Put 46,000 men in a stadium and you would expect to find:
At least 43,000 adjustable baseball caps that say things like ''Valvoline,'' ''Titleist'' and ''John Deere.''
About 52,000 hands holding cups of beer. (Some guys use both hands).
Roughly a million profanities about sports, women, cars or empty beer cups.
Several fights.
Except for the ''Your Message Here'' hats, I found none of the above last weekend during Cincinnati's first Promise Keepers gathering at Cinergy Field.
No cursing, unless you count ''hell,'' which sounded more like an exit ramp than an expletive.
No beer. Instead, all those hands reached out to grip other hands. And that explained the lack of fights, according to a cop who also works at Bengals games.
''No, not a single complaint,'' he said. ''This is a very different crowd, very different. For one thing, they're not trying to outdrink the other guys.
''But,'' he added, ''it's more than that.'' Yes, it was. A lot more.
On Friday night, falling rain and sinking temperatures couldn't hold down soaring faith and rising spirits. Late in the evening, every man in the stadium knelt together on cold, hard concrete to pray.
Nothing has brought that many men to their knees at once since the UK Wildcats lost the NCAA championship game.
''What is going on here?'' I wondered.
Rob Becker had part of the answer. He was not at Promise Keepers, as far as I know. He's the one-man show, Defending The Caveman, that came through Cincinnati a few weeks ago.
His blend of comedy and science - sort of a humor-hypothesis - is that women evolved as gatherers, primitive shoppers who learned to share information by talking about how to find the best berries, what colors they come in and comparing the sales at McAlpin's and Lazarus.
While women were talking berries, men took off in hunting parties, silently focused on one mammoth at a time, communicating with grunts and hand signals like a modern poker game - which is why we still can't choose pizza toppings during an NBA playoff game.
But rather than recognize these different traits, women have decided all men are a seven letter word that begins with ''A,'' and it's not ''acrobat.'' Our culture has reinforced the label by reducing us to slack-jawed simpletons in TV ads, whose highest goal in life is to run over something in a new pickup loaded with beer. Pop-cultural Man is an abuser of women, children, alcohol, tobacco, horsepower, pets, TV remotes, Bambi, pornography, credit cards, football, lottery tickets, insensitive jokes, guns, minorities, golf, power tools and third-world nations (this is a partial list).
At the end of his play, Mr. Becker yells, ''Men are not acrobats!'' - using that other seven-letter word.
Like every other man leaving the theater, I was sure he was right - about me. But after attending Promise Keepers, I'm sure he's right about thousands of other guys too.
That doesn't mean there are not plenty of acrobats among us. If not for those jerks, we wouldn't need shelters like the one on our Forum cover today.
But non-acrobatic men need to stand up like Rob Becker and shout, ''Hey, we're different.'' Recovering acrobats should rise to their feet - or fall to their knees - to promise we can all do better.
I have to admit, writing about this is not easy. It takes more courage than an early tee time on Mother's Day.
Cavewoman: ''How was the hunting party?''
Caveman: ''We held hands. Hugged. Og cried.''
Cavewoman: ''Stop lying. You guys stopped at the cave of fermented mushrooms again, didn't you?''
In the news business, there's a technical term for groups like Promise Keepers: ''rightwingreligiousnuts.'' They are in the same marry-your-cousin family with snake handlers who talk in tongues, twitch spastically and roll their eyes like slot-machine cherries.
Promise Keepers is presumed guilty of sexist bigotry because there are no women allowed. So women wonder: What are all those men talking about?
The answer is not new but it's true: ''Not much.'' Or, as they said at Promise Keepers: ''Not enough.''
''Men need to talk about something deeper than football,'' one speaker said. Not psychobabble trash about being victims. We need to talk about being better husbands, fathers and brothers, who have the courage to stand in the gaps that divide families and divide men by our backgrounds and races. Amen.
Words can't describe the sound of 46,000 men raising their voices to the sky as the morning sun emerges from the clouds and floods a chilly stadium with light. But men who join hands and stand together to rise above a shallow culture of consumer gratification are one heckuva hunting party to find a better world.
Put 46,000 men in a stadium - and you can find more than you expected.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. Call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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