Overview:
Gaucho soccer fans have been pitching tortillas to the pitch at Harder Stadium for the last two decades
Who’d a thought a power-conference school from the scrub brush of Texas would be a tortilla chip off the old Gaucho block?
Texas Tech fans unknowingly marked the 30th anniversary of UC Santa Barbara’s first tortilla fling of 1995 by throwing the flour and corn dervishes onto their own field during last week’s 42-17 football rout of Kansas.
It drew a pair of unsportsmanlike penalties — plus the unmitigated wrath of Kansas coach Lance Leipold.
Nothing, apparently, irritates a wound more than having salted food rubbed into it.
Leipold confronted Red Raiders coach Joey McGuire after the final gun and blurted an expletive that equates to the excrement of a male bovine.
McGuire threw up his hands and said, “Coach, I can’t do anything about it! You want me to do something (expletive) about it?”
Former UCSB basketball coach Jerry Pimm could feel McGuire’s frustration.
He couldn’t do anything about the Gauchos’ own tempest of tortillas despite the consequence of technical fouls — and even his “administrative” ejection from a game in 1997.
Lubbock, Texas, was actually the birthplace of the tortilla toss in 1989. Texas Tech’s football fans switched to the Frisbee-like food after they’d been banned from throwing plastic soda lids onto their field.
The Red Raiders decided to make it a ritual after an ESPN announcer described Lubbock as “nothing but Texas Tech football and a tortilla factory” during a 1992 game.
On a Roll
UCSB students exercised their own style of rowdiness during the Gauchos’ historic basketball season of 1988.
They greeted second-ranked UNLV with a flurry of toilet paper rolls, not tortillas, when UCSB made its first basket during a televised game at the Thunderdome.
The shocked referees didn’t know how to react. Neither did Runnin’ Rebels coach Jerry Tarkanian.
“I remember Tark chewing on a towel and shrugging,” said Bill Mahoney, who was typing the official play-by-play for UCSB’s sports information office that day. “He was stumped.”
And the Gauchos were stoked. Future NBA star Brian Shaw and sophomore sensations Carrick DeHart and Eric McArthur led them to a 71-66 victory.
The upset — their second over UNLV that season — helped them secure their first-ever berth in the NCAA Division I tournament.
Everybody knew the toilet paper was ready to roll when the Runnin’ Rebels returned to the Thunderdome in 1989.
The rolls were streaming not long after “the twilight’s last gleaming” had rolled off the lips of the national anthem singer.
The refs, however, were also ready to deem it a delay-of-game violation worthy of a technical foul.
Greg Anthony sank one-of-two free throws for the 18th-ranked Rebels, sending them off to an 84-75 victory.
Crumby Situation
TP tossing remained standard-operating procedure for all of the Gauchos’ televised basketball games until UCSB’s fans flushed the practice in 1995.
They switched to tortillas for an ESPN Big Monday telecast in which they lost badly to DePaul.
The Gauchos fell apart soon after Lelan McDougal’s game-opening basket … and so did the tortillas. One of ESPN’s cameras was ruined when fragments got into its mechanism.
UCSB compensated the network for the damages, but a skittish ESPN still boycotted the Thunderdome in 1996.
The network was rewarded with one of the craziest telecasts on its 1997 schedule when it returned for UCSB’s home game against the University of Pacific.
The Tigers, fortified with future No. 1 NBA draft pick Michael Olowokandi, were 18-2 and headed for the Big West Conference championship.
When they took the court for warmups, however, UCSB’s crowd of 5,313 crowned them with a blizzard of tortillas.
The continual barrage led to three technical fouls and Pimm’s automatic ejection in what was later determined to be a misapplication of NCAA rules.
“The technical before the game, I didn’t mind that,” Pimm said. “Get it out of their system. Get them on the floor and clean them up.
“Then they shoot two and they get the ball … And then it’s over.”
But when Pacific’s Mark Boelter missed the first free throw, the crowd celebrated by flinging more tortillas — resulting in another technical foul.
“The next one bothered me a little bit,” Pimm admitted. “Those (technical fouls) go on the head coach.”
He was warned that the third one would trigger his ejection.
Boelter made just 1-of-4 free shots, which prompted the launching of more tortillas from UCSB’s student section.
The officials approached Pacific coach Bob Thomason and said they’d call a third technical, if he so desired.
To his credit, Thomason said no.
“He told the ref that he didn’t want Jerry kicked out of the game,” one UCSB official said.
The referees heeded his request even though the tortillas continued to fall.
The public address announcer kept warning the throwers that they would be ejected from the arena, but the game’s closeness kept their frenzy at full boil.
UCSB led 71-69 when ESPN returned from a commercial break with 59.2 seconds remaining.
“Welcome back once again to just another sleepy night in Santa Barbara,” TV announcer Joel Meyers deadpanned.
Tut Tutt, Gauchos
UCSB star Raymond Tutt appeared to put the Gauchos’ win to bed in the following seconds.
He whirled along the baseline to make a short bank shot. Fourteen seconds later, he was fouled after grabbing a miss by Boelter.
“Raymond Tutt with the rebound,” Meyers declared, “and the Gauchos will upset the Tigers!”
But UCSB’s students spiced things up by pelting the court with enough tortillas to keep Fiesta stocked for a decade of summers.
Pimm jumped to his feet and began waving his arms as if aboard an aircraft carrier, trying to abort the landings of a F-14 squadron.
Larry Farmer, ESPN’s color commentator, declared, “You don’t want a technical foul here!”
“This is crazy,” Meyers interjected. “To throw this on the floor now, the officials may not have a choice. They’ve got a win in sight, and to put this on the floor again …”
Referee Jim Stupin signaled the technical foul before Meyers could finish his sentence.
Pimm was ejected for the first time in his long coaching career … and Pacific had new life.
Before leaving, the Gaucho coach took the P.A. microphone, glowered at the student section and barked, “Grow up!”
But when the tortilla chips were down, Tutt was ready to step up again.
He made two free throws for the last of his 26 points — and Boelter missed his two — to seal the Gauchos’ 75-69 victory.
Pimm had cooled off by the time the media reached him in the locker room.
“I love our students and our fans,” he said. “They were great.
“By being there, they helped us win the game, no question, by their noise, by their excitement.
“But they’ve got to understand that that could’ve cost us the game.”
Getting Their Kicks
Harder Stadium has become the tortilla tossers’ venue of choice after they were banned from the Thunderdome.
The UCSB men’s soccer team caught their attention by advancing to the NCAA College Cup finals in 2004 and 2006.
Gaucho fans were even bribed into throwing a few for the University of Akron during the Zips’ run to the 2010 College Cup championship at Harder Stadium.
Michael Lipka, a longtime UCSB fan known as “Big Mike,” was one of about 40 members of the “Gaucho Locos” support group who attended NCAA soccer’s Final Four.
“We have to create an environment, you know?” he said. “Part of why we were able to host this was because of the atmosphere we create, so we got as many Locos as we could out here.”
One of Akron’s fans contacted them on the Locos’ internet site and offered a few cases of beer if they’d toss some tortillas in support of his beloved Zips.
“We have not received anything yet,” Lipka said after throwing a few during Akron’s 2-1 semifinal win over Michigan. “Apparently, it’s an IOU.”
Gaucho fans even took their tortilla tossing on the road during basketball season the following year.
They flung them in celebration at the Jenny Craig Pavilion at the University of San Diego when UCSB’s Jaimé Serna blocked a potential tying shot by the Toreros in the final seconds.
USD coach Bill Grier was as dumbstruck as Tark had been in 1988.
“It’s kind of a weird one when it happens on your home floor,” he said.
Bob Williams, the Gaucho coach at the time, did some quick thinking to talk referee Tony Padilla out of assessing UCSB with a technical foul.
“He said he looked up and actually saw people with Gaucho shirts on throwing them,” Williams said. “I asked him if he could verify that they weren’t San Diego fans wearing Gaucho shirts.
“And he goes, ‘Oh, no, actually I couldn’t guarantee that.’
“So I said, ‘Before you call a T, I’d want you to pull that person down here and check his ID.’”
Padilla decided it was easier to just drop the whole matter.
The tortillas still drop with regularity at UCSB soccer matches.
Not even the lack of goals in the Blue-Green rivalry match with Cal Poly on Sept. 27 could keep the Meredith Field pitch at Harder Stadium from turning into a doughy mess.
Stay-Puft Tough
But UCSB isn’t the only local school that’s had to deal with thrown objects.
Westmont College has had to brace for an air show at Murchison Gym for its basketball games against arch-rival Biola University.
At least its students are original. Marshmallows were their projectiles of choice in 2007.
“They’ve been doing it for years,” then-Westmont coach John Moore said at the time. “They’ve gone from toilet paper, to tortillas, to bouncy balls and pennies.
“One year, they even threw hard-boiled eggs.”
He then smiled sheepishly and added, “They were saving the nonboiled ones in case the refereeing turned rotten.”
It’s all a “throwback” to perhaps the most original group of fans who root for the Detroit Red Wings in the National Hockey League.
They started throwing dead octopuses onto the ice during the 1952 Stanley Cup playoffs.
Hockey’s postseason in those days consisted of just the semifinal and final series, both of which were best-of-seven affairs.
The octopus’ eight tentacles symbolized the eight victories the Red Wings would need to claim the Stanley Cup.
This, of course, set into motion Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion — that “every action results in a reaction.”
When the Red Wings visited the San José Sharks during their Western Conference semifinal series of 2010, a small shark was tossed onto the ice with an octopus in its mouth.
So be thankful for tortillas, Gaucho fans. They are so much easier to stomach.
