When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  Mike Vontoure was a basketball and track star at De La Salle who went on to play basketball for St. Mary’s College in Moraga.

  Chris followed Mike to De La Salle, was a standout in football, and as a sophomore on the basketball team could execute 360-degree dunks. He was a member of De La Salle’s undefeated North Coast Section champion football team in 1992 and helped the basketball team win a championship a few months later. He was a gifted athlete who struggled in other areas. He was kind-hearted, soft-spoken, and always made his teammates laugh. But Chris could also be volatile and temperamental.

  He was the first student-athlete that Mike Blasquez took a real interest in. Blasquez had been a trainer at the school for only a year, but he was coming to understand the type of relationships commonly formed between teachers and students at De La Salle.

  They spent a lot of time together. Chris had trouble focusing and needed constant monitoring. Blasquez thought if he could convince Chris to dedicate himself in the weight room, he could tap his potential as an elite athlete and as a person.

  Chris expressed a desire to get out in the wilderness, away from it all. Blasquez was an avid outdoorsman. They struck a deal. If Chris worked hard during the January-through-June phase of the conditioning program, Blasquez would take him rafting at a place his family often visited in the wilderness northeast of Clear Lake. They would take a two-man raft up Cache Creek and have a cool, relaxing float back to camp.

  Blasquez had been tubing the river since he was five. Gently flowing water gurgled around partially submerged rocks. When the river widened rafts had to be carried to deeper water.

  Temperatures reached into the 90s the day they hiked up into the hills above the creek but they still pushed each other. They reached a point that was as far upriver as Blasquez had ever been. They pushed on past one more hill to make the trip back to camp even longer.

  They lost sight of the creek behind the hill. When they reached the other side they jumped in the raft and pushed off.

  “What we didn’t realize was that the area we couldn’t see was the only treacherous part of the waterway,” Blasquez said.

  The creek wound between two steep cliff faces, the river getting narrower, the water rushing faster and deeper, until they saw it crashing against a giant boulder completely blocking their path.

  Chris was in the front of the raft when it capsized. He grabbed onto an exposed log pinned under the rock. “Hold onto that and climb out!” Blasquez shouted before he was sucked feet-first beneath the boulder.

  It was like being forced through a cold, black garden hose full of murky bubbles. At one point Blasquez felt as if he were in a deep underwater cavern. He was about to give up hope of ever surfacing again when he saw a glimmer of light and fought hard for the surface.

  He was so exhausted he barely made it back to shallow water, gulping air.

  Then came the panic, followed by horror, grief.

  “I was spending so much time with him and we were doing so many positive things and then our worlds came crashing down,” Blasquez recalls, disbelief still registering in his voice years after the incident.

  Chris’s body was found five days later in nearby Yolo County, nine miles downriver from where the accident occurred. He was less than a week away from celebrating his seventeenth birthday.

  The De La Salle community was grief-stricken, bringing back memories of Brother Laurence’s death in a similar incident thirteen years before. Nobody took it harder than Blasquez, who still finds it difficult to summon the words to describe his feelings of responsibility.

  “The Vontoures embraced me, supported me, they knew I was doing something good for Chris,” he said. “I don’t even understand how they could be that way after losing their son, but they found it in their hearts to help me through it.”

  The De La Salle community stood behind him. Blasquez dedicated himself to the program, even framing Chris’s number twenty-three jersey and hanging it in the training room where he was sure to see it every day.

  “Kids have a tough time and want to blame somebody,” he said. “They want to be able to say why something happened. They want an answer. There were some kids who felt he never should have been up there with me and that he never should’ve been in that water. You never get closure on something like that.”

  Chris died in June 1993. Anthony Vontoure entered the school as a freshman two months later. Anthony was devastated by his brother’s death. In fact, some believe he never completely recovered.

  Anthony didn’t blame Blasquez for the tragedy. In fact, they soon fell into a similar relationship. Like Chris, Anthony was a gifted athlete. Like Chris, he was capable of extraordinary compassion and dark rages. He was a respected leader, but he could be volatile.

  Anthony found comfort in the tight-knit community of the football program and thrived on the field as a senior, racking up one hundred tackles and returning four kickoffs for touchdowns.

  During the spring of his senior year Anthony was arrested for fighting. He spent part of the summer at a boys’ camp. He already had accepted a scholarship to the University of Washington, where he later led the Huskies with six interceptions during his sophomore season. He was an All-American candidate the following year, when it all began to unravel.

  There had been several incidents at Washington, each a little more troubling than the last. He smashed a window in the locker room and was suspended from the team. He rejoined the Huskies in time for the Rose Bowl but missed a practice and played sparingly.

  He later was either dismissed from the team or left on his own accord, depending on who is to be believed. He planned to continue his career at Portland State.

  Then came September 11, 2001. Anthony became increasingly disillusioned in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. He didn’t feel that his coaches and teammates were reverential enough and withdrew from the team, watching twenty-four-hour news channels rather than practicing.

  Anthony was living in an apartment complex in a Sacramento suburb when several of his roommates were awakened in the early morning to strange sounds downstairs. Anthony was babbling incoherently about little green men in masks. When his friends were unable to restrain him they reluctantly called police. They described their friend as having a violent bipolar episode.

  Sacramento County Sheriff’s officers arrived at the scene and used handcuffs to restrain him. They planned to take Anthony to a mental hospital, according to a Sacramento County Sheriff’s spokesperson and an initial police report. The sheriff’s office later stated that Anthony kicked officers and tried to escape as they approached the squad car.

  Three more officers arrived at the scene. Anthony’s breathing became shallow during the ensuing struggle. Officers removed the handcuffs and began performing CPR. By the time paramedics arrived, Anthony Vontoure, six weeks shy of his twenty-third birthday, was dead.

  “It brought it all back,” Blasquez said of Anthony’s death. “It was like both of them died at the same time. It was terrible. I hate to think what Mike and Emma were dealing with.”

  Mike and Emma Vontoure were divorced when Anthony was three. They both suspected police brutality and hired a prominent civil rights attorney. The preliminary autopsy report found cocaine in Anthony’s system. University of Washington officials would later tell the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that he had been prescribed medication after being diagnosed as bipolar; this was consistent with the traces of what they believed was a psychiatric drug found in Anthony’s body. The diagnosis was news to Mike and Emma Vontoure, however, whose quest for answers only produced more questions.

  “Anthony’s life was like a flash of brilliance, a lightning streak across a darkened sky—we all looked up and took notice,” Ladouceur said in his eulogy. “The price for heightened awareness often can be pain and disillusionment. Anthony had this heightened awareness. I knew it. I think we all knew it.”

  ★ ★ ★

  The game itself was not unlike th
e seventy-two games that preceded it. There was little doubt which team would prevail. The College Park High Falcons had size up front and speed in the backfield. They were coming off an impressive victory. They didn’t deserve to be cast in the role of sacrificial lamb, but that’s the position in which they found themselves on November 7, 1997. The standing-room-only crowd spilled out of the stands. Fans stood in the end zones and hung over the fences lining the field. Reporters crowded the sidelines. Photographers peered through telephoto lenses and a TV news helicopter landed across the street. Satellite trucks were lined up in the background, generators humming.

  “I remember standing in the middle of the field before kickoff,” said former De La Salle defensive back and running back Nick Walsh. “I remember looking at the faces of the College Park kids, seeing the fans and feeling the electricity. I had never been so excited.”

  For the most part, The Streak had been incredibly boring, the games laughably predictable. There were rare exceptions: the last-second win over Pittsburg in 1993, for example. More typical was the game between the Spartans and Pirates two years later. The Pirates were ranked twelfth in the nation by USA Today when the two teams met again in 1995 before the largest crowd in the history of Pirate Stadium. De La Salle won 28–7 for consecutive win number forty-four.

  After the Spartans conquered Dan Shaughnessy’s Salesian Chieftains to achieve dominance in the Catholic Athletic League, they were presented with a series of obstacles, all of which they negotiated with ease. They were realigned into one public school league and then another, each one posing a stiffer challenge than the one before. They won the league championship every year. They were bumped up in classification from 2A to 3A and finally to 4A and responded with undefeated seasons and North Coast Section titles.

  The difference between De La Salle teams of the 1990s and their predecessors was speed. Ladouceur’s teams always fired off the line and ran the veer to perfection. They always left every ounce of effort on the field. Now the school was attracting elite athletes. This no longer was a grind-it-out offense. Their veer became supercharged.

  De La Salle continued to rise when the rest of the Bay Valley Athletic League was beginning a long, slow decline. There were many factors involved, from new schools skimming players from traditional powers to coaching instability. The gap between the Spartans and their opponents grew so wide that blowouts became a foregone conclusion.

  Freshmen entered the school, seniors graduated, and The Streak went on, week after dominating week, the undefeated seasons piling up like cordwood, until people started picking up the paper not to find out if they won or lost but to find out how wide the margin of victory was. The novelty wore off and people became numb to the Spartans’ success.

  “I’m sick of De La Salle” became a common refrain.

  Cardinal Newman of Santa Rosa held the state record for consecutive wins with forty-seven from 1972 to 1977. De La Salle won its forty-eighth straight game with a 41–8 victory over a powerful James Logan team in 1995. It wasn’t until The Streak reached the mid-60s that Ladouceur became aware of another approaching milestone.

  Hudson High School in Hudson, Michigan, won 72 straight games under legendary coach Tom Saylor between 1968 and 1975. As the national record came within reach, the media attention exploded. Ladouceur and Eidson realized that their pursuit of the record would be a national story, but they never imagined that the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, CNN, ESPN, and countless regional and local media affiliates would descend upon their school in the weeks and days leading up to the potential record-breaking game against College Park.

  Ladouceur prepped for College Park as if it were the biggest game in the program’s history. Between his class schedule, coaching demands, and media obligations, he was so exhausted by midweek that he started napping on an old mattress in the coaches’ office.

  “I just didn’t want to do anything to mess it up for those kids,” he said. “We were extremely prepared for them. I worked very hard all week to go over every detail and every scenario. If we screwed it up it wasn’t going to be because I cut a corner.”

  No team before or since was more perfectly suited to breaking the national record. Nine players on the roster had older brothers who played during The Streak. They grew up attending De La Salle games and even serving as water boys. They understood that The Streak was an inheritance, something to be prolonged and passed along.

  “I was on the field when they lost in 1991,” said Nick Walsh, whose older brother Patrick was one of the greatest running backs in school history. “I remember seeing how heartbroken my brother was. I remember the mission he and his teammates went on that summer.

  “Those of us who had older brothers who had been part of The Streak could feel their presence and a link to something really special even though they weren’t on the field.”

  After a bizarre play on the opening kickoff, when a College Park player recovered a fumble and ran the wrong way, the game unfolded predictably. D. J. Williams was the fastest if not the strongest player on the field even in 1997 as a sophomore. He ran untouched for a 38-yard touchdown on De La Salle’s first official play of the game. He scored again on a 54-yard run to make it 14–0 at the end of the first quarter. By halftime the score was 35–0 and the competition had turned into a coronation.

  “We could’ve probably had a lousy week of practice and still beaten College Park,” linebacker Matt Costello said. “But Lad made us believe that if we didn’t play our best game, we could lose. He convinced us that if we took the wrong first step on 13 veer, we wouldn’t break the record and everybody would go home disappointed.”

  Eidson wrote the number “73” on a chalkboard after the last game of the previous season. “If you don’t know what this means,” he told them, “you soon will.”

  Ladouceur hadn’t talked to his team about The Streak until the week leading up to the record-breaking game. He and Eidson had prepared them for the media and let them know what to expect, but they hadn’t tried to put the potential accomplishment in perspective.

  There was no avoiding the issue as the game approached. Ladouceur told his players they would never have this opportunity again. This was a chance to not only set De La Salle apart but to make national sporting history. How many high school football players get to do that?

  “We were talking about something we had been given and carrying it on,” Matt Costello recalls. “It wasn’t about us. It was about all the people who came before us. We were just a small part of it.”

  The second half turned into a reunion. Former players and coaches reminisced on the crowded De La Salle sideline. The media turned its collective back on the massacre on the field and took notice of the three men in black jackets and hats standing on the sideline.

  Bill Mullaly, Greg Gutierrez, and Chris Monahan hadn’t planned on attending the game. They later realized they had no choice. They couldn’t stay away. They remembered what it was like when television sportscaster Brent Musburger came to their tiny farming community when they broke the national record in 1975. Mullaly was the starting free safety on Hudson’s 1975 team. His picture appeared on the front page of the New York Times the next day.

  Now they wanted to share that experience and relive it themselves.

  “I’ll be honest,” Mullaly said. “Up until they set the record, we were hoping they would lose. We really were. I guess we can still say we hold the public school record.”

  Hudson has a population of 2,000 and is located a few miles north of the Ohio border. The town’s football team enjoyed a streak of six undefeated seasons that spanned the Nixon presidency. The pressure became so intense as the national record approached that coach Tom Saylor’s hands trembled uncontrollably.

  “The Hudson teams were just like De La Salle,” Mullaly said. “They were well-coached and there was a feeling of family and not letting your uncles and brothers down. We thought we worked harder than any team in the state and were better prepared than anybody
.”

  Ladouceur laughed with former players on the sideline in the final two minutes of the Spartans’ 56–0 victory over College Park. He hugged Eidson with a minute left, and his players drenched him with a bucket of ice water as the final seconds ticked down.

  His wet hair was slicked flat from the water and he was picking ice cubes out of his collar when he was swarmed by reporters and photographers. After he answered their questions, the Hudson trio presented him with a game ball signed by members of the 1975 team that had held the record for the past twenty-two years.

  “I couldn’t believe Ladouceur didn’t wear a headset,” Mullaly said. “I thought all football coaches wore headsets.”

  Ladouceur had never made The Streak his mission. He understood that it was a big event, a historic milestone. He knew how much it meant to the De La Salle community when he walked out of the locker room before the game and saw a standing-room-only crowd filled with familiar faces.

  But it wasn’t pride or validation he felt. It wasn’t joy in being the coach of a team that held such a distinction. As he tried to make his way to the locker room through the throngs of reporters and well-wishers, Ladouceur was overwhelmed by relief. He was just glad it was over.

  24

  A WEAKNESS BECOMES A STRENGTH

  Danny Ladouceur and Zac McNally put on their equipment as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. They have never been this nervous before a football game, and this is only a practice.

  They are among the four junior varsity players added to De La Salle’s varsity roster for the 2002 playoffs. It’s an annual tradition for the best JV players to participate at the varsity level to gain experience at the end of the season. Danny and Zac have been consumed by the thrilling possibility for weeks, handicapping their chances in hushed whispers.

  Danny knows the responsibility that comes with wearing the De La Salle jersey. More than that, he knows the legacy and power of his uniform number—number twenty-three.