When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  The Spartans have just finished their annual scrimmage with James Logan High School. No one bothered to keep score, but had this been an actual game, the nation’s longest winning streak would’ve been in jeopardy.

  “We have a lot of work ahead but we’ll get there if you’re willing,” Ladouceur told players when they gathered around him after the scrimmage. “We can’t make you great players. We can offer you the opportunity to become great players. You’re ninety percent of the equation. We’re ten percent.”

  The bus takes the players back to De La Salle’s campus, some fifty miles to the north. The day drags into night for the coaches. Eidson drives to San Jose to scout Archbishop Mitty’s season-opening game. The Spartans will host Archbishop Mitty in their own season opener in seven days. Ladouceur and Aliotti follow in another car, and Panella, Geldermann, and Alumbaugh ride in yet another.

  “A lot of teams would wait a couple more years before testing us, but they want to see where they stand,” Eidson says of Mitty. “If the game stays close it can be a huge confidence builder for their program. If they get torn apart it’s like, ‘Well, I guess we’re not that good.’ That’s why I give them credit for playing us.”

  Ladouceur already has broken down film of three of Mitty’s games from last season and methodically assembled a detailed scouting report, but he prefers to scout teams personally so he can gauge their speed, size, and secondary coverages. Besides, he wants to see if Mitty coaches have added any new wrinkles.

  There are seven De La Salle coaches on hand, as well as Pat Hayes, who arrives separately. Hayes’s long white hair makes him look more like a member of the Grateful Dead than a high school football coach.

  He was a teacher and junior varsity assistant coach at De La Salle for thirteen years. Now he contributes by scouting, filming, clipping articles out of local newspapers, and feeding Ladouceur information on game days. Much to his dismay, he is the target of almost constant good-humored ridicule from Ladouceur’s younger assistants.

  Ladouceur has a binder on his lap filled with identical pages divided into quadrants, each one containing an X to represent the center, and circles for the guards and tackles on either side. Panella barks out down, distance, and whether the play will begin from the middle of the field or the right or left hash mark, information that Ladouceur dutifully notes in the left-hand corner of each quadrant before every play. He begins diagramming at the snap of the ball.

  One longtime former assistant claims that Ladouceur has the gift of spatial intelligence. He can see order in the midst of chaos, like a math prodigy who looks at an equation and sees a solution when others see a jumble of letters and numbers.

  He diagrams eleven individual assignments down to the smallest detail. He can see the left guard pulling and the tight end releasing and running a shallow crossing route.

  His assistants fill in blanks, such as calling out the routes run by outside receivers. Aliotti jots down Mitty’s personnel groupings. Eidson watches the offense and special teams.

  “Second-and-six, right hash,” Panella calls out.

  “Straight dive,” Aliotti predicts.

  “Halfback in the flat,” Panella counters before the right tackle jumps offside and the official whistles the play dead.

  “Call me crazy, but the back was going deep behind the quarterback. It could’ve been a double pass,” Hayes ventures.

  “You’re crazy,” Ladouceur says, never taking his eyes off the field.

  This night is equal parts scouting expedition and boys’ night out. The insults and one-liners fly, as is the case whenever this group is together.

  Hayes’s narcolepsy is a source of great amusement. He can fall asleep in any setting. There are often wagers on how long it will take for him to nod off.

  “Are you still up?” Panella teases.

  “The night’s still young,” Hayes answers, bright-eyed and confident. Then a look of enlightenment crosses his face. “Oh, shit. You guys have got a pool going, huh?”

  When Mitty is forced to punt, Aliotti notices the punter lining up shallower than normal.

  “I don’t see a lot of speed on that punt team,” says Eidson, whose special teams units terrorize opponents weekly. “Here’s a suggestion: don’t punt to us!”

  Mitty is ranked twenty-third in one state poll. De La Salle’s season-opening opponent has a talented running back and a big, strong tight end, but isn’t overly threatening.

  Mitty leads by thirty when Hayes’s eyes flutter closed and his chin drops to his chest. “You couldn’t even make it through the first half,” Panella says with mock disgust.

  Hayes jerks awake with a snort. “There’s no love on this staff,” he mutters sleepily.

  Ladouceur has seen enough. Geldermann, Alumbaugh, and Panella have already left. The coach who owns the longest winning streak in history climbs down from the bleachers at the end of a fourteen-hour day and walks through the main gate, disappearing into the darkness of the parking lot, unnoticed.

  The dashboard lights give Eidson’s bearded face a haunting glow during the seventy-five-minute drive back to Concord. He tries to explain the sense of obligation the coaching staff feels toward the game, but most of all toward the players. “My wife doesn’t get upset with me when I’m never home during the season because she knows how hard these kids work,” he says. “It’s when I get home late after a basketball game that she gets upset.”

  So, Eidson is asked, what did he learn on this scouting expedition that he didn’t already know?

  “It taught me that we’ll be 1–0 heading to Hawaii,” he says.

  3

  1971 THE DE LA SALLE EXPERIMENT

  Before there were oleanders, there were walnut trees. No roads led to the construction site. Brother Jerome Gallegos remembers bumpy rides into seemingly nowhere just to reach the location of the new Christian Brothers high school opening in Concord.

  “You couldn’t even call it the boonies,” he said. “There was nothing there, literally nothing.”

  The San Francisco province of the Christian Brothers commissioned a study in the early 1960s that concluded that Concord would experience a population boom. In fact it already had, growing from a sleepy burg of 6,953 in 1950 to a community of 36,000 by 1960. With no other Catholic high schools in Contra Costa County and none slated to open in the next ten years, the Brothers completed plans to found one of three new high schools on the West Coast.

  Contra Costa County was beginning its transformation from an agricultural community to a suburban enclave. Even though the population was steadily rising, this was a risky venture for the Christian Brothers, who typically built schools in major urban centers.

  There wasn’t much of a student population to draw from. There were numerous quality public schools in the immediate area, including Ygnacio Valley High School, which bordered the new school’s 18-acre property. As a result, some Brothers began to quietly refer to the new school as the “De La Salle experiment.”

  “At the ground-breaking ceremony the Diablo Valley College president talked about the experiment of the Brothers leaving the cities and coming to the suburbs,” said former De La Salle student and longtime teacher Pete Kelly. “That was a big question. Did they belong? Would it work?”

  De La Salle was built at the same time as an all-girls private school across the street, run by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. Both schools were designed in the European monastery style, with outdoor courtyards and arcades.

  Carondelet was completed in time for the incoming class of 1965. Construction at De La Salle lagged behind schedule, however, forcing the four Brothers, one lay teacher, and the 115-member inaugural class to take up temporary residence less than a mile away at Most Precious Blood Catholic grammar school.

  The first entrance test was called a “placement test” because administrators didn’t want to scare potential students away. It was scheduled for a Saturday. When the forms had not arrived at the school by Tuesday, Brother Norman
Cook, the founding principal, called the company and was told the tests would arrive via air mail at San Francisco International Airport on Thursday.

  “So I put on my blacks,” Brother Norman remembers. “I had to get results and I was hoping to impress them.”

  His request for his package at the airmail counter created a bustle of activity, which he found curious, even though he was wearing his black robe and collar. His package had indeed arrived, he was told, and had been promptly packed in ice.

  In ice?

  “Here, Brother, is your most precious blood,” an employee said while proudly producing a box covered with ice crystals.

  The package had Most Precious Blood written prominently on it. Employees saw the address and assumed it contained plasma.

  “We had two days to thaw it out and then we were OK,” Brother Norman said.

  The grammar school serving as the temporary facility had no cafeteria, forcing students to bring bag lunches from home or buy their lunch from one of six vending machines. There were no tables. Students sat on benches and ate outside the school.

  The girls from Carondelet were invited to the first school dance. Money was tight, so Brother Norman found a nearby Elks Hall with a jukebox, saving him the cost of a band or disc jockey.

  He and several parents and faculty members were decorating the hall the night of the dance when they discovered that the jukebox only contained one record.

  “We locked the doors and they danced to Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ all night,” Brother Norman chuckled. “I don’t know how they ever recovered.”

  De La Salle was officially dedicated in September 1967, but it took several years before students and faculty were welcomed in the community. Some viewed the Brothers in their black robes with suspicion. Students from neighboring schools looked down on the new private-school students, calling the institution “Gay La Salle,” “Homo High,” or “De La Who?”

  It was not uncommon to see graffiti on various walls of the school on Monday mornings. “Fags” was a popular epithet. It later became school policy to have a maintenance crew erase offensive words before the students arrived for class.

  “A lot of them would not wear De La Salle jackets,” Brother Jerome said. “They preferred being anonymous.”

  Athletics at the school consisted of basketball, baseball, golf, tennis, and cross-country. Soccer was added later. De La Salle competed in the now-defunct Catholic Athletic League and enjoyed limited success in the early days.

  High school football was king in Contra Costa County at the time. Neighboring public schools such as Ygnacio Valley and Concord fielded high-caliber teams. Eventually the Brothers were forced to consider starting a football program. They were losing prospective students who wanted to play. The faculty was divided.

  Administrators were busy trying to keep the doors open. The school was struggling financially, and the provincial council considered closing it. With no wealthy alumni to tap, the Brothers had to come up with creative new ways to raise money.

  It was at a fund-raiser in the school cafeteria in 1970 that Brother Norman noticed an intense-looking man with a blond mop of hair. He appeared too young to have high school–age children.

  “Who is this guy?” Brother Norman thought. “Mafia? A private eye?”

  The man finally introduced himself as Ed Hall. He was a San Francisco police officer interested in launching a football program at De La Salle.

  “I thought, there’s no chance, none,” Brother Norman said. “I told him I didn’t see how we could possibly do it, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  Hall said he would bring fellow officers from San Francisco as his unpaid assistants, and they would raise all the necessary funds themselves. Brother Norman said he would do his best to represent Hall’s cause.

  Hall was determined to make it work and regularly dropped by the school unannounced. Brother Norman’s secretary would tell him that the principal was unavailable. Hall would wait in the reception area until Brother Norman appeared in the doorway.

  “Our initial interviews were based on my persistence and his reluctance to meet with me,” Hall said.

  There had been increasing parental pressure to start a football program, eventually prompting Brother Norman to write a letter to the District Council requesting permission to establish a football program at De La Salle. Because of the school’s substantial operating deficit, he stressed that the program would be financed outside the existing school budget.

  “We believe the athletic program which includes football as an interscholastic sport will greatly benefit De La Salle’s recruitment of freshman students,” Brother Norman wrote in the letter dated November, 14, 1970. “The resultant publicity of a few wins now and then [italics added for emphasis] in the area of the major sports provides a ready springboard for selling our academic and extra-curricular program to a more disposed and receptive public.”

  “I was bullshitting like mad when I wrote that,” Brother Norman said more than thirty years later. “I was saying anything I could to get the program going.”

  Brother Norman’s letter helped convince the council to agree to allow De La Salle to establish a junior varsity football team for the 1971 season.

  It would have been impossible to start a football program without someone like Ed Hall. But this would be a daunting task for anyone, especially someone with a full-time job as a San Francisco police officer and two young children at home.

  The school was in dire financial straits. There was no field, no equipment, and no budget. There weren’t even goal posts. But Ed Hall was a man of intense singular focus.

  The school attracted more merit scholars than potential football stars. Many students arrived at the insistence of their parents. Athletes didn’t gravitate to the school. Hall noticed the absence of the hard-core jock group commonly found at public schools.

  It didn’t fit the profile of a budding football dynasty, but the kids he did have were tougher than they looked, and Hall was convinced that De La Salle was a sleeping giant.

  Hall threw himself into his work. His team lacked size, speed, and experience. He quickly determined that to be successful they would have to rely on the deception of the triple option. He organized golf tournaments and crab feeds to raise money while immersing himself in learning the new offense.

  Football debuted at the school in 1971, on the junior varsity level only. Players carried Ed Hall off the field after the school’s first victory, a 28–0 shutout of Bishop O’Dowd. The Spartans finished their inaugural JV season with a 6–2 record, including a win over the varsity team from the California School for the Deaf. “It was like taking kids off polo horses and putting football helmets on them,” former De La Salle teacher and coach Steve Quirico said. “We had kids who didn’t know how to wear shoulder pads. It was crazy.”

  Hall cut the victory cake after De La Salle upset perennial Catholic Athletic League power Salesian during its first varsity season the following year. A troubling trend was developing, however. The Spartans averaged 7.5 points per game that season and were shut out in three straight games late in the year.

  Hall was a defensive-minded coach who put all his best players on that unit. His teams played hard, hit hard, and were rarely blown out, but his offense continued to flounder during a 3–5–1 season in 1973.

  “I remember when Oakland Tech came to De La Salle in 1973,” Hall said. “I kept telling our kicker not to kick the ball to number twenty-four. He kicked it right to him and Rickey Henderson ran it back for a touchdown. We played St. Elizabeth the following week. They had a big stud fullback, the biggest, meanest-looking guy we played against. Have you ever seen [former Oakland A’s pitcher] Dave Stewart’s beady eyes looking out from under a baseball cap? Well, you should’ve seen them from inside a football helmet.”

  The first “winning season” came in 1974, at least according to the yearbook, which insisted that the team’s record could easily have been 7–2. The yea
rbook staff was using the term “winning” loosely, since the Spartans were the picture of mediocrity at 4–4–1.

  The Spartans were forced to play home games in the heat on Saturday afternoons because their stadium had no lights. This added to their second-class status in local football circles. Only a smattering of parents and students attended home games.

  Hall remembers calling a time-out late in a close game so he could talk strategy with his quarterback. As he walked back to the sideline his eyes wandered. That’s when he noticed four Brothers playing tennis on nearby courts, which summed up the support of the administration.

  “Sometimes we were lucky to get parents and families in the stands,” Brother Jerome said. “It was a very slim turnout. The support for the team was negligible. I used to feel terrible for those kids. They had very little backing.”

  Hall spent so much time at the school that his colleagues wondered when he slept. He raised money for aluminum bleachers that he and his assistants attempted to assemble themselves to save money. When they gazed at their handiwork from afar, they noticed that the entire structure leaned drunkenly to the right. Eventually, professionals had to be hired.

  ★ ★ ★

  Owen Owens sent eight of his children to De La Salle and Carondelet. He was an avid car collector and prominent local newspaper publisher forced into retirement after being diagnosed with leukemia.

  He took great interest in philanthropy in retirement and donated $5,000 for new helmets, also contributing to the scoreboard and other improvements for the field that still bears his name, even though none of his four sons played football.

  “I remember running the jackhammer across the asphalt so we could run conduit to the main building,” Hall says. “My ears rang for a week.”

  Hall believed the best way to raise the visibility of his program was to schedule games with public schools. It wasn’t a popular decision, because De La Salle was still struggling for wins while playing a relatively easy non-league schedule.