BERKELEY, Ca. — “Wouldn’t it be nice if they actually pulled this one off…?”
That was my initial, fleeting thought as the California Golden Bears got the ball back with about three and a half minutes left, trailing PAC-12 rival UCLA by just two points on an almost embarrassingly picture-perfect California afternoon Saturday.
It would have been nice, my brain told me, because I was in California to celebrate the life of Earl F. Cheit, my grandfather, who, as I would learn at his memorial service roughly 24 hours later, holds the unofficial record for the most positions ever held at the University of California, including director of athletics. It would have been nice, I thought, to celebrate such a win, to have something positive to talk about the next day, to connect cosmically to the event.
But it wouldn’t have been fitting. That was my next thought — the one from my gut, the one that endured, the one that removed any surprise or frustration from Cal quarterback Jared Goff’s interception that sealed a 36-34 defeat.
Sports are not, as we’re too often told, all about winning. They are all about learning how to deal with success and failure, the latter at least as important as the former.
My grandfather enjoyed more success than nearly anyone you or I know in his professional life, serving as a professor, dean of the Haas School of Business and vice chancellor at Cal. He devoted his professional life to higher education, and to the pursuits that surrounded university life.
But for his beloved Golden Bears, the results were mostly failures.
Cal hasn’t been to a Rose Bowl since 1959. Their best chance at a BCS game was washed away in 2004 by a bit of politicking from the now-former University of Texas football coach.
To be a Cal fan is to understand and accept such a reality. Cal’s Rose Bowl drought is the longest in the conference, as every other original PAC-10 team has been to Pasadena save for Arizona, which did not join the conference until 1978. Rival Stanford has been five times since then, including each of the past two seasons.
And yet, that’s not really why we choose the teams we root for, if we have an honest sports soul. We are most often connected to our teams through our family members and our hometowns. For myself and the rest of my family, being a Cal fan wasn’t a decision — it was a birthright.
While other universities have enjoyed greater success on the field, there was always a sense of greater purpose that came with cheering for Cal. The school’s higher academic standards would sometimes cost its athletic programs top recruits, but that was part of the contract that came with supporting the student-athletes. And even though I chose to attend a different branch of the University of California for my own education, my support of Cal’s teams never wavered.
I’m also an Oakland A’s fan, but the only one in my family. I support the San Jose Sharks, too, because my best friend dragged me into his own hockey fandom. I largely did the same to him with the A’s — we have essentially ruined each other’s sporting lives. While he and I live and (mostly) die with each of those clubs’ postseason failures, neither have the same meaning on a family level as Cal’s does.
And so, on Sunday, as a litany of academics lined up to extol my grandfather’s impact on his beloved university, the accolades stood in stark contrast to the athletic experiences we had shared. As they recounted their personal perspectives on his successes, I thought of wiffleball and HORSE games in my grandparents’ backyard, where he taught me how to swing a bat and shoot a jump shot.
Mostly, I thought of our shared suffering through heartbreaking defeats.
The speeches were all well delivered, but nothing elicited an emotional jolt as strong as the moment when the Cal Band came marching through the grove of trees over to where the ceremony was being held and performed “Fight for California.”
I’d heard the song countless times as a child, as Aaron Rodgers and Marshawn Lynch stormed the field at Memorial Stadium, as Jason Kidd and Shareef Abdur- Rahim weaved through layup lines at Harmon Gym. But I’d never really stopped and listened, soaked in the words of the school’s fight song, which hung much heavier that day.
Our sturdy Golden Bear
Is watching from the skies,
Looks down upon our colors fair
And guards us from his lair.
Our banner Gold and Blue,
The symbol on it too,
Means fight for California,
For California through and through!
Maybe one day, Cal will finally get back to the Rose Bowl. Maybe they won’t.
Either way, it’ll be OK, and we’ll continue to learn from our failures and grow into better people. That’s all Grandad really would have cared about.
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