Berserkley once more: Stanford wins on a blocked PAT

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By Art Spander

BERKELEY, Calif. — It was Berserkley all over again, this time with cardboard cutouts in attendance.

You can put masks on the coaches, but you can’t cover up the unpredictability of a game when Stanford is at Cal.

So much has been made about The Play, the laterals, legal and illegal, that gave Cal the win in 1982 and gave TV a lifetime of reruns.

Then, almost forgotten, in 1988 a kid from Vietnam, Tuan Van Le, blocked a short field goal with three seconds left to keep Stanford in a 19-19 tie.

In this Covid-19 season, on a Friday at Memorial Stadium, without fans but certainly not without drama, Thomas Booker of Stanford blocked a Cal extra point attempt with less than a minute left to preserve a 24-23 victory.

That was after Cal had a field goal partially blocked late in the first half.

When the PAT was blocked, on the sideline Cal coach Justin Wilcox showed his shock by grabbing at his mask and momentarily pulling if off his face.

Cal also lost two fumbles, one on a muffed punt deep its own territory that set up Stanford’s first touchdown.

Asked what he would do to correct the failings, Wilcox said, “It’s unacceptable. On special teams, it’s literally a simple technique that we have to execute with great effort, and we are having issues.”

That’s putting it mildly.

“I’ve got to help give them answers,” said Wilcox. “We’ve got to coach better. And we’ve got to perform better on special teams.”

So someone perceptively asked why, after that last touchdown, didn’t Cal — which had been moving the ball well — go for the two-point conversion?

“I felt we had shored up (the defense) where we needed to be shored up,” said the coach, “and I felt good about going into overtime. That’s on me.”

Booker, a 6-foot-4, 310-pound junior, said the defense had been getting in against Cal on place kicks.

“We had put pressure on them earlier,” Booker said, “so I knew we had a chance.” 

What both teams wanted this bizarre season, with games being cancelled, was a chance to get off the schneid, in gambling lingo, to grab a win. And although outplayed the first half, Stanford got that win.

And thus in what was the 123rd Big Game, the Cardinal regained the old trophy, the Stanford Axe.

Cal took it in 2019, after nine straight Stanford wins, and the school’s rally committee was not going to allow anyone to forget.

On a huge section of empty seats, the big, colored ones used for card stunts were aligned so they read “OUR,” with a depiction of the axe.

We’re familiar, unfortunately, with the restrictions and adaptations brought about by the pandemic, golf tournaments held without galleries, ball games with nobody in the bleachers, but perhaps nowhere is the void more noticeable than in college football.

It was a spectacularly beautiful late-autumn afternoon for the game, and in any other year on a day like that there would have been tailgate parties packed with people wearing red or blue, laughing, shouting and relishing the camaraderie of sport.

But it was not to be, understandably. The streets were empty. The only sounds were from those piped in growls and groans that have nothing to do with cheers or chants.

The national anthem and Cal fight song were played. That should be enough, right?

Maybe next year we return to normal, as far as celebrating our sports. Of course, the way this one ended seems normal for a Cal-Stanford game.