Top 50 Cal Sports Moments -- No. 11: Big Upset, 1892

A seemingly overconfident Cal team was upended 14-10 by Stanford in what was the first Big Game

Cal's 1892 football team /

As the Pac-12 Conference era comes to a close after more than a century, we count down the Top 50 moments involving Cal athletics.

THE MOMENT: Sporting goods store owner David Goulcher saved the day by retrieving a football that allowed the first Big Game to be played after a 90-minute delay in San Francisco.

THE STORY: There are a number of important aspects of the March 19, 1892 football matchup between Cal and Stanford you may not know.

First of all, the game was not yet called the Big Game. Cal was referred to in an Oakland Tribune account of the game as “State University” or simply Berkeley, but never the Bears. The game was staged at the Haight Street baseball grounds in San Francisco and attended by a crowd ranging from 6,000 to 20,000, depending on the source, and netted $30,000 in gate receipts that were split between the two schools.

In any case, it was a big deal. The Cal team spent the night before at the Palace Hotel while Stanford stayed at Lick House, a luxury hotel in the city’s financial district that was built three decades earlier. Both were destroyed 14 years later in the fire triggered by the 1906 earthquake.

Cal, with a more robust football history, was confident. Seemingly overconfident. A Berkeley player, talking with the Chronicle before the game, called Stanford “a kid team. They play fair football for boys, but they can’t do anything against us.”

The crowd was enthusiastic. Fans used “fish horns, Chinese fiddles, conch shells, rattlers, bazoos — in short, everything that could make a noise,” according to the Oakland Tribune.

But the start of the game was delayed 90 minutes, as Ron Fimrite explained in his book, “Golden Bears.”

“When referee Jack Sherrard blew his whistle to begin play, it was discovered that neither team had bothered to bring a ball, a grievous oversight blamed legendarily but unfairly on Stanford football manager Herbert Clark Hoover, a cherubic youth who some years later became the thirty-first President of the United States,” Fimrite wrote. 

“And it was not Hoover, as legend has it, but a spectator, David Goulcher, who volunteered to ride off in search of a proper ball.”

The owner of a sporting goods store, Goulcher rode horseback to his shop and returned with what looked like a football but actually was an inflated bladder removed from a punching bag.

He was the day’s first hero, sparking cries of, “The ball has come.”

Stanford jumped out to a surprising 14-0 halftime lead and prevailed 14-10, despite two second-half touchdowns by Cal’s Ray Sherman. (Note: touchdowns were worth four points at the time, conversions counted as two points).

The outcome was shocking to Cal fans. Wrote the Tribune: “The majority of the great crowd was terribly disappointed in the work of the Berkeley team.”

The newspaper offered one final sharp message to the Bears.

“And now, a word to the Berkeley football players on what is necessary to bring the University team into shape. First, a clever coacher. Second, a level-headed captain. Third, practice; plenty of it. Then they may be able to play winning football.”

* Top 50 Moment No. 12: Pac-12 Dies

* Top 50 Moment No. 13:  Streak Ends, 1986

Only specific acts that occurred while the team or athlete was at Cal were considered for the Top 50 list, and accomplishments spanning a season or a career were not included. 

Leslie Mitchell of the Cal Bears History Twitter site aided in the selection of the top 50 moments.

Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo