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After his team's stunning victory, superfan Bill Cheatham led a group of Baker Backers in removing the tarp that the state legislature had ordered to be placed over the statue of Mr. TD.
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By Ariel Mutha-Tafoya
FSN Sports
When President Donald J. Trump moved The Village Green’s home game against the London Bakers to the Bakers’ old home field, and then purchased the rights to rechristen it for one week as Trump 12 South Stadium, he intended to intimidate and embarrass the team that he has come to hate more than any other except his most bitter rival, the Downtown Corsairs.
Instead, in a raucous, sometimes violent weekend that reminded many observers of the rough-and-tumble early days of the NFFA, the Bakers not only throttled Trump’s team, but restored a degree of both physical and moral sovereignty in the city they once called home.
The weekend began with Bakers owner QCurl Sharif and an entourage of 500 Baker fans from London being turned away unceremoniously from the gates of the game venue, formerly known as Grey Goose Stadium. It ended with a sustained melee in the stands, a hurried evacuation of Vice President Mike Pence, and nude dancing that spilled out from spontaneous celebrations in The Cherry Bomb Café onto Avenue Q.
“It feels like the ending of Return of the Jedi!” exulted 12 South activist Roz Tefarian, who had stood alongside a phalanx of the hastily reorganized Fedayeen Bakers to protect one of the team’s sacred shrines, the Satan Tree in Sevier Park, from hard-core evangelical Trumpites, led by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who threatened to chop the tree into pieces and build a bonfire.
Similarly, Trump and his supporters had demanded that the NashVegas Metro Council remove the statue of beloved Baker mascot and Sharif confidante Mr. TD from the plaza outside the football stadium. Since the Bakers moved to London, the statue had become a pilgrimage site for fans who often left flowers or hoped to receive a blessing from the statue, which was rumored to have healing properties after a young girl saw real tears streaming from Mr. TD’s bronze eyes in 2016. The council had not acted on Trump’s demand, but the Republican-dominated Tennessee General Assembly ordered that a black drape be placed over the statue in the meantime.
After Sharif was denied entrance to Trump 12 South Stadium, he and the 500 fans who had made the trip from London walked to the Cherry Bomb Café, site of some of Sharif’s greatest triumphs as a campaigner for global peace through medical marijuana, and crowded inside to watch the game.
The historic Cherry Bomb, which badly suffered from neglect after the Bakers left the US ahead of the Trump tidal wave, was unprepared at first for the large crowd, but quickly roared to life and regained its old form. Master Bartender Devlin Redd, on loan for the day from Club Gitmo to man his old spot at The Bomb, created a special drink for the occasion that he called the Knee Down in honor of a practice begun by Bakers and Bubbas fans this year to kneel during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Redd said his concoction — a mixture involving Nehi Grape Soda, Johnnie Walker Double Black and a tincture of battery acid — was also a tribute to old-time residents of 12 South who had taught him how to mix a similar libation before gentrification drove them out of the neighborhood. A Metro fire marshal, alerted to code violations created by the throng of fans inside, was last seen heading upstairs to Sharif’s old quarters with a Knee High in one hand and a Touchdown Taser® in the other.
Throughout Sunday afternoon, when it became apparent that the Bakers were going to defeat Trump’s Village Green, roughly 3,000 Baker fans in one corner of the stadium began taunting Green supporters with chants of “You’ve been Goosed” — a victory cheer going back to the venue’s years as Grey Goose Stadium. The chants quickly escalated into fistfights as Baker fans began snatching Make America Green Again caps from the heads of Village boosters.
“It was a [bleep]ing outrage,” said Baker superfan Bill Cheatham, who was briefly taken into custody after being identified from cellphone video as an instigator of the brawl.
As Cheatham was being led away, Baker coach Snoop Dogg ran into the stands and began to yell at police officers: “What do they mean ‘green again?’ The Bakers made this place totally green years ago, if you know what I’m saying. Bitch, we don’t let an insult like that just pass. Maybe in London, but not at the Goose.” As fans surrounded the police, blocking their exit, the officers let Cheatham go.
Cheatham then led hundreds of Baker fans outside the stadium, where they removed the tarp covering the Mr. TD statue and cut it into shreds.
Afterward, a visibly moved Sharif, who had a number of well publicized differences with Cheatham over the years, announced that the man he called “our number one fan” would be one of the speakers at the Bakers’ annual Integrity Dinner later this month in Nashville.
As the melee unfolded, Baker fans pointed to the VIP suite occupied by Vice President Mike Pence, attending the game while President Trump was in Asia, and began chanting, “Hu-man Pa-ra-quat!” over and over. According to eyewitnesses, a number of Village Green fans also joined in the chant. Secret Service agents quickly evacuated Pence via the escape tunnel designed into the stadium years earlier by Sharif.
The Green’s minority owner, Dave Goodrow, apparently was not in the luxury suite with the vice president. Hours after the disturbance, several fans noticed him emerge from a private coach in the parking lot, visibly intoxicated, asking passersby what time the game was supposed to start.
Early Monday morning, as the party shifted from The Cherry Bomb to Sharif’s lavish West End Tree House, reporters were invited to mingle with the guests, who included former president Barack Obama and former British prime minister Tony Blair.
“Donald Trump has tried to tear down all the great institutions of this country,” Sharif told members of the media who had asked him about the significance of the Bakers’ victory. “We all know he tried to buy a team in this league once before. We managed to hold him and all his new money at bay back then, but once he got his nose under the tent it was a different kind of fight. This league is one of the institutions that binds us together and reminds us of our common humanity. And today our team stood up for that institution and echoed the words of Mr. TD’s grandfather at Verdun in 1916: ‘They shall not pass!’”
As Sharif concluded his remarks, a misty-eyed Joe Biden told a reporter standing near him, “If I could speak like that, I’d be president right now.”
Blair, who had crossed the Atlantic with the team’s boosters, remembered remarks that Sharif had made early in the afternoon, as the Londoners had begun to gather outside The Cherry Bomb. “He reminded us that it was Veterans Day weekend,” Blair said, “and he told us that we were all veterans of this struggle against fascism in football and everywhere else.
“He stood on that balcony of The Cherry Bomb, where he had given speeches to huge crowds before, and spoke just to our group that seemed so small at the time. We all know he’s been battling depression and psychosis, and who can blame him, but he put that all aside and roused himself as in the old days. He said that, after we achieved victory today, no Veterans Day would go by ‘from now until the ending of the world but we in it shall be remembered — we few, we happy few, we band of brothers. Gentlemen in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks that fought with us on Veterans Day.’
“And then everybody began cheering as one,” Blair said, “After that speech, we not only knew we would win but that this day would be celebrated for as long as there is an England and an NFFA.”
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