Published: September 06, 2008 12:26 pm            

Note to self: Don't wear steel-toed boots to football games

Before Cleburne’s season opening football game Thursday night, I arrived at Herman Clark Stadium in Fort Worth with sports reporter Zack Cunningham in tow.

We pulled into the stadium parking lot about an hour before the scheduled 7 p.m. kickoff and proceeded to walk to the gates to enter the stadium.

Unfortunately for me, the stadium had metal detectors.

I went through once and the buzzer went off.

I emptied my pockets and went through again, but the buzzer signaled that there was still a problem.

After several (Zack says seven) trips through the contraption, we finally figured out that my steel-toed boots were setting off the alarms.

The security guards at the stadium ran the wand over me and were satisfied that it was, in fact, my boots setting the darn thing off and not that I was concealing a weapon or something.

The guards also searched my computer bag to make sure I wasn’t sneaking in something I wasn’t supposed to be sneaking in.

While I generally don’t worry too much about what I’m wearing to a football game, I might have to remember to leave the boots at home.

It’s great that some area football stadiums have added security such as metal detectors, but it ended up being quite an ordeal once we found out the offending party was my boots.

Having extra security at football games doesn’t hurt because you never know what might happen when a large group of people is gathered in a public place.

I was an athletic trainer in high school and I recall one instance in which we heard gun shots outside a stadium while our football team was warming up for a game.

I don’t know if anyone was injured, or killed, in the incident, but it did make us wonder what was going on.

Once the game started, the gun shots were far from our minds, but obviously not forgotten.



Matt Tasler can be reached

at 817-558-2855, ext. 2334

        

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