GRANADA HILLS VS. KENNEDY : A Different Kind of City Championship

Bob Yurosek is the president of the Kennedy High booster club.

His oldest son, Joe, was a member of Kennedy’s City 4-A championship baseball team last season.

His youngest son, Steve, is a linebacker for Kennedy’s football team this season.

So how does the elder Yurosek view tonight’s match-up in football between Kennedy and Granada Hills?

“I’d love to see my son’s team win,” Yurosek said, “but deep down, if Granada Hills won, I wouldn’t be too upset.”

How’s that? The Kennedy booster club president expressing feelings--other than disdain--for Granada Hills?

Yurosek is in a no-lose situation. He played football for Granada Hills in 1961 and 1962. Regardless of the outcome, he wins.

He is in the minority.

For nearly everyone else involved, there will be a winner and a loser. No middle ground.

“If you have one game to win all year long,” said Tony Ginnetti, Granada Hills’ booster club president, “this is the one to win.”

The Granada Hills and Kennedy campuses are within three miles of each other in the suburb of Granada Hills. Many of the students grew up together and attended the same elementary and junior high schools.

So it’s a friendly rivalry?

“From 8 p.m. to about 10:30 p.m. (tonight) it’s not very friendly,” Kennedy Coach John Haynes said.

Granada Hills opened in 1960. When the enrollment grew too large, Kennedy was opened in 1971.

And since then, the Highlanders from Granada Hills and the Golden Cougars from Kennedy have built up a rivalry that may be second to none in the San Fernando Valley.

When the teams meet, as Granada Hills’ wide receiver Greg Fowble said: “It’s a matter of pride.”

Bob Francola spent five years teaching at Granada Hills. The last four years, he was also an assistant football coach. This season, he has gone from Granada Green and White to Kennedy Gold and Brown.

“The kids at Granada Hills feel if there’s any one game they must win, it’s Kennedy,” said Francola, now Kennedy’s defensive coordinator. “It was all we pointed to.”

Francola learned early on, though, that Kennedy is equally as serious about the game.

“When I met the parents at Kennedy for the first time,” he said, “one man stood up and said, ‘The one game we want to win this year is Granada. I hope you will be able to provide us with things to beat them this year.’ ”

Upon arriving at Kennedy, Francola sensed that the Kennedy-San Fernando game was a big one.

Just last week, Haynes said that San Fernando was the bigger of the two games for the Golden Cougars.

But Francola is hoping he can make the Kennedy players realize that, for Granada Hills, “it is a must-win game.”

The players seem to be catching on.

When asked which rivalry was more important,

Kennedy tailback Roman Carter said: “They’re neck and neck with me.”

Carter, who lives in Pacoima, grew up with several San Fernando students. Still, for him, “this is a big game.”

For others, like Ara Derderian, a lineman who grew up in Granada Hills, “this is the one.”

“We’ve lost two in a row to them,” said Derderian, a senior. “I don’t know if I could take another loss.”

Granada Hills is coming into the game with a 5-0 record and a No. 2 ranking in The Times’ City poll. But nothing that the Highlanders have accomplished matters this week.

“Right now,” Fowble said, “this game means everything. It’s like the City championship. And that’s just because it’s Kennedy. Also, because we’re undefeated, we don’t want to lose to them--of all teams.

“Whenever Granada Hills and Kennedy get together, no matter what sport, it’s a hard-fought game.”

Kennedy and Granada Hills first met in football in 1974, with the Highlanders winning, 25-9.

Entering tonight’s 8 p.m. game at Granada Hills, the Highlanders, with victories the last two seasons, lead the series, 6-5.

In 1975, Kennedy defeated Granada Hills, 22-12, and tied San Fernando for the league championship.

Two years later, Granada Hills went unbeaten in league. Kennedy was 4-1, losing only to the Highlanders, 28-13, in the first league game for both teams.

Seven of Kennedy’s defensive starters were caught defacing the Granada Hills campus the night before the game. They were suspended for the game, meaning the Golden Cougars had to face a quarterback named John Elway with a rather green defense.

Elway, who later starred at Stanford University and is now the starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos, played at Granada Hills from 1976 to 1978.

During those same years, Kennedy had Tom Ramsey at quarterback. Ramsey later led UCLA to a Rose Bowl championship.

“Each quarterback was great in his own right,” said Haynes, who has been the Golden Cougars’ coach since the school opened. “Ramsey was a tremendous field leader. Everybody had all the confidence in the world in him.”

Don Tamburro was an assistant football coach at Kennedy from 1972 to 1982, with the exception of 1976. That year, he served as an assistant at Granada Hills.

For Tamburro, 1976 was a most memorable year. Elway and Ramsey were sophomores that year.

“I could not believe how both the sophomore kids threw the ball, got knocked down and physically beat-up, but still looked like seniors,” said Tamburro, who coached Kennedy’s baseball team from 1979 to 1984.

In 1978, Elway was injured and missed the Kennedy game, but Granada Hills still won, 21-14. Since then, no team has won by more than six points.

Kennedy handed El Camino Real, which reached the City final, its only league loss in 1980. But the Golden Cougars were denied an undisputed league title when they lost to Granada Hills, 20-14, in the last regular-season game.

One of Haynes’ most satisfying victories in the series came in 1982.

“They were by far the superior team,” he said. “And they blocked three of our punts. They also fumbled on our five-yard line and we stripped a guy of the ball while he was going for the end zone.”

Kennedy won, 19-17.

“How can you have three punts blocked and still win?” Haynes asked.

Last year’s 28-27 victory by Granada Hills ranks as one of the wildest games in the series.

With 38 seconds left, Kennedy’s Greg Friedman was wide left by inches on a 29-yard field goal attempt. The Highlanders, amazingly, could not run out the clock. With one second left, Friedman tried from 38 yards out, but missed again.

“That game in my mind was one of the most nerve-wracking wins I’ve ever been involved in,” said Francola.

Fowble called it the “second-most exciting football game I’ve ever played in.” The first, he said, was a 7-6 win over Gardena earlier this season.

The win over Kennedy helped Granada Hills to a 3-1 league record, the same as Kennedy’s. The Highlanders were the league champions, however, by the slightest of margins.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Tamburro said. “You can never bet on the this game. You can never assume. The records just don’t mean a thing.”

Tamburro, who still teaches at Kennedy, is an assistant baseball coach at Pepperdine University. His son, a freshman at Westlake High, is the starting quarterback for the junior varsity team, meaning Tamburro will be watching Warriors rather than Highlanders and Golden Cougars tonight. It will be the first time he has missed a Kennedy-Granada Hills football game.

“And I’m sorry that I am missing it,” he added.

“We hate the school, we hate Granada Hills and we hate green.”

So said Kennedy senior Steve Korechoff, the associate editor of the school newspaper.

“A lot of the guys I work with,” Korechoff said, “all they say is Granada this, Granada that. They talked a lot after football last year. They also talked a lot in baseball, but who won City?”

Make no mistake about it, the game means as much to the rest of the students as it does to the players.

“This game is more important than any other game,” Colleen Courtney, the song queen of the Granada Hills’ cheerleading squad, said. “If we had lost to Gardena, we wouldn’t have had to live with it very long. But we’ll have to live in the Valley with this loss.

“We’ll have to be around them and hear it all the time.”

The rivalry extends beyond the field. The Granada Hills’ cheerleaders, Courtney said, are working extra hard this week.

“We want to look good to the Kennedy cheerleaders,” she said.

“I think the Granada Hills kids think the Kennedy kids are rowdier,” Francola said. “And the Kennedy kids look at the Granada kids as snobbish.”

Tonight, they’ll get another look at each other--from the other side of the field.

“They’re chanting ‘Green (bleep), green (bleep)’. It wasn’t the Kennedy players, it was the crowd with them. It bothers me.”

Those were the comments of Highlander baseball Coach Darryl Stroh after a game with Kennedy last year. The game, won by Granada Hills, 13-6, featured as many near-fights and insults as pitches.

In 1977, a baseball game between the two schools was stopped after a fight broke out involving players, coaches and parents.

“It’s not a dirty rivalry, but it’s not friendly,” said Tamburro. “It’s dog eat dog.”

Stroh, who is now the head coach of the football team, said: “For the intensity and magnitude of the rivalry, there has been very little physical stuff. There has just been a lot of talking.”

Stroh said he doesn’t have to do or say much to fire up his team this week. “Actually, you have to say less,” he said.

Dick Whitney, who was co-coach with Haynes from 1977 until last season, said that one year the coaching staff had bagpipe music played over the P.A. system during practice.

“We also had a coach wear green,” Whitney said. “At the end of the week, we let the kids rip the clothes off the coach.

“But the (gimmicks) never worked. We always lost.”

One year, Tamburro put a Granada Hills jacket and hat on a dummy and placed it on the goal post. The dummy was then set on fire.

Kennedy still lost.

A crowd of 5,000 to 6,000 is expected tonight. Kennedy, which lost its league opener last week to San Fernando, 21-7, needs a victory to stay in the race for the title.

Granada Hills is the favorite.

“The year that one team should win,” Francola said, “the other team does. I hope that happens this year, too.”

“This is the game,” Fowble said, “the one I’ve been waiting for all season. I can’t wait.”

Neither can the rest of the community.

The Granada Hills-Kennedy Series

LEAGUE RECORD YEAR WINNER SCORE GRAN. HILLS KENNEDY 1974 Granada Hills 25-9 4-1-0 1-4-0 1975 Kennedy 22-12 3-2-0 4-1-0 1976 Kennedy 28-22 2-3-0 2-3-0 1977 Granada Hills 28-13 5-0-0 4-1-0 1978 Granada Hills 21-14 4-1-0 3-2-0 1979 Kennedy 15-14 2-4-0 3-3-0 1980 Granada Hills 20-14 4-2-0 5-1-0 1981 Kennedy 7-2 3-3-0 5-1-0 1982 Kennedy 19-17 4-2-0 4-2-0 1983 Granada Hills 20-16 2-4-0 3-2-1 1984 Granada Hills 28-27 3-1-0 3-1-0