I got some criticism from friends and enemies alike for not showing sufficient enthusiasm and spirit in the wake of the Stanford football team’s defeat to Oregon in my last column. Perhaps frustration got the better of me after a game that promised so much but, at least for Cardinal fans, never quite delivered. Whatever excuse I can muster, though, karma paid me back for showing weakness—nine Red Zone points or not, something went wrong when I showed up for the Big Game. As I scanned my ID card to enter the stadium, I discovered I hadn’t been allocated a ticket.
In an ironic twist of fate, this was probably the one game at which my presence and my voice would have made a difference. As palatable as watching football in the California sun might be, my British upbringing makes it hard to take the job of a fan seriously unless you have to deal with at least a little rain. Watching on TV, I couldn’t believe the stadium was so empty on such a perfectly cold and miserable evening.
It was heartbreaking to sit at home alone through the single most important game Stanford will play all season. Forget Oregon, forget the supposed rivalry with USC and forget any BCS bowl or even national championship aspirations—winning this game and holding on to the Axe will always matter more. Every sports team on campus—varsity and club—wants to beat Cal, and they all get their chance, from the Big Splash to the Big Spike. It doesn’t end with real athletes either; among other rivalry clashes in the week before the Big Game, the two schools’ quiz bowl teams squared off, and just a few short hours before the crowds packed into Stanford Stadium, The Stanford Daily itself welcomed The Daily Californian to campus for the annual Ink Bowl, an event that has been taking place for at least the past 40 years.
It is these side-events that make the Big Game mean as much as it does. There are only a very few lucky individuals on campus who can claim to have represented the Cardinal on the football field against another school, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands who have battled Cal in some way at some point in their Stanford careers. Standing up alongside your fellow students and seeing the whites of the eyes of those Golden Bears, you get to feel how much this rivalry matters. More than any amount of standing faceless among a crowd, you assume personal responsibility for the win.
Big Game day was not a great day just because Stanford held on to the Axe. The icing on the cake was retaining the Exacto Knife with a 42-21 win and sending the Daily Cal home without even the consolation prize of a boat-race win. With this victory The Daily extended its winning streak to three games over its most hated—and only—rival.
Playing flag football, or in fact any version of football, was a new experience for this international student, and I cannot claim to have shown much prowess on the field—that honor should probably go to our part-time managing editor of sports/part-time quarterback and to the showing by The Daily’s business team. What I did do, though, was put my body on the line—even if an old injury and being wrestled by a Cal player in a blatant case of holding limited me to just three downs—and stand up for my friends and fellow students. I even managed to demonstrate far better football knowledge than both the Cal players and their so-called coach. At more than one point we had to walk on the field to disrupt play when a Golden Bear had his flags tied on so tight he could drag the Stanford player grabbing them along with him, and also when their players took flag football so seriously they committed infringements for holding and roughness that wouldn’t even be legal in real football.
In my fourth proper year of life as a grad student on the Farm, I finally feel I have earned the right to wear cardinal, and no matter how many points I might have in my student ticket account, or whether I successfully navigate the online ticketing system, I deserve my place in the Red Zone. Go Card.
Tom Taylor has gone from hating football to a possible career as a referee. Ask him if he saw as much holding in the Notre Dame game as the Ink Bowl at tom.taylor “at” stanford.edu.