Idiots Write About Sports

This is it. A play-in game for the Rose Bowl. One game, a single game, that Cal must win to end 48 years of frustration. To let the faithful Cal fans reach one of their lifelong — and, at times, seemingly insurmountable — sports goals.

I have said for many years now that I have only two sports wishes in my life. One is for my beloved San Francisco Giants to win a World Series. (Hope Russ Ortiz still has that ball.) The other is for my beloved Cal Bears to play in (not win, just play in) the Rose Bowl.

Not to win the Pac-10 championship — let’s face is, I hate Mack Brown for only one reason: that he prevented Cal from getting a rare second-place shot at the Rose Bowl.

Not to play for or win the national championship. My sadness about the Arizona loss last week is all about my general Cal insanity and a more specific feeling that it might have cost Cal an outside shot at a fall-back trip to the Rose Bowl. BCS be damned.

And so I sit here in the greater Los Angeles area, six hours before kickoff, getting ready to visit a hostile enemy stadium I’ve never been in before. And although I’ve been nervous about this game for more than a week now, a (perhaps temporary) sense of calm has settled over me. I can’t play in the game, have no control over the outcome. USC has been, over the last four years, the most dominant team in college football. But by all appearances this is a slightly down year for them, a year where Cal may actually have more talent on the field than the opposition.

And all they have to do is win. Win, and erase 48 years of misery. Win, and heal feelings about Bruce Snyder and Roger Theder and Joe Kapp. Win, and give Cal fans something greater to hang their hats on than the crushing of a random trombone player. Win.

Thousands of trees have been chopped down to supply paper for navel-gazing Bostonians to write about what the Boston Red Sox curse, and its exorcism, meant to them. Cubs fans are famous for suffering endlessly at the hands of bad teams interspersed with the occasional moment of hope that’s immediately dashed by painful failure.

I understand what they feel. But it doesn’t go the other way. Most people outside of our little circle do not know the magnitude of what this would mean to us. Cal fans have suffered in silence, suffered through Tom Holmoe and Keith Gilbertson and the Joe Kapp years and many years of poor-to-mediocre play that preceded the appearance of my young self on the benches of Memorial Stadium.

I can’t speak for the new faces that have filled Memorial Stadium the last few years. I’m sure they’re excited, and I’m glad they’re aboard for the ride. But I speak as someone who has seen the lean times, chanted the mantra “Keep It Close, Lose With Dignity,” who stood outside the stadium and cheered Tom Holmoe because Cal only lost to Nebraska rather than getting blown out. Who watched Stanford run around with the axe innumerable years and then cap it off with their own inconceivable trip to the Rose Bowl. Who has seen older people from the benches around us disappear from this world during the off-season, never to see the Bears reach that goal.

The other week I was riding the bus to work and began to think about what I would do if Cal played in the Rose Bowl. I really couldn’t even get my arms around it, emotionally. And very quickly I stuffed it all back down under a pillow in a corner of my mind, promising myself that there was no point in running that emotional simulation when the goal was so far off. There would be plenty of time to live the event after it occurred, if somehow a series of ridiculous events that began with Cal hiring a brilliant football coach and recruiting a series of star players culminated in the most ridiculous event of all: a conference championship and a berth in the Rose Bowl.

There would be tears, certainly. And madness, incoherent shouting and whooping. And perhaps the distinct buzzing feeling that we’ve all been transported to some parallel universe where black is white and night is day and man bites dog.

But that’s all hypothetical. And it will remain so unless Jeff Tedford’s team does one thing tonight, one simple thing.

Win.

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