Taking Their Shots in the High Desert League

Bernie Cason, the California Wolves’ free safety, had just picked off a pass and was forced out of bounds. As he trotted back towards the bench, all of the fans in the Bell High School bleachers--about 200 of them--rose to their feet. Cason’s chest swelled.

“Usually no one cheers for anything in this league,” he said. “Usually, no one’s there to cheer. So when they got up like that after my interception, I was feeling pretty proud of myself. But then I looked back up at the stands and saw everybody running. Stampeding, really. That didn’t seem right.

“Then I heard the gun shots.”

The booming noises from the snub-nosed barrel of the handgun during the third quarter of the game against the Bell Hurricanes was as close as the Wolves of the High Desert League would come to a high caliber of football.

Safety Robert Lewis remembers the night well.

“I heard three shots, and then everybody was running,” he said. “I mean, it was massive herd scatter. The refs told us all to lie down on the field, and when we did, the refs took off, running like hell. I figured that was the best bet, so I got up, and then about 20 guys from both teams followed me across the field. There were more shots, and we hit this chain-link fence, about 15 feet high. We were so scared, we cleared this thing. All of us.

“We ran down an alley and saw these dudes sitting in a garage, drinking beer. We rushed over and said, ‘Call the cops.’ And they said, ‘You guys are visitors here,’ like, ‘Get the hell outta’ here.’ They weren’t very nice-looking people. So now we’re running from these guys in the garage and we go back over the same fence and we’re back on the field. And there’s a guy on the field with a gun. So we start running again. Man, it lasted forever.”

The Wolves later learned that the gunfire came from gang members. The Wolves had inadvertently worn their orange and white uniforms onto the turf of a gang that also claimed orange and white as their colors. The gun shots were part of an ultra-intelligent gang warning system.

Lewis said he needed no such elaborate warning.

“If they wanted to warn us about colors or something, man, they coulda told me,” he said. “They didn’t need to be shootin’ guns at us. Man, just tell me that stuff at the gate. I woulda listened.”

That night in October was a bit unusual, even for the Wolves, although life in the High Desert League is filled with similar close encounters of the weird kind.

The league was formed in 1936 by Jim Lott, who is now 80. Two years ago, Lott was forced to officiate a game when the regular referees failed to show up. For his trouble, the league’s founder got slugged in the mouth by an angry player, whose team was instantly disbanded.

The High Desert League, with 12 teams this season, is largely a collection of ex-high school and college jocks who weren’t quite good enough for pro football, but who love the game much too much to hang up the pads. Some of the players are small and look like they belong on a softball field. Others, like 6-6, 290-pound Bo Brooks, look like a softball field.

Brian Spear offers this assessment: “I’m the organizer of the Wolves. Some people call me the owner, but there’s not really much of anything to own.”

In addition to the Wolves and the Hurricanes, this season’s entries also include the Orange County Cougars and Orange County Cowboys, the San Diego Sabres, Ontario Crush, West LA Falcons, Lincoln Heights Rebels, Los Angeles Mustangs, San Jose Bandits, Riverside Rams and Victorville Raiders.

The Wolves, based in Encino, play the Cougars this Sunday at 1 p.m. at Birmingham High in the first round of the High Desert playoffs.

Dozens of teams have come and gone over the decades, including the San Fernando Rams, who wore uniforms nearly identical to the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams. That prompted a harsh letter from NFL lawyers, who mentioned things like “infringement” and “court action” and other things that lawyers babble about.

“I guess they figured we were a threat to the Rams,” said Brian McGregor, an ex-San Fernando Ram and now a Wolf. The Rams quickly became the Bulls.

Right. And Pee Wee Herman is a threat to Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman.

“This is just like a weekend softball league,” said Lewis, who played football at Oxnard High and Ventura College. “We’re serious about it and we want to win, but mainly it’s just for fun. People say this is like semi-pro football, but there’s nothing semi-pro about it. Just a bunch of guys who love football.”

And love to have fun.

In 1982, a team called the Americans was busing to San Diego for a game against the Sharks. Somewhere south of San Clemente the Americans stopped at a freeway rest area. And what should prance aboard their bus? Why, a girl clad in a full-length mink coat, high heels and a bikini, what else? She said she was from Canada, said she had just broken up with her boyfriend and, well, she said more than the players who were on that bus care to say about the incident now.

“Let’s just say it was one of the High Desert Football League’s legendary stops,” said Wolves safety Mike McShane.

And who could forget those annual mid-winter trips to Mexicali and other Mexican border towns for the Friendship Bowl, a weekend of football matching a team of High Desert League players called the Nomads and against Mexican club teams.

“You think it’s easy?” asked Jed Blair. “You try staying up all night drinking ‘til 6 in the morning, eating breakfast at 8 and playing football at noon. You’re half-drunk when the game starts and then you get sick. . . .guys running off the field to throw up.”

The High Desert League has made stops virtually everywhere in its 50 years, from Barstow to Boron, from King City to Victorville. But nowhere, perhaps, were the California Wolves more impressed than at games they played inside the Soledad prison and the Tehachapi prison.

“When we went in, they searched us,” said McGregor, who played at Pierce College in 1975 and is an assistant coach at Monroe High. “I mean searched, like tearing cigarettes apart looking for drugs. In 1980 we went into the Tehachapi prison for a game, and a big fight breaks out between us and the inmate team. People are going at it pretty good, swinging helmets and all that stuff, and all of a sudden a guard runs down near the brawl and fires two shots from a shotgun. All of the prisoners hit the ground, spread-eagled. We’re standing around asking ‘What the hell’s going on?’

“We don’t schedule the prisons anymore.”

Which is too bad, because some friendships have suffered.

“The funniest thing about the trips to the prisons is that some of the guys on our team knew people in there,” McGregor said. “We’d be walking through and a prisoner would come up to one of the players and yell, ‘Hey, Johnny, how’s your brother? Tell him I’m outta here in two months.’ ”