Fear No Man by Gastineau Mike;Saban Nick;Saban Nick;

Author:Gastineau, Mike;Saban, Nick;Saban, Nick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

Close Call at Cal

HOBERT STRODE BRISKLY DOWN A HOTEL HALLWAY, REACHED THE end, opened a door, went down a flight of stairs, and reentered the hotel. He then walked the length of the hallway there until he reached the other side of the hotel. Out the door. Up the stairs, back inside, and down the hallway. It was 2:00 a.m. the night before UW was to meet unbeaten Cal, and like during most nights before games Hobert was too keyed up to sleep.

“I tried watching movies, listening to music, white noise,” Hobert said. “I tried everything, and what I eventually did that worked was to power-walk through the hotel and go over scenario after scenario. I’d play the game two or three times so that the next day there was nothing the defense could do that I hadn’t already seen in my head.” Hobert ran through his checks and talked to himself as he walked; eventually, exhausted, he’d return to his room for a few hours of sleep. On this night he wasn’t particularly worried about the opponent, but maybe he should have been.

Cal was not only unbeaten, but also ranked seventh in the country, the highest for a Golden Bear football team since 1951. Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium had not hosted a matchup of two teams both in the top ten in the national rankings since October 1947. UW had dominated the series over the years, but the Bears were 11–2–1 in their last fourteen games overall; they were coming into the game after routing Oregon the week before, 45–7; and they were looking to gain some measure of revenge for the 46–7 loss they had suffered the previous year in Seattle.

The stadium was packed for kickoff, a rare accomplishment for Cal home games that did not go unnoticed by ABC’s Brent Musberger. “Usually when you come to a game at Memorial Stadium there are more empty seats than folks,” Musberger said. “But that is not the case now.”

“The whole atmosphere was antithetical to what Cal is all about,” Rondeau said. “It was a packed house, and it was noisy. It was an unbelievable crowd for Berkeley. They were into it. It was a hell of an atmosphere.”

Days before the game, Cal running back Russell White expressed excitement in the San Francisco Examiner about the expected big crowd: “You see those guys at Ann Arbor, at Tennessee, playing in front of 100,000 people, and you think, ‘Wow, those cats are living. That’s big time.’”

Speaking of big time, the Las Vegas line on the game was a hefty fourteen points, an unusually high number for a matchup of two top ten teams. But that line was likely inflated a bit due to the Huskies’ relentless success, not just on the field, but also for gamblers wagering on them. The Dawgs had covered the spread in twelve of their previous thirteen games. “They just keep rolling,” Jeff Bauer, assistant manager of Harrah’s Reno, told Bud Withers of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “They can’t be stopped by anybody.

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