One of the players got hit in the head with a metal folding chair.

The umpire had his hand slashed. The cops who tried to intervene had hats and badges stolen. Okay, that part's a little bit funny. The poor dude at the organ tried playing Take Me Out to the ball game. I guess hoping it had calmed things down. That or maybe he just had a dark sense of humor. I hope it was the latter. At this point, more cops started.

had shown up. A call had gone out from dispatch that there was a riot at the ball field. One cop remembers driving into the stadium parking lot, seeing a little crowd of naked women run out in front of his car and thinking, oh, it's that kind of riot. This is going to be that kind of party. But it would have taken way more cops than they had to quell the chaos. Fortunately, for everybody, the Cleveland players weren't going to let the opposing team get eaten alive by the crowd. They grabbed their bats and sprinted out. onto the field. They had to fight their way over to them, but eventually they formed a protective circle around the Texas players. You want to get them, you're going to have to go through us

first. The mob could either attack their own team or back the fuck off. There was a moment of like, huh, as the crowd considered their options, and that was just enough time for the players to haul ass off the field and out of sight. Shue. I think it's so nice, by the way, that the players all banded together like that. It was like a little bit of the best, if you humanity in the middle of all this drunk chaos. Oh, yeah. It just reminds me of the time that my, like, debate teacher in high school got mad because he was upset that the, like, the Broncos and, like, I don't know, it was probably the Raiders,

actually, like, enemies. Like, after the game, all go on the field and talk with each other and, like, show, like, shake each other's hands and, like, ask about each other's wives. And it's, like, it's, first of all, it's sportsmanship. And second of all, like, they're not sworn. enemies. They're not, like, what are you talking about? It's never that serious. People genuinely think of sports like war. And I think that's really funny. And you all know, I've said before, I'm not really a sports fan. Like, I'll watch it if, you know, I've been to baseball games and

going to them in person is really fun. Like, we were Cubs fans when we lived in Chicago and, you know, we would go to the games. But, like, I'm not somebody who would, like, choose to watch sports if I had other options. But I used to teach, like, freshman-level competition. position courses. Okay. And every single semester, I'd have several students who would write their papers about their high school football experience. And if I heard the phrase, we were a band of brothers once, I heard it 8,000 times. And that's how they talked about it. Like, it was war. Like, it's saving Private Ryan, like they're down in the foxholes, get the hand grenades thrown out. So you do have a bonding experience.

I'm sorry. We do have a bonding experience. And I do think the way that boys are coached and women are coached. Because I didn't talk about this in the last story, but like, girls are held to a higher academic standard than boys always. Like that was like always very clear to me when we talked about like academic expectations in college is like the football team was fucking stupid. Like where I was like, I'm getting damn near a 4.0. And these idiots are barely scraping by. I think the requirement was a 2.0 or a 2.5.

And like I had a 4.0 for like three of the four years I went to my school. And these idiots are like scraping by and like still getting like awards. And I'm like, what the fuck are you people doing? And not idiots because they're not smart. No. They don't go to class. They don't go to class. They're not trying.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not. Yes. No. Thank you for clarifying that. And it's like, it's really frustrating, like, because the way girls are socialized and because like the way girls are socialized to bond with each other too is like we're not, we're not going to war together. But what I always tell my players is like, I don't care if you like each other, but we all have the same goal. We're all working towards the same thing. Like we have to, we have to find a way to cooperate despite our differences. Right. And so that's that's the thing you have to get past. And so I think men just are so. They watch too many World War II documentaries.

Yeah, seriously. Calm down about the Roman Empire in World War II. But it's more the fans, I think, even than the athletes themselves. They just get so mad. Yeah, and the shit I see on Twitter after basketball games or, like, Formula One races, is foul. Like, it's the worst shit I ever, like, so toxic. And athletes almost always respect other athletes. That's why you will never see a serious NBA player say, oh,

I could beat Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese in a one-on-one. Like, it's always some, like, you know, 5-8, Chud who never made the varsity team. Like, fans are fucking stupid. So back in the home clubhouse, the Cleveland players were shook. Some of them were bleeding. Most had bruises. Ken Aspermante told a reporter, those people were like animals. But it's not just baseball.

It's the society we live in. Nobody seems to care about anything. And it's so funny to me because it sounds like he could be talking about 2025, doesn't it? Like, people always talk like that, no matter when. People talk like that in the medieval times. People will talk like that in 100 years. And they're usually right because, you know, people are awful. The Rangers stayed in their locker room for two whole hours, hesitant to even pop their heads out the door.

Eventually, they went back to their hotel with a large police escort. The umpires got one, too. Back on the field, the pandemonium continued, with fans stealing anything they could get their hands on, including the bases, until it finally wound down. All in all, the riot lasted only about 40 minutes, and, shockingly, nobody was seriously hurt. About a dozen people got arrested, and this is the real kicker for me. Cleveland had to forfeit the game. So, good job, goobers, you cost your team a win. And we laugh about it now, because let's face it,

most of this story is freaking hilarious, but it really could have been a lot worse. And, of course, the riot didn't do Cleveland's reputation any favors. There were already T-shirts that said, Cleveland, you got to be tough. And with this story hitting the national news, Clevelanders just looked like a bunch of drunk hooligans. And Rangers manager, Billy Martin, was determined it wasn't going to happen again when the Cleveland team came back to Texas. He went on TV and radio and told the story of how the Cleveland players came to their rescue on the field. if they hadn't he said it could have gone down very differently that's probably the closest will come to seeing someone getting killed in the game of baseball he said in the 25 years i've played i've never seen any crowd act like that it was ridiculous fortunately for everyone the cleveland management had learned their lesson they promised to never ever host another 10 cent beer night and they kept that promise for an entire four weeks i swear to god i'm not making this up. See, for all the blood and bruises, beer night had done what it was supposed to. Made the team

a lot of money. And isn't that all that really matters? Come on, nobody got killed, right? At the next one, though, they made a stern announcement before the game that anybody who ran out onto the field would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and amazingly enough, it worked. There were no more riots, and the 10-cent beer night fiasco took its place in history as one of the wildest nights in sports history. So, what did we learn? from these two stories, folks. Sports can really ignite our passions, and evidently, some of us don't know how to act right when things don't go our way. Or even when things do, I mean, Cleveland was winning when the riot broke out. Sports is sort of a microcosm of human

society, if you think about it. It can bring out our worst, it can bring out our best, and it definitely brings out a lot of weirdness. If you doubt that, just have a look at Gritty, and you'll see what I'm talking about. The thing is my sleep paralysis demon. So, any of who, we hope y'all are wearing your protective gear and playing by the rules and behaving yourselves out there. And remember, God is on your team's side and always wants you to win. So that was a couple of wild ones, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire.

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