When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  Then Monte Vista players ran to the right side of the formation while the upback with the ball remained hunched over with his elbows on his knees, waiting.

  After pausing for eight seconds, little-used running back Chris Musseman started running down the left sideline, barely avoiding the tackle of one of the few De La Salle defenders who hadn’t been fooled, en route to a 40-yard touchdown that gave Monte Vista a 12–7 lead. Stockberger used another trick play, this one a halfback pass, on the 2-point conversion that gave his Mustangs a more comfortable seven-point lead.

  Eidson was going bonkers on the sideline. He had attempted to run a clever trick field goal attempt earlier in the game but it had been nullified by a penalty. He and Ladouceur had seen San Ramon run the same play years before. Eidson had even told his punt return team to guard against the fake at all costs. Not all his players heard his instructions.

  There were still more than seven minutes left, and the Spartans weren’t about to quit, especially after Rob Forester returned the kickoff 38 yards to the De La Salle 40. Rugged running by Forester and fellow running back Craig Pruski resulted in a first down. Pruski converted a fourth-and-1 from the Monte Vista 30 with a 4-yard run, keeping the potential game-winning and streak-saving drive alive.

  Ladouceur had no choice but to go for it again on fourth-and-6 a few plays later. The 15-yard completion gave De La Salle a first-and-goal on the Monte Vista 7 with less than two minutes left. Quarterback Brad Heyde gained two yards on a keeper, then Forester barreled in from 5 yards out to pull De La Salle to within 14–13 with just over one minute left.

  The frenzied pace of the game left players from both teams exhausted. Forester was breathing heavily in the huddle on De La Salle’s final drive and was thankful for the time-out that gave him and his teammates a brief rest before the deciding play.

  Ladouceur could kick the extra point and try to force overtime, or try to win the game with one bold stroke. He sent the field goal unit onto the field before calling time-out and thinking better of it. Both teams were on the verge of collapse. His best chance was to try to win it now.

  “I was so glad we went for it because I was exhausted,” says Jim Hinckley, who played five different positions for De La Salle that season before going on to Stanford. “I haven’t been that tired before or since. Just standing up straight was pure agony.”

  The play was called “lead at 9.” It was designed for two receivers to line up on the right side, which would pull the free safety—in this case Abrams, who already had 13 tackles in the game—away from the middle of the field. The quarterback would run left with Forester in tow. He could either turn upfield himself or pitch if necessary.

  Heyde collected the snap and ran down the line. Inside linebacker Shad Hansen, who would end up at BYU, sliced through a gap and was closing fast.

  Heyde’s pitch was a little behind Forester, forcing him to turn his torso to collect the ball against his right shoulder pad. Hansen continued his relentless pursuit, diving at Forester’s heels and almost tripping him up.

  Forester had the ball cradled in his left arm and was running for the left corner of the end zone when he spotted Abrams streaking toward him. He lowered his shoulder and drove for the pylon.

  “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders, not to mention a 44-game winning streak,” Hinckley said. “He did everything he could do to get into the end zone.”

  It wasn’t until he watched it on film that Ladouceur realized the receiver who was supposed to line up to the far right to draw Abrams toward that side of the field had not gone into the game. The Streak was on the line and the Spartans only had ten men on the field.

  Paul Still was playing guard for De La Salle. He came off the ball hard and fast and ended up face down in the end zone.

  “I heard a roar from the crowd and I thought, ‘OK, I made a mistake but we still won,’ ” Still recalls. “Then I heard another roar from the Monte Vista crowd and everybody was arguing with the ref.”

  Officials are taught to retreat out of bounds on goal line plays, to be in position to determine whether the ball crosses the plane. In this case, the head linesman was standing at the 6-yard line when Forester and Abrams collided in the most controversial ending in NCS playoff history.

  Forester reached across the goal line, the pylon deflecting off his left forearm as Abrams’s hit sent him careening out of bounds. The ensuing seconds seemed to unfold over hours to those on the field.

  De La Salle players threw their hands in the air, anticipating a touchdown signal. Monte Vista players jumped up and down, convinced that Forester had been knocked out of bounds.

  When the official indicated that Forester had stepped out of bounds before the ball broke the plane, Monte Vista players rejoiced.

  “There was no way he could’ve seen the ball crossing the plane because he wasn’t on the plane,” Hinckley says. “He was looking at Forester’s back. From his angle, [Forester] probably did look out of bounds.”

  The play would be reviewed from a dozen different angles in ensuing days, but each was as inconclusive as the next. It was impossible to determine whether Forester stepped out of bounds before the ball crossed the goal line. Those who were there debate it to this day.

  “I remember rolling over and staring at the ref and he was waving it off,” Forester said. “All these emotions hit me like a Mack truck. I knew that was it. We weren’t going to get a chance to get back down the field. All that hard work, The Streak, was rushing through my head.”

  Moments later the clock expired, and Tom Jr. and Stockberger embraced on the sideline as fans from many different schools spilled out of the crowd and started running onto the field to join the celebrating coaches and players.

  “All these people rushed the field and you saw all these different letterman’s jackets and they were all congratulating us,” Abrams recalls. “They kept saying, ‘It’s about time somebody beat these guys.’ To have guys you played against celebrating with you was weird.”

  North Coast Section commissioner Paul Gaddini describes what he witnessed in the aftermath of that game as the greatest single moment in De La Salle history. The Spartans and their streak had been defeated on two gadget plays and the most controversial of calls. Players were sobbing as Monte Vista players celebrated and fans swirled around them.

  “It was their ultimate moment of athletic grief, but they remained on the field and paid tribute to the team that defeated them,” says Gaddini. “To me, that was impressive. That was the defining moment in educational athletics at De La Salle High School.”

  It wasn’t until later that Monte Vista players realized what the win meant to Stockberger.

  “He may have been worried that he had been outcoached in the first game,” Monte Vista linebacker Jim Coleman said. “He had a strategy the second time.”

  They have kept in touch over the years, and phone calls and e-mails fly back and forth to this day. Rob Forester and Steve Abrams, whose collision on the goal line remains one of the great moments in the history of Bay Area high school football, are especially close.

  They attended each other’s weddings.

  “That last game was so indecisive, it’s hard to say there was a loser,” Coleman says. “But it’s those relationships I really value. When we draw off that experience together it’s pretty powerful.”

  18

  PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE

  De La Salle’s resounding victories over Southern California powers in the late 1990s changed the way the school was perceived. The program’s rise to regional and then national prominence lessened the animosity directed at the program locally.

  For the most part, however, the Spartans remain the perceived scourge of the East Bay. They are more than dominant—they are the catalyst for an intense, ongoing debate over the competitive equity between private and public schools.

  This is a debate that rages wherever public and private schools coexist. Public schools bemoan the fact that private schools have n
o attendance boundaries. This allows private schools to draw students from a wide geographic area, giving them, theoretically, an unfair advantage over public schools that must draw students from within district boundaries.

  Private school supporters counter that the high cost of tuition and the lack of government-subsidized transportation to and from campus make it more difficult for them, theoretically, to attract students. Besides, private schools point out, many local public school districts began operating under open enrollment policies in the 1990s, allowing those programs to draw athletes from outside their boundaries.

  Nowhere is the practical aspect of this debate more hotly contested than in the East San Francisco Bay Area, where the unparalleled success of De La Salle’s football team has contributed to two sweeping realignments.

  The first came in 1986, when the North Coast Section decided to break up the Catholic Athletic League, citing concerns over competitive balance. De La Salle opposed the breakup, preferring to remain in a league comprised of private schools that share similar philosophies. In fact, most CAL coaches and administrators opposed the idea and fought desperately to keep the league together. De La Salle even considered legal options.

  “We were adamant about protecting our right to maintain our history, but we never took it to court,” said Brother Jerome Gallegos, the De La Salle principal from 1981 to 1992. “We didn’t want to become so ideological that we would make ourselves outcasts.”

  The league eventually was disbanded and member schools placed in public school leagues based on enrollment and geographic location. De La Salle was placed in a league with public-school teams from eastern Contra Costa and Alameda counties. It was a less-than-ideal arrangement. In fact, under the new plan, the Spartans were required to travel longer distances to compete than almost any other school.

  “It was an honest effort to do what was right,” said Paul Gaddini, the North Coast Section commissioner for twenty-eight years. “It would’ve been easy for us to leave the Catholic schools alone, but we didn’t do that. We set our criteria and we applied it. I believe it was a major step toward competitive equity given the resources we had.”

  As part of the realignment, De La Salle was reclassified from 2A status to 3A status. To some, the reclassification seemed punitive.

  “They were trying to teach De La Salle a lesson because we had started to win,” said Brother Thomas Jones, who represented De La Salle in meetings along with Brother Jerome. “The whole idea was they would put us in with larger schools and that would teach us a lesson.”

  It didn’t. De La Salle continued winning at the 3A level. In 1988 the school was subject to another realignment. The new Bay Valley Athletic League was considered the premier football conference in Northern California and was made up of schools much closer to De La Salle’s Concord campus.

  Pittsburg High School had one of the proudest traditions of any team in the state. Antioch and El Cerrito fielded rugged teams year in and year out. Pinole Valley produced, among others, Gino Torretta, who won the Heisman Trophy at the University of Miami in 1992.

  Although the Spartans played many competitive games against Pittsburg, Antioch, and Pinole Valley, the vast majority of their games were lopsided affairs. Their only conference loss—in fact, their last conference defeat—was a one-point loss to El Cerrito in 1989.

  Nobody was more adamant about the inequity of De La Salle’s ongoing dominance than Liberty principal Gene Clare.

  De La Salle outscored Liberty 196–28 in the first four games of the series between the schools. The controversy came to a head after the Spartans outscored six BVAL opponents 326–27 during the 1996 season.

  Clare and three other Bay Valley Athletic League principals threatened to forfeit games against De La Salle in 1997 unless the North Coast Section agreed to hear their concerns about competitive equity between public and private schools.

  Clare referred to the NCS mission statement, which said that all competition should be “wholesome, equitable and fair.”

  Presiding over the debate was Gaddini.

  “Ideally, public schools and private schools should compete amongst themselves,” he said. “But that just wasn’t practical.”

  Longtime BVAL commissioner John Nules, a former track and football coach at El Cerrito High, had little sympathy for the schools threatening to forfeit games to De La Salle. He thought De La Salle’s success gave the BVAL a measure of prestige that other conferences didn’t have.

  “They have a hell of a coach,” Nules said. “How much did they dominate before Lad got there? They have it rolling and the pendulum has swung, but I think it would swing back in a hurry if Lad left.”

  The NCS held numerous public hearings over a ten-month span. The realignment and classification committee studied the public-private debate, and possible solutions were considered. A proposal to pit the biggest schools in the area against De La Salle in a football-only league was ultimately defeated when several of the proposed members complained about being placed in the same football league with the Spartans.

  De La Salle officials weren’t necessarily advocating the status quo. High-powered programs from around the state had made inquiries about future games, but Eidson had little flexibility because of a BVAL schedule that obligated him to play nine conference opponents each season.

  He and Aliotti were watching a Pac-10 Conference game at Aliotti’s home in Pittsburg when the idea first occurred to them. Pac-10 teams didn’t play every other league member each season. They played teams on a rotating basis. Why couldn’t De La Salle do the same?

  The arrangement gave De La Salle quasi-independent status. The Spartans would play five games against BVAL opponents and five regular-season games against teams of their choosing. That compromise was approved by a vote of 31–0 and ended almost a year of hearings on competitive equity.

  “On behalf of the ad hoc committee, thank God,” one NCS administrator said when the compromise was finally passed.

  BVAL Commissioner Nules kept bullet casings from a starter’s pistol in a coffee can, which he used to determine lane assignments when he was the track coach at El Cerrito. BVAL coaches selected casings from the can. Those who selected a casing with a smiley face taped to the side would not have to play De La Salle during the upcoming season.

  The Spartans would no longer compete for the league title but would instead apply for an at-large berth into the NCS playoffs. Spartans players would remain eligible for post-season league honors.

  The compromise satisfied everybody at the time. BVAL schools that didn’t want to compete against De La Salle were only required to do so once every three years. Eidson was free to begin scheduling games against powerhouse teams such as Mater Dei and Bakersfield.

  “De La Salle’s success is certainly a problem in an environment where you want to have competitive equity,” Gaddini says. “But it was hard not to respect their decision to leave the BVAL. Their proposal didn’t come at anyone else’s expense—it came at their own. They put the onus on themselves to find teams to play.”

  ★ ★ ★

  Liberty High School is located in the east-county community of Brentwood, an agricultural town that has turned into one of the fastest-growing cities in the state.

  It has never been a football school. The Lions always struggle to compete in the Bay Valley Athletic League, but in 2002 they are 3–2 overall and tied for the league lead on the eve of their home game against De La Salle.

  Liberty coach and athletic director Mark Stantz is a large, red-haired former Marine machine-gunner whose attitude toward De La Salle reflects the sentiments of many past and present BVAL coaches.

  “You go into it saying they have to lose sooner or later and you try to fire the kids up, but in the same breath you’re thinking, ‘Why do I want to do this?’ ” he says. “It’s not a good situation for me. I don’t want my kids to get hurt. Every time you step on the football field you have an opportunity for injury. Here I am playing a meaningless game
against a team nobody wants to play that has an advantage over all of us. Why am I doing this—because they have to play football? Well, what about me? What about my kids? What about my school, my spirit? My hat is off to them. I wish them well and I hope The Streak continues forever, but not at my expense.”

  A week after defeating Long Beach Poly for the second time in two years, De La Salle players step off the bus in Brentwood and see a soggy field that looks as if it hosted a tractor pull the night before. De La Salle coaches suspect that the quagmire is an attempt to slow down their team. It’s a tactic that has been attempted by various teams over the years.

  Stantz blames it on an erratic sprinkler system that has inadvertently soaked the field in the days leading up to the game. The ankle-deep mud doesn’t slow down Maurice Drew. The senior running back and kick returner runs the length of the field untouched to score on the opening kickoff.

  The Spartans sweep Liberty’s defensive line down the field, allowing Drew to scamper 22 yards to score another touchdown, again untouched, on De La Salle’s second possession.

  “Maurice Drew should be going to Antioch or Deer Valley,” Stantz growls. “Their quarterback should be at Livermore. That’s a pretty big attendance area and we have to compete against that. I guarantee you if those players went back to those schools, those schools would be on top. They would be competitive schools in their leagues. That’s the kind of athletes they are. But instead of that one athlete playing for Livermore and one athlete playing for Antioch, they get them all. They’re getting the cream of the crop from every school.”

  It’s a common complaint by public school coaches. De La Salle robs them of their best players, which makes the Spartans’ program stronger while at the same time weakening the competition.