"Stanford on the Offensive," Big Game, 1904. Larger.
In California, football is king of college sports, and there is no better way for your team to rule than by playing a perfect season.
In "A Simple Genius," author Eugene Burdick tells the unlikely story of the Big Season, a year in which the UC Berkeley football team remains undefeated and beats their arch-rivals by the hugest of margins.
The first game of the season was with Stanford. It had always been a warm-up for Stanford. Berkeley had never yet won. . . . The kickoff was a long low ball that Jacobson picked up on the ten-yard line. He held it gingerly for a moment and then he started forward and the Big Season had begun. It was a slaughter. The Stanford team did not even come close to stopping Berkeley on the kickoff. The Berkeley men trotted slowly about the field, cutting sideways, throwing laterals and then regrouping. It was like watching a clumsy bull facing the best of matadors. The Berkeley men were no better or stronger than they used to be, but the Stanford men always seemed to be a yard or two out of position, standing still when they should be turning, turning when they should be going ahead. When Jacobson crossed the goal no one was within thirty yards of him. . . . The San Francisco Chronicle the next morning had a headline in the sports section: The Big Season for Berkeley; They beat Cardinals [sic] 217 to 0.
Eugene Burdick's "A Simple Genius" was published in "A Role in Manila" in 1966.
Think of southern California and you're likely to focus on two things, the automobile and the freeway, avatars of an absurd lifestyle simultaneously attractive and appalling.
In 1965, University of California professor Eugene Burdick took a stab at describing the car culture of southern California for Holiday Magazine. Here are his conclusions.
If the mystique word that drew them to the South is "luck," the object that enthralls the Southerner is that seductive possession "the car." The South depends on the car, and not just in some dim Freudian sense. The South is the only place in the world so geared to the automobile that if it were eliminated the whole region would collapse. Outsiders stare with a barely disguised horror at the white, wormlike freeways of the South. . . . The freeways are expensive, hideous, congested and self-defeating. They are obsolete the day they are finished. But the Southerner cares little. He plans his life so that he roars to work on the freeway in off-hours. . . . It is not uncommon for the Southerner to drive sixty miles to work; 120 miles on a date; and fifty miles to shop for loss leaders at the colossal supermarkets. . . .
Eugene Burdick was co-author of the best selling novels The Ugly American and Fail Safe.
below to hear radio segment.
