Football hazing penalty splits tiny Utah town : Student is threatened after his complaint ends his team’s season.

Ever since backup quarterback Brian Seamons was hogtied naked to a towel rack, many football fans in this farming town of 6,000 people have thought of themselves as the real victims.

They blame 16-year-old Seamons for the school superintendent’s decision to cancel the high school’s last game of the season and with it, the trip their Sky View Bobcats had already won to the state playoffs.

“I think the press has made him out to be a hero,” said Janine Ward, mother of one of the players who took part in the hazing. “There’s a lot of heroes in everyday life, but I wouldn’t consider Brian one of them.”

In late October, Sky View fans sought a restraining order against the superintendent’s decision so that the Bobcats might finish their season. Cheerleaders in school sweaters and pleated skirts joined angry parents who packed a courtroom to say that the games should go on.

When the judge rejected their plea as “trivial,” the threatening phone calls to Seamons began.

“Someone called and said I was a sinner and needed to repent,” he said. “I just laughed.”

Then the calls got ugly. A woman phoned every night to say she was going to burn down his house. The Cache County sheriff tapped the line and traced the calls. It was one player’s grandmother.

“I think the same kind of mentality is at work that was at work in that small Texas town where the mother hired someone to shoot (the mother of another cheerleader),” said Jane Seamons, Brian’s mother.

This mostly Mormon town of wheat and dairy farms on a broad slope stretching westward from the Wasatch Mountains was predictably quiet until Oct. 11. Then, 10 of Seamons’ teammates did something that would pit neighbor against neighbor.

They grabbed him fresh from a shower and bound his hands and feet to a horizontal stainless-steel towel rack with athletic tape. They taped his genitals as well.

Some accounts estimate that 20 schoolmates were brought in to view his humiliation.

“Everybody was laughing,” Seamons said. “Then I heard a scream, and when I looked up I saw the girl I’d taken to homecoming. She ran out screaming. The next day I said hello to her and she just laughed and kept on going. The humiliation is tons worse than physical injury.”

Seamons went to his parents. His parents went to the principal and the coach. They came away angry. No disciplinary action would be taken. There was simply a public team apology to Seamons and the student body.

Seamons’ mother confronted Coach Doug Snow: “I said: ‘You’re telling us that there’s nothing these boys could do that would justify kicking them off the football team?’ And he said: ‘No.’ I said: ‘Not even murder?’ And he said: ‘No.’ ”

She said the coach told a story about a boy at another school who had hit and killed a child while driving drunk, yet played in a championship game the next day. She said the story ended with the boy kicking the game-winning point.

Snow said he’s been ordered not to talk to the press. “I wish I could,” he said. “What I could tell you would be totally different from what you’ve already heard.”

As Seamons tells it, he wanted to play football despite the humiliation and the controversy. He said a team co-captain, in the coach’s presence, told him he’d first have to forgive and forget. He said he couldn’t. The coach told him to take the weekend off; he wouldn’t be playing.

Enter Cache County School Superintendent Larry Jensen, who canceled the rest of the season. “I discovered that there was a culture of belief that (hazing) was OK. It had a past, and it would have had a future,” he said. Of canceling the season, he said: “It wouldn’t have been enough to do something less startling.”

In Salt Lake City, a newspaper sports columnist wrote that he didn’t condone hazing but that “boys will be boys.” In editorials and columns of their own, his colleagues disagreed. So did dozens of letter writers.

Seamons received several hundred letters. An Oakland attorney said he’d been the victim of something similar but had told no one. He thanked Seamons for refusing to be a silent victim. A college coach in Ohio commended Seamons for his bravery and said any coach worthy of the profession would do the same.

Jensen said he has also heard from hundreds of people. “They say something similar happened to them,” he said, “and I think in a very large way these people found catharsis in this. Who’d have thought this would strike a chord around the nation?”

There are other opinions. Ward said she “probably wouldn’t have thought much of it” had her son been hogtied. “I probably would have thought: ‘OK . . . be a good sport and get on with life.’ ”

Ken Roe, the father of another hazing participant, said he read a letter from a team co-captain who said the hazing was a gesture of friendship. “I know that sounds screwy,” Roe said, “but I believe it. My son told me they thought Brian could take it.”

State Rep. Grant Protzman, who plans to close a legal loophole that kept Seamons’ hazing from being prosecuted as a crime, said: “There’s still an element in society that thinks if you’re tough, you won’t complain about something like this. I think we need to make it clear that maintaining dignity is important to society.”