Part 1: The Comeback
Table of Contents
Part 1: The Comeback
Part 2: The Merry Mob
Part 3: A Fan and Doctor Khumalo
Part 4: Bliss in Korea / More Merz
Part 5: The Meaning
On its 20th anniversary, Crew SC historian Steve Sirk offers an in-depth look at one of the most memorable moments from the Black & Gold’s inaugural season—the dramatic comeback win vs. New England on May 11, 1996, and the ensuing postgame pitch invasion. This is the first of five installments that we will publish today. The remaining installments will be published at noon, 1:30 p.m., 3:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m., so please check back throughout the day to explore a surreal moment in Crew SC history.
All Columbus Dispatch beat reporter Craig Merz had to do was click “send.” As the MLS-official scoreboard clock counted down toward zero, as it did back in 1996, Merz had put the finishing touches on his first-edition game story. He wrote that for the second straight home game, the Columbus Crew had fallen behind 2-0, and although they fought hard and even pulled back a goal to make it 2-1, it was another disappointing loss in front of a crowd of nearly 25,000. The article was in the can. All he had to do was wait three more minutes to officially file it.
Looking back 20 years to the third home game in Crew SC history, which took place on May 11, 1996, Merz laughs and says, “And then all hell broke loose.”
Columbus clobbered D.C. United 4-0 in the club’s inaugural game at Ohio Stadium, then dropped a 2-1 home decision to the Tampa Bay Mutiny the following week. A three-game road trip produced a win and two losses. One of those losses was a 6-4 disaster in Kansas City whereby Columbus blew a 4-2 lead by conceding four goals in the final 23 minutes. On the evening of May 11, back home in Ohio Stadium, the Black & Gold trailed the New England Revolution 2-1 and appeared destined for a loss that would drop them to 2-4 on the season.
All was not lost, however.
“It felt like there were goals in the game,” recalls Todd Yeagley, one of the Crew’s starting midfielders that night. “It was a great atmosphere in the stadium. You could feel the momentum.”
Sure enough, the Black & Gold received a new lease on life when substitute forward “Sneaky” Pete Marino tied the game in the 87th minute. New England goalkeeper Aidan Heaney couldn’t hang on to a Paul Young header. The ball bounced off his chest and fell to the ground, whereupon the ever-opportunistic Marino epitomized his well-earned nickname by sliding in and knocking the loose ball into the net.
“It was a typical Sneaky Pete goal,” Crew defender Mike Clark says as he recalls the moment two decades later. “He just got in there. He just slid in there to get it.”
“I'm put in there for offense, to create chances," Marino told the Columbus Dispatch after the game. "My first priority is to score. After that, whatever happens, happens.”
In this case, the whatever happens that happened was Brian McBride capping a legendary comeback in the 89th minute by chest-trapping a long Clark pass that he received on the left side of the box and then rolling a shot into the side netting at the right post. Columbus 3, New England 2.
“That was a great goal," Revolution defender Alexi Lalas told the press afterward. “That shows why he is the star of Columbus and the league. Every team in the world needs someone like McBride.”
Comebacks of this nature are rare. In a little over 20 seasons, Columbus Crew SC has taken three points on only eight occasions when trailing after 75 minutes. Marino’s 87th minute equalizer was the latest game-tying goal in those eight occasions. To flip a 2-1 loss to a 3-2 win in the final three minutes, especially without the benefit of stoppage time in those early MLS days, was a staggering achievement.
Up in the press box, Merz, a hockey reporter who was only a handful of games into his very first soccer beat, had to turn his story around in a matter of minutes to hit his first filing deadline. The original article that had been one button-press away from being filed was now the match report equivalent of Dewey Defeats Truman.
“With the countdown clock (that MLS used at the time), when there were two minutes left, there were two minutes left,” Merz says. “If there’s two minutes left in a basketball game, you’ve really got 15 minutes to write. In a hockey game, you’ve got eight minutes to write due to timeouts and faceoffs. But with this, two minutes was two minutes and I was still getting used to that rhythm where I didn’t have all the time in the world to finish this.”
As Merz frantically hit the delete button on his laptop, McBride celebrated the winning goal Lambeau style. He raced across the running track that ringed the field and jumped into the waiting arms of the delirious crowd. It was a spontaneous moment of emotion. McBride wanted to share the thrill of the comeback with the fans.
90 seconds later, after the final whistle, the fans would reciprocate in a wholly unexpected way. Merz’s rewrite was about to get a lot tougher...
Part 2: The Merry Mob
Table of Contents
Part 1: The Comeback
Part 2: The Merry Mob
Part 3: A Fan and Doctor Khumalo
Part 4: Bliss in Korea / More Merz
Part 5: The Meaning
On its 20th anniversary, Crew SC historian Steve Sirk offers an in-depth look at one of the most memorable moments from the Black & Gold’s inaugural season—the dramatic comeback win vs. New England on May 11, 1996, and the ensuing postgame pitch invasion. This is the second of five installments that we will publish today. The remaining installments will be published at 1:30 p.m., 3:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m., so please check back throughout the day to explore a surreal moment in Crew SC history.
There is a social and legal contract when a fan attends a sporting event. The field belongs to the players. That is their space. They have every right to feel safe while doing their jobs. Players may make a welcomed foray into the fans’ space if they are so inclined, but the reverse is criminal trespassing and puts athletes in danger. As we fondly look back at this event and its significance, let’s not lose sight of that fact. This was a singular moment in a different day and age and, thankfully, it has a happy ending. Celebrating a crazy event from past is not an endorsement to repeat it, any more than writing about Ten Cent Beer Night in Cleveland is an endorsement of a mob taking the field at an Indians game. Ten Cent Beer Night also gives you an idea of how ugly such situations can be and why it is illegal to enter the playing field. On May 11, 1996, we got lucky. Let’s never press our luck again.
For Mike Clark, the first sign of trouble was the look on the security workers’ faces. At the match’s conclusion, jubilant fans started making their way out of the stands to celebrate the victory with the team. What started as a trickle almost instantly became a torrent of several hundred fans, overwhelming the undermanned and unprepared security staff.
“When the final whistle happened, we were pumped,” Clark says. “People had been involved in games where you came back and won, but I certainly had never been involved in a game where people stormed the field. That caught everybody off guard. You went through a lot of emotions. It starts with ‘oh crap!’ panic. I saw the security guards’ faces, and the people who were responsible for the field itself, and they were panicking. You could just see it in their faces and then they were waving at us like, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ There were people running everywhere. It was mayhem.”
The chief mayhem-magnet was McBride. Not only was he the breakout star of the team, but he had been that night’s hero with his 89th minute game-winning goal. Everyone wanted to celebrate with him.
“The first few ran on and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is cool,’” McBride recalls. “And then the whole group started running on and I remember one of the coaches yelling ‘Everybody get inside!’ It was a mad dash to try to get into the locker room before the fans got to you. That didn’t happen of course.”
McBride found himself in a crush of Crew crazies. Fans not only hugged their new hero, but kissed him as well.
“It was like, ‘Whoa! What’s going on!’” McBride says. “There’s like three or four people hugging me and kissing me on my face. I mean, what are you going to do? I just took it all in with the fans.”
McBride and his teammates quickly, and smartly, discerned that this was a merry mob. The easiest way to safely get off the field was to roll with it and celebrate with the fans while making progress toward the locker room at the southeast corner of Ohio Stadium.
“I was just trying to find a way to get off the field,” says Bo Oshoniyi, the Crew’s goalkeeper that night. “I didn’t know what was going on. It was my first time with something like that, so it was more about can I find my gloves and get out of here? But then you start getting into the moment when the fans are jumping all over you, and you just start enjoying it.”
“Nobody forearm shivered me like the band member in that Cal-Stanford game,” Crew midfielder Brian Bliss recalls with a laugh, referring to the famous college football play when the marching band came on the field too soon. “None of that. It was more high-fiving and backslapping and that kind of stuff.”
“I think we realized it would be a happy crowd, but we didn’t know what to expect,” adds McBride. “For me, I tried to make a mad dash but then just enjoyed it with the fans. I think the best part about it was that it was so young in the season, and to see our fans as excited as we were, and even more so. I didn’t know what to expect, but once you get the calmness back in you, you can start to enjoy it. It’s a moment I won’t forget.”
Somehow, Clark managed to escape much of the madness. Although he would go on to become a Black & Gold stalwart, at the time, Clark was a no-name defender, which played to his advantage.
“I was out of there pretty quick,” he says. “I think everyone was after McBride. People weren’t too concerned about me. I just kinda jogged out of the stadium. The benefits of anonymity.”
“I would fall into the category too,” laughs Yeagley. “They certainly all wanted a piece of McBride. They were all probably trying for a piece of the hairband. They wanted a piece of the shoestring. Who knows? I don’t think Clarkie and I were who they were going after, so we just blended in with the group. We just got to enjoy the festivities.”
Part 3: A Fan and Doctor Khumalo
Table of Contents
Part 1: The Comeback
Part 2: The Merry Mob
Part 3: A Fan and Doctor Khumalo
Part 4: Bliss in Korea / More Merz
Part 5: The Meaning
On its 20th anniversary, Crew SC historian Steve Sirk offers an in-depth look at one of the most memorable moments from the Black & Gold’s inaugural season—the dramatic comeback win vs. New England on May 11, 1996, and the ensuing postgame pitch invasion. This is the third of five installments that we will publish today. The remaining installments will be published at 3:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m., so please check back throughout the day to explore a surreal moment in Crew SC history.
Matt Bernhardt has filled a variety of roles over 20 years of Columbus Crew SC history. Some of you may know him from his data and analytics tweets via @bernhardtsoccer. Some of you may recall his writing as part of the club’s official website back in the early 2000s. Prior to that, you may remember him as one of the principal organizers of early supporter culture back in the 1990s. And now that the statute of limitations has expired, we can delve into his secret life as a criminal trespasser. Sitting at the front of the stands in the northwest corner of the field, Bernhardt was one of the hundreds of fans that made it onto the field.
“I remember that last-minute goal going in and thinking ‘Holy cow! That’s amazing! We won!’” he says. “Seeing everyone else run onto the field, it was really easy to get swept up in the celebration. You look around and it’s like, ‘Oh, people are going down on the field. Well, here we go then.’”
Bernhardt had the thrill of running out onto the field, but he did not make it to any Crew players. Once he got out there, he questioned what he was even doing. He thought of Ohio State students getting pepper sprayed by police when they stormed the field to tear down the football goalposts after a Buckeyes victory. He wanted no part of any potential sprayings. Then it occurred to him that the sprayings were property-related, which probably wouldn’t apply here.
“The worst the soccer crowd could do was carry off the nets,” he says, “but they weren’t going to do that. They were looking to celebrate with the players, not take home a trophy.”
Nonetheless, as the PA announcer urged fans to leave the field, Bernhardt complied. “I remember thinking, ‘Okay, what exactly is the end game here?’ Then the PA announcer came on and I turned around.”
Not every fan who made it onto the field possessed Bernhardt’s calm rationality.
On May 11, 1996, my 21-year-old self sat perched near the top of the lower deck, so I made no move to get down to the field. I just watched in wonder as the scene unfolded. The defining image of that night, to me, was the terrified exodus of Crew midfielder Doctor Khumalo.
As chaos reigned on the field, an excited fan chased after the South African star. The skillful midfielder had been marketed as “The Michael Jordan of South Africa” and was one of the faces of the franchise that first year, so, like McBride, he would have been a top target for the on-field celebration. He wanted nothing to do with it. He ran toward the locker room in a dead sprint with an eager fan in hot pursuit. Khumalo, without breaking stride, hurdled the sign boards at the south end of the stadium as if he were The Edwin Moses of South Africa. The fan, who, to be fair, was a not a professional athlete, did not successfully hurdle the sign boards. He went from eating dust to biting the dust. Khumalo never looked back as he raced into the sanctuary of the locker room.
“The foreign guys, the fan mob was probably about violence against the referee or an opponent, not so much euphoria,” Bliss says. “You were probably scared, not realizing that you were in the Midwest and all these people wanted to do was hug ‘em.”
“The Good Doctor, I think he was kind of freaked out,” Yeagley agrees. “Part of it is that I think he might have been part of a game back home where it might get dangerous. Our fans were just going to jump with you a little bit, but he might have had a different perspective on why he ran so darn fast.”
Oshoniyi recalls talking to Khumalo in the locker room. “He said he didn’t know what was going on, so he was like, ‘I’m gone.’ That’s probably something he wasn’t used to. We laughed about it. It was neat to see his face and his expression.”
Clark still finds himself amused by the memory. “I can say without a doubt that that was the most energy Doctor Khumalo ever exerted on that field,” he says. “That’s got to be the fastest he ran and the highest he jumped in a Crew uniform. That guy could do anything with the ball at his feet, but I’ll tell ya, he didn’t cover that much ground.”
Fear does that to people. Even though it was a friendly mob, Khumalo’s athletic escape is a reminder of how miraculous it was that nobody got hurt.
Part 4: Bliss in Korea / More Merz
Table of Contents
Part 1: The Comeback
Part 2: The Merry Mob
Part 3: A Fan and Doctor Khumalo
Part 4: Bliss in Korea / More Merz
Part 5: The Meaning
On its 20th anniversary, Crew SC historian Steve Sirk offers an in-depth look at one of the most memorable moments from the Black & Gold’s inaugural season—the dramatic comeback win vs. New England on May 11, 1996, and the ensuing postgame pitch invasion. This is the fourth of five installments that we will publish today. The final installment will be published at 4:30 p.m., so please check back throughout the day to explore a surreal moment in Crew SC history.
“After the game, I remember in the locker room recounting the story of what happened to us prior to the Olympics in South Korea,” Brian Bliss says.
In June of 1987, Bliss was with the U.S. Men’s National Team as they participated in the President’s Cup. Hosted by South Korea on a mostly-annual basis, the tournament featured a hodgepodge of club and national team competitors in an effort to help bolster the development of the South Korean National Team. In this instance, it would also serve as a dry run for the following year’s Olympics.
It was a tumultuous time in North Korea. The military regime chose new leaders via indirect elections, but the public pressure for direct elections had been growing. Then, on April 13, 1987, ruler Chun Doo-hwan announced that there would be no constitutional revisions. On June 10, Doo-hwan named Roh Tae-woo as his successor as voted upon by the party. The appointment of another indirectly elected military ruler sparked an immediate nationwide protest as people took to the streets for what was called the “Uprising Rally to Defeat the April 13 Decision and to End Dictatorship.”
The pro-democracy protestors would ultimately succeed and pave the way for South Korea’s Sixth Republic, which exists to this day. On an infinitely more insignificant note, they also gave Brian Bliss a story to tell his Crew teammates nine years later. As the June 10 protests went on, tear gas wafted into the stands at Masan Stadium as the U.S. took on C.D. Espanol. The fans fled the gas and there was only one place to go.
“It’s the first half and, all of a sudden, all of these fans started jumping out of the stands and onto the track and onto the field and the game’s still going on,” Bliss recalls. “The referee’s looking around and doesn’t know what’s going on. They finally stopped the game because there were literally several thousand people on the field.”
The teams were ushered into their locker rooms, where they safely waited for the tear gas to dissipate. Play resumed a couple of hours later in an empty stadium, although South Korea’s match scheduled later that night in Masan was canceled, prompting more riots.
The two pitch invasions he experienced couldn’t have been more different, but once he and his Crew teammates finally found refuge in their Ohio Stadium locker room, Bliss found the Masan incident to be the only remotely relatable experience in his life.
“I remember recounting that story in the Crew locker room, although this one in Columbus was in euphoria.”
Up in the radio booth, with a swarm of fans buzzing all over the pitch, Dwight Burgess attempted to convey the scene to his listeners.
“The first thing I did was pick my jaw up off the table because I was so stunned at what was happening,” he says. Burgess tried his best to make the scene relatable. “I think my reference was that it was as if the Buckeyes had beaten That Team Up North. I’m watching this happen, and after a bit of disbelief that I’m watching people charge the field to celebrate a Crew win, once I adapted to that, my point of reference was that it was like the Buckeyes beating That Team Up North.”
It was an apt description. In 1994, when the Ohio State Buckeyes beat the Michigan Wolverines for the first time in seven years, jubilant college football fans overtook the very same Ohio Stadium field. What was once a sea of Scarlet & Gray was now Black & Gold.
My joke at that time was that the pitch invasion consisted of concerned Buckeyes fans racing down to inspect the field so as to ensure that this newfangled soccer team wasn’t messing it up for the all-important spring football practice. Todd Yeagley offers a different take on the relationship between the fans and Ohio Stadium.
“Fans just loved being in the Horseshoe,” he says. “Let’s face it, that’s sacred ground, and to see soccer in there was exciting and we gave them an excuse to storm sacred ground for a little bit.”
Meanwhile, circling back to the plight of Craig Merz in the press box, not only did he have to rewrite his game story, but he had to do so in the face of a compelling and newsworthy distraction.
“I was trying to grasp what I was trying to write,” he says, “and also just looking at the whole image on the field, with players and fans running and Doctor Khumalo jumping over the sign boards. Suspended animation is what I was feeling at that point. I needed to be writing something, but I didn’t want to write. I wanted to watch this. It was surreal.”
With his first story filed, Merz then had to make his way down to the locker room, which usually required cutting across the field. Easier said than done on this night.
“I had to get down there through the mob,” he says. “The fans stuck around for a while.”
Merz described the Crew’s locker room as full of shock and awe.
“It was unbelievable the way they went crazy,” Crew forward Marcelo Carrera told Merz, as quoted in the next morning’s Columbus Dispatch. “It felt like I was back in Argentina.”
When Merz made it over to the New England side, Alexi Lalas had put his disappointment aside in recognition of the moment.
“I think Lalas expressed the thoughts of everybody,” Merz says. “He was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got 25,000 fans here and they were over-exuberant and nuts, but what’s wrong with that?’ Even though they lost the game, it was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got something going here.’”
Or, as Lalas is quoted in Merz’s story: “Tonight’s game was great for a soccer fan.”
Part 5: The Meaning
Table of Contents
Part 1: The Comeback
Part 2: The Merry Mob
Part 3: A Fan and Doctor Khumalo
Part 4: Bliss in Korea / More Merz
Part 5: The Meaning
On its 20th anniversary, Crew SC historian Steve Sirk offers an in-depth look at one of the most memorable moments from the Black & Gold’s inaugural season—the dramatic comeback win vs. New England on May 11, 1996, and the ensuing postgame pitch invasion. This is the fifth and final installment. We hope that you have enjoyed this exploration a surreal moment in Crew SC history.
The Pitch Invasion is second only to The Great Scoreboard Fire of 2013 in terms of spontaneously surreal lunacy in the 20+ years of Major League Soccer in Columbus. The reason this game compelled me to take a deep dive is not so much that the fans rushed the field, but rather WHY.
If you were to look at MAPFRE Stadium or most any park in MLS these days, there is little doubt about the league’s chances of survival. The crowds are sizable and passionate and there’s now a generation of fans who have never known a world without Major League Soccer.
In 1996, Columbus was considered a graveyard of junk sports and fly by night leagues. It was Ohio State and nothing else. Central Ohio’s foray into Major League Soccer garnered some hype and curiosity, but nobody was really sure what to expect. Skeptics and naysayers held the majority opinion, but the early crowds in excess of 20,000 offered some hope. Surely there were many people giving the games a try as an exotic night out, but did people truly care? Did the games actually matter, or was it just a fashionable spectacle? Would Columbus ever find room in its heart for ANY non-Buckeye sport, much less soccer? And would this pitch invasion be framed as soccer hooliganism and used to tear down the sport?
“I don’t think anyone brought it up right then that this probably wasn’t a really good job of security,” Craig Merz says. “That came later. At the time, I think everyone was like, ‘Oh yeah, this was awesome.’ By Monday, it was like, ‘You know what? The fans probably shouldn’t be storming the field like that. We have to do a better job.’ But the players loved it. It was a new league and they didn’t know if they were going to be accepted in Columbus, so to have such raw emotion, the players loved it.”
Brian Bliss concurs. “It was the first year of the league and only our third home game of the year, so we were still trying to find our voice. It was like the fans were responding to the team, so this is great. We were mini-celebrities!”
“It was one of those things where it was very early in the league and you don’t know how people are going to react,” adds Brian McBride, “but when they run on the field and want to celebrate with you, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got some great fans. They want to be a part of what we’re doing.’”
Although those early games put many curiosity seekers into the seats, there was already a hardcore soccer fan base that was starved for a top-flight league. The buildup to the launch and even the early season games were more about supporting the sport and the league. Every soccer fan was in it together. With no history or rivalries, the diehard fans were almost as single-entity as the league itself. That would of course change with the passage of time as the league and clubs started filling pages in the history books, but as Matt Bernhardt notes, the Pitch Invasion was the first shift away from supporting the league to supporting a club.
“There was kind of a novelty about how we have a league now,” Bernhardt says. “You were rooting for the sport to succeed. There was still the euphoria of ‘Yay! We have a team! We have a league! People are showing up! It hasn’t folded yet!’ That New England result was a totem because we won. It was part of the transition from a novelty to a sport, because we care if we win. I don’t know how much of that was conscious at the time, but there was suddenly the sense that the results matter.”
The players noticed the shift too. Mike Clark says, “It was like, ‘Okay, we’ve arrived. Columbus has embraced us as their own.’ It just shows you the sophistication of the soccer fans. It’s awesome that your team came back and won the game, but to storm the field, you have to be really passionate about what’s going on. You’re not just casually watching.”
“I've never seen that at a soccer game in the United States,'' Crew coach Timo Liekoski told the Columbus Dispatch that night. “I had a lump in my throat. It was unbelievable. You can tell the city has taken to the team. It wasn't just young people who came down on the field. There was a mixture of young and old, male and female. It was great.”
That night, Bo Oshoniyi felt the first inkling that MLS and Columbus were truly going to make it. “That’s when you knew it was here to stay,” he says. “That’s when you knew that people were passionate about it. You expect that in the New Yorks and LAs and the bigger cities, but in Columbus, you didn’t really expect it. To see the people really buying into what Major League Soccer was doing and what Lamar Hunt was trying to put forth was great to see. Even now, if you watch the Crew fans today, they are so into it and so knowledgeable about soccer.”
Both the Crew and MLS would have some growing pains over the coming years, and the league itself almost folded after the 2001 season, but a crazy Saturday night in Columbus helped show that there was something there worth fighting for when times got tough.
“It was just a spontaneous event inside this historic old stadium that had only seen its field stormed for the Buckeyes,” Dwight Burgess says, “and now suddenly this little upstart professional soccer team in a town starved for professional sports has embraced this entire opportunity. It was an amazing night and I think it demonstrated that there was something that could be built upon if it was managed properly.”
When one looks at Columbus Crew SC and Major League Soccer today, it is a validation of what so many felt in their hearts and minds at the end of the night on May 11, 1996.
Jamey Rootes is currently the president of the NFL’s Houston Texans. Back when Rootes was just 29 years old, Lamar Hunt tabbed him to be the first general manager in Columbus Crew history. Rootes worked hand in hand with Hunt to launch the club and oversee its formative years, culminating in the construction of MAPFRE Stadium, which debuted in 1999. Rootes left for the Texans at the end of that 1999 season, but he has always carried fond memories of his time in Columbus, building our soccer club with Lamar Hunt.
As we look back on the Pitch Invasion, I thought it might be fitting to leave you with the email I recently received from Rootes when I asked him for his memories of that night. The day to day realities were surely more complex at the time, dealing with operations and security, etc, but those items were correctable and fade into the distance with time. What’s left is the enduring emotion of a watershed event.
“That game was one of many highlights of a season that I will always cherish,” Rootes wrote. “As you will recall at the time, there were very few outside of our organization and our supporters in the community that thought we had any shot of making the Columbus Crew and Major League Soccer work. I recall only joy and a sense of accomplishment from that evening as it was a tangible demonstration of the love that our fans had for our players and our organization. Our players, coaches and staff worked so hard to be a team that reflected the spirit and values of our community, and that night we saw all of our hard work pay off. There were many other great events in that historic first season, but on that night it was clear—the Columbus Crew was here to stay and that statement was delivered emphatically by our amazing fans.”
*
POSTSCRIPTS
PS—I know I mentioned it earlier in this series, but pitch invasions are a bad idea. I just felt like I should reiterate that. While acknowledging the historic romanticism of this event, I feel that we lucked out like Willie Mays Hayes making that showoff basket catch in the movie “Major League.” When Hayes got back to the dugout, his manager, Lou Brown, said, “Nice catch, Hayes. Don’t ever (bleeping) do it again.” The Pitch Invasion was our Willie Mays Hayes basket catch. We should all heed our inner Lou Brown.
PPS- If you were at the game on May 11, 1996, I would love to hear your own personal recollections of that night. Please email me at sirk65@yahoo.com if you have any stories you would be willing to share with someone eager to hear them.
