Top 50 Cal Sports Moments -- No. 33: Camelot’s Death, 1963

The NFL played on but the 1963 Big Game at Stanford was postponed after John F. Kennedy was killed the day before

The front page of the Indianapolis Star, Nov. 23, 1963, in the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. / IndyStar archives / USA TODAY NETWORK

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: On Friday evening, Nov. 22, 1963, as Cal’s players settled into their team hotel at Palo Alto the night before the Big Game, word came that the showdown at Stanford would be postponed following the assassination earlier in the day of President John F. Kennedy at Dallas.

THE STORY: Craig Morton was Cal’s star junior quarterback in the fall of 1963. But on Nov. 22, he was no different than anyone else.

“When Kennedy was assassinated, nobody knew who to be mad at, so we were just hurt,” Morton told the San Francisco Chronicle in a 2018 interview. "We were just shocked and hurt. It went to our souls. The cloud had burst. Camelot was gone.”

Morton said he got the news walking out of an English class into Sproul Plaza. It was about 11 a.m. and he was greeted by stunned fellow students in tears.

“Nobody really knew which direction to go. We didn’t know whether to go north, south, east, west or just hunker where we were.”

The football team headed south that afternoon, boarding buses and crossing the Bay to Stanford, as planned. The Big Game loomed the next day even if it probably didn’t feel like a capital letter event at that point.

It wasn’t until after dinner that the decision was made to postpone the game. “We went back to Berkeley and kind of settled in for a horrible weekend,” Morton said.

Oklahoma and Nebraska squared off in their rivalry game as scheduled, and several other college games also were played. Most were postponed.

Commissioner Pete Rozelle decided NFL games would be played, which years later he said was a mistake he regretted. TV networks did not cover the games, opting instead to stay focused on the bigger story.

Kennedy actually had some history with Cal, having attended the 1940 Big Game while briefly taking classes at Stanford. On March 23, 1962 — 20 months before his assassination — JFK addressed a crowd of 90,000 at Memorial Stadium on Charter Day, celebrating the university’s founding.

The ’63 Big Game was held a week later, on Nov. 30, and Stanford rallied in the second half to claim a 28-17 victory.

Morton said it was time to release some of the tension of a grim week. “Somebody was going to knock the s— out of you. I knew somebody was going to shake me up,” he said. “It was probably good for us.”

* Top 50 Moment No. 34: Rosy Fumble 

* Top 50 Moment No. 35: Working Overtime

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