30 years later, the game is on

Thirty years ago, a pack of teenage friends could see the end coming. They were football jocks, mostly, guys who had bonded as freshmen and sophomores on the gridiron at Corona del Mar High School. When high school ended and they scattered to the winds, they wondered, what would become of those friendships forged in Sea Kings jerseys, in the shared grit and pain of twice-a-day practices?

So they made a pact, 17 of them. They would gather every Thanksgiving for the rest of their lives, wherever they were, to play some football. They persuaded a parent to buy them a bottle of champagne, tore off the label and affixed their pledge. They would play it till their legs gave out, till the last surviving man could pop the cork and toast the other 16.

It sounded nice enough. But there was no good reason to expect it would stick, no guarantee it would endure a micro-second longer than a million other doomed, idealistic high school pacts.

This Thanksgiving, however, the jocks will celebrate the 30th get-together of what they call the Last Man Society. With few exceptions, for war deployments or personal crises, most have managed to make it every year. And so far, all are still standing.

One guy commands a nuclear sub. One works at a blue-chip Los Angeles law firm. One does construction. One owns a pizza restaurant. One’s a helicopter mechanic. One’s a real estate magnate with a limousine that he makes available to the guys. Many still live in Southern California but don’t see each other much, except for the reunion.

“I would never miss it, unless I’m on the wrong side of the dirt,” Greg Wilfahrt, 46, who now lives in San Diego. Wilfahrt, who co-founded a wireless communications company, was a long-jumper at Servite High School in Anaheim, one of the two members of the group who didn’t attend Corona del Mar High.

“We met, and it was just one of those deals that you can’t explain,” Wilfahrt said. “Here’s a bunch of high school kids, and we just couldn’t get enough of each other. As college approached, we said, ‘Hey, we don’t want this to end.’ ”

Tom Freeman, 47, of Lake Forest, who played for the Sea Kings and is now an IBM executive, said he and his friends got the idea for the Last Man Society from an episode of “MASH” in which a character made such a pact with his basic training classmates. The episode drew on an old military tradition.

In a fireproof box, Freeman keeps letters the friends have written -- full of pictures, clippings, personal histories, and notes to the other guys -- that will remain sealed while the letter writers live. Should one of them die, the group’s rules go, the others will open his letter and celebrate his life.

Until recently, no one has had to take it very seriously. But there have been some recent scares, heart murmurs, melanomas, a guy falling off a ladder and hitting his head. Months back, a dad died.

“We know we’re gonna start dying off,” Wilfahrt said. “This is the first year we’ve actually come to terms with our mortality. What we said 30 years ago -- it’s even more so now. You’ve got executives of companies going, ‘I love you, buddy.’ ”

The day before Thanksgiving, the group meets at the Corona del Mar home of Freeman’s parents, where his mom serves them Ding Dongs, just like she did when they were in high school. They will pull out the bottle of 1976 champagne with the ragged, self-made label and pass it around for inspection. They will head to a sports bar on Pacific Coast Highway, where Wilfahrt, the former long jumper, will try to pounce onto the waist-high bar from a standing start. Barring injury, he’s been able to manage the leap every year. One year, it paid for drinks when he found a sucker to bet he couldn’t.

On Thanksgiving Day, the men stretch on their old jerseys -- which fit snugly now even without pads -- to pick seven-man teams for touch football. There will be hamstring injuries, and skulls banging together and quarterbacks throwing passes straight into the sun.

“Most of our passes, you can watch a movie and then come back and it would be landing,” said Chuck Buelow, 47, of Temecula, a former Sea Kings player who now sells software. “When we were first playing, [they] were bullets.”

Buelow said he has assembled a movie for his friends, featuring old football clips and the history of the Last Men. “Everybody I’ve mentioned this to has said, ‘Oh my God, I don’t even see my friends from high school anymore,’ ” he said.

After the game, after the last goodbyes, the bottle of 1976 champagne will be tucked away safely till next year. Because they were kids, it did not occur to them that wine or fine whiskey might be better suited for the lifetime pact.

“The guy who opens this,” Freeman said of the bottle, “is gonna die drinking it.”

christopher.goffard@

latimes.com