When I graduated from high school, I went toUniversityof California San Diego. It’sexcellentschool for academic pursuits. I scored a $100 scholarship. That covered 1/3 of the annual tuition. One hundred dollars won’t buy the eBook versions of many textbooks any more.
Although an academic powerhouse, UCSD was nowhere near a football presence, let alone a powerhouse. I played on the only football team in the history of the UCSD campus.
My high school football team in my senior year could best be categorized as bad. The UCSD team I played on was worse, as this quote reports.
Walt Hackett, hired away from his position as Chargers defensive coordinator, was the head coach of the brand-new football team that year at UCSD. He recruited the school’s debut team and held two-a-day summer practices at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot.
Triton home games were played on a field adjacent to Old Miramar Road. [A qu0nset hut housed the locker room and showers. Three portable “fan stands” were dragged in on the “home” sidelines. I don’t remember if the visitors had stands of any kind. Each seated about 40 people, but that was more than enough.]
In that one-and-only season, the mostly freshmen Tritons lost seven straight to the varsity teams of La Verne College (41-6), Loyola University (34-14), Cal Western University (34-7), Cal Tech (34-31), Nevada Southern University (27-6) and St. Mary’s College (27-13). UCSD even allowed Cal Tech to break a four-year losing streak. The Evening Tribune concluded, “The best thing about UC San Diego’s first football season is that it’s over.”
We had some very good football players and our coach, Walt Hacket was excellent. He moved on and to become a member of the Pittsburg Steelers Super Bowl champion coaching staff. But the coaches filled roster spots with warm bodies until we suited around 30 players for the pre-school year practices.
Included in the warm bodies was a guy who'd broken his leg skiing. When day during practice he collapsed. We gathered around and looked at what appeared to be a severely broken leg--the outside of his foot lay flat on the ground while his kneecap pointed straight up. However, the player wasn’t in any pain at all.
He did go to the hospital, and his leg was repaired. Turns out, the spiral fracture that he done skiing never really healed. What did break during practice was a portion of the bone that had died instead of healing.The dead bone didn’t hurt.
But I digress.
Our first football game was before the school year started. UCSD had never had a football team. Because of that, the cheerleaders were not used to having anything to do until basketball season. Gamer's that they were, the cheerleaders dutifully showed up. As might be expected, there were some glitches.
During that first game, the cheerleaders misspelled UCSD more than once in the traditional University of California clapping chant. The entire chant is the cheerleaders and the crowd shouting our the school's initials followed by "Tritons Fight!"
I didn't think remembering U--C--S--D was that challenging.
I was mistaken.
I was mistaken.
That example of horrific cheerleading was the highlight of the first game.
We lost 40 to nothing.
Our second game was against Cal Lutheran University. Our schedule consisted of teams that had openings in their schedules when we also had openings—that was pretty much every week.
Cal Lutheran was the defending small schools champion.
Remember, we were terrible.
We rode from La Jolla to Cal Lutheran in a yellow school bus. As soon as we arrived we carried our own football gear to the locker room and suited up.
We were the first team out on the field to do the warm-ups.
About 10 minutes into our stretching exercises, the Cal Lutheran team stormed the field—all 60 or 70 of them.
Cal Lutheran kicked off. We ran three plays and punted. Cal Lutheran probably ran four or five plays before they scored.
They kicked off again.
We ran three plays and punted again.
That cycle continued throughout the first half, and for the rest of the season for that matter. Punting is a critical part of the ruptured disk part of the story.
We’ll get to the ruptured disk part of this tale next week
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It's interesting how "experience builds character" or better, how "experience prepares us for the next situation".
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