On January 1, 2024, the Washington Huskies defeated the Texas Longhorns to advance to the College Football National Championship Game. It was a tough adn disappointing loss that wasn’t final until the final play of the game.
This was not the first time that a Husky sent my team packing in the first round of the playoffs…
The month was November. The year was 1980 – the fall of my senior year of high school. The location was the Bishop High School stadium in Bishop, California. I was told the game was here instead of at Mammoth’s home stadium was because they did not have stadium lights? That seems so odd. Anyway, it was a neutral site – four hours away for us and one hour away for the Mammoth High School Huskies.
We were the Desert Scorpions. It was the first round of the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) playoffs. We were winning the game, but at the very end the Huskies connected on a long pass and had the ball at our five yard line or so. They had no timeouts left, but they did something impossible. They ran two running plays in six seconds. There was no out of bounds play. There were no timeouts from either team or injury timeouts. There was no incomplete pass. No penalties. That still baffles us. My coach was steamed about that after the game.
What happened next was illegal. The Mammoth Husky running back, Troy Rowan, even apologized to our quarterback, Dusty Wince, after the game. “I’m sorry we had to use that on you guys,” he told him. Their quarterback, Marty Zwartz, was stopped at the line of scrimmage, but he threw the ball with both hands – kinda like a basketball inbound pass – into the end zone. It was headed straight for the hands of our defensive tackle, Pat Zang. He simply batted the ball down. “Incomplete pass. Game over.” Or so we thought. Their offensive tackle jumped on the ball. The refs raised their hands to signify a touchdown. “Fumble recovered in the end zone for a touchdown.”
I know a lot of competitors will often complain about officiating errors and possible cheating, but the officials in this particular game met with our head coach in Lancaster, California, the following week and told him, “We were wrong. We are sorry.”
Sorry!?! That doesn’t cut it.
I wrote a book about all this. It’s called Desert High. It’s my great American novel. It’s a story I had to tell. Once I started writing it, it kind of just jumped out of me, like there was some sort of purpose behind it.
While I was researching the book, which involved a trip to Southern California where all this happened, my former teammates and friends would encourage me. Pat looked at me as though he were serious about my time travel exploits and said, “Tell me to catch the ball.” He was referring to the fake fumble that was headed his way. He just batted it down to end the play, but in hindsight catching it would have solved the problem and truly ended the game.
Time travel? That’s what the book Desert High focuses on. It’s like a combination of Friday Night Lights meets Back to the Future. The Air Force builds a time machine, but instead of using one of their test pilots to guide the man mission back in time, they hire an “air force brat” like me with a civil servant contract. I would seriously have jumped at this chance to travel back in time to fix a “small and insignificant” event like a high school football game.
When a fan sees his or her favorite team get gypped out of a playoff win due to cheating or poor officiating, it can impact their emotional well being for several days. If it happens to yourself as a player – especially a young, impressionable high school athlete – it might stay with you for years. My friends from high school and I still talk about that game when we get together. I’d for sure brave the unknown and the risks of being stuck back in 1980 if I could somehow fix that game’s outcome.
But how would one go about that? Would you stop the game and tell the players and people in the stands that you are from the future and have come back to right the wrong that is about to take place? Give me a break! Would you talk to the refs before the game and brief them on clock management and advancing a fumble on the last play of the game? Have you ever talked to a ref before a game? How about a playoff game to boot? They are sequestered away from the public and want no part of any conversations – especially one with an agenda for one team over another. What would you do in this situation?
Thus comes the anti-spoiler answer you were expecting: read the book. Maybe someday I can also say, “Watch the movie.”
Bad officiating? Cheating? Sigh. I feel your pain. Trust me, I do.
Wait a minute? Was this blog just a plug for a book? Well, yeah, but I’ve only done this once. Want to read Desert High? It’s available on Amazon for the Kindle, but the paperback can be had for only $10 (using the coupon code “playoffs” at checkout) here.
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