At the 2026 Winter Olympics, Cal forestry Professor Matteo Garbelotto-Benzon, M.S. ’93, Ph.D. ’96, carried the Olympic torch in his native Dolomites, accompanied by his service dog, S’Abba. Garbelotto, who fractured a vertebra in a 2018 ski accident and experienced a pulmonary embolism just months later, credits S’Abba, whose name means water in Sardinian, with helping him walk and ski again.
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Moseley ’07 not only came to Cal after winning gold, he also enrolled after delivering the commencement convocation address—in 2002, five years before graduating with a degree in American studies.
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Table tennis player Lily Zhang ’18 also came to Cal with an Olympiad under her belt. The six-time national champion and four-time Olympian made her Olympic debut in 2012, in London, at age 16. As it happens, Zhang grew up in enemy territory—literally on the Stanford campus, where her father was a mathematics professor.
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Another athlete to arrive at Berkeley already a Winter Olympian was speedskater Connie Carpenter-Phinney ’81, who competed in the 1972 Games at age 14. At Cal, she rowed to a national championship in the varsity four. And, in the 1984 Summer Games, she won the gold medal in the first year of Olympic cycling for women.
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On February 15, former Cal golfer Collin Morikawa ’19 won the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, his first PGA title since 2023, bringing his total number of PGA Tour victories to seven, including two majors—the 2020 PGA Championship and the 2021 British Open. At the 2026 Masters Tournament, Morikawa and another former Cal golfer, Max Homa, both placed in the top 10, which means they’ll automatically be invited back in 2027.
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Homa is widely considered the funniest man on the Tour, known for his often self-deprecating X posts and critiques of amateurs who ask to have their swings evaluated. “What u lack in confidence off the tee u also lack in swing speed.” Golf humor.
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Solomon Hughes ’02, M.A. ’07, was awarded the Pete Newell Career Achievement Award at Haas Pavilion on January 17. The 6’11” Hughes was part of the 1999 Cal squad that won the National Invitation Tournament. After Berkeley, he earned his doctorate in education at the University of Georgia. More recently, he played Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the acclaimed HBO series Winning Time.
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On the day Hughes was honored, Cal upset 14th-ranked UNC, 84–78. The high scorers for the Bears were John Camden, with 20, and Dai Dai Ames and Justin Pippen, son of legendary Chicago Bulls player Scottie Pippen, with 19 apiece. All three players came to Cal through the transfer portal: Camden from Delaware, Ames from Virginia, Pippen from Michigan.
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The portal giveth and the portal taketh away. Pippen will play at Ohio State next season. Ames decamped for Tennessee. As for Camden, he reached the end of his college eligibility. On the plus side, Cal picked up Jake Wilkins from the Georgia Bulldogs, son of another NBA legend, nine-time All-Star Dominique Wilkins.
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Both men’s and women’s basketball finished middle of the pack in the highly competitive ACC—notably, ahead of Stanford, which both squads vanquished in head-to-head competition. The men went 22–12 overall, while the women finished the season 21–15, making it to the quarterfinals of the Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament.
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In March, Sports Illustrated’s Jake Curtis predicted a strong showing for the Cal women next season, with 8 of the 9 players from the WBIT game having eligibility remaining. Ultimately, head coach Charmin Smith was able to keep most of them out of the portal and on Cal’s new practice court, a $10 million commitment from the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund. Joining them are several new players, including center Albina Syla and guard Carly Amborn. Syla comes to Berkeley from Finland via Rhode Island. Amborn is transferring from somewhere a bit closer. Hint: It’s just across the Bay.
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Amborn, who grew up in Larkspur, comes from a multigenerational Cal family. Her mother, Pam Nelson-Campbell ’96, was a three-time tennis All-American for the Bears. “I cannot wait to continue my family legacy here,” says the incoming sophomore. “Cal truly feels like home.”
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Getting back to Pete Newell, the legendary Cal basketball coach who led the Bears to the national championship in 1959, it seems he also left his stamp on Cal football. According to coach Joe Kapp ’59, it was Newell’s post-practice tradition of “grabasse” (a Frenchification of “grab ass”) that led to the rugby-like sequence of laterals in The Play. Kapp, who played basketball for Newell, adopted and adapted the practice for his football squad.
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Readers of the March 3 edition of The Athletic’s Until Saturday newsletter may have been surprised to see the Cal rugby program largely left out of an item exploring “College sports’ best current DI dynasties.” That’s because rugby is not officially an NCAA sport. The writer stuck strictly to NCAA-sanctioned dynasties, but noted that “Cal rugby is hilariously great.” Indeed, the Golden Bear rugby program, led by former Golden Bear rugby and football player Jack Clark ’78, has won 34 national titles since 1980.
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Cal is well-represented in the writing stable of The Athletic, the New York Times’s subscription-only sports section. Contributors include Berkeley writers Michael Silver ’88, Vic Tafur, and Jason Jones, M.J. ’02. Another notable Cal scribe at the paper is Kurt Streeter ’89, a former “Sports of The Times” columnist.
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Streeter, who is now a national correspondent at the Times, played tennis at Cal in the late ’80s and was the first Black team captain when the Bears won the 1989 national indoor championship.
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Did you know that Cal and Stanford both gave up football for rugby in 1906, after a series of deaths on the college gridiron caused a crisis in the sport? Cal only switched back to the American game in 1915, and Stanford four years later.
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You might think that helps explain Douglas Tilden’s The Football Players, the statue by Strawberry Creek that features uncharacteristic costumes and an oblong ball. It doesn’t. Tilden created the piece in 1893 while living in Paris, using French rugby players as models. It does, however, help explain how the U.S. won Olympic gold in rugby in both 1920 and 1924, the national rosters pulling heavily from both Cal and Stanford.
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Current Cal football fans breathed a sigh of relief when freshman phenom quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, a.k.a. JKS, announced his intention to stay at Cal to play under new head coach Tosh Lupoi ’05. They may have held their breath when they heard that football GM Ron Rivera ’89 was interviewing for the head coaching position at the Arizona Cardinals. Rivera told sportscaster Jim Rome, “This was an opportunity to talk and see where I am… they chose and went the direction they went, which is fine because I’m at the University of California.”
