63-13 Game Leaves Scars on South Coast Community

Few high-scoring prep football games in Orange County have triggered so much emotion as a 1982 South Coast League--one almost hesitates to use the word game --between Capistrano Valley and Laguna Hills.

The circumstances surrounding Capistrano Valley’s notorious 63-13 victory had all the background intrigue of a soap opera played out on grass.

The game’s significance was heightened by a tangled web of loyalties between the two coaching staffs, teams and the community. The stage was probably set earlier in 1982, when Laguna Hills fired Chuck Gallo, the coach who had guided the young and struggling Hawks through their first four seasons.

Then, Gallo became the offensive coordinator at Capistrano Valley, which Laguna Hills partisans considered the enemy camp.

Another factor that contributed to an almost unreal outcome was Cougar quarterback Burt Call, then involved in a race to break the county career passing yardage record.

There was a third unusual circumstance. Cougar Coach Dick Enright remembers losing his temper at the Hawks because he believed their defense was intentionally trying to injure Call. He said there were three roughing-the-passer penalties called against Laguna Hills.

So Enright left his first string in the game through the third quarter. The scoring spree spawned in the first half mushroomed out of control, feeding off its own momentum like an avalanche.

“That’s my only regret about that game, losing my temper and leaving him in,” Enright said. “It was kind of stupid because he could have been hurt.”

When Capistrano Valley was through, Call had set a short-lived Southern Section record, passing for seven touchdowns. And some of the Laguna Hills players remember dreading the thought of having to go to school and face their classmates that Monday.

“I remember walking out into the field after the game that night and the kids were demoralized,” said Mike Taylor, then an assistant at Laguna Hills and now an assistant at Orange Coast College. “Some of them were very vocal about it. Some of them were crying.”

A few weeks later, the Hawks felt as if insult had been added to injury when Call and a mention of the game appeared in Sports Illustrated.

“It was just a fun game,” said Call, a student at Brigham Young University who is on a mission with his church in Italy. “I didn’t even know I had a record until I read it in the papers the next day.

“I felt I had a good game and things just clicked. I never felt ashamed of it. I didn’t feel we were trying to run it up on them. I was just playing and having a good time.”

But from Laguna Hills’ perspective, the exact margin blurs in retrospect until it seems like the score might have been something like 79-0. To some, the result seemed so grossly out of the ordinary, so unnecessarily huge as to be almost unspeakable.

Even now, four seasons later, former Laguna Hills Coach Ed Adams cannot bring himself to mention the game.

“It’s in the past and it’s buried,” said Adams, who is now the athletic administrator at El Toro. “I don’t see any purpose in discussing it.”

He would not comment on the game, but Adams said of coaches who run up scores: “This is not a good example of sportsmanship.

“How important are ratings or records at the expense of hurting others? A coach has to take a good look at himself and ask if this is worth the price. He has a relationship with the players and the community that could be destroyed by doing something like that.”

But Gallo, now the coach at Mater Dei, says he does not feel ashamed of the game. Though he admits there were bad feelings between the staffs after his firing, he denies that the Cougars intentionally ran up the score.

Gallo says the way he handled the Cougar offense was a reflection of a lifelong coaching philosophy--the same philosophy that enabled him to gracefully accept his share of bad defeats in his own four years as coach of the Hawks, he said. He produced as evidence a sheet of paper chronicling those seasons, including one streak of 49-0, 42-0, 56-0 and 57-7 defeats in 1978.

“If I had been on the other (Hawk) sideline that night I would have done the same thing I did for those four years, which was to shake the other coach’s hand and say, ‘Good game, coach,’ ” he said. “Good luck in the playoffs.”

Gallo explained why he accepts such scores as simply part of the game.

“Number one, a coach has no right to expect anything from his opponent from the whistle to the final gun,” he said. “You have no right to ask the other guy to go easy on you.

“Number two, any kids in statistical races, like Burt Call was at Capo Valley, should get their chance to play long enough to make normal progress toward their goal. Then you get them out of there.”

Call had 321 yards passing against Laguna Hills and his seventh touchdown, scored by Steve Skupien on a 92-yard play after a Hawk defender lost his footing, raised the lead to 62-6 in the third quarter.

“The third thing is you want to work on things (like a two-minute offense or new aerial patterns),” Gallo said. “We’re a passing offense and we’re going to throw the ball all the time. It doesn’t matter if we’re 100 points ahead or 100 points behind. . . . We were not trying to rub anything in anybody’s wounds. That’s just our attack.

“The fourth and last thing is to be sensitive to the other team. Your first responsibility is to your own team.”

Gallo said it was only when his goals for the Cougar players were fulfilled that the first string was pulled.

“Very frankly, we played a football game and the score got out of control. . . . They were embarrassed and they lashed out. It’s human nature. . . . I regret that people felt badly about it, but I had no vindictive motives at all. I had no intentions of embarrassing anybody. I loved the kids who were playing for us and I loved the kids who were playing against us.

“Any good athlete isn’t going to let one disaster ruin his career. The winners bounce back.”

Three of the former Hawk players said their affection for Gallo was not affected because of the game; they did not consider him responsible. But Dave Price, an all-league safety for the Hawks, said he did think Gallo was overly concerned with records at times.

“He’d do anything to get a record,” Price said, emphasizing his general respect for his former coach. “He’d lose a game to get a record.”

Todd Williams, an all-league tight end for the Hawks who now plays catcher for the Pepperdine University baseball team, said the Hawk coaches seemed to take the defeat personally.

“It didn’t affect us (players) that much,” Williams said. “It did get a little depressing to have to go out there and return 10 kickoffs, but it never really demoralized me.”

But he added, “Coach Adams was really bitter. He was mad at the other (Capistrano Valley) coaches. He told us it was uncalled for.”

With regard to Enright’s contention that the Hawk defense tried to harm Call, Lee Plemel, the Laguna Hills quarterback, said Adams would never have condoned such tactics.

“(Sportsmanship) was one thing Coach Adams insisted on,” said Plemel, a pitcher at Stanford University.

“I think maybe they (the defense) were getting frustrated, and once they did get to him (Call), they probably did get a little overexuberant--because obviously they weren’t getting to him in time.” Price said he thought it was unsportsmanlike of the Cougars to continue passing when the score was so high.

“The thing that bothered me the most was when they got up by 30, they could have put in the backup quarterback,” Price said. “But Burt Call was still in there, throwing 30- and 40-yard balls.

“The game was obviously in control after the half and they should have had all 80 guys in there. If their third team had been able to kick the crap out of us, that would have been fine, but that’s not the way it was.

“In one sense it was an embarrassment . . . a feeling like we’d been stomped on enough and we wanted it to be over. It left us with a desire for respect. Then there was this other thing, a severe lack of confidence. After the game, we felt like we couldn’t beat anybody.

“It kind of was a feeling of disbelief. The team was just really down. No one wanted to talk about it. You didn’t want to go to school the next day.

“It also created a hate of Capo Valley. They were already cocky and every time I’d see them around after that, it was like they were laughing at us. But they didn’t do that anymore after the game my senior year (in 1983).”

That year, the Hawks motivated themselves to play Capistrano Valley by watching a film of the 63-13 game in profound silence, Price said. They led the Cougars 10-6 into the final minute of play when Capistrano Valley capitalized on a fumble to rally for a 13-10 victory.

Price, who hopes to become a football coach after graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, said he does not believe in pursuing records “at the expense of the other team and the community.”

“It created hard feelings,” Price said. “There’s a classy way to win and a non-class way to win. I have no respect for Dick Enright as a coach or a human being. You just don’t do that to people.”

Enright said: “I personally do not get a big charge out of scoring a lot of points. I don’t want to wreck kids’ lives or destroy a football team, and I don’t think we destroyed Laguna Hills.”

Price said: “It’s a funny thing. When all my friends from high school get together, we never talk about that game. It’s like everyone’s kind of tried to push it out of their minds, like it didn’t exist.”