Cal's 52-34 beatdown by Ohio State
last Saturday was pretty bad – although Cal still leads OSU in Nobel Prize winners,
22-3 - but it wasn't the worst humiliation the Bears have suffered at the hands
of the Buckeyes.
That came at the 1950 Rose Bowl,
but not during the game. It happened at halftime, when the Cal Marching Band
was upstaged by the Ohio State Marching Band, whose spiffy costumes and high-stepping
strutting made Cal's old-fashioned, military-style band look mundane by
comparison.
The fans booed. The Daily Cal wrote
scathing editorials. Even President Robert Gordon Sproul got into the act,
saying, "The band smells." The band's director, a respected music
professor who had led the band for 16 years, was fired.
Enter the hero of the story: football
coach Pappy Waldorf.
Two years later, the Bears were in
Columbus to play Ohio State, and while they were there Pappy secretly filmed
the OSU band and gave the film to the Cal band, which copied all the moves.
But they couldn't copy Ohio State's
band uniforms, which were – shudder - red. So they copied Michigan's
maize-and-blue uniforms instead.
Next October 3 would have been
Pappy's 111th birthday, which gives me an excuse to write about the
greatest football coach who ever lived.
Yes, there were coaches who won more
games, although Pappy's 67-32-4 record, including three straight Rose Bowl appearances
and back-to-back 10-win seasons, is not too shabby.
But the thing that sets Pappy apart
from the rest is that they did it with fear, while he did it with love.
Nobody can ever remember him
cursing or yelling at a player. Never.
In fact, he didn't even correct
players' mistakes during a game. As far as he was concerned, that's what
practices were for. Game time was for keeping their spirits up and doing the
X's and O's.
When he corrected a player's
mistake at practice, he had a four-step technique that was described for me by
one of his assistant coaches, John Ralston, who went on to employ Pappy's
methods with great success at Stanford.
Step 1: Make physical contact. If
you can, put your arm around his shoulder.
Step: 2: Praise him for something
good he did. Only then do you get to:
Step 3: Point out the mistake and
show him how to correct it, followed immediately by:
Step 4; Put your arm around him
again and reassure him that he's still your boy and you still love him.
I know it sounds too good to be
true, like a story out of a boy's dime novel. But Pappy believed his real job
was to build character, and that the victories would follow.
And he did build their characters –
many of "Pappy's Boys," as they call themselves, went on to have happy
families and successful careers – and the victories did follow.
The newspapers dubbed him "The
Wise Walrus of Strawberry Canyon," and Clark Kerr, who succeeded Sproul as
president, said, "I considered him to be our best teacher. He had more
moral impact on more students than did any other faculty member."
Pappy died in 1981, leaving a wife,
two daughters and 542 sons.
Yes, martinets like Nick Saban and
Urban Meyer have won more games. But nobody's ever going to call them Pappy.
Posts
