Rivals Play Game of Half-Decade One More Time : Football: Granada Hills and San Fernando highs renew one of the Valley’s most intense series, and, for the fourth time in five years, a league championship is in the balance.

Even the new kid on the chopping block is aware of its significance, of the venom involved in what has become the most spirited and competitive City Section football rivalry in the area. And this is a coach who has been through the Banning-Carson skirmishes, to boot.

Sure, Banning High versus Carson is always a Titanic affair. But San Fernando and Granada Hills isn’t exactly down there on the SS Minnow scale, as even the uninitiated have learned.

When the longtime rivals meet at 8 tonight at Granada Hills in a game that could decide the North Valley League champion--yet again--expect some double-indemnity enmity.

“We hate those guys,” said Troy Starr, San Fernando’s second-year defensive coordinator who coached at Carson before moving to San Fernando. “To say that we dislike them intensely would be an understatement.”

As understated as a neon necktie--and about as subtle. Imagine, if one of the newest coaches on either staff feels this strongly, the others must be chewing up clipboards by now.

And with good reason. For the fourth time in five years, the game should decide a league champion. Only in 1986, when San Fernando stumbled to its worst record of the decade at 2-8, did the game not directly decide the eventual league champion.

“It seems like every year since about ‘85, it’s come down to us and them,” San Fernando Coach Tom Hernandez said.

But it goes back even further. For Hernandez, a 1975 San Fernando graduate, the rivalry is rooted in the early 1970s. “I remember when I was in eighth grade and it was Anthony Davis against (Dana) Potter,” Hernandez said. “It was all we talked about for weeks.”

The showdown hardly diminished, A. D. (after Davis). Tonight’s game--Granada Hills is 8-0, 5-0 in league play and San Fernando is 5-3, 5-0--has the potential to be one of the more memorable ones.

For perspective’s sake, the most recent nuts and bolts of a riveting rivalry:

* In the latter half of the 1980s, it has not been difficult for the Tigers to gear up for the Highlanders. Including this season, Granada Hills is 41-9-1 since 1985, a winning percentage of 81.4%. The Highlanders’ start this season is their best of the decade and they have won or shared a league title the past three years.

* Tonight’s game marks the first time since 1985--when both were 3-0 in Valley 4-A League play--that Granada Hills and San Fernando have both entered the game with perfect league records.

* The game’s recent history has been sprinkled with standout individual performances. Last season, San Fernando defensive back Howard McCrary caused a school-record five turnovers, intercepting three passes and recovering two fumbles. In 1987, San Fernando quarterback Joe Mauldin passed for 217 yards and three touchdowns in a losing effort. In 1986, Granada Hills running back Khalid Ali gained 125 yards in 17 carries.

* The game’s importance over the past half-decade has been indisputable--and so have most of the outcomes. Since 1985, only one game has been decided by fewer than 15 points and that came, improbably, during San Fernando’s disastrous 1986 season when Granada Hills defeated the Tigers, 10-3. The average margin of victory since 1985 has been 17.8 points.

* The winner doesn’t even need a victory in next week’s North Valley finale to clinch the league’s No. 1 playoff seeding. If each team finishes 6-1, they would share the league title. Head-to-head competition decides the top playoff berth, however. The league champion receives a first-round bye and could potentially play host to each postseason game.

As is the custom, everything revolves around the Highlanders this time of year at San Fernando.

“When I was (a student), we used to dedicate the whole week to them,” Hernandez said. “We’d have extra meetings, extra film, meet at lunch, stay late at practice, whatever it took. We still do.”

The early emotional edge might swing toward the underdog Tigers. Six weeks ago, several players from Granada Hills and San Fernando attended a game at Kennedy High and verbal volleys were exchanged in the stands. The San Fernando players were ordered by campus security personnel to leave. After the game, two San Fernando players were arrested in a nearby parking lot and several others were detained at gunpoint.

Hernandez, who attended the game and was present during the arrests, insists that his players were unfairly singled out--no Granada Hills players were ejected or arrested. A few days later, Hernandez said, he called Granada Hills co-Coach Darryl Stroh to discuss the episode.

“He said he’s always told his players to sit with their arms folded and to look straight ahead (when they watch other teams play),” Hernandez said. “Yeah, right. Like a kid is going to sit there and not say a word.”

Starr said that contact between the two coaching staffs has virtually ceased. The schools did not exchange game film this week as they have in previous seasons.

“We had all we needed from other coaches,” Hernandez said.

Ditto Granada Hills.

“I didn’t need it from him and he didn’t call me, so I guess he didn’t need it, either,” Stroh said.

The coaches are antsy to get things started because both correctly predicted months ago what tonight’s stakes would be. Pregame butterflies--probably too graceful a species to describe what should be a game of the take-no-prisoners variety--have started to affect all parties.

“It’s been pretty noisy,” Hernandez said of San Fernando’s practices this week. “It’s been pretty physical. We didn’t have to say much to get them going.”

That’s because everybody knew it was coming. Over the past five weeks, the most popular postgame question in both coaches’ offices has been: Anybody hear what (insert Granada Hills or San Fernando here) did tonight?

“I think we’ve done a good job of keeping it in proportion,” Granada Hills quarterback Bryan Martin said. “We knew all season we had a game we had to win that week, but we did kind of look ahead in the schedule. . . . I figured it would come down to this.”

Martin, a junior transfer from MacArthur High in Decatur, Ill., says there were no comparable league rivalries around his old neighborhood. But like Starr, Martin caught on fast.

For too long, it’s been win and wait, win and wait. . . .

“It’s always tough to wait for a game like this,” Stroh said. “The anticipation, the anxiety, can get pretty high.”

Echoed Hernandez: “I’m kinda glad it’s a four-day week. Let’s get out there and get it over with.”