I'm Busy, But It Is Big Game Week

This is the shirt I'll be wearing on Saturday.

Go Bears!

I've been remiss in my Big Game posts, so this will have to suffice for now.

What every self-respecting Cal fan should have in their office.

Big Game 1986 - Farewell, Joe

During the time I worked as a busboy and then waiter at Chuck's Steak House of Hawaii, I met a guy named Steve who would hang out in our bar on a lot of evenings. Steve was a huge sports fan, to the point of obsession. At the time, he would wear a Denver Broncos cap that looked like it was 50 years old, and sported a very sporty (if not necessarily stylish) pair of mutton-chop sideburns. Well before Chris Berman became a household name in the sporting world, Steve had developed clever nicknames for just about every figure in the sporting world, nicknames that were all the more amusing for their frequent ribaldry. In short, Steve was a character.

As it turned out over the course of numerous late night conversations, Steve was also a huge Stanford fan. He didn't go to Stanford, or have any relatives that went to Stanford, but had adopted them as his team. He had season tickets to football, and would also go to many of their basketball games. As it also turned out, Steve hated driving in Berkeley, after a couple of bad experiences, and was delighted to find out that I had gone there, and in fact might be willing to drive and accompany him to the Big Game on the years when it was at Cal. Our deal, which stands to this day, is that he gives me the ticket, and I drive and pay for the parking. In 1986, I was getting the better end of the deal. Today, I think it's a wash.

Our routine - Steve, shall we say, is into routines - is the same every two years: I pick him up at 8 a.m. in front of his office in downtown Sacramento, we park on the top level of the public parking lot at Durant and Telegraph in downtown Berkeley, and then spend a couple of hours in the used book stores on Telegraph perusing the stacks. Steve is a collector, both of sports memorabilia and of books about old film stars. The book stores on Telegraph are a treasure trove of such stuff, and it's very easy to lose track of time wandering through the five stories of Moe's Books and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of Shakespeare's. After we're finished with that, we head back to the car, have our lunch and a beer, and walk up to Memorial Stadium for the game.

1986 was another one of those years (they were frequent back then) that Cal stunk to high heaven, and Stanford just needed one more win to make it to a bowl game. Heading into the Big Game, it was already known that the Joe Kapp experiment was coming to an end. Kapp, the legendary Cal quarterback who led the team to the Rose Bowl in the late 1950s and went on to a good pro career with the Minnesota Vikings (and who apparently, based on the SI cover shown above, was "the toughest Chicano"), had been hired to coach the Bears in 1982 despite never having coached a minute at any level of organized football. As became clear over the course of a five-year period, Kapp was a great guy and an absolutely wonderful cheerleader for the Cal football program, but was about as bad a coach as one can imagine. Despite having a lot of talent, the Bears underachieved each year under his tenure, although it must be said that Kapp was the coach for the single most exciting play in the history of college football (you know which one I'm talking about). He had little to do with it, but so be it. The Bears were 1-9, and the University had had enough. Joe had to go.

Back to Steve for a moment - another thing he is, is a pessimist. When he saw that Stanford was favored by 17 1/2 points, he decided right then and there that they were going to lose. All the way down to the game, he complained about the spread, and "how in the world those jerks could make any team a 17 point favorite in the Big Game!"

Well, as it turned out Steve was right. Cal played a great game, and basically outplayed the Cardinal until the very end, when it was too late. The first half was a defensive battle, but Cal crack through the end zone first to take a 7-0 lead. After Stanford closed it to 7-3, the Bears added a field goal in the third quarter, and then ran a beautiful, perfectly executed reverse with about 7 minutes to play to stretch their lead to 17-3. Stanford made things interesting with a late touchdown and two-point conversion, but for once in the Kapp era, the Bears held on when it counted, and prevailed 17-11. And once again, Stanford stayed home for the holidays.

Big Game Memories - 1980

The fall of 1980 was my first quarter at Cal, and along with my last quarter, probably the most fun I had in my two years there. There was something incredibly liberating about being away from home for the first time in my life, and sharing that experience with a dorm full of people experiencing exactly the same thing. It took me a while to find an appropriate balance between "fun" and school (that D+ on a midterm helped a lot in that regard), and it also took me a while to realize that I needed to start pacing myself in the spending department if I was going to make it through two years without taking out major student loans. Over the course of the quarter I got better at it, and still managed to partake in a lot of activities outside the classroom - including my first Bruce Springsteen concert, as well as an incredible show by Talking Heads and The English Beat - to this day, one of the five best concerts I've ever seen.

And of course there was football. Cal was actually expected to contend for the Rose Bowl that fall, but unfortunately I had been accepted so late in the process (due to a mixup with my community college transcripts) that it was too late for me to get a student football pass. I still managed to hit most of the games, using the pass of someone who couldn't go or just didn't care. As the season progressed, the latter reason prevailed most often, because the team underachieved to a spectacular degree, and really stunk up the joint after starting quarterback Rich Campbell went down for the season with an injury. His successor was a guy named J Torchio (that's right, just the letter J), who was around 5'11" and was obviously not a threat to go on to a professional career. His first three starts were all blowouts, and heading into the Big Game the team was a desultory 2-8.

I wasn't expecting to go to the game, but miraculously, on Friday evening one of my dorm-mates (in fact, a classmate from my high school) decided he didn't really care one way or another about the game, and gave me his ticket. Needless to say, that made the evening, and I remember calling home to let everyone know (and no, they didn't really care) that I was going to THE BIG GAME!

If I recall correctly, Stanford was 6-4, and only needing a victory "over lowly Cal" (we saw that a lot in the papers that week) to wrap up a bowl bid. This was before the days when 2/3 of Division I teams went to a bowl game, so a winning record was no guarantee of a postseason berth. They were favored by about two touchdowns, and their quarterback was this arrogant bratty sophomore by the name of John Elway. Of course, we had no chance.

But strange things happen in the Big Game, and this one was no exception. Cal took the opening kickoff and drove down the field as if the Stanford defense was made of cheese, and of course we all went batsh*t crazy. The group I went to the game with had gotten there two hours early, just so we could stake out perfect seats on the 50-yard line. The first keg had been tapped about 10 a.m., so you can imagine we were already having a good time.

Stanford came right back and scored, and we figured the rout was on, but to our surprise and glee, Cal dominated the rest of the first half, and went into halftime with a 21-7 lead. Back in those days, they still allowed Cal fans to throw oranges at the Stanford band while they were performing, and all of us tried to get our orange into the tuba, to no avail. The band dedicated their first song to "the losers of the world," and then spelled out "Theder," the name of Cal's coach. Naturally that infuriated everyone, and the orange throwing became a little more urgent (not to mention dangerous).

In the third quarter, Stanford scored two touchdowns while Cal did absolutely nothing, and we fully expected to be disappointed. But then, after a great punt which was downed on the Stanford 4-yard line, the Cardinal fumbled the snap on first down and the Bears recovered. Two plays later they scored to take a 28-21 lead, and somehow the defense held on to that lead, despite a barrage of deep Elway passes that had us holding our breath with each heave. When Cal took over on downs with less than a minute to go, deep in their own territory, they were able to wind down the clock, take a safety, and kick the ball out of danger - or so we thought. As people around the world would learn later, that Elway kid had a bit of a gun as an arm, and he managed to get one last Hail Mary pass 70 yards down the field into the end zone. But it was batted down, and the Bears escaped with a 28-23 upset victory. And Stanford stayed home for the holidays.

The rest of the day, I have to admit, is a bit of a blur. I know that beer was involved.

It's Big Game Week!

That's right, folks! After two years of exile in the frozen wasteland of December, the annual Big Game between the California Golden Bears and the Stanford Cardinal has returned to its rightful place, the Saturday before Thanksgiving. And because of that change, which by itself is reason enough to be thankful as we head into the holiday season, I'll be back in Berkeley on Saturday for my 13th Big Game seen in person.

For the next few days, you're going to see a lot on this site about Big Game memories. Most of you probably could not care less, but I hope there's enough football fans out there - particularly of the Blue & Gold and Red-shirt variety - to find the entries entertaining.

Of course, pictured here is the Stanford Axe, which is awarded annually to the winner of the game. Alas, it pains me to say that the Axe is currently in the hands of the Cardinal, which would make a victory this weekend that much sweeter.

Stay tuned, and in the meantime...Roll On You Bears!