'The Play' still resonates 40 years later

To paraphrase The Beatles, "It was 40 years ago today / Cal and Stanford brought the world “The Play.’’

On Nov. 20, 1982, it was the Stanford Band — not Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — that grabbed center stage and became part of “the most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heart-rending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football.”

That’s how Cal announcer Joe Starkey called it, seconds after uttering seven words that have become part of the lore: “The band is out on the field!”

Forty years later, there’s a new book to commemorate “The Play” titled “Five Laterals and a Trombone: Cal, Stanford and the Wildest Ending in College Football History.”

Author Tyler Bridges, a former Stanford trombonist himself, reconstructed the final 21 seconds of mayhem at Cal’s Memorial Stadium that afternoon by interviewing hundreds involved, from players and coaches to referees and, of course, Stanford band members.

A quick-as-possible refresher on “The Play”: Stanford, leading 20-19 after making a field goal with four seconds remaining, went with a squib kick on the ensuing kickoff from the Stanford 25-yard line (a penalty for excessive celebration after the field goal moved the ball back from the 40).

Cal’s Kevin Moen fielded the bouncing kick at the Cal 45 and made the first of five laterals, to Richard Rodgers. Moen eventually got the ball back on the final lateral around the Stanford 25 and weaved his way through a sea of red and white . . . Stanford band members.

You see, when Dwight Garner took the second lateral on “The Play,” he appeared to be tackled at the 50-yard line (some players maintain they heard a whistle) and the Stanford band, as well as some Stanford players on the sideline, charged the field to start their celebration.

However, a series of continuing laterals kept “The Play” alive, and Moen — who encountered the first band member just inside the 20 — reached the end zone to cap Cal’s wild 25-20 win, then bowled over trombonist Gary Tyrrell before racing through more musicians with the ball clutched above his head.    

The field was a sea of confusion. Players either celebrated or shook their heads “no” depending on which uniform they wore. Some band members froze in place, some scurried back into the end zone. Game officials huddled to sort it all out, eventually ruling “The Play” was good.

Cal had won the 85th Big Game, capturing the Stanford Axe (the rivalry’s traveling trophy) in the kind of finish you’d believe only if you saw it with your own eyes, as the 75,662 in attendance had. No one else saw it because the game wasn’t televised — even in the Bay Area, let alone nationally. There were no top plays on “SportsCenter.” No instant reaction on Twitter or Facebook. Nothing.

(Bridges said the game was recorded by a company that employed both Stanford and Cal broadcasters for a replay to be shown that night. Also, a local TV station sent a cameraman to the game.)

THE TROMBONIST

After the immediate shock, Tyrrell said he rose to his feet quickly and discovered he wasn’t hurt. He said it reminded him of when people on the sideline accidentally get hit by a player running out of bounds.

“Those people that get hit, you never hear about them. That’s kind of what I thought my situation was,” Tyrrell told Newsday in a phone interview. “I soon found out he had scored the winning touchdown in the rivalry game. The following day I was identified, and that’s when I started getting a lot of attention.”

The attention has never really stopped, and with today being the 40-year anniversary of “The Play,” Tyrrell was part of multiple features on nationally televised programs. ESPN’s “E:60” did a documentary that aired this past week. NBC’s “Today Show” ran a segment on Friday. Last year, Tyrrell and Moen were part of Eli Manning’s “Eli’s Places” on ESPN+, and there have been countless other events over the years.

Tyrrell and Moen keep bumping into each other, as Tyrrell estimated they’ve made at least four dozen appearances together. “Kevin and I almost have a shtick we do. We get asked the same questions. We can finish each other’s sentences,” Tyrrell said. “We can sort of appreciate the other’s position.”

Tyrrell, 61, is a financial officer in Sacramento. He lives in Half Moon Bay, a small city on the California coast about 30 miles south of San Francisco. He doesn’t mind if you ask him about “The Play.”

“After a few years, I started to embrace it,” he said, “because it was a lot more fun to join people laughing at me than to be laughed at.”

THE AUTHOR

If “The Play” had happened the previous year, Bridges would’ve been on the field as a member of the band, but he graduated from Stanford in June 1982 and a few months later was working in Washington, D.C.

On the day of the game, he attended a Stanford-Cal alumni function at which a radio broadcast of the game was set up. When Stanford took a 20-19 lead on Mark Harmon’s 35-yard field goal, “we did a traditional ‘Give ’em the Axe!’ yell and left the party,” Bridges told Newsday in a phone interview. “Stanford had won the game.”

Not until the next morning, when he picked up a newspaper, did he realize Stanford had lost.

Bridges grew up in Palo Alto rooting for Stanford. Most of the band members on the field that day were his friends. “I felt a deep, deep connection to what happened that day,” he said.

In 2016, a chance meeting inspired him to write this book. One day, he and his daughter, Luciana, 14 at the time and now a sophomore at Stanford (no, she’s not in the band), met a “Cal guy and he started giving me [a hard time] when he learned I was a Stanford guy.” Bridges said his “daughter had no idea what he was teasing me about,” so the two watched a video of “The Play.”

“I got tears in my eyes when I watched it,” said Bridges, who thought to himself, “I got to write a book on this. No one had written a book.”

Bridges, a journalist who reports on Louisiana politics for the Baton Rouge/New Orleans Advocate, has written five other (non-sports) books. He started researching his passion project in 2017. He interviewed more than 375 people and said he copied 1,500 articles from nine Bay Area newspapers on the two schools’ 1982 seasons.

Denver Broncos legend John Elway, the Stanford quarterback whose college career ended in unthinkable fashion that day, wrote one of the forewords. So did Ron Rivera, a Cal linebacker at the time and now coach of the Washington Commanders.

THE AFTERMATH

“The Play” wouldn’t have happened if not for the drive, two words that later became synonymous with Elway’s NFL career.

Stanford’s final possession began at its own 20 with 1:27 to play, but three plays lost 7 yards. That’s when Elway stepped into a fourth-and-17 pass from the 13 and completed a 29-yard strike.

Stanford drove into field-goal range and called timeout with eight seconds left. Had the timeout been called with four seconds left, Harmon’s kick would’ve ended the game. Instead, four seconds remained, but as Starkey bellowed, “Only a miracle can save the Bears now!”

About that miracle: “The Play” itself is riddled in controversy. Was Garner’s knee down at midfield? Was the final lateral to Moen a forward pass? Wait, didn’t Cal have only 10 players on the field? (One player rushed on just in time.) What if a band member had made a tackle? “They weren’t gonna stop me,” Moen said after the game.

Four days later, Stanford students got the last laugh, in a sense. In a straight-out-of-Hollywood scenario that might as well have been called “The Prank,” members of The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper, produced a fake four-page “Extra” edition of The Daily Californian that ran the front-page headline: “NCAA awards Big Game to Stanford.’’ More than 10,000 copies were printed and distributed all over the Cal campus.

Many students — and players — were duped. “I gotta hand it to them,” Moen said during the “E:60” special. “That was pretty classic.”

40 YEARS LATER

Tyrrell remembers the day well. “It was the quietest bus ride home after the game,” he said of the band’s mood. “We were all in shock. Some folks thought they might get expelled or something like that in the role for losing the game.”

Tyrrell said he wouldn’t change a thing . . . except for the result of the game, of course.

“I am happy with how things have turned out and that I’m still here 40 years later and can laugh about it,” he said, “but it’s a rivalry game. When I think about that part, it still burns me a little bit.”

On Saturday, Bridges had a book signing next to the stadium before this year’s Big Game at Cal.

“I’d say that there was nobody better who could’ve been in that position than Gary Tyrrell,” Bridges said. “He’s just a sweet, nice guy who had a lot of fun with his notoriety over the years. A great ambassador for Stanford and the Stanford band.”

“The Play” can be viewed on YouTube, and Bridges recommends the 6-minute, 48-second version because it also shows the go-ahead drive by Stanford.

Tyrrell estimated he’s seen “The Play” about 800 times, a number he arrived at by doing some quick math: “20 times a year, 40 years.”

Only 800? Sounds low, no?

“Well,” Tyrrell responded in the way only he could, “are you counting my nightmares?”

By Joe Manniello

joe.manniello@newsday.com@joe_manniello

Joe Manniello, an editor on the sports copy desk, has written the NFL picks column since 2015. Manniello joined Newsday in 2004. He graduated from St. John's.