Bird-Watching : Ventura County Cardinals Fly High in Relative Obscurity of Fledgling Semipro League

Standing on the sideline during a semipro football game, Bo Brooks, the founder, president and 325-pound center of the Ventura County Cardinals, notices a few of his teammates swigging Gatorade directly from the jug. He moves quickly to correct this breach of etiquette.

“Hey, I got cups here,” Brooks says. He begins to unwrap a package of cups, but another emergency arises: His 6-foot-5 body is wanted on the field to fill the void between offensive guards. He pulls a cavernous helmet over his crew cut. The look on his face says: Oh, boy, now I can stop playing executive and have some fun. He spends the next few minutes colliding violently with other large men.

Although a handful of Cardinals still play to keep alive their dream of making the big leagues, Brooks and most of his teammates endure the pain and punishment purely for the primal pleasure of playing tackle football.

“I love to hit, but am I sore after games,” says Miller Aupiu, a 25-year-old linebacker who played at Moorpark College. “Man, it takes four or five days before I lose the soreness.”

Players get paid in soreness and satisfaction, not cash. The Cardinals--along with the other seven teams in the 2-year-old Southern California Football League--are semipro only in spirit and character. The league is a refuge for players--many of them ex-collegians--who get bored playing flag football and think touch football is for girls.

“We’re in the toughest (semipro) league in the country,” claims Brooks, whose team won last season’s title.

Judging by the intensity of play, prima donnas need not apply in the SCFL, where running backs stay in bounds and receivers go over the middle. And there is nothing minor about the hitting. During a recent game on a foggy evening at Nordhoff High in Ojai, the Cardinals and the Sacramento Heat made major contact.

“You don’t hear noise much better than that in the NFL, folks,” P.A. announcer John Zentner says about the sounds of violence, “and you pay a lot more money to get in.”

The Cardinals charge only $4 for adults and $1 for children, not enough to pay the players even if a crowd showed up. Fewer than 100 fans, apparently friends and relatives of the players, occupied the bleachers to watch the Cardinals and the Heat. And Brooks depends on gate receipts. An “ex-schoolteacher” turned accountant, he pays all the team’s expenses and is on an eternal search for a “large sponsor.”

But Brooks keeps slogging through the hassles. “It’s a labor of love,” says Brooks, a Venturan who graduated from Cal State Los Angeles in 1980.

In the minors, something always seems to go wrong. Programs don’t arrive from the printer. Players get stuck in traffic. Games start late. The P.A. doesn’t work. Discipline is often difficult to enforce: Life sometimes gets in the way of football.

Some of his players, Brooks says, even “have a bad habit of showing up late for games, but I’m trying to cure them.” And to accomplish that, Brooks says, “I will have to become a benevolent dictator.”

But Brooks finds it difficult to crack the whip. Several players are late for the Sacramento game--and Brooks accepts their excuse about an accident on the freeway. The Heat, however, has negotiated its eight-hour journey without incident, arriving an hour before kickoff. Despite Brooks’ assurance that SCFL games “always start on time,” this one will begin 40 minutes late.

His brow wrinkled, Brooks leaves the locker room with linebacker Paul Lee, discussing last-minute strategy, and then must deal with another mundane detail. “Hey, Pete, help me out,” he says to a man by a goal post at the open end of the field. “Stand here and make sure nobody tries to get in without a ticket.”

While minor league baseball gets a romanticized treatment from the media, minor league football is virtually ignored. It has neither traditions nor rhythms nor sentimental nostalgia--nobody has ever waxed poetic about minor league football linking the generations.

But it does have a casual folksiness that isn’t permitted in other brands of organized football. On one end of the field, for example, as the Cardinal defense conducts a drill, trying not to crush the kids playing with a football, Aupiu is interrupted by his young daughter, who pads up to him and grabs his hand.

Anybody who has grown to dislike the stodginess of the NFL would get a kick out of a Cardinal game. “We need four people to help us with the chain gang,” the P.A. blares a few minutes before kickoff. Four kids volunteer, get a crash course from the officials, and become instant experts at moving the markers.

Aside from their SCFL title, the Cardinals can boast of the player with probably the longest hair in football--Aupiu’s mane spills from his helmet to the middle of his back--and “the oldest player in America in organized football,” according to the P.A. announcer. Bob Blechen, the Cardinals’ 6-5, 280-pound offensive lineman--soon to be 56--amazes teammates. Like Timex, he takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Jimmy Connors, George Foreman, eat your hearts out.

“Hey, Methuselah, it’s game time,” Brooks says to Blechen.

As the teams line up for the kickoff, the P.A. announcer explains that each team has a 2-2 record, melodramatically adding: “It’s the Desperation Bowl.” To which Cardinal defensive lineman Dave Davis says: “That guy thinks he’s Chick Hearn.”

After a scoreless first quarter, the offenses are having problems and so is the announcer: “Will the Heat please update their rosters at halftime?”

The Cardinal defense put the Sacramento quarterback out of the game with a bruised shoulder. Aupiu, who says he never gets his hair pulled by opposing players, is the team’s most explosive defensive player, forcing the Heat to run its plays away from his side. Newcomer Lee Jaitt impresses his teammates with an interception that sets up the Cardinals’ only touchdown.

Jaitt--so new to the team that he didn’t have time to sew his name on his jersey--is out of breath. “I’m not even close to being in shape,” the former Oxnard High linebacker says. He hopes to try out in January with the Sacramento Surge of the World League of American Football. Playing with the Cardinals, he says, will allow him to “hit and get in shape. Where’s the oxygen mask?”

At the start of the third quarter, the Cardinals are nursing a 7-0 lead and Brooks is nursing an aching neck, holding an ice pack to it. But Brooks has to get off the bench to shoo a fan who has strayed onto the field in violation of the team’s insurance policy. Then Brooks is back in the game. But how can he concentrate on football when he’s worrying about liability? He snaps the ball over the quarterback, who is in the shotgun, and the Heat gets a safety.

Brooks trudges to the sideline, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible for someone who is bigger than a telephone booth. Coach Joe Davis goes over and asks Brooks to switch positions with Blechen. Brooks argues mildly but doesn’t pull rank and gives in.

“When the game’s on, he’s not the owner,” says Davis, who is offensive coordinator at Oxnard High under his father Jack.

With only a few minutes to go, the Cardinals sit on their slim lead, a slowdown tactic that is duly noted by the announcer: “Here’s another of those over-left-tackle-for-a-yard-and-a-half plays.”

Later in the game, when the Cardinals’ Dave Davis tackles the quarterback on third down, “the Heat (is) forced to punt for probably the 15th or 20th time,” Zentner says.

Lee, who played at Cal State Long Beach, preserves the 7-2 victory with an interception--his third of the game--with a little more than a minute to play and is congratulated by teammates and well-wishers. For a few moments, he flashes on those golden days of his youth.

“Sometimes, juggling work and practice gets you down,” the 33-year-old physical therapist says, “but this is all about playing football on Saturday.”

Just don’t forget practice. “Show up this week,” assistant Steve Henry tells the players after the game.