Joe Kapp still full of fight — and he has a cause

Joe Kapp played football like a Comanche warrior chasing after his frightened horse. Once, in one of the greatest demolitions not involving gunpowder or a fuse, the former Vikings quarterback ran over a Cleveland linebacker. At the time, the grounds crew in Bloomington, Minn., didn’t know whether to erect a headstone or a plaque. The linebacker, a pretty ferocious guy by the name of Jim Houston, may still be there — orange and brown roadkill.

“For Kapp, a happy-go-lucky soul who is half Mexican, half imp and often half a collision, a game plan is just a bunch of plays selected by his learned coaches, which, if the mood strikes him, he may use. If not, he invents his own,” Sports Illustrated’s Tex Maule wrote at the time.

So, yeah, Kapp could play a little. He was inventive and, most of all, fearless. Famously, his passes wobbled as if they’d been hit by musket fire.

“In that game where I threw seven touchdowns, there might’ve been a couple of spirals in there,” he says, laughing.

That’s right, seven. No one in the NFL has thrown for seven TDs since that September day in 1969. It is just one of the many historical footnotes that belong to the former Newhall Hart High School star. To this day, Kapp is a living scrapbook of gutsy, in-your-face football.

“ ‘Forty for 60’ was the motto of those old Vikings teams,” he says by phone from his Los Gatos home, south of San Francisco. “Forty guys playing for 60 minutes. … That’s what this year’s Vikings are missing.”

Kapp ran over coaches and game plans the way he ran over linebackers. He quarterbacked Cal to a Rose Bowl (1959) and the Vikings to a Super Bowl (1970), then returned to Cal to coach the most improbable finish ever, the trombone-assisted mugging of Stanford (known simply as “The Play”).

“Nobody had more fun playing quarterback than I did,” Kapp says.

It’s hugely possible that nobody had more fun doing anything.

If you love football, I hope you had a chance to see Kapp play. If not, you can catch his progeny this week as USC squares off against Cal. Like his dad, Will Kapp plays with more heart than finesse, as a backup fullback and busy special teams player for this season’s Golden Bears. A redshirt junior, he’s certainly not his dad — neither are you, neither am I, neither is anybody playing football today.

Mostly remembered as the Ultimate Viking, Kapp is a great California story as well. Grew up in Salinas and the suburbs of L.A. Played hoops for Pete Newell. With Brick Muller and Chuck Muncie, remembered as one of the best to ever play at Cal.

Inexplicably shunned by the NFL until the 18th round, he wound up in Canada, where he led the BC Lions to a Grey Cup before returning to the U.S.

He burned brightly if not long as one of the NFL’s elite quarterbacks, becoming by some accounts the game’s highest-paid player.

Yeah, sure, you know your NFL history, but did you realize that Kapp was the Curt Flood of football? We’ll spare you the legal spittle, but after butting heads over the standard player contract, Kapp sued the league, winning a summary judgment that helped ease the owner-slave stranglehold the league once held over players.

“There were other cases, that wasn’t the only case,” he says. “But it was huge in creating free agency for the NFL.”

Kapp much prefers to talk about how he offered to give up his beloved tequila till his Cal team won the Rose Bowl. Or how he had the entire team practicing laterals before that epic Stanford finish — pure happenstance — but a mostly-for-fun drill that would be vital to the last-second heroics.

Yeah, Kapp has some stories, all right.

He tells how he coached the guards and the prisoners in “The Longest Yard,” and of meeting Burt Reynolds, a pretty good athlete himself.

“Burt said, ‘When you saw Burt Lancaster playing Jim Thorpe, who’d you want to be?’

“I told him I wanted to be Jim Thorpe, of course,” Kapp says. “Well, I wanted to be Burt Lancaster,” Kapp recalls Reynolds saying.

In truth, Kapp was more Jim Thorpe than Burt Lancaster ever was, a hard-nosed multisport athlete of mixed ancestry (Mexican-German-rascal-raconteur-hero).

Now, at 72, Kapp’s trademark swagger may be dialed back but he’s still full of fight (while playing for Newell, he once went into the USC locker room to seek revenge over a taunt directed at a black teammate).

And Saturday, he’ll be among the crowd in the Coliseum, the proud paterfamilias watching for Cal’s No. 22, his former number as a collegian.

“He’s his own man, I’ll tell you that” he says of his son Will, the greatest compliment in the Kapp dictionary.

“My dad always said that having fun is no laughing matter,” Will says.

If you happen to spot Joe Kapp this weekend, congratulate him on his son and kid him about having a daughter at USC (a freshman). Slap him on the back and thank him for the memories.

But keep your head on a swivel. Because Joe Kapp usually gets the last lick.

chris.erskine@latimes.com