Just like every other sports fan, Denny Schuler has seen
”
The Play
”
a thousand times.
Just like every other sports fan, Denny Schuler has seen “The Play” a thousand times.
You know the one, where in 1982, with Cal trailing 20-19 to Stanford, a Cardinal squib kick resulted in a Bear touchdown just five laterals and one hapless trombone player later in the closing seconds of the Big Game.
Schuler showed up one year after as the defensive coordinator/outside linebackers coach at Berkeley, his fifth stint in college football since graduating from the University of Oregon in 1969.
And according to Schuler, who lives in Hollister eight months out of the year now, The Play was no fluke, but in fact a game that head coach Joe Kapp employed to let his players unwind.
“You know how that play came about? Joe Kapp on Sundays … Joe taught the players this game and he called it grab-ass,” Schuler said. “Literally, it’s like rugby – don’t get tackled with the ball. And these kids did this every Sunday.
“I never saw it. But I heard about it … They had been playing that game forever and ever and ever, and they got pretty good at it, obviously.”
Unlike every other sports fan, though, Schuler pledges allegiance to few.
He played running back in high school, and was a wide receiver at Oregon.
He was an offensive coordinator for the Beavers, and a defensive coordinator for the Ducks.
After his first time at Cal in 1983 as the defensive coordinator, he returned 10 years later as the offensive coordinator.
And in 1999, he took the reigns as defensive secondary coach for Cal’s Big-Game rival, Stanford.
This Saturday, when the two teams meet up in Palo Alto on the 25th Anniversary of The Play, you’ll find Schuler in the stands not wearing Cal Blue or Cardinal Red, but Gray Coat
n n n
Enter Denny Schuler’s Hollister home and you won’t find any extravagant, over-the-top memorabilia layouts that one might come to expect from a man who’s been coaching for more than 30 years.
You will find simple Cal and Stanford football helmets pitted against each other on a bookshelf in the living room, but any trips down Memory Lane will be made in Schuler’s study.
Despite employment with 12 different teams, only Cal and Stanford have dedicated bookshelves in their honor – with photos, souvenirs, pom-poms and footballs, among other things, filling the stacks in Schuler’s study.
To his knowledge, Schuler, along with Walt Harris and Mike White, are the only coaches to coach football at both Stanford and Cal.
While certain members of the Oregon State staff distrusted Schuler, a former Duck, when he was coaching for the Beavers, he said the rivalry between Stanford and Cal was not a bitter clash of football titans.
“I think it’s one of the great rivalries ever,” Schuler said. “It’s not a bitter, hate you, can’t stand you (rivalry) – it’s not Oregon-Washington … This is not a hate-rivalry. I think it’s a great rivalry.
“I think they’re two great academic institutions that have the thing right … I remember the old days when I came with Joe Kapp in ’83, it was a big deal. The stadium was filled, half the seats were blue, half the seats were red. And I still think that is one of the greatest spectacles in college football … It still brings chills to me.
“I coached in eight of those games and my record was 6-2. If the rest of my record was like that, I’d probably still be coaching.”
Schuler said the problem right now is that Cal is up and Stanford is down, leading the national Big Game spotlight to stray from its subjects.
n n n
Schuler remembers plenty of Joe Kapp stories, the head coach at Cal from 1982-86. Said Schuler, Joe Kapp was a throwback.
Case in point, the Cal head coach didn’t like his own staff to talk to the “enemy” prior to a game. Despite any given coaching staff being a mishmash of the coaching fraternity, Kapp preferred his assistants to keep to their own.
Well, Schuler was talking to USC’s Norv Turner one day before a game – a former Duck and an old friend – and he knew Kapp didn’t exit the locker room until right before the game started.
Well, as luck would have it, Kapp came on to the field a little early.
“Joe came out early that day, and nearly fired me on the spot,” Schuler said. “I had my back to the tunnel, and Norv said, ‘Denny, here comes Joe, and he looks mad.'”
n n n
Schuler coached in four different bowl games before he was smelling roses at Stanford in 2000. But the Rose Bowl that year against Wisconsin was special to Schuler because it allowed him to stop and, well, smell the roses.
The previous year, Schuler was the defensive coordinator at Northern Iowa, and they played their final game that season against Winona State.
One year after Winona State, though, Schuler was preparing for Ron Dayne and the Badgers in Pasadena.
“I never went to the Rose Bowl before, other than as a spectator, and I knew I probably wouldn’t go there again,” Schuler said. “So I went out to the 50-yard line, the big rose out in the middle of the field … and I didn’t move for two-and-a-half hours. I knew that’d be the last time I’d be there.
“That was one of the great moments in my coaching career … considering where I had just come from the year before, it was so special.”
n n n
Saturday’s Big Game will mark the 110th meeting between the two teams (Stanford leads 54-44-11). Although Schuler will sit on the Cal side of the field (he has to sit somewhere, right?), he wasn’t joking about the grey coat.
“I don’t find myself really getting involved emotionally with any team because we’ve been to so many places,” Schuler said. “They were all great experiences. Do I have a favorite school? I get asked that probably a ton, but I think there were favorite parts to every school we were at. But I find myself not getting emotionally involved in any of them now.”
He’s seen The Play a thousand times, but Schuler has a thousand other memories to go along with it.
