When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  This community has long been a prime breeding ground for football talent. This is the only team that plays De La Salle regularly that can claim to have equal and often superior athletic ability. The Pirates may not be as polished or as devoted, but the raw athleticism is always here.

  Athletes and opportunity—that’s why Pittsburg may be the single greatest threat to The Streak. While other schools have threatened to forfeit games against De La Salle in the past because of concerns about competitive equity, Pittsburg has volunteered to take on the Spartans season after season, loss after loss. Every year the hope returns: maybe this will be the year Pittsburg rises up and slays De La Salle again.

  Optimism is as high as it has been in recent years. The Pirates have a popular new coach, a Pittsburg boy, and who is better equipped to defeat De La Salle than the former De La Salle player and coach?

  “They don’t have a perfect program,” Galli says. “They make mistakes, but they have a hell of a blueprint. I have that blueprint. I’ve been on the inside. Other people want to do what De La Salle does but they don’t know how because they haven’t been there. I’ve been there.”

  Galli was supposed to have gotten this job four years ago. He had the unflagging support of longtime athletic director Al Bonnano and was the choice of the hiring committee, but was passed over by the school board because he was not a school district employee.

  He was crushed. Bonanno, a Pittsburg native who taught at the school for more than thirty years, resigned over the flap and later did what many in his hometown still consider the unthinkable. He followed Galli to De La Salle as a member of the junior varsity staff.

  That’s just one example of how intermixed the two programs have become. Joe Aliotti was a hometown hero in Pittsburg and a head coach in waiting. He was the assistant principal in charge of discipline, who came from one of the most recognized families in town. Coming to De La Salle was as easy as switching fingers, he jokes. Instead of raising his middle finger at the Spartans, he holds up his index finger instead: “We’re number one!”

  He laughs now, but some still consider his defection a treasonous act, even if a fractious school board and small-town politics prompted an exodus of many longtime Pittsburg teachers.

  “People still call me traitor,” Aliotti said. “But that’s narrow-minded and not understanding of what’s best for my family. People who understand that say it’s a great move. They understand my family is number one and this is a different challenge, a better place for me.”

  It’s stories like this that add another level of intensity to this series. The men in green jackets who’ll be standing on the opposite sideline on Friday are Galli’s friends and former teachers, people who know him as only a select few do. He knows the faces of the players behind the silver facemasks as well, if not better, than he knows the faces of his own players.

  This is personal, although not for the reasons you might imagine. There is no bad blood here, even if there always was friction when Galli coached under Ladouceur.

  Galli does things his own way, which didn’t always endear him to the man who created a program in his own image. The brash assistant ordered jerseys with single-digit numbers, something Ladouceur never did, because he didn’t want his players arguing over them. Galli ran a passing offense that was dubbed “Air Galli” and didn’t always resemble the offense the varsity ran. “Ever hear of the veer?” Ladouceur grumbled when he passed his JV coach at the end of a game against Clayton Valley one year.

  Ladouceur even began to call his JV team the Pittsburg Spartans.

  “Vic always was and always will be a Pittsburg guy,” Ladouceur says. “That means he’s very loyal to the community and his roots there, which is fine. It told me too that he always wanted to go back there and he never one hundred percent bought into what we were doing here. He treated athletes a little differently than I did. He cared about the kids. I like that. But I never felt he wanted to be the head coach here. I never felt that or felt he was preparing for that.”

  “I wouldn’t want the De La Salle job for two hundred grand a year,” Galli admits. “I feel sorry for the next guy who takes it. If you lose you’re the asshole who ruined the program. If you win you will never get the credit because it’s Ladouceur’s program to begin with.”

  This game is personal for Galli, but not only for the obvious reasons. It’s personal because his life has been defined by football and because he will measure his success against his ability to beat his mentor under the lights on a Friday night. It’s personal because he’s convinced that fate has chosen him to finally end The Streak.

  All these common strands make him want to win this football game more than any single thing he has wanted in his life. He can’t help but think that given his background, beating De La Salle and snapping The Streak is precisely what he was born to do.

  “Everybody has been talking about it since I got the job,” he says, the words coming in rapid-fire bursts. “De La Salle, De La Salle, De La Salle. I didn’t want to talk about De La Salle. We’ve got to win football games, and when we get to De La Salle we’ll talk about it. Now there’s a buzz around town. We’re 5–2—we should be 6–1—but people are getting excited and now this game comes up. You know something? We’ve got athletes that will match up with them. We’re not like other teams. We’ve got home-run hitters. We’ve got guys that can go the distance. We can hit home runs against De La Salle. We have athletes. Anything is possible. Nobody expects us to win, but we’re capable of shocking the world. It’s not an impossible thing.

  “I had a good experience there playing and coaching, but nobody wants to beat them more than I do. It’s going to happen, whether it’s this year or next year or the year after that.”

  His assistant coaches are trying to come up with new ways to stop De La Salle’s veer, something Pittsburg coaches have attempted to do with precious little success for fifteen years.

  But Galli has a secret weapon. He has something no other Pittsburg coach has ever had. He’s got the greatest veer quarterback in De La Salle history on his side.

  ★ ★ ★

  Mike Bastianelli has never felt so uneasy. He is standing in the De La Salle parking lot, shifting nervously from foot to foot, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his Navy pea coat, waiting for the Pittsburg bus to arrive.

  He still moves with the fluidity and grace of an elite athlete. His smile still lights up his dark Italian features. The only difference between the way he looks now and the way he looked ten years ago, when he was knifing through the line and bolting upfield to score yet another De La Salle touchdown, are the flecks of premature gray in his short black hair.

  He is striking, charming, and in many ways an unwittingly tragic figure. Between his own fallible instincts and fate’s cruel hand, he keeps winding up in odd situations, places where he doesn’t seem to belong.

  “In a way I feel like a traitor—not a traitor, but uneasy, like gosh, here I am coaching against the school that gave me everything, gave me the world,” he says quietly. “I want to give back and I feel I can by taking what I learned somewhere else. They don’t need me. Lad and Terry have everything wired. This is my way of giving back.”

  He had a storybook high school career. He not only was the best veer quarterback the school had ever known, he also kicked and punted and returned kicks and played safety while guiding the Spartans to back-to-back undefeated seasons in 1993 and 1994. Not once in his four years at De La Salle did he taste defeat at any level. He left with a record of 39–0.

  He always will hold a special place in the hearts of his former coaches, and it has nothing to do with him rushing for 938 yards with 22 touchdowns as a senior. It goes far beyond his fifty-four percent completion rate and his fourteen touchdown passes.

  There’s a flicker of tragedy, an inherent goodness, and a sense of longing in his sparkling brown eyes that make people care about Mike Bastianelli. Few have cared for him more than Terry Eidson and Bob Ladouceur.

/>   “It shaped me,” Bastianelli says. “Without De La Salle I would’ve gone the other direction. Eidson was huge in my life. He was my father figure. I am who I am because of him.”

  He can’t help but feel that he has failed them. He is divorced and separated from his daughter, who means more to him than anything. He has yet to earn his college degree. He is working as a day laborer until he gets hired at the steel mill, or at least that is his plan at the moment.

  Everybody knew he had been with former USC teammate Darrell Russell the night Russell and two others allegedly drugged a woman at a San Francisco nightclub, then videotaped themselves performing sexual acts with her at Russell’s home. It didn’t matter that Bastianelli had not been so much as questioned by the police when they arrested Russell the next morning. It didn’t matter that Russell and the two others were eventually acquitted. Bastianelli knew that Ladouceur and Eidson didn’t approve of his friendship with the former Oakland Raiders defensive tackle, even if all they knew about Russell was that he had twice been suspended for violating the NFL’s substance abuse policy.

  Bastianelli knew how some would view this series of circumstances. He knew how it would look through the eyes of Ladouceur and Eidson. They would think he was everything they feared he would one day become. All this is swimming in his head, making him look nervously over his shoulder, when the Pittsburg bus hisses to a stop and Vic Galli appears wearing his own nervous expression.

  “You got something for me to wear?” Bastianelli asks his boss.

  Vic takes off his orange and black “Pirate Football” windbreaker and throws it to Bastianelli, who sheds his pea coat and puts it on, leaving no doubt about his allegiance in this upcoming drama. They are De La Salle graduates and Ladouceur disciples, but here they are, on this familiar campus, pitting themselves against the man and program they revere.

  This is going to be awkward for everybody.

  “I guess I don’t need to show you around,” says game-management volunteer Tom Bruce, extending his hand. Vic smiles his sideways smile. “I guess not,” he says, shaking hands.

  Galli was Bastianelli’s freshman coach at De La Salle, but they became more like brothers. The young coach recognized the young student’s athletic ability immediately. But there was something else that drew him in, something someone born and raised in Pittsburg understands intuitively.

  “Everybody thinks De La Salle is full of rich boys, but Mike didn’t have the greatest family,” Galli says. “He was more like a Pittsburg kid.”

  Bastianelli never met his father, a reputed organized crime figure who was only recently released after eleven years in prison. Mike took the last name of his stepfather, who divorced his mother when Mike was nine. He loves his mother dearly, but her struggles with alcoholism eventually forced him out of her house.

  Mike moved in with his girlfriend’s family when his mother’s drinking made his home life too chaotic for him to bear. He moved in with Galli when his mother moved to Oklahoma City. He always felt he was among kindred spirits in Pittsburg, even if he played for De La Salle.

  “There were times when I wasn’t there for Mike, and Lad and Terry were,” said his mother, Nancy West-Marr. “I was going through another divorce and I couldn’t stop drinking for long. They took Michael off and made him a star. They treated him like their own son.”

  Bastianelli played on a Rose Bowl team during his freshman season at USC. He started the last seven games at receiver during his sophomore year and finished the season as the team’s third-leading receiver. He was suspended for two games during his junior season after it was discovered that an athletic department employee wrote part of a term paper for him. His senior year was full of more disappointments as his playing time dwindled.

  When his girlfriend got pregnant, he did what he thought was the right thing and married her. His daughter was born with a visual impairment.

  Galli drove him to training camp after the 49ers signed him to a freeagent contract following his senior year at USC. By that time Bastianelli had so soured on football and was so distraught over being separated from his daughter that he wasn’t sure he wanted to play.

  He blew off a practice. Later that night he was arrested for driving with a suspended license. Team officials bailed him out and eventually cut him from the team.

  “He’s his own worst enemy,” Galli says, sighing. “He’s a decent kid who will be the first to tell you when he screws up. He regrets some of the things he’s done.”

  Bastianelli was working as a grip in the TV movie industry when his marriage fell apart. He felt lost in Los Angeles and came back to the place that felt like home, if for no other reason than there were people there whom he knew cared about him. The first person he called was Galli.

  “In a way De La Salle is a fantasyland,” Bastianelli says. “They won’t let you mess up. You get out on your own and you mess up and your mistakes are your mistakes.”

  He’s standing in the back of the end zone watching a junior varsity game and feeling like a stranger when Nate Geldermann smothers him in a warm embrace. The former teammates have been joined by Mark Panella when Bastianelli spots Ladouceur trudging up the home sideline.

  He walks toward his former coach and gives him an awkward hug. They have barely exchanged pleasantries before Ladouceur turns serious.

  “What are you doing hanging out with Darrell Russell?” he asks.

  “Coach, I’ve made a lot of bad choices and done things I’m not proud of, but here I am,” Bastianelli replies, holding his arms out from his sides, looking Ladouceur in the eye.

  Bastianelli is chewing sunflower seeds and pacing nervously as Pittsburg players stretch in semidarkness behind the stadium during the fourth quarter of the junior varsity game. Galli is checking his watch for the umpteenth time when Joe Aliotti walks across the track, through the gate, and shakes Galli’s hand just as the Pittsburg JV team scores to make it 43–7.

  “Hey, look, we scored,” says a Pittsburg student equipment manager, genuinely surprised.

  Aliotti has spent the afternoon three miles up the road scouting a critical Bay Valley Athletic League game between Clayton Valley and Freedom.

  “Clayton beat Freedom,” he tells Galli. “You’re in it.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Vic responds, his jaw dropping.

  “No, Clayton beat Freedom,” Aliotti repeats firmly.

  “Why are you talking to a guy from De La Salle?” a Pittsburg ball boy demands of Galli after Aliotti walks away.

  “Did you know that is the greatest quarterback in Pittsburg history?” Vic fires back, impatiently. “Did you know he was offensive coordinator the last time we beat them? So shut up.”

  It’s obvious the boy knows none of this. “[But] he’s with De La Salle now,” he offers weakly.

  Freedom’s win is a huge break for Pittsburg. Tonight’s game against De La Salle will have no impact on the BVAL standings. If the Pirates beat Liberty and archrival Antioch in coming weeks, they will claim their first outright league championship in twenty-two years.

  “I’ve got to stay healthy,” Galli says, clapping his hands together, delighted. “Shit!”

  His mood is ruined when he hears that the final score of the JV game is 50–7. “Welcome home, Galli,” someone shouts from high atop the home stands.

  “Tonight is a beautiful night for football,” he tells his players minutes before they take the field, unwittingly repeating words Ladouceur tells his players before games. “Just think, you’re in high school, you’re facing the number one team in the country, and they’re not invincible—believe me, they’re not. This could be the greatest night of your life, something you will never forget. Will it be a night you want to forget, or the greatest night of your life?”

  “There is so much I want to say,” Bastianelli tells them when Galli is finished. “I wish I could play with you guys tonight. That’s what I wish.”

  The Kansas City Chiefs have a bye week, allowing NFL rookie Shaun
ard Harts to return home to California and watch the Pittsburg team for which he once starred take a shot at ending The Streak.

  He wears a sweatshirt, baggy jeans, a backward Chicago Cubs hat, and cradles a video camera in his right hand as Pirates players bounce up and down in the end zone before introductions.

  “We’re done talking,” Harts shouts, a menacing scowl on his face. “We’re going to talk with our pads tonight. Let’s make history tonight. It’s time to go to war. We’re going to war. Are you all ready to go to war?”

  “Hell, yes!” several players shout in reply.

  “It’s time to go down in history. You can go down in history, fellas. You can go down in history tonight. Be proud. Wear those jerseys with pride. You represent Pittsburg. You represent your whole community. You represent your family. You gotta represent!”

  “Let’s go!” fired-up players shout. “It’s a war. It’s a war, baby.”

  Pittsburg players begin to learn the difference between hope and false hope when the Spartans score on their first possession. Cameron Colvin throws a 31-yard reverse pass to tight end Terrance Kelly, who is beginning to find the end zone with regularity. Maurice Drew scores the touchdown on a 15-yard run.

  Pittsburg’s athleticism worries Ladouceur, especially the way his offensive line performed against Freedom the week before. The Pirates have talent, particularly on offense. They take advantage of a muffed punt and march to the Spartans’ 25-yard line on their next drive. An incomplete pass on fourth-and-6 gives the ball back to De La Salle.

  Spartan Jackie Bates sweeps the right side and glides down the sideline for a 46-yard gain. Drew eventually scores untouched from 10 yards out for a 14–0 lead with 1:57 left in the first quarter. Galli stands stoically on the visitors’ sideline, arms crossed, gnashing his gum.

  A bad snap sails over the head of the Pirates punter and out of the end zone for a safety to make it 16–0. “They ran that same play in the junior varsity game,” a member of De La Salle’s chain gang cracks before Bastianelli quiets him with a glare.