Mirjam Swanson (OC Register)  —  LOS ANGELES — Only natural. You see yellow caution tape and you want to know: What’s going on over there?

Especially when you see a couple dozen adults wearing it around their heads.

And I get paid to be nosy, so when I saw a bunch of people sporting strips of bright yellow plastic as headwear at the old Dedeaux Field that evening in May 2023, I asked one of them: “What’s going on with, you know, the caution tape?”

The gentleman I asked – he had to have been a parent of a USC baseball player, like the rest of the folks fashioning the distinctive look that night – pointed at a tall blond dude seated in the front row, as close as he could get to USC’s on-deck circle, and he said: “It’s for Crash.” A tribute, in fact.

Some heroes wear capes; Superman, say.

Others wear caution tape; this superfan, for one.

If you’ve been to a USC sporting event in Southern California in the past four years, odds are Crash “CrashLit” Collier has been there with you.

The 22-year-old Newport Beach native has been omnipresent at Trojans sporting events during the past four years – going to 430 games, matches, regattas, making the absolute most of his USC student-fan career: “It’s your university,” he said. “You can feel more of a connection to it than you feel with professional sports.”

The Trojans’ record when Collier crashed the proceedings: 311-119, documented on an Excel spreadsheet that lists all the “teams he’s pulled up to” – 16 of 21 – and which he’s maintained as dutifully as he laid out his life on his iCal. “My best friend,” Collier joked about his calendar app that helps him demarcate sufficient space for studies, sports and socializing.

I wondered, then, how he organizes his experiences: Could he break it down to the best five games he’s been a party to? Could he name names? His favorite athletes to watch, say, or perhaps the greatest individual performances to which he bore witness?

Yes, easy. And no, no way: Picking individuals would be like making parents name their favorite kids, for the record, in the newspaper.

But games? Let’s goooo.

No. 5 – The No. 21 USC men’s basketball team’s 67-64 victory over No. 12 UCLA on Feb. 12, 2022 at Galen Center, highlighted by Drew Peterson career-high 27 points and 12 rebounds, and most memorable to Collier “because that was the only time I’ve ever gotten to experience a [court-]storming.”

No. 4 – USC’s 74-61 victory over Stanford to clinch the Pac-12 women’s basketball tournament championship on March 10, 2024, in Las Vegas. Notable for McKenzie Forbes’ 26 points, the Trojans’ nabbing a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, and, most certainly, for the bus ride with other students to and from MGM Grand Garden Arena: “Five-hour bus ride? It was totally worth it!”

No. 3 – The No. 7 USC football team winning a 48-45 thriller over No. 16 UCLA on Nov. 20, 2022, in front of 70,864 fans with Collier at the Rose Bowl. It was the Trojans’ 10th win that season, it clinched USC a spot in the Pac-12 championship game and it kept them in contention, in Lincoln Riley’s first season, for a College Football Playoff bid. Though fleeting, that feeling – “This could be our year! Like, you could actually feel the belief” – sticks with Collier still.

No. 2 – The No. 6 USC women’s basketball team taking down No. 1 UCLA, on Feb. 13, in the rivals’ first meeting last season, a win with JuJu Watkins’ fingerprints all over it: 38 points, eight blocked shots, 11 rebounds, five assists and, for Collier, a great seat right by the Trojans’ bench, thanks to booster Sue Cimbaluk. “It was super-cool,” Collier said, “to see them get all hyped.”

No. 1 – The Trojan women’s basketball team (then No. 4) taking down UCLA (No. 2) again on March 1, this time at Pauley Pavilion, where Watkins wound up with 30 points, USC wrapped up its first Big Ten regular-season title and “then, afterwards, because all the UCLA fans got the hell out of there, all the USC fans stayed congregated behind the bench and celebrated with the team.”

Collier couldn’t have imagined that he would become such a big women’s basketball fan when he arrived at USC. In part because USC’s rapid ascent under Coach Lindsay Gottlieb happened to coincide with Collier’s tenure, but more so because Collier couldn’t have foreseen how hard he’d fall for all USC athletics.

He’s graduating with the economics degree he sought out initially, but really he hopes to pursue his growing passion for sports journalism.

He’s more than 50 episodes into his own podcast, “Behind The Caution Tape,” where he offers regular updates on a range of sports and interviews Trojans of the present and past, including the great Cheryl Miller, who is also one of his professors.

Here’s the thing about Crash. You’d think someone so conspicuous would be self-aggrandizing. That someone rocking hazard tape on his head – a tradition that started haphazardly at his first football tailgate as a freshman – would be a natural-born showoff.

That a dude who wasn’t just invited personally by the women’s rowing team to watch them take on (and defeat) UCLA, but who they also recruited to join them in the boat during a practice, that he might think he could walk on water.

Or that anyone who was asked to play the national anthem on his violin before his favorite baseball team’s games – he performed it twice! – would like the sound of his own story.

But you would be wrong. Cimbaluk recounted waving over Crash recently to take a photo with her and a group of friends and that “when he came over, he sincerely asked, do you want me to take the photo for you?” she wrote in a message. “We all laughed; he never assumed that we wanted him in the photo.”

Ask him what his energy and passion has meant to the athletes he’s directed it toward, and he squirms: “That’s an unfair question,” he told me last week during a regularly-interrupted chat – “Hey, Crash!” “What’s up, Crash?” – near the athletes’ dining hall on campus.

“I’m not the one out there,” he said. “I feel like that’s something I can’t truly speak to.”

But baseball coach Andy Stankiewicz can: “Oh yeah, the guys love seeing him … guys see him and they get excited about it; they know Crash is in it with them.”

Crash doesn’t know where he’ll land next, and what that will mean for his near-perfect attendance at Trojans’ sporting events. But if he can be at one, he will be: “Say I’m working in, like, Iowa or something,” he said. “And like, volleyball is like playing through there and I can get the night off, I’ll be at that.”

Wherever life takes him, whatever his future conquests, it’ll be impossible now not to root for him.

ocregister.com

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