Cal Bears Overcome the Impossible

by Randy Shaw, 2007-10-01

Although team sports are supposed to serve as a release valve from the struggles or daily life, for many Bay Area fans it is simply another venue for grief. To paraphrase the classic intro to ABC’s Wide World of Sports, many of us have experienced too few joys of victory and too many agonies of defeat. But on Saturday afternoon in Eugene, Oregon, a sports miracle occurred. In a game that Cal’s valiant football team seem destined lose, and in the most heartrending manner possible---Oregon scoring a tying touchdown on the game’s last play and then winning in overtime---the iron laws of the Cal football Universe suddenly bent. Rather than heartbreak for Cal, it was Duck fans that left the stadium in a trail of tears. No Cal fan that witnessed the game’s climatic play will ever forget it. We have triumphed over the impossible, and should feel emboldened in taking our sense of inspiration into changing the “real” world.

My status as a Cal football fan suffers from a fundamental problem: my first two college years coincided with the school’s best teams for nearly two decades before and two decades after. I got spoiled, and by my third year simply expected Cal to compete for the Rose Bowl each year.

So much for wildly unrealistic and, in retrospect, delusional expectations.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1975, the USC Trojans, who had not lost to UCLA since General Motors pulled up the Los Angeles trolley system, simply had to do their usual to put Cal into the Rose Bowl. But in a game that never got the Congressional investigation it deserved (due to LA’s political clout), USC coach John McKay did everything possible to ensure a Bruin victory.

USC was so vastly superior to UCLA that year that McKay had to work overtime making bizarre coaching calls to ensure his team’s defeat. But he ultimately prevailed, and UCLA, not Cal, went to the Rose Bowl that year (yes, I know UCLA beat Cal that year but that’s a whole different story and does not change McKay’s treachery)

The post-Thanksgiving Day game in 1975 was my most cruel Cal football defeat. But September 29, 2007 was going to come close, particularly given that the referees stole a field goal from Cal---how often do you see announcers call a kick good and the refs say it missed---that would have made the last second heroics irrelevant.

But victory is sweetest when it surmounts our harshest adversities.

Berkeley is known for its commitment to world peace, and I do not believe riots would have broken out had the referees’ ruling on the touchback been overturned on review. But we’ve got a lot of great litigators who are Cal fans, and I foresaw lawsuits by the dozen to reverse such a ruling had the refs given Oregon the ball on the 1-yard line.

But no lawsuits were necessary.

Cal won exactly the type of game it has almost always lost for over thirty years.

Future heartbreak may follow, but Cal fans have experienced the triumph of the impossible. And that is not a feeling we will easily forget.

Send feedback to rshaw@beyondchron.org