How controversial can water issue really be?

Published online on Wednesday, Sep. 23, 2009

Students were kicked out of Bulldog Stadium Friday for holding up political signs. This, mind you, at a university desperate to put people in the stands, and a football game that included a military flyover and an on-field 9/11 tribute.

One man's political is not always another man's the way it oughta be.

As always, there are different versions of the story, the administrators saying the students were warned and then confrontational, the students saying they followed all the rules and the administrators overreacted.

Both seem plausible.

What certainly did happen is a group of agricultural students wore black T-shirts that said "got water?" on the front, a reference to the San Joaquin Valley's ongoing battle for irrigation water. If you haven't heard about it, well, you were the target audience. The piggyback on the milk advertising campaign was also a nice touch.

During timeouts, the students held up signs with the same message, which was allegedly OK. But an administrator said he saw a sign with the word "Obama" on it -- not derogatory, but presumably not "Obama Loves the 'Dogs!" either -- which crossed the line into political, something that isn't allowed at games. The back of Fresno State football tickets have that great legal fine print that reaffirms the school can make judgment calls about pretty much whatever it wants.

Several students were ejected during the game, and you wonder if there wasn't some confusion by security about what was OK and what wasn't. Either way, when you try to police something so large and abstract, it's going to be a pain.

Politics, and everything that word has come to encompass, has been intertwined with sports forever, if for no other reason than people watch sports, and people with messages want as many people as possible to see those messages. You get the equation.

You'll recall it was a man named Rollen Stewart who became somewhat infamous in the '70s and '80s for holding up those "John 3:16" signs at sporting events. It did not end well for him, of course; stink bombs and a kidnapping attempt. Stewart is in prison.

His signs seemed harmless, though, and you still see a "John 3:16" now and then. Some consider it a nice reminder. Others wonder what it could possibly have to do with sports.

A lot of athletes talk about their religious faiths in interviews; been happening for generations, from Ali to Tebow. Sports are where Tommie Smith and John Carlos held gloved fists high, and are now universally admired for it. Major League Baseball fields integrated in the 1940s when a lot of the nation couldn't or wouldn't. The Olympics have banned countries for political reasons.

We are talking about a smaller scale here in Fresno, but the idea of keeping politics and sports entirely separate seems impossible, if not a waste of time and energy. And the issue of water to the Valley is hard to overestimate. It affects us all, many directly. The team's starting quarterback grew up driving a tractor on his parents' farm.

You can't just let anything go, of course. You need a rule book if the KKK shows up, or the stands turn into a health-care bloodbath. But the water issue, while contentious, doesn't seem to be one that would cause the student section to come to blows.

On Friday, the Bulldogs and Broncos played for the not-so-highly coveted Milk Jug, and if we can go ahead and stretch, does that mean Fresno State supports dairy farmers? Does it give its approval to the way dairy cattle are treated?

This is not to pick on the school's administrators. In a lot of ways, they are Morgan Freeman in the movie "Lean on Me," and when you've inherited a huge mess, you're going to have to be the bad guy at times, go to extreme measures.

You might remember, though, that Freeman's character eventually acknowledges that he needs to pick his battles, relax and not try to micromanage every situation.

Sounds familiar.