Cortaca is this Saturday, a yearly reminder that I technically was arrested & expelled from SUNY Cortland, during the riots that ensued after the 2013 Cortaca game. For those who don’t know, Cortaca is football game between the SUNY Cortland Red Dragons and the Ithaca College Bombers. The rivalry is as old and as heated as any in college football, dating back nearly a century. It’s been featured on ESPN, coined “the biggest little game in the nation”, & after what happened in 2013, it almost came to an end.
Like every big rivalry game in college football, Cortaca gets circled on the calendar early. And as you’d expect, students & alumni get fired up. Huge parties, giant tailgates, day drinking starting at 9am, friends & family come up to visit in truly tremendous numbers. Every hotel in a 25 miles radius is booked months in advance, the dorms cap the amount of visitors each student can have, it’s absolute mayhem. Beautiful mayhem. Giant signs hang from all the off-campus houses with “Cortland fucks hard & Correct” or “Ithaca blows cock” written on them. Real eloquent stuff.
Every year its wild, but in 2013 it would reach legendary status. Something like 9,000 people were drunkenly raging on the streets. Cortland PD reported they had something like 100+ arrests. Apparently they had to stop arresting people because the jail was full….. THE FUCKING JAIL WAS FULL? They called in state police with full riot gear, and a couple surrounding police departments to help with crowd control. They even brought the K-9 unit out. People were tossing TVs from 3rd story windows. A guy got tased after running after a cop with a hatchet. There are multiple videos of people jumping off roofs into a sea of drunk humans waiting to catch them. A few couches lit on fire on front lawns. A few cop cars got ruined from people throwing grills, glass bottles, and random pieces of wood at them. It was out of control. You’d think I’d get caught up in this human zoo, & that’s how I got arrested, but no. I was actually at the game (in Ithaca) so I missed a lot of this.
In 2013 I was living off campus in the football house. Shoutout 3 Monroe (its tattooed on my ass, story for another day.) I didn’t play on the team but I was part of the team. So much so, I was and still am the only non-player to ever live there. I don’t know if that’s true but I'm the only one I know so I feel free to say that. This year, Coach said he didn’t want anyone going out, getting into trouble. So being a good teammate, I agreed to stay in and just get blown out at the house. Nothing wrong with that. We had booze, industrial sized speakers, and Drew, the master of ceremonies, set up a mixer with the sluttiest sorority on campus. Staying in was fine by me.
Around 2am the girls I had up visiting from home call me n say they’re leaving the bar. Being the gentleman i am, I rounded up a few boys & we decided to go downtown to walk the girls home. On our way back, in the distance I see my buddy (who’s on the team) & his 2 older brothers face to face with another group of 5/6 dudes. I can tell it’s not a friendly face to face by his hand cocked back behind his back ready to thunderclap some rando. Just as I go to yell at him to keep it moving, (we are literally 6 feet from our front door) I see him smack the Yankee fitted off this guys head. That's all it took. Chaos. Fists start flying, bodies throwing bodies… it was wild. Straight out of a movie. I tell the girls to just keep walking home, & the rest of the us sprint to go help my buddy crush some skulls.
We eventually get broken up by some cops & everyone kinda just walks away. We’re literally right behind our house, I could’ve just went inside like everyone else & kept the good times rolling. Do I do that? No, of course not. Some fucking bean pole twerp keeps running his mouth, so I’m chirping back. I tell him to keep walking. He doesn’t listen & starts coming at me. My other buddy sees this & gets in between us. I forget exactly what the other kid said but I didn’t like it. I throw an absolutely beautiful right hook over my buddy’s shoulder & land it clean on this bozos chin. He stumbles back like a pussy & trips over the curb, flopping back into the street. I consider this a win, I proved I’m cool & tough, so I start walking back to my house. The kid gets up & tries to run at me. My buddy, who at the time was the starting DE & leading the league in sacks, explodes on this guy. He bodies him clean off his feet. Sending him tumbling into the road & starts cursing him out. He kept yelling at the kid, who was lying on the ground trying to remember where he was, “why would you do that?!” Anyway, the cops tell him to leave it alone & walk away. Does my buddy do that? No, of course not. He keeps screaming at the poor kid “why would you do that?!” The cops tell my buddy if you don’t shut the fuck up, right now & walk away, you’re getting arrested. Of course he doesn’t & says “well he called me a pussy”. Just as promised, they grab my buddy & say he’s under arrest. He keeps mouthing off & I guess that pissed the cops off cause just as I reach my back door I hear the cop yell “AND GET THE FAT ONE TOO.” (Totally uncalled for). So they run n grab me. They put my buddy in a car. They try to put me in a car but I don’t fit, pure comedy.
They eventually call for a truck, that I can only describe as one of those money trucks you see outside of banks. I think they are designed to move groups of criminals at once. I fit nicely in there. We get to the station, they give us court appearance tickets for disorderly conduct & we eventually go home a couple hours later. Thinking back... I think they were so busy that they didnt really wanna deal with us. "Here kid.. take his ticket" and boom, free at last. We finish the night off by laughing about it back at the house & kept drinking for a couple more hours. The night ended with a thicccy boo bear on the kickline team coming by to snuggle.
Weeks later, after going in front of the university, they decided I’m expelled for a year, effective next semester. After fighting with them for weeks, writing apology letters to the university president, & unleashing my Puerto Rican mother on them, we settle on 110 hours of community service. My last day of community service, was a year and a half later, where I helped assemble the stage that I would walk across to accept my dipolma.
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