Cal football, Eshleman Hall and me (a Daily Cal retrospective)

Lots of Cal football fans like to dwell on Sept. 27, 2003. That was the last time the Bears beat USC. I’m sure that those two sentences will continue to go together until the end of time (or at least until the end of college football as we know it).

Sept. 27, 2003 is a distant memory for me. I experienced it as a high school senior hoping that I would be accepted to one of the two schools I saw on my TV screen. Whatever feelings I have now about that date I have picked up vicariously through those that were there and through the expectations of what it means to be a fan of Cal football.

But at the time, I just saw a great game and then texted my friends who had enrolled at Berkeley that fall. They weren’t at the game.

Another date does stand out though.

Sept. 29, 2007.

I was in Eugene, Oregon, covering what was then a dream meeting between Cal and the University of Oregon. It was the marquee matchup that weekend in college football, pitting two teams ranked in the top 12 against each other. ESPN’s travelling party known as College GameDay decided to make the trip to cloudy Eugene despite a local start time of 6 a.m. I was on national TV the Thursday before the game, making an early appearance with a writer from Oregon’s student daily. Friday morning, before flying up with the team’s entourage, I was interviewed on Bay Area radio. The night before, I went out to the local bars in Eugene with the writers from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune. I took pictures with random people because they recognized me from my five minutes on ESPN earlier that week. I got pretty soused. After less than four hours of sleep, I headed out to College GameDay with the Daily Cal photographer, got backstage passes and watched the production of what is considered one of the best, if not the best, live sports preview shows on television.

It was everything a college sports writer could ever dream of.

Then the game happened, and somehow Cal won its first game at Autzen Stadium since 1987. The Bears catapulted from their No. 6 ranking to No. 3 in the country. A week later, Cal would climb to No. 2 in the polls and play for a chance at being No. 1 in the country for the first time since Truman was president.

Then the wheels fell off that season. But that’s another story for another day.

I never really got to celebrate that victory in Eugene. Covering a sports team that you are actively rooting for is an interesting position to be in. I was happy, for sure. But—being the professional that I am—I didn’t celebrate with the couple thousand of Cal fans in Eugene. I stood in awe on the field as the rain fell on Autzen and saw the Cal flags wave proudly and the Straw Hat Band play loudly. One of the Mic Men—the guys who help prompt the Cal crowd to do cheers during games—ran up to me and shook my hand. But that was the extent of my celebrating. There were no first pumps. I did not jump up and down in ecstasy. I didn’t hug anyone. I just soaked in the sights and sounds.

On the bus ride back to the plane, I opened my laptop and started typing. This was a story that needed to be on our website quickly. However, this was the age before broadband and WiFi service on buses. I wanted to be able to upload my story once I was back in Berkeley.

My bus was full of the entourage that flew to away games with the football team—the band, the boosters, the cheerleaders. One of the cheerleaders sitting next to me asked what I was doing.

“Writing,” I replied.

“Oh, do you guys always do that?”

“Do what?”

“Begin writing right after the games?”

“Not necessarily,” looking up at this girl, “but this is a huge win. I want this on our website when we get back to Berkeley.”

She smiled at me, said something to the fact about how cool it was that I was writing already and let me get back to work. In hindsight, I probably should have kept talking to her. I was a college kid after all, a college male. And it’s not every day that I get to talk to a cute girl (especially at Cal)—and talk to a cute girl about sports.

My laptop died on the plane and I decided to relax and to think about the possible storylines. Still, I wasn’t celebrating. The players weren’t really either. The expected din after a huge win wasn’t a constant as I had expected. Yes, there was a cheer when we got on the plane as the pilot congratulated the team. There was a Bear Territory chant. But it wasn’t a party. That would probably wait until we got back to Berkeley.

On the bus from the Oakland Airport to the campus, we almost had that party. USC was about to lose to the University of Washington. They didn’t, but there was a 10-minute period when everyone was on their phones (before everyone had smart phones, though a few had the first iPhone), trying to get updates. If SC had gone down that Saturday night, I’m sure there would have been an explosion of spontaneous revelry on that bus. We probably would have been stuck on the I-880, but we wouldn’t have cared.

As the bus dropped us off at the stadium in Berkeley, that same girl asked if I was going to go celebrate.

“Not yet,” I said (stupidly, I admit now), “still got to write this story.”

I walked down from Memorial Stadium, down Bancroft Avenue and towards the sixth floor of Eshleman Hall—where the Daily Cal’s offices were located—with Salgu, the photographer that was sent to Eugene with me. If there were any celebrations going on, I did not notice it; maybe because Bancroft is far enough away from where the students live; maybe because I was intent on getting my story published.

At the same time I was writing on the bus and on the plane, Salgu was “editing” her photos—going through her memory card and deleting photos that weren’t satisfactory.

We both went up to the offices and she started picking photos that would go online and in the paper the next Monday. I hurriedly began typing a story. She asked me which players I wanted. Salgu wasn’t as avid a football fan as I, but she could shoot a good photo (and spot a few players). I wrote down numbers on a Post-It Note.

“1, 20, 9, 29”

1 for DeSean Jackson. 20 for Justin Forsett. 9 for Nate Longshore. 29 for Marcus Ezeff.

“Oh, and can you find a shot of Tedford celebrating?”

As I wrote my story, Salgu intermittently showed me a few photos. There was one of a Cal football player wearing the No. 1 jersey making a tackle.

“That’s not DeSean,” I said, as I looked at a picture of Worrell Williams, the senior Cal linebacker.

“It’s not? But he’s wearing number one.”

“Players on defense and offense wear the same numbers in college. There are too many players to not share.”

“That’s stupid. But it’s a cool photo.”

“But it’s not DeSean.”

After a while, Salgu settled on a couple of pictures. One was of Jeff Tedford raising his fists in glory. The other was of Jackson scuttling down the sideline for a touchdown. Both would make the paper that Monday.

With her work seemingly finished and with actual schoolwork to do (Salgu stayed in the hotel room that Friday night studying for a midterm while I was being a faux-celebrity), I asked: “You leaving?”

“Not yet, I’m going to pick out the pictures for the online slideshow.”

And I kept writing.

I don’t remember what time I left the office that night. Salgu did leave before me. But I sat there, staring at the desolate office. The desks empty. The fluorescent lights hummed. The blinking of computer screens and telephones signaled the voice messages not yet heard. On the shelf next to the sports desk was the soft-cushion, bright orange Tennessee football that my editor-in-chief brought back from Knoxville the year before. There was the Exacto Knife—the trophy given to the winner of the annual Ink Bow, a flag football game between the Stanford Daily and the Daily Cal—sitting on the window sill.

There were ridiculous quotes adorned on the wall. The amazing art produced for various sections, most notably our Arts and Entertainment section. There were the covers of our Gameday issues and special issues. There was a picture of when Cal students and fans rushed the field after beating SC in 2003. There was a picture of Olympic gold medalist and former Cal swimmer Natalie Coughlin, on the cover of the now defunct Sports Illustrated College Edition.

I looked out the window, through the now faded yellow letters that spelled “The Daily Californian” that were just put up two years prior. From the sixth floor of Eshleman Hall, you imagined you could see the entire campus. It was quite the view. Of course a college daily had to have a view like this—high above the chaos that is university and city life, reporting the facts to the student body writ large, holding the university and its actors to the light of truth. The campus was still that night. The lights from Sproul Plaza flooding the concrete floor in a basking glow. The Campanile seemed to glow brighter that night. And I could make out the silhouette of the Berkeley Hills to the east of the campus, where no doubt the Cal coaching staff was celebrating in the halls of the old Memorial Stadium.

Looking back on that moment five years ago, I now know that that was my celebration. To be able to go up to that sixth floor office and type away while another student journalist looked through photos was the reward. To be in that office, one that in just a few hours time would be filled with noise, stress and—yes!—celebration because our football team was able to score its biggest victory in the four years I was at Cal, was the reason why I wanted to write for the paper. For those few moments, for that entire weekend, I actually felt like I a sports reporter. And I imagined to myself that this is what real sports reporters do: go into their offices at ungodly hours, when no one else was around and write their stories. I know most sports writers—hell most reporters—file from wherever they are these days. But there was something about walking into that empty newsroom that made me feel real.

I write this now because that office no longer exists. That whole story about Cal beating Oregon and my experiences there was a device I used to get into this nostalgic state of mind. It helped me to remember where I spent most of my undergraduate years. Not in a frat house, not at a bar (though that comes a close second), not at the library or even in class, but at this office where a bunch of naïve 17 to 22-year olds put out a daily newspaper.

There are plans to tear down Eshleman Hall and replace it with whatever the university and the ASUC decide to replace it with. The building still stands, but instead of budgets and inch counts, designs and photos, arguments and more arguments, the click-clacking of keyboards and the groans of editors, it’s just a ghost. An empty building with the faded yellow words “The Daily Californian” scrawled on its sixth floor windows.

I was reminded that buildings don’t make institutions when I visited the new Daily Cal offices a few weeks ago. It seems like the paper will be more than OK in its new digs on the northside of campus.

I’m sure whoever writes for that paper now will end up at the office at some weird hour, and instead of partying or studying or having any semblance of a normal college life, will be assuming the role of a journalist.

And maybe they’ll feel the way I felt, wandering up to the sixth floor that September night, exhausted, tired and (finally) hungover. Instead, it’ll be at some new office, with new quirks that makes that office feel like home. And they’ll feel exhausted, tired and hungover. There will be a party to be at or a bar to go to. But that won’t stop them. They have a story to write.