GRIZ25 said:
I remember that game. I remember bringing little American flags and handing them out to the student section. I remember how the crowd starting chanting USA when the demonstrators came out and how the one got pulled by his hair.
I knew the guy who was drug off by his hair, Duminda DeZoysa, and the ring leader, a guy named Jim Parker who was a student activist and not a bad guy if you got to know him. DeZoysa was from Sri Lanka. I am pretty sure he was deported over the incident. That was his first and only Griz game. I was standing courtside as they drug him off and I couldn't stop laughing. I remember it like it was yesterday. It still makes me laugh. Here is a story I found for those who were not there.
Memories of a mad dash
By VINCE DEVLIN, The Missoulian - 04/06/03
Early in the 1991 Gulf War, a dozen protesters disrupted a UM basketball game; today one participant reflects on what's changed, and what remains the same.
Todd Struckman remembers being in someone's kitchen in Missoula when the plot was hatched. He was 19 back then, in 1991. He doesn't remember who came up with the idea, isn't sure who took charge.
He's still puzzled who came up with the 16 tickets to the basketball game.
The United States had just begun bombing Iraq in the first Gulf War, and the group in the kitchen was opposed.
ESPN, meantime, was showing up in Missoula in two days with announcer Tom Mees and analyst Terry Holland, the former Virginia coach, to nationally televise a basketball showdown between the Montana Grizzlies and Idaho Vandals on Jan. 17.
"We realized it was an opportunity for a ‘moment,'" Struckman says. "If we did it right, we'd have our moment and then the basketball game could go on."
The moment: Just before tip-off, the protesters planned to don T-shirts with the slogan "Play Ball, Not War" on the back, storm the court and lie down on their bellies while the national sports network's cameras were running, in a self-proclaimed "die-in."
The problem: "I don't think there was a sports fan among us," Struckman says. "I don't know if any of us had been to a game before. We didn't realize what the atmosphere would be like, with 10,000 people who are riled up by a sports ritual, packed into a small space."
And Montana's opponent was Idaho. That meant the crowd was armed — albeit with potatoes. Grizzly fans used to roll them on the court when the Vandals, then a rival in the Big Sky Conference, came to town every year.
"My first impulse," Struckman says with a laugh, "was, ‘Wow — these are great seats!' "
America was just hours into the war, and Struckman recalls "‘UM' chants morphing into chants of ‘USA.'"
The teams had been introduced, the national anthem had been sung, and just before the starters made their way to center court for the opening tip, Struckman and about 11 cohorts pulled out their wadded-up T-shirts, stretched them over their street clothes and dashed onto the court.
Struckman, seated near the Grizzly pep band, dove as he ran on the court, and slid much closer to the stands than he would have liked.
"And the button on my pants popped," he says.
He remembers being hit by something; he assumes it was a potato. He remembers a Missoula police officer picking him up by the seat of his pants and hauling him off the floor. Indeed, officers and UM security had the protesters off the floor in about a minute's time, and it took five more minutes to clean up the spuds and debris fans had tossed at them.
But one of the protesters, Duminda DeZoysa, was dragged off by his ponytail, which made for dramatic footage for ESPN's cameras.
By the next morning, ABC and CNN were replaying the footage, NBC sent it to affiliates, and CBS highlighted it on its overnight, morning and afternoon war feeds to affiliates, as well as replaying it on a prime-time roundup of war protests narrated by Charles Kuralt.
"It totally changed how I view law enforcement," Struckman says now. "I really believe those people saved my life. They are there to enforce the law and ensure peace, and that's exactly what they did."
Students who had come early for good seats — back then students sat courtside — had waved banners and shouted anti-Iraqi slogans for nearly three hours, and there had been rumors that Grizzly football players intended to jump any anti-war protesters.
About a dozen of the 16 protesters who claimed tickets actually made it to the floor, and nine, including Struckman, were arrested. Two of them were women, and one of them was pregnant, although she didn't know it at the time, according to Struckman. She and DeZoysa, Struckman says, complained about how they were handled.
"I was hauled off by the seat of my pants, taken to a secure area and handcuffed, but it was all incredibly gentle," Struckman says. "Not everybody got the same treatment, though. I think people who were taken off by student security, by people who weren't trained for this type of situation, maybe had a different experience than I did."
The group had set down three rules back in that kitchen where the plan had been devised.
"One was to make sure we didn't injure a player," Struckman says. "If we'd tripped a guy and sprained his knee, that wouldn't have gone over too well. We also said we'd act with dignity, and accept whatever punishment was doled out. We had to fully accept the consequences. That's the bargain. As Ghandi taught, the penalty will be dwarfed by the principle."
Two months after the die-in, the nine arrested peace activists — Struckman, DeZoysa, Margaret H. Persico, James G. Parker, Michael W. Howey, Marcy J. Boltz, Lewis T. Anderson, Matthew B. Colligan and Paul W. Curtis — pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct. Judge Don Louden sentenced them to deferred, three-month jail terms and fined them $25 each, with $10 surcharges.
Struckman isn't sure what became of the "Missoula 9." DeZoysa, he thinks, returned to his native Sri Lanka. Parker, he believes, is still around Missoula. The others he's completely lost touch with.
"We weren't really bound by friendship," he says, "as much as we were bound by our feelings about war."
Todd Struckman came by his activism naturally. His father was a U.S. Marine during the Vietnam War — who opposed the war in Vietnam.
"I always admired that," says Struckman, who's from Billings, where his father is a pharmacist for the Indian Health Service and his mother teaches at Head Start.
"My father had a very sophisticated, quixotic relationship with war. He always said there was a difference between policymaking and dedicating oneself to one's country. He had to take a lot of grief from his friends in the Marines for not supporting the war, and he had to take a lot of grief from his friends who opposed the war, for being a Marine. But he always taught me it's a citizen's duty to think critically."
Struckman, 31, who was a sophomore at the University of Montana when he protested the first Gulf War, is just as opposed to this President Bush's decision to invade Iraq this time around, and although he's attended a couple of anti-war rallies, he isn't sure he'd take part in another protest like he did at the basketball game.
"Times change, and people change," he says. "It might be somebody else's turn."
But he's never regretted diving onto the court.
"It's funny. Back in '91 we felt like we could change the course of the world. There was widespread support for our actions in Iraq. We couldn't allow one country to invade another country. It was an action that could not stand. Yet here we were, protesting an international coalition trying to right a wrong. This time (America's) motives are much more questionable, yet the protests are more sedate. Is it a question of hopelessness? I don't know.
"My best response is to hunker down, hope it's quick and clean, and then to advocate high-quality nation-building. I can't imagine we won't prevail, and I suspect we'll find out even more nasty things about Saddam Hussein before it's over. But I don't think this war will achieve a lasting peace."
Struckman, who received his MFA in poetry from UM in 1999, has been employed as a journalist at the Ravalli Republic and Missoula Independent. He's currently at work on a book of poems, and "I cobble together enough work projects, such as house painting, to keep me active." He's also a professional triathlete, although "I don't make enough there to even pay income tax on."
Struckman never got to watch that game back in '91 — Montana defeated Idaho 67-62 — but he never forgot the energy level inside the crowded field house, in stark contrast to the sports he competes in, alone, outdoors. In fact, he says he started going to a few Grizzly and Lady Griz games after that.
His activism these days is more direct.
"I better understand what I can change," says Struckman, who volunteers as director of the Blue Mountain All-Women's Run. "I ride my bike to work, turn my thermostat down. I advocate for rights for gays and lesbians, for women, for the environment."
And while he might not lie down on a basketball court again, he still speaks up against the war.
"I think it was the wrong decision to invade, for a couple of reasons," he says. "One, violence begets violence, and while it may seem like we're solving something, I think trouble will crop up again. Second, to use the pretext of the terrorist attacks of 9-11 as an excuse is not only inaccurate, it's insulting to the intellig ence of the world. A war on terrorism is fine if you can solve the antagonism between ethnic groups that's at the root of the problem. But starting a war to win the war on terrorism is the wrong approach."
