Bridging the Gap

Bridging the Gap

Chronicling the Case for Community College Athletics

Steve Cassady

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Steve Cassady

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Dedication

From 1936, the year the United States sent 18 African-American athletes to the Olympics in Munich—among them three medalists rooted to California Junior Colleges—an estimated 1.8 million student-athletes have matriculated through the California Community College system. Only a small percentage is chronicled in the pages that follow. This book is dedicated to the rest. Their stories matter too.

Steve Cassady Atwater, CA

Summer, 2012

Table of Contents

Prologue

1. The California Comet

2. The Bridge to Somewhere

3. The Noble Experiment

4. Profile—Mel Mason

5. Profile—Patty Cardenas

6. Profile—Oliver Ross

7. Profile—Arbatisha Kitchen

8. John Wooden’s Bruins

9. Night Train & Air Coryell

10. Profile—Dave Ashleigh

11. Profile—Zelda Bolden

12. Profile—Gary Plumlee

13. Profile—Trevor Hoffman

14. Hear Us Roar

15. Too Big to Ignore

16. Profile—Charonda Williams

17. Profile—Shannon Cox

18. Profile—Stefanie Walsh

19. Profile—Angela Rosenquist

20. Hard Wired to Inspire

21. The Academic Conscience

22. Profile—Mark Crear

23. Profile—Brian Fuentes

24. Profile—Kim Ward

25. Profile—Jason Sehorn

26. A Passing Comment

Epilogue

Prologue

Date: 12/14/ 1952. Place/Event: Pasadena, CA/Junior Rose Bowl. Point-of-View: first person—nine-year old in the stands among 35,000 people from the Salinas Valley, cheering Hartnell College from Salinas against Bacone Institute, a reservation school from Muscogee, Oklahoma...

…In its time, the JRB gravitated toward big-population Southern California schools in deference to gate receipts. Compton and Bakersfield were selected four times; Long Beach and Pasadena three times; Santa Ana, twice; Chaffey, El Camino, Cerritos, Orange Coast, and Santa Monica once each. Hartnell was the first and only Northern California team to represent the state, and the smallest. Salinas, population 13,947, the Salad Bowl to the World, is notable for row crops, John Steinbeck, and afternoon wind. Any Community College constructed in the boom of the 1960’s and 1970’s faced a 100-acre requirement—couldn’t open as a Community College on less than 100 acres. Hartnell sits cramped on 14, land-locked by neighborhood housing. Hartnell plays football games at Salinas High School—with insufficient acreage on its own campus to build a stadium. My father advised the student newspaper, The Panther Sentinel in the1952. He flacked the Junior Rose Bowl Game. Big stuff for Steinbeck country lettuce heads.

We all went. Most of Salinas went—by train, bus or car. We drove south on Highway101 six hours in a 1949 two-door Ford. My father had us comped into the headquarters hotel, the opulent Huntington, located on 23 acres at the base of the San Gabriels, an unheard of privilege for a family of five living on a school teacher’s salary in 1952. The Pittsburgh Steelers were in Southern California to play the Rams that week, also staying at the Huntington. In the lobby one morning we met Jack Butler, a Steelers’ DB. At age nine, I didn’t know Jack Butler from William Butler Hickok, but the whole thing mesmerized. In 2012, Jack Butler was chosen by the seniors’ committee for induction into the NFL Hall of Fame. Another dot connecting.

Twins Don and Babe Chandler played for Bacone. Don Chandler was a DB/punter/ place kicker. Don Chandler went from Bacone to the University of Florida. He led the nation in punting his senior year (he would be inducted in the UF Athletics Hall-of- Fame). He was drafted by the New York Giants. He punted in the Greatest Game Ever Played, the 1958 overtime epic, New York Giants against the Baltimore Colts in the December cold of Yankee Stadium. Johnny Unitas completed late-game sideline outs to Raymond Berry, Alan Ameche scored the winning TD, and the Colts marched into history while a national television audience discovered NFL football in low-resolution black and white on small oval screens. Don Chandler punted for Green Bay under Vince Lombardi in 1966 and 1967, both Super Bowl championship years. Don Chandler was named the punter on the NFL’s All-Decade team for the 1960’s.

The JRB score seesawed. Hartnell was down 20-14 late in the fourth quarter. Bacone had driven to the Hartnell one-yard line. Bacone outweighed Hartnell by an average 20 pounds per man. Bacone’s roster was all Native-American from Oklahoma Territory. Bacone had a big equine running back—something Horse or Horse something. The Panthers couldn’t stop big Horse until 170 pound DB Bob Scofield, a tough kid from Watsonville, knocked him out of the game with a crushing shoulder tackle. The Panthers held at the goal line for four torturous downs. Change of possession on the one. 99 yards to travel with 2:08 on the clock, operating from a pre-historic split-T formation: hardly possible. Hartnell’s offense consisted of quarterback keepers, halfback dives, fullback plunges, with maybe four passes in its playbook.

Left-handed quarterback Chuck Dillard—the game’s eventual MVP—drove them downfield anyway. At the gun he threw an interception. Game over—except that a Bacone DB, probably one of the Chandlers, was flagged for pass interference on left end Jerry Jackstis. One more play. On the extra snap, left handed QB Chuck Dillard passed 15 yards to right halfback Tony Teresa. Tony Teresa had sliced through the line, slanting into the right corner of the end zone. Tony Teresa had broken both hands late in the season. He sat out the conference finale against Monterey. Official ruling: hands in plaster casts considered weapons. For the JRB three weeks later, the doctor buzzed off the casts and taped him like a boxer from wrists to lower knuckles. Tony Teresa caught the tying TD on fingertips of broken hands sticking through wisps of gauze. Hartnell shanked the extra point and the game ended in a 20-20 tie, but…Pasadena at the Rose Bowl/famous Tom Harmon at the stadium mike/ Jack Butler and the NFL Steelers…the whole thing indelible in imagination and permanent in memory.

Date: 12/2/1974. Place/Event: Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum/AFC Divisional round playoff game between the Miami Dolphins and the Oakland Raiders. Point-of-View: third person—31 year old free-lance writer, a pro football aficionado since childhood, viewing from the Coliseum press box…

…Assorted media members from South Florida sported 70’s Miami rags—double knit sport coats, white belts, patterned slacks in hideous, magenta, dark blue, or sea green. They beheld the damp Coliseum under gray skies, 49 degrees temperatures in 78% humidity: raw concrete walls holding 55,000 black and silver lunatic fans cheering a black-shirted badass football team. One of them: Looks like the end of the world out there. Ray Guy kicked off. Nat Moore returned it 89 yards for a touchdown. John Madden, post-game: People hadn’t sat down from the National Anthem, and we’re behind by a touchdown. John Madden: great coach, funny guy, a JC original, with two stints as a student at the College of San Mateo in Football and Baseball, wrapped around a season of Football in Grays Harbor CC in Aberdeen, Washington. He later was an assistant to Al Baldock at Allan Hancock then Hancock head coach for a year before elevating to San Diego State under Don Coryell and into the NFL with the Raiders.

As a young coach, Madden had listened to Vince Lombardi explicate the Green Bay Packers’ power sweep. Among other insights, Madden gripped the importance of three-tool running backs like Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor, guys that could run, block, and catch passes out of the backfield. As the Raiders’ head coach he had inherited Charlie Smith, adept at all three, from Utah State by way of Bakersfield College. Charlie Smith was drafted in the fourth round of a monster 1968 Raiders draft. Al Davis whiffed on the first choice, quarterback Eldridge Dickey out of Tennessee State but hit big on the next three. He took Alabama’s Kenny Stabler in the second round, Art Shell from Maryland, Eastern Shore, in the third, and Charlie Smith in the fourth. By 1974, Smith—hero of the 1968 Heidi game—neared the end of a solid career. He was the third-down backup to starter Clarence Davis, an undersized All-America tailback from USC, following two stellar seasons at East Los Angeles Community College. At 5-9, 190, Clarence Davis didn’t profile for stardom in the Raiders’ attack. He could run and block, but was too small and couldn’t catch. Maverick Al Davis drafted him anyway—fourth round, 1971. Al Davis liked gritty players from schools that won. 13 months later, Clarence Davis would rush for 137 yards on 16 carries in Oakland’s first ever Super Bowl win—a 32-14 defeat of the Minnesota Vikings at the Rose Bowl in SB XI. Clarence Davis is one of only two All-America tailbacks from USC ever to earn a Super Bowl ring. The other was Marcus Allen.

The Raiders rebounded from Miami’s opening TD. In a throwback era, Kenny Stabler ran his own huddle on Sundays after long sessions with coaches and film during the week. In the second quarter, Stabler saw a match-up he wanted: middle linebacker Nick Buoniconti covering Charlie Smith out of the backfield. Charlie Smith slipped through the line and foot-raced Buoniconti toward the post. Stabler arced the ball 31 yards. Charlie Smith caught it over his shoulder as he crossed the goal line. In the booth, receivers’ coach Tom Flores fist-pumped the misty air. Tom Flores: former Raiders quarterback and future Super Bowl coach, from College of the Pacific by way of Fresno City College. The game stood at seven through until Garo Yepremian kicked a 33-yard field goal. In the third quarter the teams traded TD passes to Hall of Fame receivers—Stabler 13 yards to Fred Biletnikoff; Bob Griese 16 yards to Paul Warfield. Miami moved ahead 19-14 in the fourth quarter with a 46-yard Yepremian field goal.

Stabler countered, hitting Cliff Branch 72 yards up the left sideline. Branch pulled up and dove to make the catch, untouched by Miami defenders. He bounced up and sprinted the final 27 yards to put Oakland in front 21-19. 4:37 remaining. Miami driving, controlling the ball, Larry Csonka and Benny Malone ticking off time consuming rushes. Benny Malone swept right breaking tackles 23 yards for a touchdown and a five-point lead, 26-21, with two minutes remaining. Oakland started at its own 32, with all its timeouts. The Dolphins’ sideline was anxious, afraid they had scored too soon.

Stabler handed to Marv Hubbard behind Clarence Davis’s lead blocks. Stabler threw sideline comebacks to Fred Biletnikoff. In five plays, he moved the Raiders 60 yards to the Dolphins’ eight. Third down, 35 seconds showing. Stabler dropped to throw. Stabler danced on his toes, cocking his left arm, looking left, looking right. Five in the pattern. Everyone covered. Kenny the Snake slithered to his left ahead of a marauding Miami front. He saw Clarence Davis streaking across the end zone right to left. He felt the breath of the rush down the back of his neck. Vern Den Herder bore down and wrapped him low. On his way to the ground, Stabler floated a low-velocity duck toward Clarence Davis, bracketed by Dolphin defenders. Clarence Davis wrestled defensive back Charlie Babb and linebacker Mike Kolen for the ball.

On the other side of the field Marv Hubbard saw the play unfold and thought: INT. We were so well-trained, he said, I was running into position for the tackle so we could stop them short and work to get the ball back and go in and score. Hubbard pulled up when he heard the whistle and saw the official goal-post his arms with the TD signal

Miami still had a shot, 30 seconds left. Oakland covered the kickoff. Linebacker Phil Villapiano intercepted Bob Griese’s desperate pass on the next series. The score stood at the gun. Oakland over Miami, 28-26. At the sight of the INT, wearing bad 1970’s silver/black checkered pants, linebackers’ coach/defensive signal caller Don Shinnick yanked the headset off his backwards hat and blew up along with everyone else on the sidelines and in the stands. Don Shinnick played on the iconic Johnny Unitas/Gino Marchetti (USF-Modesto JC) Baltimore Colts. He played in the 1958 Greatest Game against the Frank Gifford (USC-Bakersfield College)/Sam Huff New York Giants. He played 13 years in the NFL. He holds the all-time career record for interceptions by a linebacker, 37. Don Shinnick grew up in San Pedro and played two years at LA Valley CC before taking a scholarship to UCLA. He was an All-America on the Bruins’1954 National Championship team, a second round draft choice by Baltimore in 1957, the first Bruin ever to play in an NFL championship game.

The Raiders/Dolphins of 1974 game still resonates. Kenny Stabler, in an NFL Network retro documentary that continues to air: Clarence Davis—great runner, tough guy, great person…and probably the worst hands of anyone in the stadium. No matter. In a game characterized as the Sea of Hands, Clarence Davis’ two hands were the best in the water for the final score. The Sea of Hands—high on everyone’s short list of the greatest ever NFL games. JC guy Clarence Davis, hanging on, making a play for all time.

Current Perspective: two events spaced 22 years apart compressed as one, indelible in imagination and permanent in memory, JC cleat marks all over both.

1.

The California Comet

Note: this is one of two chapters lapsing into the first person. Some writers might have figured an objective method for telling the tale, but this one lived it and could not.

Dismal economic indicators projected the state of California nose-diving throughout 2010 with a 26-billion dollar deficit, auguring draconian slashes in 2011-2012 budgets and beyond, higher education included. In the spring of 2011, a report from the LAO (Legislative Analyst’s Office) leaked into print. Among its findings—the state could realize 55 million dollars a year by defunding Community College Athletics. LAO spokespeople insisted the report was hypothetical only, the crunching of what-if numbers. Absent from the LOA report were what-if numbers crunched from defunding other California Community College disciplines. Only the one I was born into. Adverse reaction from insiders followed: horror over high-level oblivion to the complex and beneficial circuitry of Community College Athletics.

It cuts deep with me. My father attended Sacramento Junior College after Vallejo High School in 1928. He pole vaulted on the 1929 track team the first year that Hughes Stadium was open for business, the last boom of the Roaring Twenties before the bust of the Great Depression. While world economies crashed, 1930-33, my father competed in Track at UC Berkeley under the legendary Brutus Hamilton. My father graduated in 1935 without prospects, a married man with a BA degree in German, a teaching credential, and zero job offers. He applied for high school jobs, among other places in Sonoma County. Teaching positions were scarce, salaries low, in the Valley of the Moon, bonuses paid out with gunny sacks of stewing hens or crates of Gravenstein apples. My father was a hustler disinclined toward meek appeal. He followed up his paper applications by bracing Board Members on site, apple growers in orchards, chicken farmers in barnyards, bankers sitting behind their desks. My father advanced his candidacy in person with the people who influenced decisions, and it worked. He was employed at Sonoma High to teach History, Foreign Languages and coach Track.

In 1940, Bud Winter, from Pacific Grove, was coaching Football and Track at Salinas Junior College, now Hartnell. I never questioned the stock account of how my parents and sister matriculated from Sonoma High School to Hartnell before I was born. Salinas Junior College looking for a German teacher that could coach Track; Salinas Junior College contacting Brutus Hamilton, wondering if Brutus Hamilton knew anyone qualified; Brutus Hamilton saying he might at that. Nobody is left alive to verify, but after scouring yearbooks, and Googling relevant names through archives, the real story turns tricky. The system was primitive then, only 31 Junior Colleges in the system (112 today), all of them indentured to a K-14 structure, not yet emancipated from Secondary School oversight. Even within that backwards configuration, the Athletics system reached out. It spins something like this:

Bud Winter was a climber, a Junior College Football and Track coach with bigger ideas. Hard to imagine, but long before cell-phones, e-mail, Twitter, tweet, and Skype, ambitious college coaches managed to stay informed. Bud Winter had a climber’s single-minded shrewdness. He would have known that Salinas Junior College was advertising to hire an Instructor of Germanic Languages. He would know Brutus Hamilton. He would know that Brutus Hamilton coveted Salinas JC’s world-class sophomore sprinter, Harold Davis. Bud Winter would have been conversant with results from the state high school meet in 1939. He would have known that Sonoma High School senior Frank Freeman finished second in the state meet in the broad jump. Frank Freeman was legitimate. His high school section record of 23-10 would stand for 26 years before broken by Mel Gray of Santa Rosa who went on to a Pro Bowl career as a wide receiver and kick returner for the NFL St. Louis Cardinals. Bud Winter would have known Frank Freeman was coached at Sonoma High by Henry Cassady, Foreign Language instructor who pole-vaulted for Brutus Hamilton at Cal. He would have known all that and put it together. However the influence was peddled among the participants, however the dots connected through the singing wires and smoke signals of the day, Salinas Junior College ended up with its German teacher; my father with his college job; Bud Winter with his assistant Track coach; Frank Freeman with a college to attend—he would broad jump 23-11 for Hartnell in 1942; Brutus Hamilton with Harold Davis; and me, as yet unborn, with a destiny.

Harold Davis, from Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, had Chariots of Fire credentials. In 1974, he was one of only two Community College athletes inducted into the charter class of the USATF Hall of Fame (Les Steers, high jumper from College of San Mateo in the 1930s was the other). As a high school junior in 1938, Harold Davis won the 100 and 220 yard dashes in the Pacific AAU Championships with times of 9.7 and 21.0. Bud Winter recruited him to Salinas JC in 1939. In June of 1941, Harold Davis ran a 10.2 100 meters at the Compton Relays, tying Jesse Owens’ world record. He never lost that year, all the way through the AAU Nationals in New York. He transferred to UC Berkeley. He was undefeated at Cal in 1942. He won both sprints in the Big Ten-PCC dual meet, setting meet records with 9.4 and 20.4, and in the NCAA, AAU Nationals, posting meet records. In 1943, he won both sprints in the NCAA and AAU nationals again. In an era of heroic nicknames, Harold Davis was the California Comet, and the World’s Fastest Human. From 1940 through 1944, he held every major sprint title in the world. He held the world record in the 100 yard dash until 1948, when it was broken by the Panamanian Lloyd LaBeach. Harold Davis was denied Olympics stature only because the Olympics were cancelled during World War II. He settled for inventing his own history as athletics immortal from Morgan Hill by way of Salinas JC.

Bud Winter later would gain fame at San Jose State, where he built his Speed City empire in the 1960s and 1970s. He coached Olympic medalists Tommie Smith, Lee Evans, and John Carlos. He would coach 102 Track and Field All-Americas, including 27 Olympians. He would coach for a short time future civil rights groundbreaker, discus thrower Harry Edwards. The string didn’t stop there. Bud Winter left Salinas JC for the war, but the program remained, my father intermittently involved. Among the athletes my father coached in the 1940s was a fidgety 17-year old sprinter from Gwinner, North Dakota, a 5-6 multi-sport athlete, Wilmar Martineson, who went by Willie while at Salinas JC. Willie Martineson transferred to Baylor and ran a first-place 9.7 hundred in the Texas relays in 1947. In 1949 he dead heated USC’s Mel Patton in the Coliseum relays in Los Angeles. Willie and my father stayed in touch by telephone. Willie would check in over the years as he built nomadic resume as an educational administrator in the Dakotas, Montana, Alaska, and New Mexico, interning for his true ambition: California Community College president.

He turned up in Merced College in 1971 as the Dean of Extended Ed (up from Night School) coincidentally the year I was finishing my Master’s in American Literature at SF State. Willie, by then, was Bill and had dropped the e from his last name. Bill Martinson hired me to teach adjunct at Merced. It isn’t nepotism, he said when I asked. In the first place, this is part-time. What you get after part-time is what you earn. In the second place, it is faith. I know your old man. I don’t believe he would raise an incompetent kid. Judgment affirmed. Eighteen months later, I was hired full-time certificated in English. Three years after that, Bill Martinson was appointed President-Superintendent of Merced College. 15 years after that, I evolved into coaching and athletic administration. A fateful run without prior design—somehow buzzing its way through the circuitry of the JC/CC athletics system.

My father seized his moment in 1940. He and my mother packed my two-year old sister and their belongings into a 1937 Ford and trundled to the Central Coast. Eventually my family grew to five, and our lives tended to organize around college events, especially athletics events, Football games, Basketball games, Baseball games, and Track meets. In 1952 and 1953, it was magic. Salinas Junior College now was Hartnell, split from the High School District since 1949. Hartnell football was coached by alumnus Dick Voris, originally from Pacific Grove, who had played for Bud Winter and returned by way of a coaching stint at James Lick High School in San Jose. Dick Voris brought some talent with him. He inherited more. He installed Bud Wilkinson’s Oklahoma split-T and tore through those two years with a record of 20-0-1. The one, the tie, came at the end of 1952, in the Junior Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The Junior Rose Bowl was organized by the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce as a mid-December undercard for the main event, the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl. The JRB sprang up in 1946 and ran through 1966. It revived in 1976 for another two years then died out altogether. In its time it was big.

The JRB played to live crowds in the post-war era before television Shanghaied fans from arenas and stadiums into Barca-loungers and sports bars. It pitted the California State Champion against the top team among the NJCAA schools. Cal JCs usually won—16 times in the JRB’s 22 year history. Compton played in the first game, against Kilgore, Texas, and the third, in 1948, versus Duluth from Minnesota. Hugh Mclhenny starred for Compton in 1948. He would be part of legendary backfield for the San Francisco 49ers in the 1950s, all four of whom have been inducted in the NFL Hall-of-Fame: YA Tittle at quarterback, Mclhenny and John Henry Johnson at halfbacks; Fletcher Joe Perry at fullback. Of the four, two were Cal JC guys, Mclhenny and Perry, who scored 22 touchdowns at Compton in 1945 before joining the military. Sim Iness played on the 1948 Compton team. Sim Iness was a lineman and a discus thrower. He won the discus gold in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.

Some said the JRB would have done better in 1948 to schedule a match between Compton and the next best team in California, City College of San Francisco, which featured future NFL Hall-of-Fame running back Ollie Matson and linebacker Burl Toler. Burl Toler went to the University of San Francisco and teamed with Matson, Gino Marchetti (Modesto JC after WW II), and Bob St. Clair. He was drafted number one by the Cleveland Browns but he suffered a career-ending injury in the College All-Star game. He went on to officiate NFL games. He was the first African-American to officiate an American professional game. Burl Toler was a career educator in San Francisco. He officiated professional games for 24 years and served another eight as an NFL evaluator of officials.

Santa Ana played in the 1949 JRB against Little Rock, Arkansas. Al Carmichael was a receiver at Santa Ana College in 1949. Al Carmichael played for the Green Bay Packers out of USC. He switched to Denver in the early AFL. He scored the first touchdown in AFL history on a 59-yard pass from Frank Tripucka. Ray Willsey was his quarterback in the 1949 JRB. After Santa Ana, Ray Willsey transferred to UC Berkeley. He played pro ball in Canada with Edmonton. He damaged his elbow in the CFL and went into coaching. He was the head coach at Cal from 1964-1971. He coached as an assistant in the NFL with Washington, St. Louis, and Oakland. He coached Cal during the Mario Savio Free Speech disruptions. In 1952, Hartnell played Bacone Institute to a 20-20 tie in maybe the best JRB game ever. The game stays imbedded in Salinas Valley history. Players from that team stay in contact. They hold reunions. The survivors are skirting eighty and looking forward to meeting for the 60th in the fall of 2012.

Dick Voris jumped at the chances brought on by his JRB fame. He had it made at Hartnell, but opportunity tempted. He was the head coach at the University of Virginia from 1958 to 1960. In three years he rang up an ignominious 1-29 record and was canned. He caught on for some career restoration in 1962 as a linebackers coach in Green Bay under Vince Lombardi, when the Packers of Paul Hornung, Ray Nitzchke, and Bart Starr won their first NFL title. From there, one football job after another. In 1976, I was on leave from teaching English at Merced College, working in Los Angeles as a football writer. I was in the tunnel after a LA Rams victory over hapless and winless expansion Tampa. Tampa’s first season: a 0-14 debut for hot shot college coach, the witty if acerbic John McKay who had won national titles behind the power I-formation at USC. In the tunnel, post-game, I was hanging near the locker room when Tampa’s booth coaches elevatored down. I picked a face from the group wearing burnt orange pullovers. Dick Voris. I had seen him last 23 years earlier, when I was 10 years old. His features had weathered. His full head of light brown hair still was full but had turned completely white. Time can do that to a man in his 50s. Losing can do it faster. The coaches rushed toward the locker room door for John McKay’s denigrating post-game address. I braced Voris. He didn’t recognize me. I prompted him with my father’s name. He stopped to shake hands for the few seconds he could spare. The image sticks. His face rearranged into something impossibly far away. Those were good days, he said over his shoulder while jogging to the locker room. Please give your father and mother my best.

JRB hero Tony Teresa was the most decorated Panther of my upbringing, 5-9, 180 pounds of solid performing genius. These days, young athletes specialize in a single sport by Middle School. Then, play anything in season. Tony was a split-T right halfback in Football his first year, a quarterback his second, a guard in Basketball, an outfielder in Baseball, javelin thrower in Track. He was also married with children and had to support his family by pumping gas at an off-brand Regal station on John Street. Tony was great with kids. My brother and I would pedal our bikes to his station for the thrill of hanging in the presence of local athletic celebrity. Tony Teresa was all-conference in everything at Hartnell. He was scholarshiped to San Jose State in football for the 1954 season. Bob Bronzan was the head coach. Dick Vermeil was a backup quarterback the next year, Bill Walsh a grad assistant. In 1955, my father ferried us to Palo Alto in our 1949 Ford to watch Tony’s Spartans play the home field Stanford Indians. Tony was pure pleasure to behold. He was shifty, and he hit hard. He radiated excitement whenever he touched the ball. On one play, Tony gained 19 yards but reversed his field three times leaving white-helmeted, red-jerseyed Stanford defenders splayed on the ground across a field-wide serpentine path. He covered maybe 130 yards to advance 19.

Tony graduated from San Jose in 1956 and ventured north. He played a season-and-half for the Vancouver British Columbia Lions before hurting his ankle. Canadian Football imposed a hard quota of 10 Americans per team. Americans were premium—they made or broke the CFL chances. Injured Americans were disposed and replaced to sustain the quota. The joke was, You met your replacement at the airport, remembers Tony Teresa’s wife Pat. Tony tried out for the San Francisco 49ers in 1958. He was the final cut. He returned to Salinas to teach and coach in high school. In 1960 he joined the newly formed Oakland Raiders of the upstart AFL. His roommate was Tom Flores from Fresno Junior College, the Raiders’ starting quarterback that year. The first ever score in Oakland Raiders’ history was all the way JC, a 13-yard TD pass from Tom Flores to Tony Teresa. Tony was a tailback/wide receiver—in those days the Raiders’ running backs split wide opposite the strength of the formation. He is still listed in the Raiders’ record book for leading the 1960 team in rushing and scoring, 608 yards and 10 TDs. He wasn’t big enough to last in pro ball. A back injury put in him in a full body cast, and that was it for football. He earned a Masters’ degree and returned to Hartnell as an assistant in football and head coach in baseball. He was fated to die young, at age 50 in 1984, of liver cancer. Bill Walsh was coaching the 49ers then, working on his second Super Bowl. Dick Vermeil was broadcasting nationally for CBS, in between Super Bowl coaching stints for the Philadelphia Eagles and St. Louis Rams. Both made themselves available for Tony’s last days.

I saw Tony Teresa in the mid-1970’s, when the Panthers would play non-conference Baseball games against Merced College. I loved watching him coach. He coached like he played. Animated, almost feral—intense, intimidating, involved with every pitch. Tony was instrumental in a small way for my career choice. After a couple false starts, I was back in school working on a Master’s in English. I was visiting in Salinas one day in the late 1960s. My father and I strolled out to football practice and chatted a bit with Tony while he was running drills. Tony confirmed the direction my instincts were pointing. He said, Finish your Master’s. Get into the JC system. Great place to be..., a judgment confirmed eight years later on Dick Voris’ face in the tunnel next to the visitor’s locker room at the LA Coliseum. Later at the Merced College baseball field, we talked in the visiting dugout pregame. Tony asked about my teaching. I spewed some personal philosophy and told a few stories. He grinned: Just like your old man, tough but fair. Tony Teresa’s approval, my old man’s DNA feeding my own spin—validating credentials.

At Merced, I evolved into Athletics upon whim. I was teaching English, every level from remedial Composition to Shakespeare, and writing about pro football on the side. I had played Baseball in high school and at Hartnell, Fast-pitch Softball afterward into my mid-30s. After my last year at Hartnell, I played fast pitch softball in a summer league at the old Rodeo Grounds. Clive Bullion was on that team. Clive had been the left halfback from the Junior Rose Bowl team. Dick Voris had brought him down from Los Gatos High School. He was 17 his first semester in Salinas, still in his late 20’s that summer. I tried not to let it show—Clive Bullion, 1952 JRB guy and me on the same team—hero worship at age 20, not cool. Clive was still fast. I wasn’t slow. We batted one-two/two-one in the lineup. One night, Clive said, You lead off tonight. First time on base, I’ll drop a bunt. Neither of stops running. Audacious scheme, highly effective. We worked it often. Most times it resulted in two runners on without giving up an out—sometimes with overthrows, one or both of us scoring. I couldn’t have known it then, but Clive’s play was seminal to my thinking as a softball coach 25 years later. As a coach I obsessed over for methods for advancing 60 feet without giving up an out.

In the college cafeteria one day in the spring of 1987, Athletic Director, Don Odishoo, himself a JC product from Modesto, said, You know we had to cancel Softball this year. Not enough girls. I said I knew that. He said, You want to coach? Without knowing why—I had zero experience—I answered: Sure. There it was—the return to my roots. The first year of coaching was an embarrassment. We lost our first six games. We didn’t finish last, but the final record was hideous: 13 wins, 23 losses, the only losing season out of the 21 I coached. Through the years I probably lacked perspective on that 1988 season. I considered it failure. I changed my mind one day in 2011 while in line at a Target store in Atwater.

In front of me was a lady who played on that first team, Becky Gomes then, Becky Gibson now. For past 20 years Becky Gibson has taught English at Merced High School. We reminisced over a few anecdotes. Becky was part of a desperate scramble for players before we became established. Becky had some unpolished assets. She was big, strong-armed, and fast for her size but clueless. She didn’t play in high school; her parents were afraid of injury. In 1988 she was married with two children and working at United Parcel, where the day begins at 5 a.m. She was playing low level Slow-Pitch when I talked her back into college and onto the She-Devils’ roster. We hid her in right field and low in the batting order as a freshman while she refined her game—when I was developing some innovative approaches to the concept of self-esteem. Failure to execute fundamentals meant exile into turd lines for remedial drills. Becky Gomes spent her share of time in the TL’s. In the van after our last road game in 1988, she said, Steve, I don’t want to be a turd any more. I said, It’s up to you. Work it. She did. She sacrificed sleep to run stadium steps and drill on outfield agility footwork, throwing motion, bunting technique, and hitting the outside pitch.

By her second season in 1989, she was good enough play center field and make All-Conference. She hit over .340 for the year. She had a cannon arm. One game sticks out. We were in San Jose for an Easter