The Griz Lost, Not All At Once
A die-hard fan tells the story.
by Tom LuteyPhotos by Todd Goodrich
“They washed up in the parking lot of Montana’s national
championship football game like characters from the Odyssey,
eight men sailing across the Great American Desert in a Jamboree
motor home.
They’d sacked Denver along the way, collapsed in Kansas City, and lost all desire to go home somewhere between the sour mash capital of Lynchburg, Tennessee, and the host city of the championship game, Chattanooga. “It was a long drive,” Jeff Hollenback shouted. “Thirty-five hours and seven states. We stopped in Denver just long enough to pick up my brother.”
He was waiting for the matchup between the Montana Grizzlies and the James Madison Dukes, while his crew—Shawn, Ed and Ron Hollenback, Farley Frame, Moe Johnson, Jared Wierson, and Doug Chadwick—adjusted to solid ground. Behind them, six alluring sirens danced the cotton-eyed Joe in cowboy hats crafted from empty twelve-pack boxes. It was ten minutes to game time, ten minutes before the Grizzlies’ storybook season hit the rocks. No one saw it coming. We were lost in the lyrics of “Up with Montana Boys.”
The Griz lost, not all at once. On the game’s opening drive Montana marched down the field and scored. Speedy wide receivers Jefferson Heidelberger and Levander Segars picked up eighty yards off broken tackles, doing the unthinkable against a James Madison defense that hadn’t allowed a first quarter score all year. But all planes fly before they crash and soon it was obvious something wasn’t right. The grass was being ripped up like Marv Albert’s hair. Big clumps of torn turf were revealing bald ground, which had been sodded in preparation for the game to make the field look better on television.
JMU coach Mickey Matthews would later liken football on the loose field to “playing basketball in your socks.” And Montana’s hopes of a third national championship in ten years quickly slipped away. JMU’s offense adjusted by running the football straight ahead and any Griz in the Dukes’ path were driven back as if they wore rollerskates. JMU won 31-21. Duke fans headed to the bar. Griz faithful went hunting for all-night restaurants.
Championship games are never a sure bet. Deep down inside, all football fans know losses are possible even when their team is 12-2 and struggling to become the only program in the country to end its season on a good note. But fans scrub the trauma of losing from their brains as if erasing the pain of childbirth.
Lose? we say. How could we lose? We see a bright light at the end of the tunnel and never consider that it could be a train, that our wings of feathers and wax aren’t fit for stadium lighting, that exit polling right outside Washington-Grizzly Stadium is less than reliable. Our non-fanatical coworkers quiz our decision to fly clear across the country for a football game as if we’ve rashly invested our 401(k)s in Powerball tickets.
Oh, how we have been down this road before. In 1996, with hopes of back-to-back national titles, we chanted for a rematch with Marshall University from the sidelines as our team throttled Troy State 70-7. We’d never heard of Randy “The Freak” Moss, a future NFL Pro Bowl receiver and Heisman Trophy candidate who made our Montana boys look like bush-leaguers in a 49-20 defeat in the big game.
In 2000, we sang “Chattanooga Choo Choo” with then-coach Joe Glenn, only to find out we’d been tied to the tracks of Georgia Southern’s Adrian “The A Train” Peterson. It was a 27-25 loss that really wasn’t as close as the score suggests.
Memo to fans: If you know nothing about a team, their colors, their mascot, where they’re from, but know their best player’s name begins with “The,” stay home.
It’s hard to stay home, though, when the stars seem to be aligning for your team and even for you. They seemed to be aligning for Griz fan Jim Joyner, who spent hours having his entire head painted before each Griz game. Joyner’s prospects of getting to Chattanooga weren’t good. But the football gods intervened just days before kickoff. EA Sports, a video game giant with a penchant for college football, awarded Joyner Best Game Face, a prize that came with $1,000 cash. It was just enough to get him and his head-painting brother, Tim, plane tickets to the big game.
“I was thinking about renting a Suburban and driving to Chattanooga,” Joyner said. Outside the stadium, he was decked out in chains and skulls, a torn Griz jersey and a silver head. Complete strangers were posing for pictures with the silver-faced giant.
Was it destiny? Well, do lemmings run into the sea? Joyner knew the answer. So did Rich Borden, who crafted an ESPN sign recognizing the boys in Scott’s garage on Prairie Schooner Road in suburban Missoula.
Borden and the neighbors gather at Scott’s every Sunday to drink beer and watch football on a small color television. He battled fog and flight delays just to get to the game. The trip took twenty hours, but he was the only member of the Sunday crew to make it. That’s either destiny or the consequences of going against predetermination. The Dukes were just lucky.
But one person’s lucky team is always another’s team of destiny. The Dukes didn’t seem special, though sometimes when you’re in Big Sky Country it’s hard to consider all the stars. JMU’s football wasn’t flashy. Its season record was identical to Montana’s. The Griz were rolling over opponents in Missoula.
One huge difference between the Griz and the Dukes, though, was James Madison’s string of road victories in the playoffs. Their winning scores weren’t great, but every JMU playoff victory came on the road, while Montana played at home—in what, earlier in the year, Sports Illustrated ranked as the twenty-fifth best college football atmosphere in America, mentioned in the same breath as legendary programs like Penn State and Michigan.
The Dukes were the first team in I-AA history to make it to the national championship without a single home playoff game. No other team had come close to that feat. In fact 70 percent of all playoff road teams lose. It was easy to pass the Dukes off as lucky. UM’s side of the playoff bracket contained six of the top eight teams in the country. The Dukes’ side looked much easier.
After the game, a throng of parents waited outside the Griz locker room for their sons to emerge. There were real players with real injuries walking back onto the torn up grass. Everyone bore the blue bruise of destiny’s sting.
There were James Madison fans still on the field stuffing clumps of shredded victory grass into their pockets.
Down the street Griz fans wandered into a city with no real team in the championship game for whom to cheer. They were caught in a strange place grieving a loss no one around them seemed to care much about, a feeling not unlike losing your parents in a strange mall. It would be several sobering miles before they found someone who did care.
Tom Lutey is a 1995 graduate of UM's School of Journalism and
an award-winning writer for the Montanan. In between Grizzly
football games, he writes for the Spokesman-Review in Spokane,
Washington.