Riot Girls

Reading about it in the papers doesn't do it justice--last night was insane.

Mo and I went to the Cornerstone, a bar in College Park, MD, to watch the NCAA women's final. We had beers and a big-ass plate of nachos, and got free promotional basketball-shaped Mardi Gras beads from the Bud Lite guy. The bar was pretty crowded, especially considering the fact that women's basketball is a lot less watched than its male counterpart. Let me tell you, this was one of the most incredible games I have ever seen! The first half was pretty ugly, but Maryland started to light it up after halftime. They came back from a 13-point deficit in the last 15 minutes to tie the game with less than a minute on the clock (one of Maryland's freshman guards sank the sweetest 3-pointer... right over Duke's 6 foot, 7 inch center!). The game remained close throughout overtime, but Maryland managed to pull ahead and top Duke, 78 to 75.

Everyone in the bar went insane. We were all out of our seats, jumping up and down, screaming, hugging, spilling drinks and making the floor dangerously slick. Then the celebration moved outside. It was a small crowd at first--just the people from the Cornerstone--but we were quickly joined by droves of people from campus housing and nearby apartments. The sea of red- and white-clad fans (in addition to people who just wanted an excuse to fuck shit up) overtook the intersection of Route 1 and Knox Street. Traffic stopped. Cheers alternated between "Let's go Maryland!" and "Fuck Duke!" (Duke and Maryland have a long-running rivalry), but mostly it was just incomprehensible crowd noise. Early on in the fray, an ambulance penetrated the crowd. Mo and I originally thought that they were just trying to get people to move out of the street, but it turns out some girl was hit and seriously injured by a car that was trying to move through the crowd. The ambulance left and was replaced by a (passengerless) UMD bus, which was probably trying to either start or finish its route. The crowd rocked the bus back and forth for a while before deciding that tipping it over on themselves was probably not a good idea. This is about when the fires started. I don't know what was burning, but it smelled pretty acrid, and the wind blew ashes and debris all over the burgeoning crowd. A few people managed to pull up a street sign and were waving it around like a banner.

Enter the riot police. They marched in, wearing full riot gear, toting big sticks, big guns, and pepper spray, looking very much like futuristic storm troopers out of some video game. The head of the operation was quoted in the Washington Post as saying something along the lines of "We told them to disperse, and they dispersed," but that's not exactly how it went down. No one told anyone anything. But I guess law enforcement officials tend to subscribe to the philosophy that weapons speak louder than words, anyway. The cops did their perimeter-securing intimidation formation thing and cleared the crowd off of Route 1, pushing them back onto either side of Knox Street. I don't know what started it, but they began to advance on the crowd on the side of Knox where Mo and I were standing (trying to keep a relatively safe distance without completely missing out on the spectacle). A few people panicked, and everyone started to run. It wasn't exactly a stampede, but I can tell you that I haven't run that fast in a long time. Once we realized the police weren't following us, we stopped and looked back to survey what had happened. Apparently the cops had come forward and started pepper-spraying random people in the face. We came across some poor drunk girl, who couldn't have been more than 5 feet tall, who got sprayed directly in the eyes (her taller friend had gotten it in the mouth, but she seemed to be okay). The girl was obviously in pain and needed to rinse the spray out of her eyes, so she tried to get back into the bar, but they wouldn't let her in. Mo had a mostly empty water bottle in her car, but it wasn't enough to do much good, so the girl's friend had to go to one of the nearby apartments to ask for a glass of water.

I fail to see how spraying defenseless college students is a justifiable means of crowd control. There is no way on earth a fully armed, fully armored police officer could have perceived that girl as a threat. But I shall leave my issues with College Park's Finest aside for the time being.

Anyway, in spite of the riot that ensued, the game was amazing, and it was great to be part of such an enthusiastic crowd when we were watching it. It was nice to see women's basketball get some respect and some viewership (even though it only aired on ESPN and not on any of the major, non-cable networks, which bugs me because the men's tournament was featured on CBS). And I found it a little ironic (but not surprising) that it was mostly men perpetrating the violence that broke out in the wake of the women's victory.

The bonfire fumes and pepper spray added a little bitterness to the otherwise sweet victory, but we most definitely had a night to remember.