(Photos by Stuart Robinson)

One of the benefits of being a Northwestern football fan is that the team’s away games can provide the impetus to visit new places. Las Vegas, Orlando, Nashville and Honolulu are among the places the Wildcats have led me in recent years.

One look at this year’s schedule and it was a “no brainer.” The only one non-conference road game looked like a gem: the University of California, Berkeley, on Labor Day weekend. I never had visited northern California, so the opportunity to do so – and see the ’Cats play – was irresistible. The San Francisco Bay area offered plenty to do, good mass transit and an enigmatic Pac 12 opponent.

Hoping to avoid the Labor Day travel crush on Friday and Monday, I chose to visit Wednesday through Sunday. The football game would be Saturday evening. (Trips to the Citrus and Motor City bowls had taught me that, in the event one’s team loses, it’s no fun to hang around.)

So the Wednesday before the game, I flew into Oakland and took the a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train under the bay to San Francisco, where I met up with my sophomore-year roommate – who had flown in from Chicago hours before.

After two days exploring San Francisco, we took the BART back across the bay to Berkeley late Friday afternoon. It was a bit of a hike from the Berkeley station to our hotel, but once there we were well situated. It was a block from the Cal campus, two blocks from a commercial area, only a block from the NU tailgate site and about three blocks from Cal Memorial Stadium. We didn’t need a rental car, which spared us any parking hassles.

Impressions of Cal

For a school with such an anti-establishment reputation, Cal was surprisingly … normal. On Friday night, students were spilling out of dorms and heading to nearby bars, many of which had lines out their doors. A surprisingly large number were wearing Golden Bear t-shirts or caps, indicating a high level of support for their team.

Sather Tower on the Cal campus.

We began Saturday ingesting coffee and people watching on the patio of a neighborhood coffeehouse. Again, the gold and blue was out in force, but there was a respectable number of purple people walking around as well. Like most state-school campuses, Cal’s was big and reasonably modular. However the architecture was nicer and more consistent, and the main area was mostly car-free.

Fortified with caffeine, we walked to the landmark Sather Tower at the center of campus. Along with quite a few like-minded tourists, we paid our entrance fee and took the elevator to the top. It was worth it. The tower offered wonderful views of San Francisco to the west, Oakland to the south, Cal Memorial Stadium to the east and the bay to the northwest. The observation deck reminded me of the one at the Washington Monument – square, with a few openings looking out in each direction. The perimeter was for people, the center for the bells of the tower’s carillon.

Next we hoped to find the Free Speech Movement Café, which a student told us had exhibits showing the counterculture for which Berkeley was known in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, we only knew the general direction and never found it. But we did loop through the western side of the campus and ended up at the student bookstore, where I bought a souvenir t-shirt with the word “Cal” in blue on a gold background. Then it was back the hotel for a nap before the tailgate and game.

Pregame Festivities

I expected to see a lot of purple on game day. NU has a large contingent of alumni in the Bay Area, and many folks like me took the opportunity to visit. But the official Northwestern Alumni Association tailgate was the largest I’ve ever seen at a ’Cats game – topping out at 1,200 people.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what columnist Bruce Jenkins wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle the next morning:

“Walking the streets of Berkeley before Cal’s football opener Saturday night, I felt suddenly disoriented. Underhill Field, at the corner of Channing and College, had been transformed into a full-blown Northwestern headquarters.
“This was no fly-by-night operation. It was organized with great precision, complete with an elaborate buffet, cocktail bar, big-screen television and enough tables and chairs for at least 500 people.
“The place was packed with alumni, a festival of purple and white. …
“When San Jose State hosted Sacramento State on Thursday night, there might have been 38 people who made the drive down from Sacramento. Northwestern, just outside Chicago, brought its own restaurant.”

I chatted with USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan, who is from my hometown, and also greeted NU’s alumni regent for Arizona, Fred Brown. There was a small stage where the Northwestern cheerleaders performed, and then Jim Phillips, NU’s vice president for Athletics and Recreation, took the microphone to address the crowd and point out Wildcat sports luminaries on hand, including new basketball coach Chris Collins and linebacker Nick Roach of the Oakland Raiders. NU President Morton “Morty” Schapiro waited in the wings. But with my stomach full and the effects of the sun and the morning’s exercise, I headed back to the hotel for a pregame rest.

NU players greet their fans after the win.

Game Night

As the sun began to set, we joined a procession of students and fans hiking uphill to the stadium. It was quite a workout. The crowd was good-natured. It was only when we passed some liquored-up kids queued up at the student gate that we were targeted with insults. Inside, we helped form a block of purple covering the better part of three sections in one corner of the stadium.

It was an exciting game. The ‘Cats jumped out to the lead, but at the price of injuries to quarterback Cain Kolter and running back Venric Mark. Cal fought back a couple of times and even took the lead at one point, but NU eventually put the game away on the strength of quarterback Trevor Siemian’s arm and linebacker Collin Ellis’ two “pick six” interception returns. So the walk back to the hotel was downhill in more ways than one.

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Tags: BART, Berkeley, Cal, Cal Memorial Stadium, football, NAA, Northwestern, Northwestern Alumni Association, Sather Tower, University of California