Lots of inmates are seeing red or feeling blue

For yet more proof that the BYU-Utah rivalry knows no bounds, we take you today to the Utah State Prison, a facility near the border of Utah and Salt Lake counties that is almost exactly equidistant from Rice-Eccles Stadium at the University of Utah and LaVell Edwards Stadium at BYU.

At this halfway house of the rivalry, I am talking to employees, so to speak, at the sign shop, the license plate shop, the upholstery shop and the print shop.

Like everywhere else along the Wasatch Range, all anyone wants to talk about is Saturday's big game between the Cougars and Utes.

It's a hotter topic than "I didn't do it."

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Also like everywhere else along the Wasatch Range, there is a great divide of loyalties.

You've got your Ute fans and you've got your Cougar fans — all co-existing in one Big House.

Representative of the Utes are Charles Moore, 21, and Terry Perdue, 43, both of whom would be wearing red this week, in honor of the No. 5-ranked Utes, if not for the off-white Utah Department of Correction suits that are mandatory here for the home team. Terry attended the University of Utah briefly in 1981 before he set up residence at the prison, while Charles planned to not only enroll at Utah 3 1/2 years ago but try out for the football team until his plans, too, took a detour.

"(Then coach Ron) McBride talked to me, and I was all set to play football," says Charles, a wistful look in his eye.

Instead, he got his full-ride about 25 miles farther south, relegating his college football experience to watching it on TV and enduring the inevitable "That could have been you" comments from his colleagues in C Block.

"I think about what might have been all the time," Charles freely admits. He'll be eligible for parole in six years and says he wants to take the lesson he's learned and not disrupt any more of his life's dreams with activities that involve prison time.

Meanwhile, he says he'll be pulling hard for the Utes, joining hundreds of other fans of the crimson red, including Terry, who predicts, "Utah will smash them."

Countering that feeling are the prison's BYU believers, a contingent that includes the likes of Tom Dearmore, 44, and Fred Wolfe, 60, two "lifers" whose prison terms and Cougar loyalty know no end.

Tom, an amiable transfer from the California penal system, comes from a family of BYU students. "My dad, my uncles, everybody went to BYU, other than myself," he says.