Stand Up and Holler for Team Spirit

Have you ever heard of the Brentwood Eagles?

Probably not, unless you happen to have a son or daughter in Brentwood School. (Or a grandson or granddaughter.)

Having a child or grandchild in a school changes one’s whole perspective. We in Los Angeles live in a Valhalla of sports. We have the Lakers, the Dodgers, the Clippers, the Kings, the Raiders and the Rams, among the pros, as well as the USC Trojans and UCLA Bruins at the college level.

It’s a feast. Our loyalties may be as diverse as the flowers that bloom on our hills. Since my two sons attended UCLA, I have been a die-hard UCLA fan, through good seasons and bad. My loyalty has shifted from the Lakers to the Clippers, though their days of glory still lie in the future. As for pro football, I am no longer excited by either the Raiders or the Rams. What ever happened to Jim Plunkett and Jack Youngblood? Of course Fred Dryer became a TV cop.

However, there are dozens of high schools and colleges in the Southland that play with even more spirit than the pros, and they do it without million-dollar paychecks. Since we have two grandchildren in Brentwood, we went to their homecoming games on a recent Saturday.

It was a festive day. The football field lies below a fringe of eucalyptus trees, bougainvillea and flowering oleander. Balloons bobbed in the light ocean breeze above the grandstand.

We sat in front of my son, Curt, and his wife, Gail. Gail wore a button that said, “My son is 32.” My wife wore one that said, “My grandson is 32.” They established our credentials and fixed our loyalties.

Actually there are two Brentwood Eagles teams--the Junior Varsity Eagles and the Varsity Eagles. Our grandson, Casey, being only 14, plays on the Junior Varsity. Their game was first.

When the teams came out to warm up we looked for No. 32. There he was, looking strangely bulky and warlike in his helmet, face mask and pads, like a Neanderthal in costume.

The Eagles wore black jerseys; their opponents, the Campbell Hall Vikings Junior Varsity, wore white. They looked as formidable as the Eagles--ferocious, in fact.

I began to wonder if my son hadn’t been right, after all, in urging Casey not to go out for football. He was only a boy, and football is a sport in which big men often get hurt. Watching those kids bumping each other about in their heavy outfits gave me a moment’s apprehension. A fleeting glory on the field is hardly worth a broken leg. I remembered that Casey had broken an arm sliding into second base. So he was vulnerable.

While the boys were exercising, 11 girls came out in short-skirted dresses with blue and white stripes. They were the Junior Varsity Cheerleading Squad. When the game started they began yelling and clapping their hands to arouse the home crowd. Now and then one would give a high kick, like the girls in the Folies Bergere.

Their yells were mindlessly simple:

“Get’m, get’m, get’m, and when you get’m, get’m good! “

I kept my eye on No. 32. He made a couple of tackles. Got’m good. Since Brentwood and its opponent are small schools, there were only eight men on each team. There were only about half a dozen subs on each bench. The field was only 80 yards long, instead of the usual 100.

The enthusiasm and energy of the Junior Varsity Cheerleading Squad was boundless.

“Shout it out! Shout it out! Brentwood Eagles!”

I will not go into the details of the game. I am no longer a sports writer and there are intricacies of football today that I don’t understand. One is supposed to watch the guards, I’m told, but of course we watched No. 32. Anyway there should have been a big story about the game in the next day’s Times.

Suffice it to say that the Eagles won by a score of 56-12 -- a score one-sided enough to gratify the homecoming crowd. The game produced several heroes, but I will not name individual stars except to say that Scott Fagan kicked a 37-yard field goal. Casey scored two touchdowns and didn’t get hurt, though my son predicted, “He’ll be sore in the morning.”

Between the games we had turkey burgers, Brentwood’s answer to the Dodger Dog. My son left us to help out with the cooking.

We couldn’t stay for the varsity game, but since our granddaughter, Alison, was a member of the Brentwood Varsity Cheerleading Squad, we stayed until its nine members came out and began their routines. They were a couple of years older than the Junior Cheerleaders and it showed.

Mainly, I wanted to see if my granddaughter could kick like the girls in the Folies Bergere.

She could.

Jack Smith’s column is published Mondays.