An unknown QB from N.J. earns his place in Cal lore
Steve Levy faked a handoff, dropped back to pass and uncorked one of the prettiest spirals you'll ever see, and for a second he closed his eyes and waited for his ears to confirm that his wildest dreams were coming true. Then, pandemonium -- DeSean Jackson was strutting into the Stanford Stadium end zone and Levy was sprinting 60 yards downfield to greet him and 40,000 blue-and-gold-clad fans were screaming and hugging and celebrating the sudden return of Cal's football mojo. This game is SO over, Levy thought as he raced to embrace Jackson after the freshman wideout's 56-yard touchdown catch. There's no stopping me now. These are the thrills that can happen in rivalry games, the kind that send tingles down your spine and get replayed in bars and living rooms and tailgates, over and over, for decades to come. Though Cal's 27-3 victory over Stanford last Saturday had no impact on the BCS standings and only a small effect on the bowl picture, it meant everything to the students and alums in attendance who were anxiously awaiting a former fullback's first career start under center. Six minutes into the game, we witnessed a young man seizing his moment as if it were his birthright. Over the next three hours, we marveled at the poise and passion displayed by a 21-year-old who, back in September, had extracted a promise from a Cal-worshipping sportswriter he'd met years earlier to get some serious cyber-ink were he able to vanquish the red menace. Levy, one of the most improbable Big Game heroes in the history of the 108-game series between these Bay Area academic giants, had somehow seen it coming all along. The kid from Bergen County, N.J. had been part of Jeff Tedford's first recruiting class at Cal, in 2002, but a logjam at quarterback which included future first-round draft choice Aaron Rodgers compelled the nominal fifth-stringer to switch positions before his redshirt freshman season in '03. At 6-1 and 215 pounds and with only average speed, Levy didn't have all that many options. What he did have was a desire to contribute to the team and a zest for contact. Since the linebacker corps was also crowded, Levy, who had starred as an inside backer in high school, bulked up to 235 pounds and moved to fullback. After fighting through reconstructive surgery to his left shoulder, he evolved into a special-teams dynamo known for his wedge-busting prowess.
Yet Levy was miserable playing fullback, and last January, after Rodgers declared for the draft, the departing star encouraged his friend to switch back to quarterback -- a move that surprised Tedford, but one which the coach ultimately endorsed. When starter Nate Longshore went down with a broken leg in the season opener, the slimmed-down Levy was suddenly No. 2 on the depth chart. And when his friend Joe Ayoob devolved into an inaccurate, skittish mess by the season's ninth and 10th games, playing horribly in consecutive defeats to Oregon and USC that knocked the once-10th-ranked Bears back to the middle of the Pac-10, Levy was thrust into a quarterback controversy in the days leading up to the game that would define Cal's season. That Tedford hadn't called for Levy earlier, given Ayoob's struggles, was seen as indictment of the backup's talents. As it was the coach didn't make his decision until the Thursday morning before the Stanford game, breaking the news via phone to Levy, who immediately hung up and phoned his parents in Jersey. "When Coach Tedford told me, my mouth was open the entire time," Levy recalled on Tuesday night. "I was so excited I wanted to scream, but instead I just thanked him and shut up." By game day, Levy had grown far more comfortable in his new role, his confidence bolstered by a mastery of the gameplan and inspirational phone conversations with three men who'd predicted he'd be in this position -- his father, Mark, who two months earlier had informed Levy the present he wanted for his 49th birthday was to see his son start the Big Game; ex-Cal linebacker David Ortega, who had told Mark and wife Angela two years earlier that "before he leaves here, Steve Levy will be a legend"; and the star of Cal's 1991 Citrus Bowl-winning team, Mike Pawlawski, the original wedge-buster-turned-quarterback, who called Levy at the team hotel four hours before game time to assure him, "You've been my guy from the start." Shortly after completing "the best pregame of my life," Levy told Tedford: "Coach, you have no idea how pumped I am. I've been waiting for this moment since I was six years old." Well, kinda/sorta. Levy didn't know a thing about Cal or the Big Game or "The Play" or anything else about the rivalry until Tedford began recruiting him, swooping in after East Coast schools like Boston College, his first choice, and Rutgers turned him down because of his height. "I was kind of devastated," Levy concedes. "But that's the way it's always been for me -- with everything I do, I have to overcome adversity." This was the case back when Levy was a sophomore at Don Bosco Prep. "They'd brought in a big recruit, a 6-6 kid," Levy recalls. "I knew I could do better than this guy, but they made him the starter, until he was ruled ineligible before the first game." The Legend of Levy may be destined to endure forever in Berkeley haunts like Top Dog and Henry's, but it was born in his first game as a 15-year-old sophomore. "We were at Hudson Catholic," he remembers. "Night game, New York City in the background. It was just perfect. The first pass I threw was a play called '91 Right,' a streak to Dorien Bryant, who ended up at Purdue. We hit it for a 60-yard touchdown and blew out that team."
Because Levy's memory of his maiden throw is so vivid, he couldn't help but chuckle when an almost identical pattern was signaled in from the Cal sideline on the team's second possession of a scoreless game. "I knew we were going to take some shots," he says, "but I didn't know it would be that early. I knew we were going to try to isolate DeSean on No. 35 (cornerback T.J. Rushing). I got to the huddle and said, 'Aw, s---, boys, here we go!' DeSean just smiled at me." After a play-fake to halfback Justin Forsett, Levy delivered a pass down the right sideline that, in his words, "wasn't a perfect throw, because if it had been Rushing probably would've intercepted it. It was perfectly underthrown." After getting tangled up with Rushing, Jackson scooped up the ball with his right hand at the 13 and headed straight toward the heart of Cal's half (actually, greater than half) of the soon-to-be-demolished stadium. It was the signature play in 10-for-18, 125-yard effort that included a meaningless third-quarter interception. The ecstatic Cal fans had already begun chanting Levy's name the first possession of the second half, when the determined quarterback ducked his head and rolled off consecutive runs of 21 and 10 yards to set up Forsett's 21-yard touchdown run that pushed the Bears' lead to 13-3. Back in high school, Levy says, he "used to knock people's helmets off" on his mad dashes downfield.
At game's end, appropriately, Levy jogged to the middle of the Cal section, removed his helmet and donned a blue hard-hat. In his exuberance he managed to hoist The Axe to the heavens, "run around like an a-----" (in his words) and inadvertently flatten a crowd-control officer, following a time-honored Berkeley tradition. If it hadn't yet dawned on him that he was a cult hero, he came to understand it a few hours later when he arrived at the Bear's Lair, a bustling on-campus bar, with his girlfriend, Jessica Kreusch, and his older brother, Mark, and promptly received a thunderous ovation. Two days later he walked onto Sproul Plaza to pick up some copies of the Daily Californian and was deluged by honking car horns and shout-outs from strangers. As he looks ahead to Cal's bowl game, including a possible dream matchup in the Insight Bowl against Rutgers and his former high school backup, Mike Teel, Levy does not plan to be a two-hit wonder. "Starting spring ball as No. 1 on the depth chart is going to be great," he says. "I'm such a competitor that I can't imagine letting anyone take my job away." Yet if, for whatever reason, Levy is saddled with his customary adversity and reverts to backup duty, he is well aware that by bringing so much pleasure to so many on a resplendent Saturday evening, he has become part of Cal football lore forevermore. Sometimes, these cheesy stories of perseverance and perfectly timed rescues have a way of coming true, and over the past few days the emotion of the moment has overtaken the young man who made it all happen. On Tuesday afternoon, he finally sat down to read a lengthy email his father had written him while flying from Newark to San Francisco the night before the Big Game. When he got to a stand-alone paragraph near the end of the letter, the younger Levy began to cry. It read: "Mark my words -- by midnight on Saturday, Nov. 19, 2005, Steve Levy will become a legend."
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