Memories of Little Big Game, a half century later
Fifty years after he last put on his pads, former Sequoia High football player Frank Enriquez arrived at the home of teammate Don Simoni wearing a Sequoia Cherokees T-shirt and holding his battered old helmet.
With creaky knees and aching backs, they hobbled downstairs to Simoni’s den, where there was a movie screen and a box of game films in metal canisters marked with red Dymo labels.
It took the ex-lineman and linebacker half an hour to figure out how to thread film into the 8 mm projector. But when it finally flickered to life, there was their 1967 team in brilliant purple and white. The two watched as game by game, their Cherokees ran the outmoded singlewing offense to win after win, leading to the season finale against longtime rival Palo Alto.
That game took place exactly50 years ago: Thanksgiving morning, Nov. 23, 1967. The two oldest Peninsula high
schools, both undefeated in league play, met for the championship before a record 26,000 spectators at old Stanford Stadium.
They called it the Little Big Game, but for generations of players, families and fans on both sides, it was invariably the biggest event of the year. First played in 1920, it had all the pageantry of the annual big Big Game played between Stanford and Cal. Less than a decade later, the tradition stretching 55 years would come to an end. But the memories of that 1967 matchup remain sharp, indelible a half century later.
“Right now, I can feel the adrenalin rush,” said Enriquez, moving back and forth with his cane in front of the projection screen. “I can feel what some of those hits were like.”
Sequoia High, in Redwood City, opened in 1895. It was the only public secondary school between San Francisco and Santa Clara until Palo Alto High — or “Paly” — came along in 1898.
Both schools were linked to Stanford. Paly, the more upper-crust school, was across El Camino Real from the college campus. Sequoia, more working class, was about 6 miles north on El Camino.
Their Little Big Game was always the last game of the season, and both schools and their backers went all out every year. There were marching bands and baton twirlers, a full retinue of dance teams, pom-pom girls, cheerleaders, a queen and her court and mascots — a helmeted Viking for Paly and a tomahawk-swinging Cherokee in a purple and white headdress for Sequoia. There were card stunts, halftime shows and, in 1967, a 29-page program thick with advertising.
“It was homecoming and it was at Stanford Stadium,” said Laurie Ryan, a Sequoia pom-pom girl and queen’s attendant who rode to the stadium on the royal float, waving to the throngs gathered along El Camino. “It was a huge deal,” she said. “It was wonderful.”
At the dining room table of her home in Fremont, Ryan flipped through her high school yearbooks, faded copies of the Redwood City Tribune and a box of memorabilia. Next to her sat her classmate and husband, Ray Balzarini, a team captain and All-Central Coast Section center in ’67.
“The highlight of the entire sporting year was the Little Big Game,” Paly grad Keith Raffel said in a 2012 article for the school’s online sports magazine.
Today, except for the grass field at Stanford and Thanksgiving itself, everything about the longtime tradition has vanished from the landscape. The Little Big Game is gone, as are the rivalry between Paly and Sequoia and the South Peninsula Athletic League in which they played. The two local newspapers that frothed up the game — the Palo Alto Times and the Redwood City Tribune — are gone as well.
Gone, too, is the singlewing offense, which featured a tailback — instead of a quarterback — behind center. Brilliant in its simplicity and strength, it was developed beginning a century ago by Glenn Scobey “Pop” Warner, the legendary coach who led Stanford from 1924 through ’32. With four backs lined up across the backfield, the formation resembled the wing of a plane, hence the name.
As Sequoia ran it, the tailback usually took the snap. Essentially a running back, he also could pass or quick-kick the ball. To his right was a fullback who also could take the snap and run, pass or hand the ball to the tailback. A blocking back called the plays, and a wingback could pass or catch the ball.
The single-wing was already on its way out when a new coach, Joe Marvin, a former UCLA tailback, installed it at Sequoia in 1956. Two years later, Sequoia’s single-wing beat Paly in the Little Big Game, which launched a 33-game winning streak. A few years after that, senior Gary Beban led the Cherokees’ attack. At UCLA, Beban would be converted from tailback to quarterback and win the 1967 Heisman Trophy.
From running the singlewing for so long, “We had it down,” said Balzarini, the center, who retired as a deputy chief after a long career with the San Francisco Fire Department. He can still diagram the details of the offensive scheme, name the players at every position and call out plays: 10 sweep, 38 wedge, 14 power.
“Bill Walsh talked about the 49ers’ timing being an art form,” he said, referring to the eminent former head coach. “That’s the way we were. We got more efficient every game.”
Sequoia had finished its 1966 season 4-4-1 but started the next fall with sharp new purple home jerseys with a Cherokee headdress on the sleeve. Because players usually turned in their jerseys at season’s end in those days, there were no names on the backs. There was symbolism in that.
“I call it the Summer of Love football team,” said Ray Sewell, a low-to-the-ground fullback in ’67 who later became touring chef for the Grateful Dead. “Nobody stood out as the most important player on the planet, but we were really tight.”
Sequoia opened its season hosting top-ranked St. Ignatius of San Francisco. Simoni remembers leaning against the gym, in cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, watching the SI players come off the bus dressed in sport coats and neckties. Their quarterback was Dan Fouts, who would end up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
But on that night, he threw a pass that Simoni intercepted and returned for a touchdown in a 26-13 upset.
Paly, meanwhile, the favorite to win the SPAL, faltered in a 6-0 loss to St. Francis, but righted itself behind its more modern pro-set offense. Going into the Little Big Game, it had won seven straight, and had not lost to Sequoia in five years.
“They had a helluva ballclub,” Balzarini said
For Paly, in 1967 as always, the Little Big Game was a home game. The school held a Stanford-style bonfire the night before the game, and the next morning, the players dressed in their locker room and walked across El Camino to Stanford Stadium.
Meanwhile, a Sequoia motorcade with police escort headed south on El Camino, with floats carrying pom-pom girls and the 24 “Cherokettes.”
“Help us Pluck Paly” read a sign held by students adorned with “war paint.”
“It was a big purple caravan,” Ryan said.
That Thanksgiving morning turned out to be perfect for football, sunny and warm. Lines of fans overwhelmed the ticket kiosks. One report said 2,000 fans gave up and went home.
Sewell, the fullback and future Dead chef, remembers running onto the field and being stunned at the size of the crowd.
“There was a thunderous roar when we came out,” he said from his home in Eugene, Ore. “Our side was packed and the Paly side was pretty full, too.”
Paly had brought along a green-and-white helium balloon that rose above the stadium at kickoff. That turned out to be the high point for the Vikings. Sequoia’s offense clicked like it had never clicked before, with junior tailback Barr Curry running for three quick touchdowns and passing for a fourth.
One fan complained that the score was already 25-0 by the time he got inside the stadium. At halftime, it was 39-7, and essentially over.
“The single-wing wasn’t the problem,” recalled Paly defensive end Bo Crane. “Barr Curry was the problem. He’d run up to the line, then step back and pass it, and he was so squarely built that he was hard to tackle. It took five guys to bring him down.”
The final score was 48-27. The Sequoia players came to the rooting section to take off their helmets and sing along with the the alma mater: “Sequoians may we ever stand as stands our patron tree.”
There were no regional or state playoffs for high schools as there are now. But there was a final state poll. Sequoia, at 9-0, finished at the top in a tie with Anaheim (12-1).
“We said, ‘We’ll take on the team in L.A., we’ll keep going,’ ” Simoni recalled. “They said, ‘Sorry. Insurance won’t cover it.’ ”
So the players turned in their purple jerseys. Each received a 6-inch trophy, the kind Little League teams might get. And not long after Curry left for Stanford, Sequoia dropped the singlewing. It was one of the last teams at any level to run it.
The last Little Big Game was played seven years later, in 1974. The series died when Paly joined another league. In 2014, it was briefly resurrected, the teams meeting in a night game shown live online. But a new rivalry wasn’t to be.
“The kids are not all that attached to it,” Sequoia athletic director Melissa Schmidt said.
Schmidt had not heard of the single-wing or the great Barr Curry or the undefeated season of 1967 before a reporter dropped by the school to chat recently. “That was Gary Beban’s team, right?” she said.
Once corrected, Schmidt rose from her desk and walked to the trophy case in the gym. Hidden in the back, with its top piece broken, was a winged trophy much taller and more elaborate than the tiny ones given to players 50 years ago.
Etched into the brass plaque was the inscription: “California State Football Champions, Sequoia H.S., 1967.”