From about the ten-yard line, the Hawks quarterback launches the ball deep into the end zone. The Redskins defense holds strong, the pass is dropped, and a referee's flag flies into the air.
Pass interference, defense.
"Come on! You gotta be kidding me!" one Redskin parent yells at the ref, loud enough to be heard.
"These refs suck," he says with a little less volume.
"Bullshit," he finishes -- almost, but not quite under his breath.
As the refs get their usual earful of trash talk for any given Saturday, two young police cadets stroll the sidelines of the makeshift field in City Park, where Hawk and Redskin families and friends stand and sit in lawn chairs watching the game. The cadets wear Police Activities League T-shirts and carry handheld radios as they strictly enforce the twenty-yard no-man's zone between the two teams' cheering fans.
The refs hustle the ball to the line of scrimmage. The young men line up, and the Hawks' center snaps the ball into the quarterback's hands. The QB pushes the ball into a pile of Redskin and Hawk jerseys at the goal line. The Hawks throw their arms up in the air.
Touchdown, the refs concur.
"Good call, ref," shouts one of the Hawks parents.
"What?" says a Redskin parent. "Come on! No way!"
The call puts the Hawks ahead, 8-6. Game over. Both teams shake hands. All of the Hawks are smiling. One young Hawk sneaks up on coach Gary Barela with the water cooler, but Barela, himself a former PAL player, is too swift to be doused.
Across the field, several of the Redskins players are crying. Their season is over, and they blame the refs.
"They played good today," says coach Eloy Barros. "This has happened all season with us."
Barros was hopeful that his team would come out on top today, especially because his star running back was on the field again after being out for four weeks. It was Redskins versus Falcons, and the boy took a hit to the spleen on the first play, something the Redskins suspect was intentional. The kid was hospitalized, but no penalty was called.
It's just one example in a list of incidents that Barros and Barela believe indicate racism on the part of the PAL refs. When their Hispanic kids foul, they get heavily penalized, but when the offending team's players are black, the zebras look the other way. In addition to referees favoring black teams, Barela and Barros allege that those teams get to have full-contact practices sooner in the season, that they are "stacking" themselves up with the best kids in the neighborhood, and that the scheduling and playoff seeding is set up to favor them.
"I hate to say it -- I'm not prejudiced; I'm Hispanic, I have two white kids from my wife, and I've got a Hispanic son and a black son that all live under my roof -- but these refs are just strictly for the black teams," Barros says.
"Sad to say, I noticed it in my son's first year playing," Barela adds. "It's been going on every year that I've coached. Everyone sees it going on, and no one really wants to say anything about it. And it's just to a point now, in this age group, where it's really competitive. Everyone knows that, and it's not fair that the refs are taking advantage of that. I feel that they want certain teams and players to succeed. My players even ask me, 'Are we going to have to play the refs again this week?' For the kids to have to say that is ridiculous. All I tell them is that we have to stick to our game plan; we all have to do our jobs and try to come out of this game with a victory."
As an organization, Denver's Police Activities League (formerly the Police Athletic League) has been victorious since it was formed in 1969 as an amateur boxing program intent on keeping kids from the west-side projects off the streets. Currently, twelve teams play in the PAL senior football league -- whose regular season ended last week -- and more than 7,000 kids are involved in the league's roster of sports, including boxing, baseball, basketball, golf and handicapped hockey. Each year, the organization raises at least $118,000 to keep costs down so that all kids can afford to participate. For example, the football season runs $70 per child, and scholarships are available for those who can't pay the full amount. The 400 PAL coaches are all volunteers, but it costs $45,000 a season to pay the refs, who make $30 per game.
PAL director Russell Parisi doesn't see any way those refs could be throwing games. "Referees are in a difficult position, and coaches that lose will sometimes complain about a referee," he says. "Ninety-nine percent of the coaches have no problem with it. Occasionally you'll hear from teams that lose that it's a racial issue. But by and large, that has not been a problem. If we even had any inkling that that was happening, we'd get rid of the referee immediately."
As for the other allegations, he says that while the teams in question play in the PAL league, they're independent teams, so why would the league favor them? He also says that while these teams get their pads a couple of weeks before the PAL teams, both groups are prohibited from having full-contact practices until two weeks before the season starts. Likewise, team-stacking is forbidden, and all scheduling is random.
Rudy Robinson, who oversees officiating for PAL, refused to talk to Westword about Barela and Barros's claims. But the coaches believe they have plenty of examples that show how PAL policies are being flouted.
For example, on September 23, the Hawks were playing the Green Valley Giants. Barela doesn't deny that one of his players face-masked the Giants' quarterback, but he thinks the punishment was too severe: The kid was ejected from the game and suspended for the following week's match-up. And so was he.
The Giants' coach, Marcus Adams, describes a much more flagrant foul. He says the Hawks were throwing the N-bomb at his quarterback and grew even more upset when the boy threw the Giants' dominance in their faces by high-stepping all the way into the end zone after his team intercepted the ball on defense. The Hawks then retaliated with the face mask, and the offending player was ejected.
In the meantime, things were heating up on the sidelines. Adams says some of the Hawks parents joined in their team's racial slurs and then ran across the field. (Barela says he did not hear any such remarks.) At that point the refs called the game, and Adams told his kids not to shake hands with the Hawks because he was afraid a fight would break out. "In my six years of PAL, I've never instructed my kids not to shake hands after a game," Adams says.
"I honestly believe that it's just football; it's not favoritism one way or the other," Adams adds in response to the racism charges. "Everybody has their own take on the favoritism. I could say the same thing about one of the Hispanic refs. I think it's just football, and I think it's in the eye of the beholder. That's an excuse, and I honestly don't feel that that's true."
Parisi, who has directed PAL for six years, puts the responsibility on the coaches to keep things civil. The league even had a special workshop this year to teach them how to be spokespeople for their teams. "And if the coach is professional, and if he can control his kids and parents, then we won't have any problem," Parisi explains. "And if he's out of control, then we've got a problem. And we've been very vigilant about that this year."
Barela's had a week to reflect on the situation before showing up on the field today. Even though both teams are predominantly Hispanic, the refereeing is a hot topic. As they walk off the field, one Redskin parent says to a Hawk parent, "Don't feel good about that win..."
"Yeah, blame it on the refs," the Hawk parent replies.
