Play It Again

You may have seen the videotape over the years and, if not, you’ll no doubt get another chance this week to savor “The Play,” the California Bears’ wild-eyed run into college football history.

The 20th anniversary of Cal’s helter-skelter dash for the Stanford end zone arrives this week and, as one who was there, I am here to say: Check out the videotape that will make the sports highlight shows this week. Listen to the sports blooper-style descriptions that spill off the commentators’ tongues. And know that being there was so much better.

In Berkeley, there is many a path to personal identity. Drummers stage daylong jams on the quad. Hacky sacks fly from the feet of young men in dreadlocks. A Chaucer scholar strides across campus in combat boots. And an optimistic few wrap themselves in blue and gold and make the climb up the hill to Memorial Stadium. They make up perhaps the oddest clique of all -- that of the Cal football fan.

By the time “The Play” rolled around on Nov. 20, 1982, I had been fully indoctrinated into this quirky subculture. I had four years of undergraduate rooting under my belt. I’d joined friends on an implausible motor home odyssey all the way to Nebraska, where we met kindly farmers and watched giant red Cornhuskers roll over the scrappy Golden Bears. I’d once even broken into the stadium on the hill in Berkeley with my drunken pals and spent a night on the field near the “Andy Smith Bench”. (Smith coached Cal to several undefeated seasons in the 1920s.) And, only a year before, I had been sports editor of the campus paper, the Daily Californian.

By game day two decades ago, this native Southern Californian had bought into the culture of the Golden Bears. That meant obsessing on the Cal-Stanford rivalry above all others and earnestly accepting that the annual football showdown truly was “The Big Game.”

Stanfordites fill the stadium with catcalls at us “weenies,” and maybe even float a giant helium-filled frankfurter over the stands to make their point. Cal fans respond by storming the field and tackling the Stanford mascot -- a giant, dancing tree. Anyone wearing “lowly Stanford red” into Cal’s rooting section probably will leave shirtless and, possibly, bruised.

In the decade leading up to the 1982 game, several Cal-Stanford matchups had come down to the last possession. The schools’ all-time series was close to even (OK, Stanford won a few more games) and the two teams, after nearly 100 years of football, had scored nearly an identical number of points. Who needed Rose Bowls?

Cal (6-4) had the home-field advantage that year, playing in intimate Memorial Stadium (once rated by a national sports magazine as one of the best places in the country to watch bad football). But Stanford (5-5) had something better, it seemed. It had the best player on the field and maybe the best in the country, quarterback John Elway.

Even before its sublime ending, the game unfolded as a classic.

The Bears’ first two touchdowns came on brilliant catches that would have been the talk of any other season. Mariet Ford, a diminutive wide receiver, delivered the first score with a diving catch at the back of the end zone, clawing an overthrown ball into his body from a full layout position. In the fourth quarter, Cal retook the lead when beefy Wes Howell went horizontal just across the goal line and snagged the ball in his giant, basketball player hands.

By then, Stanford fans had seen enough of Cal and the referees. Each time Cal quarterback Gale Gilbert threw the ball, no matter how far off the mark, they would rise and thrust their hands over their heads in mock “touchdown!” salutes .... Smart alecks.

Cal’s two early leads did not last and, as the shadows began to lengthen over Strawberry Canyon, Elway got the ball back one last time. There was only 1:27 left. Everyone present knew this uber athlete was more than prepared to bring Stanford back again.

At first, luck was with the Bears. Elway first threw for a loss, then had two passes fall incomplete. Stanford faced fourth down and 17 yards to go, deep in its own end of the field. I could say it seemed to be a miracle that Elway picked his way free of the ferocious Cal blitz on fourth down, before firing the ball 29 yards downfield in a perfect strike to wide receiver Emile Harry. It seemed to be what always happens when Cal and harsh reality collide.

Stanford kicker Mark Harmon was soon on the field and we watched, our stomachs in knots, as the inevitable field goal fell through the goal posts in the north end zone. Stanford seemed to have it won, 20-19. When the Leland Stanford Jr. University marching band struck up its fight song, “All Right Now,” all we could do was gape at the field, zombie-like.

Our sick-hearted anger and gallows attempts at a few new expletives may have been all that kept us in the stands for what happened next. We watched Stanford kick the ball off to a Cal team so disorganized and demoralized that it managed, initially, to get only nine members of the kickoff return team on the field.

Wide receiver Andy Bark, one of those who should have been on the field, told me recently that he was so dispirited that he was already walking off the field, his head down.

To even approach the sense of wonder at what happened next, don’t watch the videotape. Instead, try to listen to the radio call of Cal’s longtime play-by-play man, Joe Starkey. A Web site for Bear fanatics (www.cyberbears.org) carries a clip of Starkey’s call (click on “The Play,” audio).

What it lacks in accuracy and precision -- Starkey never did spit out the word “lateral” -- the frantic radio account more than makes up for with emotional wallop.

When the short kick from Stanford landed near midfield, it was picked up by a veteran defensive back and former high school option quarterback, Kevin Moen. Moen, now a real estate broker on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, immediately looked to the sideline where a fellow defensive back and former high school option man, Richard Rodgers, was lurking.

Moen’s overhand toss reached Rodgers cleanly and he began picking his way upfield, with Stanford defenders coming on hard. At that point, Rodgers stopped abruptly and pitched back to a freshman running back, Dwight Garner, who was promptly met by three or four Stanford tacklers. Garner began to crumple to the turf but managed to keep his upper body free and twisted backward to push another lateral back to Rodgers. Stanford fans seem to feel obligated to insist that Garner’s knee hit the ground at this point, and that the play should have been whistled dead. (Seemingly, there is no sense of serendipity, down on The Farm.)

The play was not blown dead, allowing Rodgers to loop back to the middle of the field, with Ford, the agile receiver, sweeping convoy-style, on his outside shoulder. Soon, the ball was in Ford’s hands and he was speeding straight toward the end zone.

By this time, the floppy-hatted Stanford band had seen the clock reach 00:00 and decided it was time to take the field for a late fall frolic. A good quarter of the turf was covered with red and white band members -- not to mention extra players and penalty flags by the time Ford completed the fifth, last, and most miraculous lateral of all.

The Bears’ most valuable player threw himself at two of the last Stanford defenders, while blindly flinging the ball over his shoulder. The now magical pigskin hung in the air for a moment, before dropping neatly into the hands of Moen, who had set the whole exchange in motion. No. 26 rumbled past the last Stanford defender and into the end zone, where his jubilant leap into the air carried him crashing into Gary Tyrrell and his unfortunate trombone.

People are lying if they tell you that, in that moment, they knew what happened. All of us waited, hearts in our mouths, as the referees huddled on the far sideline to decide who had won the game.

But, in another measure of the bedlam that had descended, a scruffy fan in a brown Windbreaker had made his way to the edge of the referees’ huddle. It was not referee Charles Moffett but this Unknown Cal Fan who first emerged from the officials’ circle and threw his hands skyward. Touchdown Bears!

On the radio, Starkey gasped and then hurtled into one last, breathless, exultation:

“And the Bears ... the Bears have won ... The Bears have won! Oh my God! The most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heart-rending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football!”

The stadium erupted. Never before or since have I rushed a field. But on this day, there was really no choice. Suddenly our feet were flying down the wooden benches toward the field. I was hugging strangers. I was smacking a very large offensive lineman (George Niualiku, who played every down that season) on the shoulders and shrieking. Who knows what I said? Who cares?

In the south and west grandstands, the bulk of the Stanford faithful remained locked in their places, as if frozen in their tracks by some giant, unseen lava flow.

The celebration only got richer in the moments after Cal’s 25-20 win.

On television that night we saw the Stanford coaches mewling over how they had been cheated. They would miss a trip to the Hall of Fame Bowl that year and at, the end of the next season, coach Paul Wiggin would be out of a job. Some said he never quite recovered from “The Play.”

Elway stood in the locker room and ranted about how the officials “ruined” his last college game, turning it into “a farce and a joke.” Was that even a sniffle we heard from Big John? Nah, just wishful thinking. I talked to a Stanford teammate the other day who said that, if the rumors are true, Elway has gotten over the ignominy of Nov. 20 and could even smile about the outcome now. That’s nice.

Moen said he has attended so many tributes over the years, including the 100th anniversary of the Big Game a few years back, that he sees more of trombonist Tyrrell than he does of his old teammates. Tonight, on the eve of this season’s game, some Cal and Stanford players from the 1982 teams will gather for the first time “to swap stories and have a good time,” said Moen, one of the organizers.

He still enjoys hearing what everyone else saw and heard that afternoon. All the perspectives assure that the tale of Moen-to-Rodgers-to-Garner-to-Rodgers-to-Ford-to-Moen becomes etched still deeper in the Cal memory book.

One day soon, I will take my three kids to the Big Game. I will ask them to breathe deep the air of another crisp Northern California fall. And I’ll ask them to look out on one playing field where the inevitable wasn’t, the possible was and we had reason to believe that the whole world was opening up before us.

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Five laterals to victory

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