When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  If De La Salle is forced to punt here, Poly will have great field position and the momentum that has eluded it to this point. This is the biggest play of the game thus far, and Ladouceur bends at the waist, hands on his knees, watching nervously as Cecil takes a short drop and throws a quick slant to Fitzgerald, who is blanketed by a Poly defender. Fitzgerald leaps, reaching high above his head, and makes a circus catch for a critical 15-yard gain.

  It’s the best catch of the year, better even than Colvin’s juggling catch against St. Louis, especially considering the circumstances.

  “That’s the play of the game,” Panella tells Aliotti.

  A few plays later, Cecil rolls left on third-and-13 from the De La Salle 26-yard line and completes another pass to a wide-open Fitzgerald at the 45. Fitzgerald cuts back to shed the free safety and is all alone, galloping over a seemingly endless field of green on a 74-yard run and catch that caps a 99-yard drive.

  Cecil crosses the goal line on a keeper for the two-point conversion and a commanding twenty-one-point lead. At that point, the Spartans would gladly have played through the day and deep into the night.

  Fitzgerald, it turns out, had heard a Poly defender tell his teammates not to worry about number twenty-four before he caught the slant pass for the first down. He was just a possession receiver, the defensive back had said. Colvin was the only De La Salle receiver they had to concern themselves with.

  “That’s what people thought of me,” Fitzgerald would later say. “I was just a possession receiver. I don’t want to be known as just anything. That says I’m incapable of other things. It limits my capabilities.”

  Mulvanny is eighty-five pounds lighter than the offensive tackle assigned to block him, but he continues to make plays. He drops a Poly running back for a 2-yard loss. Sandie hits Jackson as he throws two plays later. Jackson throws deep over the middle on third-and-6 but his receivers have run the wrong routes and nearly collide. Poly eventually turns the ball over on downs.

  “They’re not that big but they’re not that little, either,” Lara says afterward. “Everybody is making it sound like they have little tiny guys playing on the line. They’re not little tiny guys. They’re short, stocky, strong guys who get it done. The discipline part helps them, the strength, the conditioning. Once again, we thought we were going to take the third quarter but they continued to execute.”

  Drew won’t find the end zone but finishes with 161 yards on nineteen carries.

  “We knew about Drew this year and focused on tackling him,” Lara said. “He’s a phenomenal athlete. We couldn’t bring him down. I thought that was the difference: Drew.”

  Drew picks up nine yards on a sweep left before Cecil rolls right and throws a shallow crossing route to tight end Terrance Kelly. Kelly catches the ball in midstride, outrunning the linebacker assigned to cover him, and cuts up the sideline where Aharon Bradley is making another key downfield block.

  Bradley is the younger brother of Alijah Bradley, whom Poly had geared their defense to stop the year before. He is a senior but this is his first year of football at De La Salle.

  “Let’s give Aaron some props,” Ladouceur had said during the team meeting the week before. “I like the way he practices.” His teammates clapped and howled, applauding his effort against the first-team defense. Bradley smiled, proud, and looked at the floor. “He’s got a great attitude. He hits and he’s not afraid of the defense. He doesn’t get shit for blocking half the time but he’s got some guts. He’s got some guts. I admire that. I’m glad you’re on the team.”

  Meanwhile, Kelly is quietly becoming one of the most respected players on the team, which is rare for a junior. He’s a steady linebacker and is turning into a playmaker as a tight end.

  Cecil holds his arms over his head in triumph as Kelly crosses the goal line. De La Salle leads 28–0 with 3:26 left in the third quarter. Cecil began the game with no touchdown passes as a varsity quarterback. Now he has three in the biggest game of the season.

  He was so well prepared, he didn’t have to think. He just knew. The game was unfolding slowly, even if this was the fastest defense he had ever played against.

  He finishes the game with twelve completions in seventeen attempts for 237 yards. He throws for three touchdowns and runs for another. He picks up first downs at critical moments and does not turn the ball over.

  It was Britt Cecil’s job not to lose games. Nobody expected him to win them, especially a game of this magnitude, or so it seemed as the season began. But he no longer can be considered an unknown, or worse, a liability. He played a more prominent role against St. Louis because of Drew’s injury, and he delivered. Now this.

  Matt Gutierrez threw for 300 yards and six touchdowns against Mater Dei in 1999, but Ladouceur will later call this the greatest performance ever by a De La Salle quarterback. Despite the many newspaper articles that will trumpet Britt Cecil’s performance all over the state the next day, those words, coming from Ladouceur—after all they have been through—mean the most.

  The Jackrabbits have a first-and-goal at the Spartans’ 1-yard line after driving the length of the field on their next possession. Drew lines up outside the defensive end like a sprinter ready to explode from the blocks. There is no one there to stop him.

  Drew flies in from the side and drops the running back for a 1-yard loss to set up second-and-goal from the 2. Jackson fumbles the exchange on the next play. Drew scoops it up, and for a brief moment it appears that he will return it all the way, scoring on a 98-yard fumble return that will serve as a stunning exclamation point to a two-year sweep.

  But at the last moment, just when he is breaking away, a Poly player grabs Drew by the ankle and hangs on for dear life.

  There’s no one on the field who is having more fun than Chris Biller, who grins in the huddle in anticipation of the next play.

  The call from the sideline is “38 power,” one of the playbook’s basics. Biller pulls down the line, stands up the linebacker, and is pushing him back when another Poly defender falls onto the back of his legs. Biller crumples to the turf and bites down hard on his mouthpiece, the worst pain he has ever felt exploding like fireworks up and down his left leg.

  It is later diagnosed as a hairline fracture of his left fibula. He knows the injury will sideline him for weeks, perhaps the entire season, but he is too content to feel sorry for himself.

  “I wasn’t thinking about the rest of the season,” he said. “I was just happy with the way the game was going. I was grateful to have played. I went from out for the season to starting and playing pretty well in the biggest game of the season. I felt satisfied with that.”

  The final score is 28–7, and Ladouceur has never been so emotional after a game. He calls it the greatest win in school history. He knows how vulnerable his team was earlier in the year, how players doubted themselves. Later, he will admit that this is his crowning achievement as a coach.

  In many ways, Britt Cecil’s story is a microcosm of the team as a whole. Ladouceur has never coached a team that came this far, this fast. This team is no longer living off De La Salle lore. It has created its own.

  “They played way beyond expectations,” Ladouceur said later. “They put together an almost perfect game, and Britt Cecil led the charge. I would’ve never dreamed he would’ve had a game like that. There were heroes all over the field. I feel that game embodied the spirit of our program in a lot of ways.”

  Poly players wander around the field in a daze while others cry or lie on the field with disbelieving looks on their faces. This game has been a focal point since the last loss to De La Salle. They were convinced it would be different this time. Instead, it was total domination in all phases. De La Salle rushed for 237 yards to Poly’s 45. De La Salle passed for 237 yards to Poly’s 213. The Spartans had four sacks and allowed none.

  “They execute everything,” linebacker Mark Washington tells reporters. “They’re almost on a college level. Their coach has them ready for every situatio
n.”

  “Their hearts were bigger than ours today,” Parish says.

  17

  1986–87 COLLISION COURSE

  The high school football community was clamoring for it, but it wasn’t going to happen. They weren’t going to play each other. No way. The programs were too intertwined. There was too much at stake. It had nothing to do with football. This was about close friends and family.

  Rob Stockberger and Bob Ladouceur worked for the local parks and recreation department during the summer of 1971. Rob had been introduced to his future wife at the Ladouceur home on Broadmoor Drive. Bob and Rob roomed together at San Jose State and drove home together on weekends.

  Bob didn’t realize that his future was in coaching until he helped Rob with the junior varsity team at Monte Vista High School. Rob helped Bob land his first paid coaching job at the school a year later.

  Bob was twenty-four when he got the head coaching job at De La Salle in 1979. Rob was twenty-five when he was named head coach at Monte Vista in 1981. By 1986 they had built two of the most prominent football programs in the Bay Area, if not all of Northern California. They shared the same philosophies and middle-class values. They started out coaching youth baseball together. Now they were ushering in a new era in Bay Area prep football.

  Their training techniques, conditioning programs, and practice plans were so similar that their programs were almost mirror images of each other. Monte Vista played on Friday nights. De La Salle played on Saturdays. Ladouceur scouted Monte Vista’s upcoming opponent on Friday night, and Stockberger returned the favor the next day. Then they swapped scouting reports.

  “Rob started his coaching career before me and set a standard for me to shoot for,” Ladouceur said. “I used to go and just watch Monte Vista games. I was a big fan of theirs. I admired the way they executed and the way the kids responded and the heart they played with. I really admired those teams. I wanted to bring our teams to that level.”

  De La Salle emerged as a local power in 1982, Ladouceur’s fourth season. That team outscored opponents 425–56 and featured 175-pound all-state nose guard Pat Oswald. It finished 12–0, and won the school’s first North Coast Section 2A football championship.

  Stockberger’s Mustangs won the 4A title that same season, on the same night, in the same stadium. It was a memorable evening, with De La Salle and Monte Vista winning championships in back-to-back games at the Oakland Coliseum.

  There was a big party afterward. Half of the cake that Bob’s mother cut was decorated with red and white frosting for Monte Vista. The other half was green and white in honor of De La Salle.

  The Spartans won the 2A title again in 1984 but weren’t viewed as a regional threat until they thrashed longtime Bay Area superpower Bellarmine of San Jose 37–14 in the 1985 season opener.

  That got the attention of USA Today’s Dave Krider, who became an overnight high school football king-maker when his national rankings were introduced in the “nation’s newspaper” in 1982. Krider’s rankings became the gold standard for prep sports, spurring interest and controversy in every state and making the accomplishments of a humble private-school team in Concord, California, nationally known.

  De La Salle went undefeated again that year, outscoring opponents 567–138, and finished the season ranked twenty-third in the Super 25 High School Football Poll. It was the first national recognition for the program.

  Bob and Rob piloted the top private school and public school football programs in the East Bay and were often asked about the possibility of a non-conference matchup. They refused. There were enough quality teams to play.

  Then in 1986 the Catholic Athletic League was dissolved, De La Salle was elevated to 3A status, and the decision was out of their hands. From that point on, Stockberger and Ladouceur were on a collision course.

  It would’ve been simpler had it just been those two. But their staffs were also interlaced with family connections.

  Tom Ladouceur, Bob’s older brother, was Stockberger’s assistant at Monte Vista. De La Salle’s defensive coordinator, Luke Wurzel, was married to Stockberger’s sister-in-law, Linda.

  Rob, Tom, Bob, and Luke all lived within a mile of one another in San Ramon, and the families socialized often. The Stockbergers lived across the street and one house down from the Wurzels.

  A meeting appeared more and more inevitable as the two teams steamrolled opponents during the 1986 season. Both teams finished undefeated and were the top seeds in the playoffs. Tom Jr. tried to break the mounting tension by carrying a sign to scout his brother’s team in the playoff semifinals: GOD RIDES WITH THE MUSTANGS, it read.

  “In the back of our minds we were rooting for that game,” Tom recalls. “Deep down we all wanted to know how we would do.”

  When the matchup came to pass, there were storylines galore, and Bay Area newspapers ate them up. It was the first time in nine years that both 3A finalists were undefeated. Both programs were vying for a fourth NCS title. “Goliath vs. Goliath” was how one newspaper described the matchup in a bold headline.

  Several newspapers detailed the family ties angle. The Contra Costa Times pictured the four coaches on the front page of the sports section, but not even that image could illustrate how interwoven these two teams were.

  The De La Salle roster included ten players from the Danville community that Monte Vista served. Many of them had attended grade school and played Little League with Monte Vista players.

  Both coaching staffs prepared intensively for the big event. So did their extended families.

  Stockberger’s dog often crossed the street to visit Luke Wurzel. When Rob whistled for Buddy to come home one day that week, his terrier walked into the house dressed in a De La Salle T-shirt.

  “An NCS Championship game in and of itself is a huge emotional event,” Stockberger said. “It’s huge. Add to that the whole family dynamic and it was pretty big, pretty emotional.”

  A record crowd of 12,228 showed up at the Oakland Coliseum for the game, many of them expecting the established 3A power to break the gaudy 32-game winning streak the upstart Spartans carried into the showdown.

  Monte Vista took a 7–0 lead after picking off a De La Salle pass on the first possession of the game. “It looks like these guys have finally met their match,” said a sideline observer after De La Salle went three-and-out on its second offensive series.

  De La Salle took a 21–7 halftime lead. Monte Vista hadn’t given up 21 points in a game all season.

  The final score was 24–7. The Monte Vista offense entered the game averaging 413 yards per game but finished with only 143 against De La Salle.

  Ladouceur had expected the game to go down to the wire. He walked off the field surprised by how easy it had been. Stockberger walked off the field thinking he had 365 days to prepare for the rematch.

  “None of us liked the taste of that loss,” former Monte Vista running back Steve Abrams said. “It was in the back of everyone’s mind. We knew we would play them again.”

  De La Salle would go on to win their first mythical state championship when Cal-Hi Sports magazine put them atop its statewide 3A poll.

  There was no party after the championship game. The coaching staffs went their separate ways, but the extended family would spend time together over the Christmas holiday. Rob and Bob avoided the topic and joked about it when the subject was unavoidable. There were no hard feelings. There was more to life than football.

  The two teams—De La Salle and Monte Vista—were ranked number one and number two in the East Bay heading into the 1987 season. Later that season, De La Salle assumed the nation’s longest active winning streak—43 games—after defeating Rancho Cotate of Santa Rosa in a first-round playoff game.

  “That’s when we started to realize that we were achieving on a level that hadn’t been done before,” De La Salle linebacker and tight end Jim King says. “That was an emergence. It was a new level of validation. We really learned we were doing something special.”


  De La Salle beat the ninth-ranked team in the state 34–7 to clinch a spot in the NCS 3A finals. Monte Vista, meanwhile, defeated Foothill 42–6 in one rematch, setting up another.

  “In the back of our heads we knew how good they were and how many guys were coming back,” De La Salle running back Rob Forester said. “We figured we’d end up with a rematch against them at the Coliseum.”

  The two teams were evenly matched and battled to a scoreless tie at halftime. Every play began with two quick lines slamming into each other and ended with a big hit as rugged running backs from both teams absorbed blow after blow. The game was played ferociously. Monte Vista’s white jerseys soon turned the same deep brown color as the dirt from the baseball infield.

  In the Monte Vista locker room, a story was recounted about how a De La Salle player’s father had bumped into the son of a Monte Vista coach that week. “It should be a great game,” the boy said. The De La Salle father strongly disagreed. He predicted the Spartans would win by 40 points.

  Players had already heard of the slight—news travels fast in a small town—but it served as a rallying cry nonetheless.

  “We were appalled when we heard that story,” De La Salle linebacker Jim Hinckley said later. “It wasn’t as if we didn’t respect them.”

  De La Salle finally broke the scoreless tie when quarterback Brad Heyde threw a touchdown pass to Andre Butler in the right corner of the end zone. Monte Vista fought back. Schon Branum collected a screen pass from Hansen late in the third quarter and ran 36 yards to the Spartans’ 12. Abrams scored from there. De La Salle blocked the extra point, preserving a one-point lead.

  On fourth-and-7, midway through the fourth quarter, and at the urging of his assistant coach Tom Ladouceur Jr., Stockberger called a fake punt they had been working on all season.

  “Everyone was holding their breath,” Abrams says. “There was excitement on the sideline but nobody wanted to give it away.”

  The Mustangs lined up with two upbacks behind the guards and in front of the punter’s personal protector, just as they always did. At the snap, the punter leaped high into the air, as if the ball had sailed over his head. Instead the ball was snapped to the personal protector, who placed the ball between the legs of the right upback while the left upback screened defenders from the deception.