CBS Sports: Have the left thinkers left the scene in Berkeley?

(This is from Ray Ratto, writing for CBS Sports): Link.

Of all the long national nightmares we currently endure, the one that just passed Tuesday is the most heart-warming.  And no, this is not about the discovery that sporting apparel giants own athletes' names.  This is about the surrender after 649 days of the protesters who blocked the removal of some oak trees near California's football stadium by living in them. The university, which wants to build an athletic training center where the trees are -- well, were -- put up an expensive and exhaustive fight to win the right to put their weights and massage tables where they wanted to put them, and finally succeeded Tuesday when four final protesters finally left their bark-encrusted homes for a leafy and photosynthesis-enriched jail cell.

Now our official policy here at CBSSports.com is that we don't really give a damn where Cal puts its treadmills. We also note that when the big one finally hits the earthquake fault upon which the entire plant stands and swallows the training center, the stadium and everything else it can suck back into the earth's crust, the trees will have the last laugh anyway. There are, after all, things more powerful than even Pete Carroll.  But the weirdest thing, now that the circus is finally over and characters like Dumpster Muffin can fade into our memories, is how few people rallied in defense of the protesters even at their arboreal heights in a town that has made its name fighting The Man in all His various forms.  Berkeley has long been stereotyped as the first and last bastion of free-range Bolshevik/anarchist/eco-liberal-independent thought -- the place where the revolution was going to start as soon as enough people got around to fomenting it.

But then the football team got good, and the training center became the new means to the greater end, getting to the Rose Bowl before a) the earthquake that tears the stadium in two, or b) all the season-ticket holders die. Suddenly a few folks in trees became not just part of the landscape but an affront to the dignity of developers and football fans everywhere.

The training center suddenly became a vital component to Cal's five-decade long fight to return to Pasadena, and that became more important to more people the more times the Golden Bears ended up at the Holiday Bowl. And yes, other athletes will be able to use the training center, but this was mostly a football thing, driven by football and fought for so stridently by football.  In short, the need for a prettier and more conveniently placed office and training center possessed far more throw-weight than a few protesters, and Berkeley became a lot less liberal, Dumpster Muffin notwithstanding, and lot more like Stillwater, Okla.

Put another way, the protesters would have won this one outright in 1998, or 1988, or 1978, and the topic would never have come up in 1968. The balance of power was different -- and the football team was crummier.  Those days are plainly over, though. There were too few tree-sitters, and the reactions to them and their protest from most other citizens of Berkeley and outlying areas was not one of bemusement but anger. The building had been imbued with special powers to provide the football team that elusive 11th victory, to ensure head coach Jeff Tedford's continued employment at the school, to pave the way for the quixotic Rose Bowl that Cal never seems to get. And the protesters were destroying the dream.

Of course, they weren't. Despite what you may have heard from every school in the Big 10, Big 12, SEC and ACC, a building does not a football program make. Players come to a school for three reasons only -- to play, to get seen by NFL scouts, and get seen on television. Cal had all those things with the trees in place, for the simple reason that people make success, not weight rooms. This was not something the athletic department needed, but it was something it wanted, and ultimately it won.

So good. It got the building. Life goes on, and the trees will be transformed into something else, and the planet will shrug and barely notice until it comes time to clear its throat and the whole thing comes down in a heap 10, 20, 30 years from now.  We mention all this only to let you outworlders know that Berkeley has come back toward the political center. Sure it might have taken a couple of Christmases, a few arrests, some derision from the rest of the country for being so, well, Berkeley about it, but it got done.

Which means that Berkeley isn't nearly so lefty as the rest of you thought it was. It just hopes that if/when the earthquake does hit and the new building joins the old stadium in a rubble-fest, Berkeley doesn't end up being a little more lefty geographically. As in the coast moving a few miles to the right.