The remark I hear most often about this magazine is that it’s “different.” My reaction? Of course it’s different! This is a magazine about Berkeley, after all, and Cal is nothing if not different.
Notice I used both Berkeley and Cal there. That’s one of the many ways the university is different; it has a dual identity. Berkeley is Nobel laureates and MarioCal is “Go Bears!” and Joe Roth. It’s Berkeley on the diplomas, Cal on the helmets. (To make it even more interesting, it’s California in the end zones, on certain team uniforms, and our masthead.)
Some may see this as a problem. I see it as two sides of the same coin; a duality, not a dichotomy. The yin and yang of the place. One name for the brain, another for the heart.
This issue is mostly about the heart—about Cal spirit and football, at a time when the college game is undergoing radical change. I like to think we’ve done it differently.
To understand the spirit of Cal, it helps to know that the university once had the most dominant football program in the country. From 1920 into 1925, under coach Andy Smith, the so-called Wonder Teams had a 50-game winning streak and won four straight national championships. The Wonder Teams were the first to play in the newly built Memorial Stadium, and after Smith died in 1926, a biplane spread his ashes over the field.
Ever since the Berkeley gridiron was thusly consecrated, Cal has been trying to recapture that glory. The 1958 team nearly did. Led by quarterback Joe Kapp, the Bears made it to the Rose Bowl, only to go down in defeat. Since then, as every Cal fan knows, the Bears have been heartbreakers, producing some of the most talented footballers in the modern era—e.g., boasting more starting Super Bowl quarterbacks than any other college—but few standout seasons and fewer championships.
Nevertheless the Cal spirit persists, and with each new squad hope springs eternal. This year, the Bears’ phenomenal freshman quarterback, Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, also known as JKS, has set the Bay on fire with his rocket arm. Whether the program can keep him from entering the transfer portal is one of the main challenges facing Cal’s football general manager, Ron Rivera—that and replacing head coach Justin Wilcox, who was fired just as this issue went to press. In this new era of cash payments to college athletes, the Cal alum and NFL veteran is betting he can win them over with the value of a Berkeley degree and the largely untapped potential of Cal’s fan base.
That potential was on full display last year when Berkeley played host to ESPN’s College GameDay. Memorial Stadium sold out. Memorial Glade became a veritable Calapalooza.
What brought the network program to campus for the first time? Some of the credit—maybe most—goes to the Calgorithm, a social media phenomenon which entertained Cal fans and trolled rivals with memes that doubled down on Berkeley stereotypes while also playing them for laughs.
Many of those memes featured Oski, Cal’s octogenarian mascot. In this issue, I write about how Berkeley’s favorite bear sprung to life in 1941 as both costume and cartoon in the Daily Californian. Like the Calgorithm, he came about organically—there was no committee, no authority behind it. Student Bill “Rocky” Rockwell, the first to inhabit Oski, just had an idea and made it happen.
Some of that DIY spirit lives on in Berkeley’s burgeoning startup culture. The campus, long ambivalent about commercializing research, today produces a remarkable number of venture-funded startups, many led by women. As Nathalia Alcantara reports, there is now “a new generation of Berkeley students for whom entrepreneurship isn’t extracurricular, but embedded in the student experience.” This transformation is a testament to the influence of Chancellor Rich Lyons, who has long encouraged Berkeley students to question the status quo and become changemakers.
Lyons, by the way, makes it on to this issue’s cover—a riff on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album. Also among the faces in the crowd: Cal football legends from Andy Smith to Pappy Waldorf, Joe Kapp to Marshawn Lynch. But it’s not just football players—or even people. There’s the Campanile, Tightwad Hill, the falcons. There’s Paul McCartney, who once played a sold-out Memorial Stadium. And there’s Glenn Seaborg, the Nobel laureate and former chancellor who, I’d argue, embodied the Berkeley/Cal duality as well as anyone. Consider: Seaborg discovered ten elements including californium, berkelium, and, of course, seaborgium. An avid Cal football fan, he took a leading role in reforming a scandal-ridden Pacific Coast Conference before becoming chancellor. Still not convinced? Get this: His surname is an anagram for “Go Bears!”
With that kind of campus lore, you can understand why this magazine is a little different. We hope you enjoy this issue—not least identifying the figures on the cover. And, as always, we invite you to write to us at [email protected].
Strawberry Creek forever!
