When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  “There’s a charisma here,” says volunteer Tom Bruce, who patrols the field with a walkie-talkie on game nights. “There’s not much to it but we keep it very clean. It makes a statement to me. It fits the demeanor and work ethic of the team. It’s a very basic field and I don’t think Bob would want it any other way.”

  When the volunteers have finished their work and the field is readied, and the cheerleaders are cheering and the band is blaring and the stands are packed with mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, this humble little field has an undeniable charm.

  De La Salle players stretch in silence on the practice field behind the stadium as the sun makes a spectacular descent and the golden foothills of nearby Mt. Diablo slowly fade into the darkness. Ladouceur gathers his team around him as the band marches to Notre Dame’s “Victory March” and smiling cheerleaders from the all-girls Catholic school across the street are tossed high into the air.

  “If you’re not sure on your blocking assignments, your rule is to pick out the closest guy and attack,” Ladouceur says, beginning his last-second instructions. “Don’t clip on special teams. Give us a chance. You guys are going to make some mistakes today, but we have to turn out on the positive side of the ledger when it’s all said and done. The thing we’re looking for tonight is aggression. This is it. We talked about it last night. You guys have to take that next step. You have to start rocking out there. If you do that, this evening will turn out just fine. It’s a game of aggression and emotion. You have to play that way throughout the game.”

  This game has created an anticipatory buzz on Archbishop Mitty’s San Jose campus. De La Salle has won ten consecutive North Coast Section championships and is ranked number one in the state and in the nation.

  Archbishop Mitty is coming off the greatest season in its school history. The school’s only loss of 2001 came in the Central Coast Section championship game. It was only the second loss that the seniors suffered during their four-year high school careers.

  A 46–8 demolition of Gunderson in the Monarchs’ season opener lent credence to their number twenty-three state ranking. An afternoon pep rally sent school spirit soaring. Fans chartered a bus to Concord hoping their team would accomplish what no other team in a decade had done—defeat De La Salle.

  The hills to the east are cloaked in black against a vibrant orange sky when De La Salle players, dressed in bright green jerseys, silver pants, and silver helmets, join hands and walk onto the field in two parallel lines. There is no open display of emotion, just a quiet confidence that can unnerve opponents.

  Archbishop Mitty wins the toss and elects to receive. On the first play from scrimmage, a Mitty running back runs for 13 yards. On the next play, the quarterback fakes a handoff up the middle and scampers for 49 yards.

  Three plays into the game, the Monarchs have a first down at the 27-yard line against a program that hasn’t lost a season opener since Ladouceur took over in 1979. Mitty fans are on their feet. De La Salle fans sit in stunned silence.

  Blitzing safety Matt Kavanaugh dumps the quarterback for a seven-yard loss. Two running plays gain 11 yards to the De La Salle 22-yard line. De La Salle takes over on downs after a fumbled snap on fourth down.

  De La Salle’s veer-option offense operates with such relentless precision that it’s often compared to a machine. Ladouceur’s teams have been shut out twice, both in his initial season, and have scored in 268 straight games, an ongoing state record.

  Maurice Drew squats in his stance in the backfield, his weight on his haunches like a frog on a lily pad, his hand barely brushing the ground. The laws of physics would seem to prohibit anyone from exploding out of such an awkward stance, but Drew does, pushing the pile for 5 yards on De La Salle’s first play.

  Two plays later, he bursts off left tackle, spins away from a defender in the secondary, and scores from 51 yards out for the game’s first touchdown.

  It’s the kind of stunning, game-turning play for which this team is known. De La Salle running backs average more than 10 yards per carry because of dominant line play and an infectious desire by everyone to make a “touchdown alley” block, or a downfield block that springs a running back or a receiver for a score.

  The score is still 7–0 when Spartan safety Jackie Bates intercepts a pass late in the first quarter. Gino Ottoboni’s ensuing 18-yard run gives the Spartans a 14-point lead, prompting the band to celebrate with another rendition of “Victory March.”

  Drew fields a punt after Mitty’s next series and quickly dips behind his wall of blockers along the right sideline. A shuffle-step confounds one potential tackler and suddenly three green jerseys are escorting Drew down the field.

  A quick cut inside leaves the punter grasping at air at the 20. Drew continues zigzagging toward the end zone until he crosses the goal line to complete a 55-yard punt return, just as Eidson had predicted while scouting Mitty a week earlier.

  The 21-point lead snuffs any remaining drama. This looks like a typical rout.

  The score is 24–0 at halftime. Drew’s heroics overshadow some uncharacteristic sloppiness, however. There are three dropped passes, including two by senior receiver and special teams captain De’Montae Fitzgerald.

  Fitzgerald is distraught at halftime. “I’m letting everyone down,” he moans as Drew and receiver Cameron Colvin console him on the way to the locker room. Aliotti sees Fitzgerald sitting all alone, his head in his hands, while Edison and Ladouceur make halftime adjustments at opposite ends of the locker room.

  “It’s all right,” he tells the emotional senior. “It’s the first half of the first game. We’ve got a long way to go. Take it easy. You’re going to be all right. Just make sure you catch the ball before you try to run with it.”

  The Spartans’ offense is lifeless in the second half. The defense, however, is turning in a surprisingly stout performance. The defensive line that was so worrisome when fall practice began is playing well and preventing Mitty from moving the ball consistently.

  The score remains 24–0 when Drew catches a screen pass in the right flat on the second play of the fourth quarter. A defender tackles him in the backfield and Drew lands awkwardly on his left ankle. He leaps to his feet and tries to hop back to the huddle before turning and hobbling toward the sideline.

  There is fear in Drew’s eyes. His intuition tells him something is wrong. When he realizes he can’t put any weight on his left leg he gets scared.

  “I think I broke it,” Drew says, grimacing, as trainer Mike Blasquez and team doctor John Wilhelmy take off his shoe and carefully examine his ankle behind the bench.

  Drew was expected to carry the team, and he had through the first three quarters, racking up 131 yards on eleven carries and returning a punt 55 yards for a touchdown. While the game continues on the field, fans focus on the drama unfolding on the sideline. Drew’s availability for next week’s St. Louis of Hawaii game is in doubt. Considering how inconsistently the team has played in the second half, that isn’t good news.

  “I can’t get hurt before Hawaii,” he says to himself as he sits on a gurney, his injured ankle packed with ice. His mother kneels by the railing separating the bleachers from the field and comforts her only son.

  “It’s just a cramp,” all-state cornerback Damon Jenkins tells a teammate on the sideline. “Reese [Maurice] is too buff to get injured.”

  Ladouceur is updated on Drew’s status by Blasquez in the waning moments of the fourth quarter. He nods and walks away, stone-faced.

  There is little joy when the clock expires and it is announced that the Spartans have just captured their 126th consecutive victory. The offense struggled in the third quarter with Drew and was lost in the fourth quarter without him.

  The Spartans didn’t score a point in the second half of a 24–0 win.

  “We looked pretty ragged compared to how we have looked in the past,” Ladouceur tells reporters afterward. “We didn’t prep for our first game. We need to prep better.”

  Every
one asks about Drew. Blasquez sends him to the emergency room for X-rays. He hopes it is just a sprain. Everybody agrees that is the best-case scenario. Nobody wants to consider any other possibility.

  “That was our lowest offensive output since 1987,” Eidson tells players as they sit with their elbows on their knees between rows of green lockers. “You know what? You can wish it, you can talk about it and try to bond, but the bottom line is: you played that second half exactly the way you practiced the last three weeks—lethargic, walking around, dazed. We tried to warn you but it’s too late. You can’t put it together in one night. We had a good effort in the first half from the special teams and the defense, but the offense didn’t drive it all night. We had a good individual effort from Maurice, but as an offense that was miserable. That’s the truth.

  “You’ve got to earn stuff. Nobody has gone out there and said, ‘I’m going to get better today.’ Nobody has practiced like that yet. You’re playing a team ranked in the top twenty in the nation eight days from now. Blow it off. Keep practicing like that and we’ll see what happens against St. Louis. This week we’re going to play more speed and bigger guys and you’re not going to scare anybody off, boys, you’re not going to scare anybody off. Let me tell you something: you put yourselves in this position.”

  “I can’t add to that at all,” Ladouceur says when Eidson is through. “That was one of the most ragged performances I’ve seen from an offensive team from our school. That goes back a long way. I’d have to say into the early 1980s. You didn’t do the things we coached you to do. We dropped balls. We didn’t make plays. Maurice made plays. The rest of you didn’t make plays. I know you guys were blocking the wrong people out there. You just looked bad. You played just like you practiced. You’re going to play just how you practice. You’re not some comic book hero who’s going to put on a cape on game day and go out there and star. It doesn’t work that way. You watch too much TV if you believe that. I don’t know if you guys are tough enough mentally and physically. I just don’t know if you’re tough enough.

  “If Drew is with the team next week or not, I really don’t care. I really don’t. I want to see what you’re made of—what a great test. We’ll see you at films tomorrow. This was not good. You better have a change of heart by next week if you want to be in the game. Right now, even if you bring it next week with everything you’ve got I’d call it a toss-up. So you better do a little more soul-searching. Last night was not enough. When you sit and watch films tomorrow you better have your eyes glued to your position, whether you’re playing or not. If there’s continued ragged play I’m going to make changes. I’m not going to continue to beat a dead horse if somebody just can’t do it or won’t do it. All right, team prayer, and then go home.”

  The assistant coaches congregate behind a locked door and up a short flight of stairs from the main locker room, in the four cramped rooms that make up the coaches’ offices. There they pick over what’s left of the pregame meal Aliotti had purchased from a local deli and discuss their team’s performance in hushed tones.

  If they play like this against St. Louis, The Streak could come to a screeching halt on the floor of Aloha Stadium.

  “Bad week to stop sniffing glue,” Hayes says, trying to lighten the mood.

  Ladouceur, Eidson, and Aliotti have yet to make their way up the stairs when former De La Salle lineman Dalton Brown appears in the doorway. Brown’s senior season at nearby St. Mary’s College was interrupted when he was diagnosed with leukemia. The disease is now in remission, and he is a frequent visitor to his old school.

  Brown passes out cold beers he has smuggled in under his sweatshirt.

  He opens his can, the white foam oozing out of the hole in the top, and holds it high over his head in a mock toast: “Here’s to 126 and 1,” he says.

  5

  1970S CHEWED UP AND SPIT OUT

  Tom Ladouceur got lost on his way to the airport. A salesman, he had been transferred from Detroit to the San Francisco Bay Area and was searching for a new home for his family when he took a wrong turn and found himself on a gravel road.

  The rolling hills of the East Bay in 1962, three years before De La Salle High School opened for business, must have seemed as desolate as the moon’s surface to a man who grew up in the crowded row houses of Detroit. Eventually the elder Ladouceur saw a sign ahead that read “San Ramon Country Club Park.”

  Tom was an avid golfer who even played in the snow back home in Michigan. There were only three unsold homes left in the first phase of the new development. It was late in the afternoon and the sales office was about to close.

  Tom wanted the house, but he knew he needed to talk to his wife first. Ever the charmer, he slipped the man five dollars for a promise to hold the house. That was in April. In May, Tom and Mary moved their four children into the $19,000 gray ranch-style home on Broadmoor Drive in San Ramon. Bob, the second-youngest, was in second grade.

  Tom and Mary’s children had been the focus of the extended family back in Detroit. With the kids gone, there was nothing to keep the rest of the family in Michigan. Tom’s mother and sister bought a house on a cul-de-sac that bordered Tom and Mary’s property. Mary’s sister and father moved into an apartment in nearby Walnut Creek.

  San Ramon is located twenty-five miles east of Oakland, but in those years it was often referred to as “San Remote.” The village had a town hall, general merchandise store, elementary school, and Methodist Church. The agricultural community wasn’t even listed on the 1960 census. The 1970 census recognized 4,084 inhabitants.

  “When we moved out there we were shocked,” Bob said. “We felt we were really out in the country, the boondocks. The crickets were deafening. Pheasants would fly right by our house. Orchards, farms, and ranches were all that was there.”

  Once they adjusted they found their new surroundings idyllic in many ways. There were no fences then and endless open spaces. Parents didn’t worry when their children disappeared after breakfast and didn’t return until dark. Kids walked into the nearby hills at night to camp beneath the stars. Fathers organized quail hunting parties on Saturday mornings.

  There was new construction all around. Everywhere the Ladouceur children looked there were surveyors’ flags, bulldozers, and piles of dirt and lumber.

  Bob and Tom Jr. acclimated quickly and were soon hunting field mice and being chased off the nine-hole golf course by the sprinklers every evening.

  “We played in the newly constructed houses,” Tom Jr. said. “When the frames went up they made really cool forts. We had unlimited lumber to build with.”

  Patricia was the oldest of the Ladouceur children by four years. Tom Jr. was fifteen months older than Bob, and Suzie two years younger. They were always playing sports, even the girls. If they weren’t at home, they were at their grandmother’s house.

  Slowly, life fell into a comfortable routine. The Ladouceur house soon became a popular destination for neighborhood kids, who joined in the games and stayed for dinner. There always was at least one dog, if not three, adding to the chaos.

  Like many women of her generation, Mary Ladouceur lived for her family. She made breakfast and packed lunches before leaving for her job as a school secretary. She was a quiet, simple woman who prayed to an army of Catholic saints and spent her Friday nights reciting the rosary.

  Tom Sr. was interested in what his children did athletically, but he never joined in their games or took them to sporting events. He was always around but never engaged. But he was fun-loving and easily the most popular dad on the block, especially when his children got older. From the outside it appeared to be a model family. Internally there was constant friction. Tom Sr. drank, often heavily. Mary hated that. It was a divisive force.

  “It helps me when I’m talking to kids about drug and alcohol abuse,” Bob said. “I’m real up front with them. I tell them, look, you don’t want to go down that road. It tears up a family and the fabric of relationships dramatically. I never had an interes
t—ever—in going down that road.”

  Tom Sr. pushed his sons into athletics. Bob and Tom Jr. played Little League. Tom Jr. was a good natural athlete but lost interest in sports at a crucial time. The more his father pushed, the more he resisted. When knee problems kept Tom Jr. from participating in high school athletics, Tom Sr. focused more intensely on his youngest son’s athletic career.

  “I felt that to get his approval and attention I had to play athletics,” Bob said. “I liked doing it, but I knew that was a way to get him to notice me. He was very interested in our athletic careers, mine in particular.”

  Football didn’t seem like a good fit for Bob, despite his love for the game. All he had ever wanted for Christmas was a ball or a jersey or a helmet. He understood the game even at a young age. Everything slowed down when he stepped on the field. He couldn’t wait to play.

  The problem was, he was so skinny that his mom and grandfather called him “Bones.”

  He weighed 110 pounds during his first year of youth football; the weight limit was 145. He took a terrible beating and became discouraged. It was a game he felt he was born to play. But it was too painful to play.

  Meanwhile, the San Ramon Valley, like the rest of Contra Costa County, was booming. Ranchers and laborers were in the process of being displaced by more than 25,000 new residents. The new 680 freeway was extended in 1966, making the entire valley more convenient for commuters. “City close, country quiet” was the slogan of one developer.

  With his final Pop Warner youth football league season still fresh in his mind, Bob opted to skip football during his freshman and sophomore years in high school. He lifted weights instead. He draped towels over the bench his grandfather built for him and worked out five days a week.

  He gained weight and was feeling more confident about himself at about the same time he noticed Beverly Lutgendorf, a pretty pom-pom girl with long brown hair and freckles.