When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  “Where’s my helmet?” Smith asks, searching the room.

  “Don’t worry,” his teammate says, holding his arm and leading him toward the door. “You don’t need it.”

  Dr. Wilhelmy is concerned after examining Smith at halftime. Players who suffer concussions usually improve. Smith is as confused and unsteady on his feet as he was when he came out of the game.

  Dr. Wilhelmy sends Smith to the hospital for tests midway through the third quarter, as San Leandro is marching down the field on a long, time-consuming scoring drive that ends Eidson’s hopes of a shutout.

  De La Salle fans sitting above the tunnel leading to the locker room chant Smith’s name as he is guided off the field, tears streaming down his face. He raises his hand to acknowledge the chants before disappearing under the stands.

  Players try to dump a cooler full of ice water on Ladouceur when the fourth-quarter clock expires on De La Salle’s 42–14 victory. He avoids the soaking.

  “After the fourth time it gets a little frustrating,” San Leandro coach Danny Calcagno will say later. “We don’t play under the same set of rules. It’s nothing against De La Salle. But for a public school to compete against a private school every year isn’t fair. I just feel sorry for the kids who never had a chance to win an NCS title.”

  De La Salle players are joyous, their long, arduous journey having finally come to an end with The Streak intact, their legacies secure.

  “You can smile, Chan. We won!” Kavanaugh shouts sarcastically. Chan, the most serious team captain in De La Salle history, actually smiles.

  San Leandro players act as if the game ended under radically different circumstances. There are no long faces or dejected expressions. They congratulate one another, climb into the stands to hug their parents and girlfriends, and pose for pictures on the field where they have watched the Raiders play.

  “I’m going to have to put it aside,” says Dixon, who threw four interceptions in the game and eleven against the Spartans in three title games. “If it weren’t for De La Salle we would’ve won four straight, but you can’t take anything away from them. That’s a great football team.”

  Ladouceur watches his players take turns holding up the championship plaque, but he’s worried about Cole Smith and Parker Hanks, who ruptured a bursa sac in his right knee just before halftime. The older Ladouceur gets, the more injuries trouble him. Sometimes he has difficulty clearing his head enough to call plays after one of his players goes down.

  “These guys showed the most improvement of any team I’ve had,” Ladouceur tells reporters. “And the defense was stellar all year long. Terry did a great job.”

  Each player puts his NCS championship medal around his neck before posing for a team picture on risers erected on the far side of the field. A local television station does a live interview, the reporter asking Ladouceur another inane question about The Streak.

  When they are through with their post-game commitments, De La Salle players do what they have been talking about doing all season. These boys, who will soon be crowned mythical national championships by USA Today for the third straight year in 2002 and the fourth time in five seasons, drop their helmets and sprint to the corner of the end zone, where home plate can be found during the baseball season. It’s a long-standing tradition. They run as fast as they can, then slide belly first, as if they were former Oakland A’s great Rickey Henderson stealing home.

  Ladouceur watches them go before stooping to pick up the cardboard box filled with pennants and the championship trophy. He dreamed of this season-ending moment on the first day of practice, when he almost dreaded the thought of another three months spent prodding, pulling, cajoling, and exhorting four dozen teenage boys to fulfill potential they didn’t know they had.

  The experience is both fulfilling and exhausting. The Streak is still alive. More important, because winning is a mere byproduct of Ladouceur’s true life mission, his methods and core beliefs remain valid. The season has ended as it usually does—with De La Salle players sliding headfirst in unrestrained adolescent glee into an infinite future, and their coach fatigued and satisfied, having momentarily quieted his conflicted soul and temporarily resolved his ongoing dilemma about how hard he should push his players.

  He is not the man you expect him to be, and this is not the reaction to a championship moment you might anticipate. He plods across the field, the architect of a 138-game winning streak, his record now 274–14–1, with the emotionless stride of a man carrying a heavy burden. It’s not the numbing repetition of the moment. It’s as if Ladouceur has given so much to his players that he has nothing left for himself, nothing beyond his intuitive gift for approaching football as a portal to life.

  All he can think about at this moment is that he doesn’t have to watch film tomorrow. He can sleep in.

  The stadium lights go dark before he reaches the home sideline, the celebration still raging all around him. He seeks out and finds his wife, Beverly, in the stands. His eyes lock in on her sweet, shining face and he moves toward her, a man perfectly in step with his time and place.

  “There’s only one word to describe the reason for our success—mystery,” Ladouceur will say at the postseason banquet. “The spirit that exists at De La Salle High is mysterious. You can’t define, box it, buy or sell it. You just allow it in, with all respect and humility. Our job is to allow the spirit to work within us to change our small corner of the world—one play at a time, one relationship at a time, one love at a time, one child at a time—and when it’s all said and done you’ll understand that it begins with you.”

  Epilogue

  He knew something was seriously wrong as he lay in bed, fighting for breath, thinking that this must be what it feels like to die. The pain was excruciating. He could see the look of terror on the faces of his wife and children. It was New Year’s Eve, 2003.

  “What’s wrong with me?” he asked his oldest son, Danny, as paramedics lifted him onto a gurney and wheeled him out the front door of his house. He thought he must be having a stroke or a seizure, but he was in full cardiac arrest.

  It wasn’t his first. The left anterior descending coronary artery—known as the LAD artery, ironically enough—provides oxygen to the heart’s left ventricle. His was completely blocked. He had ignored symptoms earlier that season, blaming indigestion. Now, minutes after arriving at the emergency room, he was being rushed into surgery. If a heart specialist hadn’t just finished another procedure at the hospital that day—or if the ambulance had delivered him thirty minutes later—Bob Ladouceur may not have lived to see his fiftieth birthday.

  “I remember thinking that I’ve met so many kids and felt like I’ve impacted their lives and that’s what I set out to do as a young man,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘I’ve done it.’ I had no regrets. I wasn’t scared. If my life ended at that point I would’ve felt I had had a good life. I felt if I didn’t make it I’d be okay and Bev and the kids would be okay. On the flip side, I was determined to hang on. I was going to fight this.”

  Ladouceur had a deeper understanding of the fragility of life as he recovered in intensive care on New Year’s Day, 2004, but there would be more to learn. This life-changing event would lend him perspective he would sorely need. He didn’t know it as he dozed, an IV in his arm, a heart monitor keeping cadence beside his bed, but the coming season would be the ultimate test of the philosophy his program was built upon. He was beginning the most tumultuous year of his life.

  News of Ladouceur’s heart attack sent shock waves through the De La Salle community. His fame grew as the victories mounted. The team with the fabled win streak had been thrust into the national spotlight leading up to the first nationally televised high school football game in history during the 2003 season. His hospitalization made headlines throughout the Bay Area.

  The Today Show sent a reporter to the campus. CBS Evening News reported on The Streak, which reached 145 games after De La Salle defeated Louisiana power Evangel Christi
an 27–10 in a game broadcast on ESPN2.

  The play that will be most remembered from that game wasn’t a touchdown. De La Salle had the ball on the Evangel 1-yard line with 1:38 to play when Ladouceur had his quarterback take a knee on three successive plays to run out the clock.

  “Tonight we learned a lot about how to play the game of football,” Evangel coach Dennis Dunn told his team afterward. “And we learned how to play it with class.”

  De La Salle, led by running back/linebacker Terrance Kelly, receiver Cameron Colvin, and offensive and defensive lines anchored by Chris Biller, went on to complete the program’s twelfth straight undefeated season and push the winning streak to 151 games.

  Ladouceur’s heart attack was a stunner because he didn’t appear physically vulnerable. He was only forty-nine at the time. He worked out obsessively, ate healthily, avoided alcohol, and had no history of heart disease. But he did have one bad habit, one guilty pleasure, something that he was so ashamed of that he protected it like a military secret for thirty years. He was a closet smoker.

  “I don’t know what was worse—his smoking or his guilt about smoking,” Terry Eidson said. “He saw himself as a role model. He was embarrassed about it. He didn’t want the kids to know.”

  The guilt was overwhelming as he recovered at home. The terrified expression on his three children’s faces as the paramedics wheeled him out of the house still haunted him. He was always going to quit but he never did. He felt like he had cheated his family.

  “The first thing I thought of was self-loathing,” he said. “What have I done to myself? That’s my personality. I beat myself up a lot but it was justified. I brought it on with my smoking. I felt stupid. I felt dumb. What a dumb thing.”

  The question was on everybody’s lips but they were afraid to ask: Would he coach again? Danny Ladouceur had the most vested interest. He had been waiting for years to become one of the senior Spartans he had so long admired.

  “You’re still going to coach, right?” Danny asked his father in the hospital.

  Bob surprised himself with his matter-of-fact reply: “Yeah.”

  In reality the answer would depend on his recovery. He was in and out of the hospital three times, during which seven stints were implanted in his coronary blood vessels. He wasn’t sure how much energy he would be able to put into coaching.

  “I was prepared for him to walk in and say he didn’t want to do it anymore,” Eidson said. “I was prepared for it.”

  Nobody would’ve blamed him had he retired for health reasons with a twenty-six-year record of 287–14–1, nineteen section championships, twelve mythical state championships, and five USA Today national championships in the past six seasons. Ladouceur had thought about getting out before. But what he felt as he recovered wasn’t pressure to keep The Streak alive, it was his own resolve. There were still times when he dreaded the approaching season, times when he got tired just thinking about the time and effort required to reach the impossibly high standard he had set for himself, his coaches, and his players, but he had made his peace with it. Coaching wasn’t who he was, but it was what he did.

  “It’s all about working with kids, and I didn’t know how I would work with kids as effectively in another area,” he said. “I’d be hard pressed to find a way to affect kids outside of coaching. I felt maybe I was meant to stick with it.”

  Ladouceur couldn’t blame his heart attack on stress because the 2003 campaign was one of the more stress-free seasons of his career. That team had been a mature and hardworking group, on the field and in the classroom. Players knew how to practice and prepare. He even let eventual successor Justin Alumbaugh coach the offensive line.

  He could manage the stress of the season, or so he told himself. It would be a test. He would try to coach a season without the anxiety he typically felt. He was lucky to be alive, after all. How could anything bother him now? Besides, he had so much confidence in his assistants that he knew he could do as much or as little as he wanted.

  “Football can be uplifting,” he said. “It can build a person up or it can tear a person apart. I’ve been very mindful of that late in my career and that’s where the stress comes in for me. I want kids to be safe and have a positive experience.”

  Still, it wasn’t until a week before the season that he found the right combination of medications that gave him the energy to consider coaching a twenty-seventh season.

  “I knew we were going to struggle,” he said. “To what degree I didn’t know. But I didn’t want to bug out on that team. I felt it would be a different kind of challenge for us, and I wanted to be a part of that.”

  The 2003 team had been nicknamed “The Last Great Team” by opposing coaches. They were licking their chops, waiting for 2004, when Ladouceur would have to replace eighteen starters and had no blue-chip prospect to build around.

  Each team takes on a unique personality. Ladouceur learned long ago that every few years a class passed through that didn’t fully comprehend the depth and breadth of the commitment necessary to play the game on the highest level. Factions between juniors and seniors had contributed to the program’s last defeat in 1991. The 2004 team was developing a group personality that was more worrisome.

  Seniors had pounded the juniors in practice the year before. Seniors dominating juniors is nothing new. But at some point juniors rise up and hit back, or at least that was Ladouceur’s experience. These juniors didn’t rise up. Seniors lost respect for the juniors as a result and juniors eventually lost respect for themselves. The staff noticed during the spring of 2004 that this team picked at one another and on classmates. Unity is one of The Streak’s major components, but this team was fractured. Individually they were good kids, but they didn’t get along. There were other problems. To be a leader you must prove yourself on the field. Nobody had done that. Nobody had that type of built-in credibility. That’s why Ladouceur pulled his team off the field during spring practice and sequestered it in a classroom for two days. He was trying to save the season before it began.

  “You guys say that you don’t care what anybody thinks about you, like you’re self-made men,” he thundered. “Well, that’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard. You better care what your teammates think of you. You better care what people think of you.”

  He made them write down things they could change about themselves that would help modify the behavior of the group as a whole. He didn’t want superficial answers. He wanted them to dig deep and examine themselves. “What does someone have to do to earn your respect?” he asked. “What are the qualities that make you respect someone else?”

  Eidson had made the schedule as daunting as ever. The early-season gauntlet began with three-time defending Washington state champion Bellevue in the Emerald City Classic at Qwest Field in Seattle. Then came two teams ranked in the top fifteen in state polls. Next was Mission Viejo, ranked fourth in USA Today’s pre-season poll.

  “To be successful we’re going to have to scrap for everything,” Eidson told players in the final classroom session. “If we’re going to be a scrappy team we have to respect each other. If you don’t like each other you’re not going to be able to rally around each other. It won’t happen unless you respect and support one another.”

  If players needed to learn how to respect and support one another, they needed to look no farther than their four teammates from the previous season. Terrance Kelly, Cameron Colvin, Willie Glasper, and Jackie Bates were as inseparable as any De La Salle players had ever been. They started hanging out as freshmen and from the beginning shared the dream of playing college football together.

  Jackie Bates had been the first to accept a scholarship from the University of Oregon. He had missed almost his entire senior season because of a foot injury and was thrilled that Oregon was still offering a scholarship. Terrance was next. He had been seriously considering Arizona State, but going to Eugene with Jackie was too tempting. Willie Glasper signed up after that. He was a highly coveted cor
nerback, but playing with his high school buddies won out.

  That left Colvin, the most sought-after of the four. He visited Miami, USC, Michigan, and UCLA but chose Oregon during a live announcement on SportsCenter.

  “There was nothing I didn’t like about any of those schools, but the deciding factor was that we would all get to go to school together,” Cameron said. “How many kids get to go to college on full athletic scholarships with their three best friends? Who gets to do that? Who gets to go to college with the people they love?”

  They were so eager to start this new journey together that they went to Oregon for the summer. For Cameron, Willie, and Jackie, it was a chance to preview their college experience. For Terrance it served a more practical purpose.

  His grandmother and father didn’t want him hanging around the notoriously violent “Iron Triangle” neighborhood where he grew up. They insisted he spend the summer in Eugene, far away from the crime-ridden streets of Richmond. Bevelyn and Landrin had always tried to steer Terrance away from the fate that awaited so many of his childhood friends.

  That’s why Landrin had worked two jobs all those years to provide Terrance clothes and cash to fit in with the private-school crowd. It’s why Bevelyn had always lectured him about staying out of trouble and making something of himself. Landrin even bought a house in a better neighborhood, to get Terrance away from the culture of drugs, gangs, and guns that defined life in the flats of Richmond.

  Terrance knew his future wasn’t on the street corners. He wanted to play football in college. He wanted to teach others what he learned. He took kids from his poor Richmond neighborhood to De La Salle. He taught them what he learned on the field and in the classroom. He became a role model, a symbol of hope in a community bent on self-destruction, a shining example of what was possible through hard work and dedication.

  “He showed me that it doesn’t matter what you have or whether you grew up in the heart of Richmond, you can succeed,” said Tyron Carter, among the legion of Kelly’s admirers. “You just have to mentally and physically apply yourself.”