Opinion
Big Game rivalry used to be innocent and fun
By Carl Heintze
My wife and I have a mixed marriage; that is, she went to the University of California at Berkeley and I went to Stanford University.
So, every November, in the best of intercollegiate rivalry--one of the oldest rivalries in the nation--we attend what has come to be called The Big Game. There are other big games around the country, but none quite so big, at least so we think, as the one between California and Stanford.
This year, the 102nd playing of the annual hoopla, celebration, sport and whatever was enacted in Stanford Stadium. Aside from the fact that it allowed alumni of either school to wear their school colors, yell and otherwise act silly, it decided that Stanford was going to the Rose Bowl. It's been a long time since that happened, and longer still, I think, since Cal went.
But I didn't start this little memorial to all that to tell you about how we won or lost. What struck me most forcefully happened near the end of the third quarter, when about 100 policemen dressed in riot gear (night clubs, plastic face masks and such) marched slowly onto the stadium track and up through the stands. What had been a harmless American football game suddenly seemed to have become the prelude to a Nazi Nuremberg rally.
True, we did get some warning in the first quarter, when the public-address announcer informed us in booming tones that Stanford, at least, would show zero tolerance toward any unpleasantness during or after the game. And this statement was underscored by the Stanford band.
The Stanford band, which has been disowned by most alumni--including, I might add, me--apparently had been instructed to cool it. Their most recent brush with trouble had been last year during the Notre Dame game, when they managed to insult the Pope--and, of course, Notre Dame, Catholics, priests, nuns and the faithful.
Somewhat put off by this, the band produced a sophomoric demonstration about being censored. Whether they were really censored or just told to use a little taste is a matter of more debate. In any event, for once, they were relatively benign. None of this, alas, cooled the crowd, which pelted the police with plastic water bottles. Twenty people from the crowd of 90,000 or so were arrested.
Fortunately, other instruments likely to cause injury had been confiscated at the gate. A search of all bags also is now a part of The Big Game. I fell to wondering, as old alumni are likely to do, about the good old days when we were allowed onto the field after the game. The winning school always went to serenade the losers, who remained in the stands. No one got hurt, the band didn't intentionally try to insult the opposing team, and although there was a lot of cross-Bay rivalry, it was not vicious in nature.
I realize there is a certain amount of what's been called college spirit in all of us. I recall, for instance, that I got in trouble because my roommate tossed what were called fireballs (lighted crumpled newspapers) out the dorm window at passing sophomores and that, when we were freshmen, we "guarded" the bonfire at Lake Lagunita (another casualty of time because it is environmentally incorrect) with oak railings torn from the banisters in Encina Hall. (We paid damages for the railing removal.)
Our other big deal was to wear pajamas to the University of Southern California rally and descend on Palo Alto for a free movie. Why this was so daring escapes me now, but we thought of it as good clean fun and a way to work off youthful exuberance.
I realize this was all in another time when no one worried about whether it was politically incorrect to have an Indian as a team mascot. My recollection is we never thought ill of Indians by having one to represent us. Rather, we admired them, but that, too, is another debate.
Somehow a tree, the present Stanford symbol, seems as silly as the Stanford band's lame complaint about being censored. But even the tree (or for that matter Oskie, the Bear, who so far has not run into animal-rights activists in any great number) have not escaped the new college spirit. At the most recent Cal-Stanford set-to, both Oskie and The Tree were followed everywhere they went on the field by an escort of six security guards clad in yellow for some strange reason.
This apparently is because in games past either Cal or Stanford rowdies had tried to tackle both Oskie and The Tree with some possible harm to the students representing the two school symbols. What the point in this may be, I have no idea. It seems as senseless as the rest of the evolution of the annual meeting.
I just guess college life is not like it was when I was in it. But I sure wish it was.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
