From Punches to Pranks, Rivalries a Part of Game : High Schools: The shenanigans that precede the actual competition have become as memorable as the final scores.

As a result of the tank rivalry and the tree incident, Sonora has become involved in a feud with the cross town farm boys. --SONORA SABRE, student newspaper

The tank was a paint-splattered water tower in a vacant field, the tree was a campus landmark and the farm boys were kids from the next town over.

It was mid-October of 1968 and Sonora and Brea-Olinda high schools were preparing to play a football game.

The rivalry between the neighboring schools began when Sonora opened in 1966. It grew slowly, centering solely on a football game--an important game between league rivals--but picked up intensity and intrigue when the students got involved.

Sonora students claimed the water tower as their own, decorating it with graffiti the week before the big game.

“SHS No. 1,” “Tower Power,” “Victory,” “Class of ’69.”

Days later, Brea students redecorated the tower with Wildcat slogans.

“No. 1,” “Brea Rules.”

In retaliation, Sonora students sawed down the senior tree, a campus landmark in the Brea quad.

You know, of course, that meant war. And it has not let up in the 20 years that have passed.

Through spray-painted water tanks, rocks, trees, mock funerals (Brea students marched a Sonora coffin around school to inspire the football players and, indeed, the campus to kill the Raiders), the schools have traded barbs, paint strokes and, this season, punches.

The shenanigans that precede the games have become as important and linger as long in the participants’ memories as the final scores themselves.

Sonora-Brea is one of Orange County’s longest-running rivalries, but by no means the only one.

Name a school and it has a rival, a hated rival that its students would do anything to beat.

Fountain Valley has Edison, Servite has Mater Dei, Santa Ana Valley has Santa Ana, Tustin has Foothill, Esperanza has El Dorado, Corona del Mar has Newport Harbor, Mission Viejo has Capistrano Valley, Capistrano Valley has El Toro, El Toro has Mission Viejo . . . you get the idea.

Geography plays a part in establishing rivalries. What could be more heated than a feud between cross-town high schools?

Some schools have seen cross-town rivals change as the county has grown.

“Our big rival now is Villa Park, but back in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s we’ve had Santa Ana, then Huntington Beach and then Foothill,” said Dave Zirkle, Orange athletic director.

Success plays a part, too.

Fountain Valley and Edison are rivals mainly because their games often decided Sunset League championships.

Rivalries between coaches can’t be overlooked, either. El Modena and Foothill were rivals for many seasons because of the contrasting personalities of personable Bob Lester at El Modena and gruff Ted Mullen at Foothill.

The rivalry has lessened in recent years, though. Lester retired in 1985 and Mullen left Foothill in 1987, first for Anaheim then, recently, for Palm Desert.

But most rivalries have endured through coaching and personnel changes, through good teams and bad. Some carry more significance than others, but Orange County’s football rivalries are a big part of Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in the fall.

Vince Lombardo, assistant athletic director at Servite, speaks for most: “I have heard it said on both sides that Mater Dei can’t call it a good season until it beats Servite, and the same for us. As long as we beat Mater Dei, we’re OK.”

To that end, the students have their own wars to wage.

Halftime of the annual Esperanza-El Dorado game in 1978 was one fans of both schools will long remember.

The Aztecs’ mascot that season was a dog named Esperanza, trained to retrieve tennis balls thrown by a custodian.

When Esperanza trotted out to do his act at halftime of the ’78 game, El Dorado fans heaved hundreds of tennis balls on the field. “There must have been 600 of them; the dog went crazy,” an observer, recalling the incident, told The Times in 1983.

Usually, such pranks carry considerably less wit.

The Villa Park-Orange rivalry has produced a number of incidents.

During a pep rally, a former Orange coach made an off-handed comment about Villa Park being the weenies on the hill.

“It stuck and our kids started throwing hot dogs at their people,” Zirkle said.

Villa Park would strike back by throwing oranges.

One year, Orange students stuck oranges on the classroom door knobs at Villa Park. Villa Park retaliated by plugging up all the key holes at Orange.

Another year, Orange students plunged a Volkswagen Karman Ghia into the Villa Park pool.

And there was the time in the early ‘70s, when a dead dolphin was hoisted up the school flagpole at Dana Hills. San Clemente students allegedly had found the dolphin during a harbor cleanup and wanted to zing their rivals, nicknamed the Dolphins.

But for sheer animosity, it’s tough to top the Tustin-Foothill rivalry.

Pranks have ranked from a tame bombing of the rival’s pool with dye to bales of hay all over the Foothill campus.

“They always referred to us as farmers, so our cheerleaders spread hay all over their quad,” said Vince Brown, Tustin baseball coach and assistant football coach.

The cheerleaders from the schools exchanged cookies the week before the game as a gesture of good will, but one year things got a little twisted.

The Tustin cheerleaders put laxatives in their batch and handed them over to Foothill.

“A tremendous amount of animosity built up and there was a lot of tension the rest of the year any time the schools played,” Brown said.

Emotions intensified during the 1981 Fullerton-Sunny Hills game. Before the season finale against Fullerton, Sunny Hills forfeited four games after the district office received an anonymous tip that the Lancers had used an ineligible lineman.

Naturally, everyone at Sunny Hills thought someone at Fullerton made the call. An estimated 25 police officers were on duty for the game, but there were no incidents.

“There was an electricity on this campus that I’ve never seen before,” said Tim Devaney, Sunny Hills coach. “It was a strong rivalry that was suddenly intensified.

“We played in a CIF (Central Conference) championship game against La Habra at Anaheim Stadium in 1983, but I’ve never seen emotions higher on campus than that week. The students wore war paint all week in preparation for playing the Fullerton Indians.”

For the most part, rivalries benefit the schools. Coaches say there is more excitement around campus during the week of a big game.

Certainly, Edison and Fountain Valley, two Sunset League rivals, have reaped huge rewards, not to mention profits, from their rivalry. It reached its height in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when the game outgrew high school stadiums and was played at Anaheim Stadium.

“Especially at that time, the best time to rob a house in Fountain Valley or Huntington Beach was when Fountain Valley and Edison were playing because nobody was home,” said Bill Workman, former Edison coach now at Orange Coast College. “The whole community was evacuated.”

From 1975-1981, the game drew between 14,000 and 32,000 each year. Only once did the teams draw fewer than 10,000 in Anaheim Stadium.

Memories of Edison-Fountain Valley games tend to stick with the participants. Dave White, Edison coach, was a quarterback on the Chargers’ 1972 and ’73 teams.

“I played (quarterback at Oregon State) against USC at the Coliseum,” White said. “I played in front of 90,000 in Tennessee and LSU. The games I remember most were the two against Fountain Valley. I still haven’t gotten over losing in 1972.”

This year, Mike Milner, Fountain Valley coach, received a letter from former tight end Greg Bolin, who is in Zaire working as a Peace Corps officer. It was dated Aug. 12 and somehow arrived before last week’s game. Bolin had taken the time to encourage his alma mater to beat Edison.

Edison won Friday’s game with a touchdown in the final minutes, 28-25, in front of a capacity crowd of 7,500 at Orange Coast.

Sometimes, games go beyond mere rivalries.

Sonora-Brea reached a head in the waning moments of the Wildcats’ victory earlier this season. A fight broke out after a number of personal-foul penalties were called against both teams. After officials broke up the fight, they ended the game early. Four Sonora players were suspended for a game by school administrators for their part in the melee.

The schools have decided not to play next season.

“We need a couple of years of cooling off,” said Jon Looney, Brea coach. “This game has gone beyond just a rivalry. We need to let it cool down a little bit. It’s gotten out of hand.”

Rivalries present a fine line between spirited pride and outright lawlessness that administrators and coaches must traverse.

“You have to have coaches who can put things in perspective,” said Tom Vitello, Servite athletic director. “I look at (last week’s) USC-Notre Dame game. Things got out of control (during a pregame fight) and I blame the coaches.”

Said James Golden, Mater Dei vice principal: “I know that kids will do things that you have no control over. You have to try and discourage all that.”

In the mid-1970s, things had become so bad between Servite and Mater Dei that the Servite administration decided anyone caught defacing Mater Dei property would be expelled.

And somewhere between the dye in the pool and the hay on the quad, administrators at Foothill and Tustin decided something needed to be done to curb vandalism and bad feelings.

“The principals decided that they better start doing something to bring the kids together,” said Brown, the Tustin assistant. “They have a lunch every year before the game at the district office and try to get them to understand that it’s just a friendly game.”

The schools have added campus security during the week of the big game to prevent vandalism.

Breakfast has become a 20-year tradition as part of the Fountain Valley-Edison rivalry.

Members of the school’s student government, cheerleaders and selected players are invited the morning of the game.

“The whole idea is to promote good sportsmanship between the schools,” said Fountain Valley Principal Michael Kasler, a former administrator at Edison. “The kids get to know each other and become friends. We think it’s very healthy in promoting a good, clean rivalry.”

Zirkle said this was the first year there were no incidents in Orange’s rivalry with Villa Park. He attributes that to a pregame breakfast both teams attended.

“Maybe it had an effect, I don’t know,” Zirkle said. “But this is the first year we didn’t have any vandalism.”

Oranges were eaten, not thrown. No word on the hot dogs, though.

Times staff writers Donna Carter, Chris Foster, Tom Hamilton, Steve Lowery and Barbie Ludovise contributed to this story.

A Collection of Classics

Perhaps no other county rivalry has produced as many significant meetings and thrilling finishes as the Sunset League showdowns between Edison and Fountain Valley. A few of the highlights from the series, which Edison leads, 15-6-1:

1969--A freshman- and sophomore-dominated Edison team stunned Fountain Valley, 21-20, costing the Barons the Irvine League championship.

1970--Edison rolled to a 28-6 victory on the way to a 13-0 record and a Southern Section 3-A championship.

1973--Fountain Valley posted a 28-24 victory for its first win in the series.

1974--Fountain Valley’s Steve Thompson missed a 31-yard field goal attempt on the game’s final play, allowing Edison to escape with a 0-0 tie.

1977--Willie Gittens’ one-yard touchdown run with 3:19 to play allowed Fountain Valley to avoid an upset with a 6-3 victory.

1978--Edison drove 81 yards in the final minutes to set up a 32-yard field goal by Rick Stephens in a 10-7 Charger victory. Edison went on to win the Sunset League championship, but Fountain Valley went one better; the loss was its only one in a Big 5 championship season.

1979--Kerwin Bell rushed for 235 yards and four touchdowns in a 35-7 victory for Edison, which was on its way to a Big 5 championship.

1980--Edison rallied for a 14-13 victory on Ken Major’s touchdown and two-point conversion runs with 19 seconds to play before a crowd of 18,000. Five weeks later, the teams played for the Big 5 championship before a crowd of 29,000, with Edison winning, 14-0, to cap a 14-0 season.

1983--Fountain Valley ended a six-game losing streak in the series with a 33-7 victory.

1985--Edison, the eventual Big 5 champion, rolled to a 24-0 halftime lead, then held on for a 24-12 victory.

1987--Fountain Valley’s Eric Sasenberg stopped Greg Angelovic on a two-point conversion run with no time remaining as the Barons held on for a 14-13 victory.

1988--Fountain Valley, the eventual CIF Division I champion, stopped a late Edison rally at the Barons’ 10-yard line with 1:22 to play to preserve a 28-21 victory.