Still a Kick

It’s not exactly USC-UCLA.

But tonight’s game between the Santa Paula Cardinals and the Fillmore Flashes stands as Ventura County’s oldest high school football rivalry, played on the gridirons of the Santa Clara River valley since the days when the helmets were made of leather and John Calvin Coolidge was president.

“It’s bragging rights for the valley,” said Bob Gonzales, a Santa Paula High School middle linebacker in 1967 and 1968, and now a commander with the Santa Paula Police Department. “You can put the league standings aside, you can put the odds aside. In this rivalry, anything goes.”

Since the games started in 1924, the teams have met every year, sometimes playing twice a year, except for two: They skipped 1942 because of World War II, and 1969 due to a scheduling glitch.

For the record, Santa Paula has won 46 meetings, Fillmore 33, and seven of the clashes have ended in ties.

No matter. That was then.

What matters, today’s players and coaches say, is what happens on Santa Paula’s Jones Field after tonight’s 7:30 kickoff.

“This is the game everybody’s been talking about since the beginning of the season,” said Fillmore starting quarterback Phillip Zavala.

And it is not necessarily the “friendly” rivalry everyone likes to say it is, he said.

It is, after all, a football game.

Leon Blythe, 70, a 1945 Fillmore High School graduate, remembers those leather helmets well. No face masks. Hardly any pads. Bone-crushing tackles.

“You didn’t give them any quarter at all,” he said. “If you buried him, you buried him.”

Still, old and new players say that when the game is over, the rivalry ends.

“It isn’t a hate thing, it’s a rivalry thing,” said Santa Paula coach Robert “Hoppy” Mumford. “In the last three years against Fillmore, we’ve only had 20 yards in penalties. We teach the kids to focus on the football game. I know it’ll be a good football game.”

Neither team has a winning record this year, but coaches say the squads are pretty evenly matched.

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Fillmore coach Norm Andersen, a history teacher at the school, said he just wants to see his players give their best tonight. The game is a big deal to the Flashes, he said. But he wonders whether his players really grasp the historic significance of a game like this.

“They seem like they’re affected by it more than they understand it,” Andersen said. “They know it’s going to be a heck of a game. As to why, they don’t have a clue.”

But the history of the game runs deep in these parts. Little more separates these two teams than the 10 miles of sprawling citrus and avocado orchards that lie between the two cities.

Over the years, plenty of Fillmore guys have married Santa Paula girls. Plenty of residents live in one city and work in the other.

They will run into one another at community functions, restaurants and gas stations, maybe offering a chance for one guy to remember the time he carried the other two over the goal line on his back.

The border gets even more blurred by extended families.

Take tonight’s two starting quarterbacks, Santa Paula’s Willie Zavala, and Fillmore’s Phillip Zavala.

They are cousins. Grandma, Willie jokes, will take her seat in the middle of the bleachers--what may be the only neutral ground going.

“To us, it’s like our championship game,” Willie said. “We wait all year just to play them.”

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To be sure, the Fillmore-Santa Paula match up is a big-time rivalry in rapidly disappearing small-town Southern California.

When Fred Stewart played right end for Santa Paula in 1934, there were only about 3,000 people living in Fillmore and 7,500 in Santa Paula.

The two cities may have grown, but not by Southern California’s standards. Fillmore’s population stands at just 12,850 residents; Santa Paula’s, 26,500.

At 80 years old, Stewart doesn’t make it out to many games anymore. But, he said, it’s nice to see the old rivalry is alive and well.

“There aren’t too many small towns left around Southern California any more,” Stewart said. “We’re both agricultural-based towns and the people are about the same, and a lot of us have lived here forever. That helps maintain the friendly attitude.”

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Score Card

Since 1924, the Fillmore and Santa Paula high school football teams have met 86 times going into tonight’s game at Jones Field in Santa Paula. The results:

* Santa Paula: 46 wins

* Fillmore: 33 wins

The teams tied seven times.