GARY PETERSON: TIMES COLUMNIST
ASSUMING THERE IS merit to the charge against Cal quarterback Steve Levy -- that he flung a pint glass into the face of a bar employee in San Francisco during the wee smalls of Sunday morning -- we are reminded of two fundamental tenets. One, give the man time to throw, and he'll pick you apart. And two, there is a price for athletic success that Cal has historically been unwilling to pay. That price has been the ritual embarrassment of the university by a member of its athletic community. And nothing says embarrassment quite like the prospect of your bowl game-winning quarterback demonstrating his technique on the skinny post, using a pint glass as a football and a bystander's forehead as a target.
Levy, it goes without saying, is innocent until proven guilty. Football coach Jeff Tedford isn't inclined to wait on the wheels of justice. Tedford took time from his summer vacation Monday to announce that Levy had been suspended from the team pending a thorough review of the pertinent facts, a move seconded (if not firsted) by athletic director Sandy Barbour. You would expect nothing less from Cal, given the school's uneasy relationship with its high-profile, high-revenue sports. Which is to say: football, men's basketball, football and football again. For one thing, Cal is an NCAA Division I anomaly in that it prefers not to be known primarily for its athletic achievement. The school takes pride in its liberal, free-thinking heritage and counter-cultural bent.
For another, and to compound matters, what few successful "eras" the school has enjoyed in its two high-profile, high-revenue sports since the Kennedy administration have ended in disgrace. Got a couple seconds? Let's review. For 15 seasons from 1959-73, the football team enjoyed just three winning records. Under coach Mike White, the Bears turned it around. From 1974-77, they won 27, lost 16 and tied 1. In 1975, Cal came within one game (or, if you prefer, a half-dozen UCLA fumbles) of the Rose Bowl. The White regime collapsed amid charges of academic neglect and recruiting violations. The dark joke at the time was that the only part of the campus star running back Chuck Muncie ever saw was the Memorial Stadium grass between the end zones.
This kind of single-minded moxie might have earned White a political appointment in the upper midwest, deep south, or most of Texas. It got him fired in Berkeley. So great was the embarrassment that no one at Cal seemed to mind much that the football team made just one bowl appearance in the first dozen seasons after White's departure. Perhaps it was because the basketball team soon experienced a similar rebirth, beginning in 1985 with the arrival of coach Lou Campanelli. After Campanelli was fired midway through the 1993 season, the team became a national power under replacement Todd Bozeman. The reasons for that ascendancy became clear when it was revealed Bozeman had paid for the services of at least one of the team's better players.
Bozeman was canned without regret. Probation ensued, embarrassment nipping at its heels. The dynamic remains unchanged to this day. Given the choice between success and righteousness, Cal's administration will always choose the latter. Considered in this context, the two-year contract extension given men's basketball coach Ben Braun last week makes absolute sense. Yes, Braun has reached the NCAA Tournament's Sweet 16 just once in his 10 seasons at Cal, and then with players Bozeman had hired, um, recruited. Yes, it seems that every season is played against the low-level buzz of critical chatter. That said, Braun runs a sanitized-for-your-protection program. If the worst that can be said of a coach is that he might have won an extra game or two along the way, well, that man has a place on the Cal campus.
Similarly, Tedford has overseen the dramatic renaissance of the Cal football program without inspiring undue drama, scrutiny or the urge to run home and take a shower after spending time in the same room with his players. Levy isn't the first of his charges to wind up on the wrong end of a headline, but Tedford is convincing when he says he does not condone stupid indulgent athlete tricks. Before taking his wards on the road for last December's Las Vegas Bowl, for example, he outlined a plan to hold approximately one cautionary team meeting for each of the seven deadly sins.
The past four seasons have been a swell time to be a Cal football fan. But with winning, you can be assured, has come concern that success is arriving through proper channels. You also can be assured that accounts of Levy's last-call drill have been duly noted and that the obligatory question has been considered, if not spoken out loud: At what point does the cost of having a nationally ranked football team exceed Cal's psychic budget?
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