A cat at a Miami college football game survived the fall: NPR

Just a minute later, the cat hung dangerously from the upper deck of Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, with nothing but an American flag – stretched out 30 feet below – that broke the crash.

But the drama gripped thousands of fans who reportedly came to watch a football game at the college between the then No. 22 hurricanes in Miami and state Appalachian mountaineers.

Ten minutes after the first quarter, the game itself could not compete with the spectacle of a black and white cat holding on to a cable, at first with both front paws – then with only one – as the fans gasped and shouted.

Then it fell.

On the deck below, a group of fans held the American flag as a kind of net, which mitigated the cat’s fall enough for a student to grab it and triumphantly raise it to show that he had survived. The fans cheered.

“He caught a cat! Unbelievable!” said play-by-play announcer Joe Zagacki on WQAM radio, pausing just for a moment before calling a 20-meter run by Miami running backwards Donald Chaney, Jr.

The Miami Herald tracked down the owner of the American flag, the manager of the University of Miami facility named Craig Cromer, who he told the newspaper that he and his wife Kimberly bring a flag to every game to hang over the fence in front of their seats.

When they saw the cat hanging, Cromer said, he ripped the flag from the zippers, and he and Kimberly stretched it out and waited for the cat to fall.

“It seemed to last forever,” he told the newspaper. His wife Kimberly called the incident “probably the strangest thing that ever happened.”

With memorable images of a cat desperately grabbing its front paws at a terrifying height – and then triumphantly raised above its head – comparisons with The king of lions were perhaps inevitable.

There was no word on why the cat was attending the Miami-Appalachian State game or how it slipped off the edge of the upper deck.

But for Miami fans, the cat saga was perhaps the only highlight of the game, which they hoped was dominated by many hurricane fans. Miami needed a goal to play in the late game and a heroic defense in the last minute to exhaust the 25-23 win over the Appalachian State outsiders.

“I don’t know anything about it or what was going on, but I’ll tell you — if a cat can help with our attack on the red zone, I’ll see if we can get a scholarship,” Miami coach Manny Diaz said after the game.