This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.
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I.
I am not an expert, but I have to imagine that we at least came close to achieving Peak Berkeley in March of 2007, when a group of people protesting the impending construction of a new athletic facility—led by a gadfly and perpetual mayoral candidate named Zachary RunningWolf—posed nude for a photo shoot while lounging in the very trees they were endeavoring to save from destruction. That, my friends, is a true Berkeley Bingo, and if it wasn’t enough to convince you that this place is indelibly weird, here were some of those same protestors on national television several months later, earning the scornful approbation of reactionary college football legend Brent Musburger.
It has long seemed kind of unfathomable that the University of California bothers to field a football team at all; I cannot imagine a single institution in America whose ethos is more symbolically antithetical to football. Everything you hear about Berkeley is true: It’s a great place, but every time I go there, I see a handful of people who appear not to have changed their clothes since the Beatles broke up. It’s been 60 years now since a young man named Mario Savio helped kickstart the Free Speech movement on campus, which means it’s been six decades since Berkeley essentially helped distill the spirit of the 1960s as a whole. Berkeley came to embody the spirit of a new liberalism that came to question entrenched power structures, and let us not mince words—most football coaches hated that shit, because it made their lives more difficult.
Back in 1964, the Bears were quarterbacked by an All-American named Craig Morton, who later said, after watching Savio and his fellow protesters stir things up, that he went to the administration and asked, Why don't you let a bunch of us athletes get them all out of here?
A meme was born: The jocks hated the hippies. The hippies hated the jocks.
“They weren’t part of Cal,” Morton said, “but they let them ruin Cal.”
II.
College football and cultural conservatism have existed hand-in-hand since that moment at Berkeley in 1964. Cal’s football program became mired in mediocrity, conservatives like Craig Morton assumed, because it could never find success on a campus where patchouli and vegan food and George McGovern voters roamed free. In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon essentially co-opted college football as part of his (largely racist) Southern Strategy. By the 1980s, the powerhouses of the sport became increasingly located in more conservative pockets of the South and Midwest; the icons of the sport were ultra-conservatives like Woody Hayes and Darrell Royal.
Every so often over the years, a great player would sneak into Berkeley almost as if by accident: They would creep quietly over the border from Oakland or parachute in from some remote junior college in search of opportunity and fresh conspiracy theories. But for the most part, Cal’s football program existed in an odd purgatory. It wasn’t dead; it was just an odd appendage to the university itself, like Michael Dukakis in an Army helmet.
But now something strange is happening: In the wake of the Pac-12 implosion, Cal football is no longer tethered to its crunchy West Coast brethren. Now, Cal football roams naked and free. It is a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, which makes no logical sense, but which has exposed its very existence to a group of fans who presumed Cal to be a quaint little snowflake of a program, where the players talk openly about their feelings in the locker room and where the playbook consists of passages from the Bhagavad Gita.
A few weeks ago, Cal managed to go on the road and defeat Auburn, an SEC school driven largely on the success of its football program and copious supplies of Cottonelle. In the wake of that victory, a Cal grad student named Miles Goodman posted a meme that went viral:
And with that, for the first time in modern history, Cal football thrust itself into the Zeitgeist.
III.
It’s not that Cal football didn’t possess a certain underground popularity—a clever Substack called Write for California has many more subscribers than this newsletter does—but there was nothing much to recommend it to the nation outside of its own echo chamber. Cal football felt to most of the country like kind of a running joke, until Miles Goodman turned the joke inside out. The vibe caught hold, and became something that is referred to on social media as “The Calgorithm.” This weekend, ESPN’s College Gameday will broadcast from Berkeley for the first ever.
The larger context here is obvious: There is a sense among a more culturally conservative swath of America that college football has long belonged to them. (As if to hammer home that point, a Republican presidential candidate from New York City attempted to gain a competitive advantage in a swing state by showing his face at the Alabama-Georgia football game, even though he has likely never watched an entire college football game in his nearly 80 years on this planet.) But Cal, by sheer force of meme, is throwing down the gauntlet on those long-accepted social mores—just as the Democratic party chose as their vice presidential candidate a former football coach who speaks in football metaphors.
And maybe this is one underappreciated side effect of college football shaking up its geographical stasis in search of the almighty dollar. Maybe it means that the cultural stereotypes have been shaken up, as well. Maybe, after 60 years, the hippies and the jocks have finally found a way to co-exist.
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Nice work. But maybe factor-in some positive history and reverence for the Higher Powers of The Game? (B/c, y’know, Craig Morton paid the ultimate price for being a dumb jock by never quite measuring up on the next level. Yeah, he was on the ‘71 Cowboys team that won it all, but was overshadowed by classic malcontented star Duane Thomas, then lost out to Roger Staubach. Later got his butt kicked by his old team in resounding fashion in the ‘77/‘78 Super Bowl. Imagine the humiliation.) When I think of Cal football I guess I date myself by thinking of Joe Roth beating USC. For a LoCali fan that left a permanent impression. I learned much later that my HS coach, Dave Thompson, played at Cal under Marv Levy. Not the greatest year for either of them but both went on to bigger and better times.
I disagree with Craig Morton. Those students were more representative of the University than the athletes. I still fume that during the Paterno mess at our Alma Mater and alum/ letterman club member (now trustee) said they shouldn't have fired him without discussing with former Athletes. Are you kidding me?