Wake 34, Liberty 14

Wake beats Liberty by 20 points and starts the 2006 season 5-0, and still some of the Deacon faithful weren’t entirely happy.

They were looking ahead to Clemson, and they found the Deacons’ more-than-adequate efforts against the Flames to be less-than-adequate against the Tigers in their minds, the Tigers that beat the Seminoles and mopped up Death Valley with the Tarheels.

When the Liberty quarterback found one of his receivers in the back of the end zone, the guy sitting behind me wailed, “Left him wide open.” I guess he couldn’t see the Wake defender running jersey-to-jersey with the Liberty receiver. To me, the touchdown looked like a great catch by a taller receiver who went up for a jump ball over the stout defense of a shorter player.

Liberty, in fact, had an impressive passing game with an accurate QB and sure-handed receivers who were rarely left “wide open,” but had a knack for hanging onto the ball in traffic.

I think the bulk of the faithful, watching Wake’s last non-conference game, wanted dominance more dominating than what they saw against Liberty. They wanted a blowout. They wanted a shutout. They wanted a 50-plus-point smackdown like the Tigers laid on the Tarheels two weeks ago. They wanted a contest as stacked and one-sided as the midway games being played across Deacon Boulevard at the Dixie Classic Fair.

Or maybe all the fair traffic on the way to the game just made them cranky. Otherwise they could have relaxed and enjoyed the fact that Wake Forest is undefeated after five games.

All together now: Wake Forest is undefeated after five games. Wake Forest is undefeated. Wake Forest has yet to be beaten. Almost halfway through the season, and Wake Forest has won every game they have played.

This has happened twice before: in 1944 under Peahead Walker, and in 1987 under Bill Dooley. The AP Top 25 comes out Monday, and Wake stands a good chance of being in it*. Dang.

Riley Skinner looks more poised than anyone in his position should; D’Angelo Bryant is picking up where Micah Andrews left off; the defense is something fierce. So, just as if they were on the Dixie Classic’s midway, the Deacon faithful should quit worrying about the quality of the competition and just savor the sights and sounds and all the pretty colors of a possible Top 25 ranking and a 5-0 record.

Back to the guy behind me: early in the first quarter he let loose with a couple of cuss words. The woman with him slapped him hard on the leg and pointed at my daughter, who had come to the game with me. Now, I didn’t mind much what he had said; the words he sued were pretty mild, nothing my daughter couldn’t hear on network TV. What got me was what he said after he was reminded to watch his language: “You’d think that when you come to a football game . . .”

What the #%^& is that supposed to mean? That when you come to a football game you ought to be able to cuss like a #$%&^ sailor on shore leave? And don’t think that the way he said “football,” the emphasis he put on that one word, didn’t have meaning. I can’t imagine him or most other guys saying “You’d think when I come to a basketball game,” or “a baseball game,” quite the same way. He didn’t just say “football,” he invoked it. Maybe he might invoke “hockey” like that, if he were a Yankee or a Canadian. Probably he’d invoke “NASCAR race” in much the same way, if he’s a NASCAR fan. But those sports have a lot in common with football: speed, violence, and men geared up in helmets and armor.

In football the helmets make the players unrecognizable to the fans in the stands, and the shoulder pads make even the few slight players – kickers and the occasional wide receiver – look like Olympian examples of robust manhood. When Roger Clemens is on the mound, he is recognizably Roger Clemens, even if his name and number were taken off his uniform. Same goes for Tim Duncan banking in a jump shot. When a football player throws or catches a pass, throws a block or makes a tackle, it could be any big strong guy inside that helmet and those pads. Maybe, even, a big strong guy with a face a lot like the one you see in the mirror every morning.

The whole premise isn’t really true, of course: Jim Brown or Tony Dorsett ran in a way that was identifiably theirs, just as Lawrence Taylor rushed the passer or Brett Favre throws the ball. It’s not even logical, but how often does logic get in the way of daydreams? Isn’t that the whole point of vicarious identification, anyway – the escape from the cold, hard fact that you can’t do what you wish you could do?

So I’m guessing that the guy behind me associates the freedom to cuss with a kind of primal joy, if not masculinity, that he also associates with watching football*. Kind of like 6th-grade boys who think they’re big because they know bad words. Now, I find a good stream of profanity as entertaining – even cathartic – as the next guy, but it takes a whole lot more than the basic rules of common civility to make me feel emasculated. Heck, it even takes more than using words like “cathartic.”

This scene leads to a dilemma, though. One fan’s common civility might be another fan’s uptight snobbery. One fan – more than one, at a typical Wake game – might wish that everyone would sit still and clap politely, maybe utter a well-considered “Go Deacs” at appropriate moments but otherwise comport themselves with absolute dignity. Other fans – a growing number of fans at Wake games – might want everyone to stay on their feet from when the team runs onto the field* to the final gun. They want cheers and screams and noisemakers, chants and heckling and loud displays. They want face paint, and bare chests in November. In other words, they want to be the kind of fans you’ll find at Alabama and Ohio State, and maybe if the fans are worthy, they’ll get the kind of football you’ll find at Alabama or Ohio State.

Prime Time with the Packman is a sports-talk radio show produced in Charlotte and broadcast all over the Carolinas. The host is Mark Packer, son of Wake basketball great Billy Packer, so I assume he grew up going to Wake games. Packman took a call one day near the start of the season from a Wake fan who said he took a bicycle horn with him to one game, only to have security take it from him after a well-dressed fan in his section complained. Packer and his co-hosts howled, and one of them pointed out that at an SEC game, the only complaint he would have gotten is not bringing horns for everybody else.

It’s a fine line to walk, but that line is as much of a barrier to Wake’s building a strong football tradition as winning and losing. Jim Grobe is doing everything he can about the wins, and doing it well. Athletic Director Ron Wellman has done an amazing job injecting energy and fan participation into all the sports, football and basketball especially. But the Deacons are never going to build the sizeable fan base a strong program needs unless the fans who want to come and yell and have a rowdy ol’ time are allowed to do so.

If I seem to be contradicting myself, keep in mind that “rowdy” doesn’t (always) mean obscene or offensive. But how in the world is a bicycle horn going to corrupt the morals of our youth? How is the guy up above us, who’s started doing push-ups on the railing for every point the Deacons score, offending anybody? How does some excitement and joy in the stands of Groves Stadium keep some Wake fans from enjoying the game? And, if it does bother them that much, shouldn’t they be the ones to leave?

* Wake was high on the 'Others Receiving Votes' list, but did not crack the Top 25. 5 ACC teams did: Clemson at 15, Florida State (huh?), Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, and Boston College at 25.

* It's not like I'm the first to notice this: the early commercials for the movie Gladiator aired during football games, and spliced together scenes of Russell Crowe swinging his sword with scenes of NFL football.

* Wake actually does something much cooler than running: while the Deacon mascot roars onto the field on a custom Harley**, the football team marches arm-in-arm in a show of solidarity until they're almost at midfield.

** Is there a less "Harley-Davidson" kind of a school than Wake Forest?