I'm the “red sheep” in our family, the only one in the entire clan who went to Stanford. Mother, brother, younger sister, uncle, cousins went to Cal. My older sister became a top administrator at Berkeley; my daughter-in-law was on its swim team. One year, at our Big Game picnic, even the eggs were blue and gold. The family sits in the Cal section, where my red shirt looks like an invitation for the bulls (and Bears) to charge.
It didn't start out this way. As a boy, I was fiercely loyal to my big brother—visiting him at Bowles Hall in Berkeley, buying 78s at Moe's on Telegraph Avenue, learning all the Cal songs and treasuring a jersey signed by Jackie Jensen. One Christmas I greeted an innocent houseguest, a Stanford student from Hawaii, with a huge poster of an Indian, dart embedded firmly in the forehead.
My aberration in allegiance occurred when my mother insisted I attend Stanford. Though she had graduated from Cal in 1922, she didn't want me to become a radical like my older brother, who flirted with the Communist Party in Berkeley in the late '40s. However, I do remember thinking that Wilbur Hall looked almost Stalinist in its sterility compared to my brother's ornate Bowles Hall.
Gradually I acquired a taste for Stanford. I loved Western Civ, and quarterback John Brodie, '57, helped me forget Jackie Jensen. As graduate students, my wife and I were in Pasadena when Jim Plunkett, '70, connected with Randy Vataha, '71, to defeat Ohio State in the Rose Bowl; we stood on the field until dark singing “Come Join the Band.” I was at the Cal stadium in 1982 when John Elway saved the game before the Disaster That Shall Not Be Named.
But it is a strange and mysterious thing now, when my family and I go to Big Game. I wear red and the others wear blue, but we are far more interested in the tailgate party and the pageantry than we are in who wins the game. Only my fanatical daughter-in-law suffers in defeat or exults in victory. The rest of us dine afterward in Palo Alto or in Berkeley, enjoying the celebration if the locals win and mostly ignoring the moroseness if they lose.
Only rabid ideologues take pleasure in the crushing of the “other side,” dehumanize their opponents as the “evil empire.” The genuine Big Game isn't played at a stadium. It is played all over the world, in divisions that drastically oversimplify the complexity of human identities and emotions. Most of us live ambiguous lives. We don't support unnecessary wars but don't want to surrender to terrorist intimidation. We don't want our country inundated with “illegals,” but we support the “give me your tired, your poor” sentiment on the Statue of Liberty. We believe in initiative and achievement but don't like the growing gap between rich and poor. We don't like abortion but don't want women to be told what to do with their bodies. We want the environment protected but also want private property rights observed. Most of us just want problems to be solved and don't care that much whether some fanatical doctrine is being obeyed. Where are the “red” and the “blue” in all this?
I wore a blue shirt to Big Game last year. My only red was in my socks. Was it because Cal was heavily favored and I wanted to cheer for a winner, or did I just want not to be a target in the Cal stands? But when underdog Stanford held its own, I began cheering openly, eliciting a “Whose side are you on, anyway?” from my daughter-in-law. I felt a reservoir of “redness'' swell in my breast as “we” walked off with the Axe.
And yet, I remembered a story, perhaps apocryphal, told about Albert Einstein. He and a friend went to dinner, and Einstein ordered peas as his vegetable. The waiter brought carrots. When Einstein said nothing, the friend, astonished, reminded him that he had ordered peas. Einstein replied, “In this world, where there is so much war and poverty, where the human condition is so troubled, who cares whether it is peas or carrots.”
The time for rigid loyalties is over. It is time for the problem solving to begin. Sometimes I'll go back to wearing red in spite of everybody else's wearing blue. So what? We will leave that game where it belongs, at the football stadium.
DAVID ALFORD, '59, MA '60, lives on a ranch near Avery, Calif.
