Duke is back and they mean business after having their lacrosse season canned last year because of the now infamous stripper crying rape who wasn't raped yet still had semen from five different men in her. Three days of fanatical lacrosse fans converged on Baltimore for the Division I, II and III championships and I do mean converge. Saturday's attendance set a record for the finals and it was broken again on Monday when the Division I game featured perennial powerhouse Duke and the local favorite Johns Hopkins.

Plenty of events were going on down on the Inner Harbor so it wasn't unusual to see people walking around with lacrosse sticks mixed in with the regular tourists and B'Morians relaxing on the water.

One particular parking lot outside M&T Bank Stadium which is also home to the Baltimore Ravens was used as an RV, mobile home, bus lot for those attending the games during the weekend. The best way to describe this lot is to say that it was a non-stop cookout/party until Monday night. One bus even had a large flat screen TV with surround sound system mounted inside the luggage area underneath the bus and the occupants had their lawn chairs arranged for their own personal movie theatre.

Duke almost didn't make it to the finals afterall when they gave up a 10-3 lead to Cornell. Cornell ended up tying the game at 11-11 with 10 seconds left in the game. Because I am a gate supervisor I made an announcement on our radios that the game is now tied while walking from the seating area towards my gate. By the time I got that announcement out Duke was able to get the ball, make their way down the field and score the game winning goal, all in 5 seconds time. Good, no overtime to extend an already long day that began at 7am and here it is already 6pm and we're looking at at least another hour or two before it's all said and done.

Most of this day was uneventful but this has to be mentioned. One gentleman approached my post and asked to speak with an officer. I summoned a BPD officer and almost laughed in the mans face when he told them what happened. Apparently he was in front of the stadium selling (in other words scalping) tickets and someone gave him forty dollars worth of counterfeit money. When he showed the police the two twenties I couldn't hold it in and had to laugh because they bills were a lime green color instead of the regular money green. The officer said "don't you realize you just told me you were breaking the law?" to which the man replied "yes but I was more concerned about getting this phony money off the street". Funny stuff. Later that day I caught another man and his partner scalping tickets with the help of one of my other supervisors. They were trying to sell tickets to a woman and her two kids when my co-worker noticed it and caught my attention on the radio. I followed the lady in and one other male who turned out to be partners with the first guy followed them in, stopped just inside the ticket turnstiles and she proceeded to hand him some money. Once I saw this I approached him and started asking what was going on, even though I already knew it's fun listening to the stories that these guys tell. He starts telling me that he didn't know why she was giving him the money to which I laughed that off and said try again because nodody is just going to give someone money like that for no reason. Then he claims that she gave him the money to get her some food even though he didn't know her or her kids. Hmmmmmmmm, try again, oh nevermind I said and then had Baltimore police escort him off the premises.

Sunday was a loooooooong day for me. I had to report at 7am again but this time I knew I was in for a longer day/night than the day before. Aside from the usual happenings like people complaining about not being able to bring their backpacks into the stadium this day was otherwise uneventful. Up until that is the point in time when one of my team members decided they wanted to try to take a beer with them that they had confiscated from a patron. She thought she was slick and had it in a bag that she had her lunch in but I noticed that the bag had more in it now than it did before. During the day we had confiscated several lacrosse balls which weren't allowed in the stadium and she had a couple of them laying on top of her bag thinking that she could keep them. That's when I noticed her lunch bag so when I went to get the balls from her I went straight into the bag and pulled out two beers. At first she looked like she was going to get mad because I went in her bag but I guess my look of "I can't wait to hear your story" caused her to pull up short and she laughed and said "you caught me". Long story short she won't be working any more events with us.

Two games were played on Sunday with the finals for Division II and III being played then. The second game ended around 7pm and the second part of my day was just getting started. Outside of the stadium several events were set up for fans. AT&T, Coca Cola, Chick-Fil-A and others had tents set up with exhibits or games that people could take part in and these had to be secured through the night. Someone had called out and I volunteered to stay and work. So, from 7am sunday morning to 3am monday morning I was on my feet after working 17 hours the day before and had to turn around and come back Monday morning at 7am to work the Division I finals between Duke and Johns Hopkins.

It's amazing how attached people can get to a backpack. One of our restrictions is that no backpacks are allowed inside the stadium. Since most people were from out of town they were unaware of this but that's really not our problem. Of course this leads to the inevitable argument and people had plenty of excuses trying to justify why THEY should be considered the exception to the rule. "Do you know who I am?", "I know so and so", "my car is too far away" etc. etc. First of all, NO I don't know who you are and even if I did you still can't get in with that backpack. If you know someone high up on the food chain then you should know that backpacks aren't allowed in so that's really not a good line to use. I tell people that even if President Bush came up with a backpack I would tell him the same thing.

I even had one worthless excuse for a man try several times to get in with his backpack. Once through my gate and when he left I radioed all of the other gate supervisors to give them a heads up and a description of him because I knew he wasn't going to give up. Sure enough he tried three other gates before he walked off into the crowd talking on his cell phone. Twenty minutes later I look up and see him standing in front of my gate looking in our direction just as a lady and her daughter with an oversized bag were coming through one of my lines. My team members stopped her becaause not only was the bag that she was carrying too large to come in but she had a backpack rolled up inside of that bag. You guessed it, she was the wife of the same gentleman that tried earlier and I guess he thought that we wouldn't hassle his wife and child.

What a moron, I thought to myself as I looked up at him and just shook my head and did the old finger wave from side to side to let him know that I knew what he tried to do and that it just won't work. I'm just too good at what I do to let something like that to slide past me.

Next up, I take a step back and try to give you an idea of what goes on pre Super Bowl. Spent a month in Miami leading up to Super Bowl XLI doing security and let's just say that it was.......challenging.

And theeeeeyre off, out of the gate it's the group with three coolers, two chairs and 6 cases of beer. Close second is the group with ten cases of beer, one VERY big cooler (which won't make it into the track), two boxes of wine and four chairs. All of this happening before it's even 9:00 am on a Saturday where the weather is nice and the horse race of the year is set to take place hours down the road. Combining upper high class, yuppieesque middle class, slight urban middle class all together in one society laden, beer/wine consuming, cigar smoking, debauchery filled day that just happens to feature horses racing at incredible speeds around an oval track of dirt and grass can lead to some very interesting events to be witnessed over the course of 12 to 13 hours.

It's amazing how much people spend on alcohol. I think that the most that I saw on this day was the group that carried in twelve cases of beer and four of the boxed wines. I've seen a lot of things in my day but in this one day I managed to see a lot more than I cared to see. Debauchery and debasement, machoism and sexism shaken not stirred with the crushed ice of humanity gone astray all came together this day to make it one that I won't soon forget. Add in an ugly twist of a horse being euthanized no more than five feet from me and you have some sort of idea of the stressfull day that it was.

We arrived at the track at 7 am after a ride on a yellow school bus readying ourselves for god knows what was going to transpire and at the same time I had to get my crew that I was to supervise ready and pschyed up for the day. The post that I was assigned to is an entrance to the track which features a tram for people to walk on as they cross the actual track that the horses will be running on. This tram is basically a sidewalk on wheels rolled into place so that the track doesn't get destroyed because of people dragging coolers. In between races this tram was rolled out of the way, the race was run, track cleared of horses and then it was rolled back into place so people could get into the infield. The gate itself was at the end of a road that was used to funnel the people into lines set up with tables so that their coolers could be searched for items not allowed in. Beer and wine is ok but glass and hard liquor is not allowed even though I am certain that some of the "water" bottles that people had didn't really have water in them. With 70,000 plus people coming in through two gates it's not out of the realm of possiblity that we may have missed one or two of those. Three guys in particular had a cooler full of Heinekeins in bottles and a big bottle of Grey Goose. They each had pretty large cups so I suggested to them to open a few of the Heinekeins and pour them in the cups. Now, Heineken is a great beer but do you really think they put the Grey Goose aside for the beer??

The track itself is in the Park Heights section of Baltimore which is not one of the better neighborhoods in B'More. Plenty of enterprising young african-american kids have come up with a great idea to use shopping carts to help the multitude of soon to be drunk patrons carry their outrageous amounts of alcohol to the gates. Five dollars here, ten dollars there adds up pretty quickly and they were also in place AFTER the race to help carry those who were too drunk to walk back to their rides. Now that was a funny sight. Had a couple of run ins with these young entrepeneurs because they didn't want to listen and kept going places where they shouldn't be. One (who was about 18-19) even threatened me and said "If I ran into you in the streets I would kick your ass", to which I immediately stepped into the street and raised my hands in a "what now" manner. He didn't expect that and backed off cussing me left and right to which I just laughed and kept doing my job. Funny how later on that day homeboy became cool with me because I showed him a way that he could make more money. All bark, no bite.

It's funny how alcohol emoldens even the most docile individual into thinking that they can take on the world. Take the one cat who kept trying to force open a locked gate who ignored the Baltimore Police requests to stay off of the gate one time too many and found his knuckles smashed with one of those telescoping batons that they carry. OUCH, that'll leave a mark. Or the one guy who kept cussing out an officer because the gate they were at wouldn't be opened for another 45 minutes (even though all they had to do was turn around and leave on the other side of the track through the tunnel) so he felt the need to verbally assault this one officer. When the gates finally opened the officer made sure that he singled this guy out and basically punked him by asking him if he had anything to say now that the gates were open. Nothing, nada not a peep came from this guy as the officer made him look foolish for opening his drunk mouth in the first place. Funny stuff.

Speaking of drunk, ignorant fools, it's amazing how human beings suddenly turn into animals if the conditions are right. Add insane amounts of alcohol, 70,000 + people in an infield of a horse track, Porta-potties as the only bathrooms and you get some of the nastiest sites imaginable. Around this infield area was a fence which had two exits, one of which was a tunnell that could be used at anytime because it didn't interfere with the races. Why it was that nobody wanted to use that tunnel to go to the main building to go to the bathroom is a mystery to me. Instead people would make their way to the fence and urinate right there not caring who was looking. Correction, at least the women held up a blanket to shield themselves somewhat while they were in the act. Guys just came to the fence line and did their thing not caring who was looking. Now I can see why we were instructed to keep our distance from the fence unless absolutely necessary. Urine wasn't the only bodily fluid being laid down in mass quantities because I witnessed numerous people tossing the cookies because of a day long drinking binge in 80 degree temps. One woman in particular was standing near one of the trams and she turned facing us and suddenly, up it came, not once not twice but a total of seven times all the while she was walking towards us and the fence stopping just short. She wiped her mouth, turned around and I kid you not walked right back to her group and.....you guessed it popped open another beer and kept right on drinking. Damn.

This portion of my day was by far the worse. This is the first time that I had even attended a horse race and even though I had a job to do I was able to sneak a peak here and there at some of the races. All of them had gone off without a hitch up until the tenth race which was two races before the preakness and, since it was a turf race, it was run on the grass inner track and not the dirt outer one. Because of that the horses actually came VERY close to our positions just inside the rail. We were instructed that when the horses neared our location that we were to make sure that nodody was near the rail just in case something went wrong. Unfortunately something went VERY wrong on this particular race. Just before going into the third turn one horse just to the inside got bumped, he recovered and was bumped again this time losing his balance and throwing the jockey before going down akwardly on his right leg. One other horse had to jump the fallen one to clear him and that horse then lost his rider further in the turn. The first jockey was very lucky because he just missed hitting the rail and hit the ground just in front of me to my right and slid to a stop just in front of me and my crew. We immediately radioed jockey down and formed a barrier between him and the onlookers inside on the infield waiting for EMS to arrive. Once this was done my attention went to the horse who was at this time struggling to get to his feet. One of his legs was caught up in the reigns and when my gaze went down his leg I was horrified to see that this was an injury FAR worse than the one that Barbaro suffered. The horse finally made it to his feet and all could see just how bad it was. His right front leg was no doubt broken becuse you could see about three to five inches of the bone was exposed and the hoof itself appeared to be attached to his leg by just one small piece of skin. I say this because as he stood up you could see the hoof spinning in a counterclockwise rotation. This was something that I really wish I didn't witness. The horse had a glazed look in its eyes and his hind quarters were going through spasms every couple of seconds no doubt because of the pain and the onset of shock. Much props to the crew at Pimlico whose job it is to control situations such as this because they were on the spot and didn't allow the horse to do any further damage to himself or the crowd. AND they had to contend with the other horse which by this time was still running the track sans rider and coming back our direction. They were able to get the injured animal back down into a laying position and we then had every Baltimore Police officer on our side of the track form a line in between the crowd and the horse who was being put behind a green mesh material to shield the view of the horse. I knew what was coming next but tried to focus my attention on the crowd because some were actually getting hysterical. They had good reason to because it's sad to say but that horse was put down right there on the track not more than five feet behind me with the owner of the horse crying uncontrollably off to my left.

What a day, and all of this happened before the running of the Preakness. My thinking was that Street Sense would win again but he was edged out at the finish.