On November 19, 1988, Albert C. Andrews, a Baldwin Wallace graduate, authored a column in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer all in good fun about John Carroll's renewal of its rivalry with his alma mater. He recalls in great detail about an incident that happened 50 years prior during a game between the two teams at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
The headline read: "When Carroll Got BW' s Goat: So Soon We Forget"
Enjoy.
A little-heralded anniversary is upon us: How could we have forgotten the Great Goat Fight.
It is brought to mind by the news that John Carroll University has rejoined the Ohio Athletic Conference after many years.
According to recent PD sports pages, the Blue Streaks will take over the football schedule slots from Wittenberg, which is leaving the conference. Among other things, they will play Baldwin-Wallace College next fall at Finnie Stadium in Berea.
This would about mark the golden jubilee of the day Carroll got BW's goat.
Back then, in the heyday of local college football, we had an informal group called the Big Four. Its members were BW and Carroll along with Case and Western Reserve, then separate schools.
It wasn't an official conference but a creation of the local news media to keep their statistics juiced up. These almost always showed the champ as Western Reserve, by far the biggest of the contenders.
With Reserve beyond reach, the folks at BW considered the Carroll game as the big one. Everyone went except those laid up in the health center, and some of those went if they could sneak past the nurse.
BW had a goat as a mascot. Memory grows furtive as to how or why this came about BW didn't (and doesn't) have an ag school, and Berea wasn't quite that far out in the country.
Nevertheless, the Yellow Jackets had a goat, which wore a decorated blanket and was led out with great ceremony at halftime of football games.
In the year concerned, the big game was at Cleveland Stadium, which tells you something about the local football crowds back then. Somehow the BW goat, making its halftime foray, got daubed with blue and gold paint -- the Carroll colors.
The BW fans took offense. Several hundred, mostly freshmen, boiled out of the stands like a human wave. The Carroll fans advanced from across the way to meet them in midfield.
There followed a glorious and extremely messy fight, with many black eyes and bloody noses.
The BW band, which usually entered to that grand old Sousa march, "The Thunderer,"' dissolved in disarray. Flutists fled and trumpeters trembled; the thunder died out around the end of the first strain.
A secondary factor: Back in those days the old Cleveland Rams trained at BW. Even as the modern Browns do. And some of the Rams were at this college game as fans. It was whispered but never proved that at least one of them. Weighing several hundred pounds, snatched a freshman beanie from the head of a nearby BW coed and vaulted onto the field to join the fray.
Calm finally prevailed, with police assistance. Memory again grows furtive as to whether the band regrouped and whether the coed got her beanie back.
Carroll won the football game.
The upshot was that BW-Carroll relations were badly strained for some time. The innocent goat, after being scrubbed off, was banned from further road trips and later retired to a farm in Medina County.
A year later, BW finally beat Reserve. That following Monday, 400 students (about half the enrollment) cut class and staged a motorized snake dance from Berea to University Circle, where they ran the BW colors up on the Reserve flagpole.
We don't have such hijinks now. Except perhaps in high school. College students seem more sedate or worldly, or something. BW and Carroll are said to be the best of friends.
It will be wonderful to see these two old contenders have at each other again. There should be a calming influence: BW doesn't have a goat. For that matter, neither does it have a marching band.
