This excerpt from Five Laterals and a Trombone by Tyler Bridges is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit TriumphBooks.com/FiveLaterals.
On the day after the game, Joe Kapp’s home phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Word of Cal’s improbable last-second triumph had spread throughout the country the old-fashioned way—through newspaper articles, phone calls, radio news and some TV broadcasts. Brent Musburger introduced the play to his national audience by showing it twice that Sunday on CBS’s top-rated pregame show, The NFL Today, which he hosted. Sportswriters, TV producers, radio announcers, former teammates, longtime friends—all called Kapp wanting to hear how Cal had pulled it off. Kapp spoke into one of the bulky, cordless phones from the era that allowed him to roam around the house as long as he didn’t stray too far from the phone’s base. Because of the calls, he didn’t get to bed until late that night.
On Monday morning, two days after the game, a houseguest named Ned Averbuck offered to drive Kapp to the Berkeley campus. Averbuck and Kapp had played basketball together at Cal in the late 1950s and remained close. On the drive over, they talked about the game and the immediate aftermath. “Did you see [John] Elway’s comments after the game?” Averbuck asked his friend. “He said that the officials ‘ruined’ his last college game! What sour grapes!”
