When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  “There was a certain mystery to Bob,” Beverly said. “I knew that he was sensitive, too. He was different from the other guys. He didn’t mess around with girls. He didn’t drink. We just fell gaga. From the very start we knew we would get married someday.”

  Beverly’s father was a captain in the Merchant Marines who was at sea for nine months at a time. Her mother suffered from periodic bouts of depression. The new couple took refuge in each other. Beverly spent more time at the Ladouceurs’, where the liveliness of an extended family was a refreshing contrast to the tense silence of her home. Bob spent time with her to escape the quiet dysfunction on Broadmoor Drive.

  “My mom pretty much raised us,” Tom Jr. said. “My dad loved to have a great time. Everybody loved him, but he drank too much and had limited time with us.”

  Football remained in the back of Bob’s mind. His body had changed dramatically since he began lifting weights. He was stronger, thicker, heavier. He started lifting in the backyard on crisp fall nights when many of his friends were playing for San Ramon. He kept telling himself he would join them on the playing field someday.

  “He didn’t feel adequate,” Beverly said. “He didn’t feel strong enough or big enough. Then he started weight-lifting at an age where you can really see results. He felt like he could do something. He wanted to do something.”

  He was working out in the San Ramon High weight room at the end of his sophomore year when coach Fred Houston noticed that Bob was stronger than most of his football players. He remembered Bob from youth football and encouraged him to come out for the team, which only made Bob more determined to make up for the years he missed.

  “The weights put me in position,” Bob said. “I was scared going in. I remember thinking, ‘God, I hope this isn’t like eighth grade.’ But I got into it and I was so much faster and bigger and stronger. The game was easier.”

  Houston was a blood-and-guts coach whose practices were so exhausting that many potential players were scared away or quit. Those who remained were dedicated and believed in what they were doing, which would later become a trademark of Ladouceur’s programs.

  “He was tough to play for,” Bob said. “Not everybody could go through his regime. We’d have two and a half weeks of two-a-days. God, it was just brutal. But he taught me a lot. He taught me it’s a game of technique, repetition, and getting it right in practice before you run it in a game. Discipline. He taught me that the game is played aggressively; it’s hard, tough. He taught me a lot of the fundamentals.”

  The triple-option offense popularized by Texas coach Darryl Royal spread through college football like a wildfire in the late 1960s, and by the early 1970s it was trickling down to places like San Ramon High. The offense relied on quick, intelligent linemen capable of executing intricate schemes. It required a quarterback who could distribute the ball in the running game as well as the passing game, and two halfbacks with enough speed to get outside.

  As a power runner with deceptive speed, Ladouceur was an ideal halfback in the new triple-option scheme.

  “Bob was one of the fastest guys out there,” former Spartans assistant coach and San Ramon teammate Blair Thomas recalls. “He had moves, ability, and certainly didn’t mind hitting people. He immediately became the halfback in that option set-up. Even though he hadn’t played in two years he was accepted as a natural and one of the starters. As time progressed it was obvious he would be a go- to guy.”

  The Wolves went three straight games without scoring during Ladouceur’s junior season, and he and the other juniors felt that some of the seniors had quit on the team. Other seniors partied, and the juniors wondered if that held the team back during a 5–2–1 season.

  They resolved to solve these chemistry problems before fall practice began the following season. This was a tight group that respected the game. They wanted to succeed for themselves, but most of all they wanted to succeed for one another. They spent long hours working out to put themselves in position to have the type of season they were convinced they had been denied the year before.

  “It was something we loved,” Thomas said. “We loved the game. Internally, it was big for us. It was pretty much all we did. We played other sports, but what we really wanted to succeed at was football.”

  When Ed Hall was struggling through his first season at De La Salle in 1971, San Ramon’s triple-option offense was firing on all cylinders. Ladouceur, a senior, gained 620 yards, averaging 10.2 yards per carry, was his team’s most valuable player, and was named to the all-conference team.

  He also excelled on defense. With so few available bodies, almost all Houston’s players had to play both ways.

  There were two dominant conferences in Contra Costa County at the time. On Thanksgiving Day, 1971, the conference champions met in what was billed as the Turkey Bowl. The man who would go on to dominate the playoffs like no other coach in history would participate in the first official football playoff game held in Contra Costa County.

  The game was played before a sellout crowd. San Ramon led 7–6 at halftime but fell apart in the second half. Four San Ramon fumbles weighed heavily in a 32–19 loss.

  Nobody was more disappointed after the loss than Bob’s dad.

  Tom Sr. idolized his youngest son. He never missed a game and always was waiting at home to dissect Bob’s performance, almost as if his own self-worth was tied to how his son fared on the field.

  “He could be very critical of other people in the family when he was drinking, but rarely Bob,” Blair Thomas noted. “But if Bob made a mistake in a football game that’s when it came out. If Bob fumbled or got tackled for a loss he could be ruthless.”

  Ladouceur was only six-foot, 180 pounds, but he could bench-press 300 pounds and run a 4.6 40-yard dash. But college recruiters weren’t sure if his success was a product of his ability or San Ramon’s triple-option system.

  He took a recruiting visit to the University of Utah. When the school officially offered him a scholarship, Tom Sr. encouraged him to accept it. Bob did.

  It was an era when young people were challenging traditional values. Ladouceur hadn’t been tempted to experiment with alcohol and drugs in high school. In his family, you either drank or you didn’t. There was no in-between. It didn’t matter what friends were doing. Bob and Tom Jr. didn’t want to be like their dad.

  College was eye-opening for someone from the sheltered San Ramon Valley. Bob was away from home for the first time. He missed Bev. He wanted to make friends and feel accepted. Everybody was drinking and smoking marijuana. He wanted to fit in with his new teammates. He now discusses his brief flirtation with drugs and alcohol with students in his senior synthesis class. His students are then required to write a paper exploring the emotional and psychological triggers that make them want to drink or not drink.

  “It was an assumption that if you were from California, you were hip, you were a surfer and a smoker,” he said. “I knew that wasn’t me, that it wasn’t my lifestyle. It wasn’t what I wanted. I kind of got intimidated into experimenting with that stuff.”

  Ladouceur was one of the few freshman at Utah relegated to the scout team, which serviced the varsity’s first and second teams during two-a-day practices. Scout-team players are typically underclassmen not yet ready to contribute, or upperclassmen who never will get the chance, but they are required to practice against first-teamers every day. It’s punishing duty, especially for a freshman playing against bigger, stronger, faster, and more mature athletes.

  By the time the other freshmen arrived three weeks later, Ladouceur had taken a beating. He started at running back on the freshman team for the first two games and had a 100-yard rushing game. By Thanksgiving all he could think about was home.

  Other freshmen were permitted to go home for the holiday because their season had ended. Bob’s request was denied. He was told he might have a chance to play in the varsity games, which he knew was a lie. The truth was, they couldn’t let all the freshmen leave because they sti
ll needed fodder for the scout team.

  It wasn’t fair. He went home for Thanksgiving anyway.

  For a week upon his return he was required to complete a grueling hour-long regime of sprints and stair-climbing that began at 6 a.m. When Bob left campus for the summer after his freshman year, he knew he would never go back.

  “The football program was run like a business,” he said. “If this was college football, I didn’t want any part of it. I was never playing again. I was done with it. I let my hair grow down to my shoulders.”

  Once again, it was San Ramon coach Fred Houston who spotted him in the weight room and revived his career. Bob spent the summer coaching youth baseball and umpiring men’s softball for the local parks and recreation department. He had enrolled at San Jose State, but had no desire to play football.

  Houston and first-year San Jose State coach Darryl Rogers had been teammates at Fresno State and remained friends. Houston called Rogers and told him that Bob was enrolled for the fall semester. He didn’t know Tom Sr. had already hand-delivered to Rogers newspaper articles detailing Bob’s performances on the freshman team at Utah.

  Rogers called Bob and encouraged him to play.

  “We knew exactly who he was and we were excited he was interested in coming,” said Rogers, who was later the athletic director at Southern Connecticut State.

  Because of NCAA rules, Ladouceur would have to sit out for one year before he was eligible to play in games. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of spending another year getting beat up on the practice team; he’d already paid his dues at Utah. He told Houston as much, and his old coach struck a deal with his former college teammate.

  Bob would serve as an assistant coach under Houston at San Ramon that fall. He would join the San Jose State team in time for the off-season conditioning program and would begin competing for a starting position during spring ball.

  “I thought that was a good deal,” Ladouceur said. “Fred said, ‘OK, but you’ve got to cut your hair.’ ”

  Ladouceur came off the bench to rush for 92 yards in the San Jose State alumni game and was offered a scholarship by the end of spring practice. When two-a-days started in the fall, he was a third-string running back and was expected to see playing time because of his pass-catching abilities.

  That plan changed as preparations began for the 1974 season opener against Santa Clara. Injuries to teammates forced Ladouceur into the starting lineup. It was an exciting time. San Jose State was coming off its first winning season since 1961. Bev, Tom Sr., and all Bob’s friends and family members watched from the stands as he scored a touchdown to give San Jose State an early lead.

  His friend Blair Thomas, who had transferred to San Jose State after one year at Houston, was a backup quarterback charting plays on the sideline when Bob collected a pitch on a sweep late in the second quarter. Bob was trying to turn upfield when an opposing linebacker hit him square in the left shoulder with the crown of his helmet.

  “He landed less than five feet from me,” Thomas said. “He kind of popped up on one knee. I was looking at him and you could see that he was hurting. I could tell he wasn’t right. He was holding his shoulder. We were real concerned for him.”

  A photographer captured the moment of impact. Ladouceur is recoiling from the hit, biting down hard on his mouthpiece, his shoulder already separated, his face twisted in pain. He underwent season-ending surgery the following day.

  “I’ll never forget when he got hit,” Bev said. “Everyone in the stands inhaled.”

  It was a long time before Ladouceur could raise his arm above his shoulder. Two stainless steel pins held the joint together. A few weeks later, Thomas noticed a blood stain on Bob’s T-shirt.

  “We get his shirt off and one of the pins is sticking through the skin,” Thomas recalls. “We went back to San Jose and damned if the trainer doesn’t grab a pair of pliers and yank it out. I saw it. The pin was three inches long. You could see Bob’s eyes watering up. You knew it hurt. I’ll never forget that. I thought, ‘Man, that’s one tough hombre.’ I was gritting my teeth and it wasn’t even me.”

  Ladouceur was climbing back up the depth chart during spring football the following year when he shredded his left knee in the spring scrimmage. “I was in over my head,” Ladouceur says. “I probably would’ve been better as a role player coming in for a couple downs now and then. In hindsight, I probably would’ve been better off as a Division II–type player.”

  Ladouceur underwent his second major surgery in a one-year span and missed the first four games of the 1975 season. He was riding on the team bus after a tough loss to California when he told Rogers that he wanted to play even though he hadn’t fully recovered.

  “Bobby was going to be a real good player,” Rogers says. “He didn’t start by default. He earned it. An injury took him out and it came at the most inopportune time. He was going to play. He wasn’t a Division II player. He could’ve been a very good Division I player. Injuries were the only thing that held him back.”

  The 1975 San Jose State team was one of the most star-studded rosters in school history. Future NFL standouts Steve DeBerg, Wilson Faumuina, Rick Kane, Kim Bokamper, Carl Ekern, and Louis Wright all played on a team that was 8–1 heading into the regular-season finale against a mediocre Hawaii team at Aloha Stadium.

  San Jose State players enjoyed the sun and the sand all week, then got ambushed 30–20, robbing them of a chance to play in the Tangerine Bowl. Ladouceur would relate the memory to his De La Salle players before they took the same field 27 years later.

  Rogers left for Michigan State after the 1975 season. Lynn Stiles, a former assistant to UCLA head coach Dick Vermeil, replaced Rogers at San Jose State.

  Ladouceur played mostly on special teams during the 1976 season. A blurb under his picture in the program that year summed up his career: “A quick player who needs only to avoid injury to realize potential.”

  By the time San Jose State wrapped up a 7–4 season in 1976, Bob was looking forward to life after football. He felt as if the business of big-time college football had chewed him up and spit him out. He would carry the scars from shoulder and knee injuries for the rest of his life. It was time to move on.

  “I got soured on football again,” he remembers. “I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  6

  A FRIDAY NIGHT IN PARADISE

  The streets outside the hotel offer every imaginable temptation to a seventeen-year-old boy. It’s a Friday night in paradise, a street festival in full party mode. Music from three different bands—one pulsating siren song—wafts up to the eleventh-floor keep of the De La Salle football team.

  The young men watch from a balcony as the stages are erected, the tents raised, and the beer trucks unloaded. The aqua waves and white sand of nearby Waikiki Beach might as well be a hundred miles away; the players have been forbidden to swim there because the coaches fear that prolonged exposure to the surf and sun would drain them for the game.

  There is no sheltering them from all of Hawaii’s temptations, however. They have elbowed one another and snickered as they passed prostitutes in strapless tops and short skirts, many of them not much older than the players themselves. They’ve even been propositioned by whispering drug dealers near the International Market.

  These young men are caretakers of the nation’s longest winning streak, 126 games, and they feel the enormous weight of that responsibility. Their season-opening win over Archbishop Mitty was one of the worst performances by a De La Salle team in more than a decade. Now they are twenty-four hours away from putting The Streak on the line against the seventeenth-ranked team in the country, on a field 2,500 miles and three time zones from home.

  Organizers of the First Hawaiian Bank Football Classic are hopeful that as many as 50,000 fans will fill Aloha Stadium for a much-anticipated doubleheader—public high schools Kahuku vs. Long Beach Poly in the first game, private school powers St. Louis vs. De La Salle in the second. The De La Salle game will be telev
ised live in Hawaii and California. De La Salle’s most vulnerable team in a decade will be lining up against a St. Louis team that has been waiting years for this opportunity.

  St. Louis High School began dominating under legendary coach Cal Lee in 1983. They won seventeen league titles in nineteen years, and fourteen Hawaii state championships, before being upset by Kahuku in the state championship game in 1999 and 2000. The St. Louis Crusaders had a fifty-five-game winning streak of their own in the late 1980s and own a 17–1–1 record against out-of-state opponents as they prepare for De La Salle. They have already defeated one California team with an impressive winning streak. In 1991, the Crusaders ended Bakersfield’s 39-game streak with a resounding 36–14 victory.

  Lee retired with a 241–32–5 record following the 2001 season, turning the program over to longtime defensive coordinator Delbert Tengan. Heading into the 2002 season, the Crusaders were expected to dominate Hawaii football once again.

  They had seven players on the pre-season All-State team, including quarterback Bobby George, receiver Jason Rivers, and six-foot-three, 310-pound pre-season all-American defensive end Tolifili Liufau. They are huge along the offensive and defensive lines, outweighing De La Salle by an average of forty-eight pounds per man. St. Louis has eighty-three players on its roster. No one plays both ways. De La Salle has forty-eight players; ten will see action on offense and defense. The Crusaders hope to use their size and numbers advantage to wear the Spartans down.

  High school football games drew as many as 25,000 fans to the stadium in downtown Honolulu before the University of Hawaii rose to prominence in the mid-1970s. But the emergence of Kahuku after years of St. Louis domination has sparked a revival that promoters of the doubleheader hope to exploit.

  The caliber of play in Hawaii is a perennial source of island pride. St. Louis gave Hawaiian high school football credibility by being included in the USA Today Super 25 rankings at various times throughout the years, but there was always a belief that the program was overlooked nationally. This is a chance to prove that the best Hawaiian teams can compete with the best programs from the mainland.