The Cal 100: No. 8 -- Pappy Waldorf
We count down the top 100 individuals associated with Cal athletics, based on their impact in sports or in the world at large – a wide-open category. See if you agree.
No. 8: Pappy Waldorf
Cal Sports Connection: Waldorf coached Cal's football team for 10 seasons, posting 67 victories and leading the Bears to three straight Rose Bowls (albeit losing all three).
Claim to Fame: His Cal teams went 38-4-1 his first four seasons, from 1947 through '50, losing just one regular-season game, and his devoted Pappy's Boys continued to celebrate him for decades.
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The men who played football on coach Lynn “Pappy” Waldorf’s earliest Cal teams were part of what is often referred to as the “Greatest Generation.” They survived the Great Depression and won World War II.
Waldorf, who checks in at No. 8 in The Cal 100, may be have been the Greatest Coach of the Greatest Generation.
Waldorf arrived in Berkeley before the 1947 season, just in time to greet a massive influx of military veterans who came to Cal on the GI Bill. The same thing no doubt happened on campuses across the country, but it seems Waldorf best took advantage of the opportunity.
Pappy Waldorf
Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics
Cal hadn’t enjoyed a winning season since 1938 until Waldorf’s first team went 9-1. That was followed by seasons of 10-1, 10-1 and 9-1-1. From ’47 through ’50 the Bears were 38-4-1 and lost just one regular-season game.
Waldorf's 1948, ’49 and ’50 teams were undefeated before losing in the Rose Bowl.
They did it with players who were “more mature, more highly motivated than any group we ever had before or since,” said former Cal president Clark Kerr, who was a young professor in the school of business administration at the time.
In fact, all but nine of the 57 players on the Bears’ 1948 roster had seen military action. Twenty-six of them were 23 or older, only four were teenagers, and they were bigger and stronger than previous Cal teams, according to the late Cal alum Ron Fimrite, a distinguished writer for Sports Illustrated.
Waldorf understood how to maximize the unique circumstances, Fimrite suggested. Here’s what he wrote in 2009:
Waldorf had a special affection for the war vets. Unlike many of his coaching confrères, Pappy, a closet intellectual, recognized that pre-war authoritarian methods would not work with grown men who might themselves have been in positions of authority making life-or-death decisions.
He knew as well that with the war behind them, the vets were out to have a well-earned good time. “I don’t consider any football practice to be a success,” Pappy said, “unless there is laughter.”
Coach and players meshed perfectly, resulting in a stretch of success the program has not equaled in more than 70 years since.
The men who played for Waldorf proudly referred to themselves as Pappy’s Boys, which was the name of their select alumni group that gathered annually for decades to honor their old coach and share stories.
“He was just such an overpoweringly strong influence and leader of that program and everything about it was good and positive. It was truly one of the great experiences of my life being exposed to him,” former halfback Jack Hart told me in a 2020 interview.
Jim Marinos, who worked his way up from 10th string to starting quarterback as a senior in 1950, shared why Waldorf’s former players had such strong, enduring love and respect for their coach.
Pappy Waldorff
Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics
“Pappy was a very charismatic, personable human being,” Marinos said three years ago. “He was an intellect. He wasn’t just an X's and O's football coach. He knew Shakespeare thoroughly. He was a gentleman.
“I looked at him, and I think we all did, as more than just a powerful coach but a powerful man. A man’s man.”
The son of a Methodist minister, Waldorf was born in 1902 in the tiny central New York state village of Clifton Springs. He was a star tackle at Syracuse in the early 1920s, then began a coaching career notable for how he turned around programs at every stop he made.
He was successful at Oklahoma City, Oklahoma State, Kansas State and Northwestern, improving the team’s record at each school. He made Cal his final stop and his home for the final 34 years of his life.
Waldorf was 53-9-1 his first six seasons at Cal, then lost momentum and was 14-23-3 his final four years. But he was 7-1-2 against Stanford and his 67 career victories remained the program record until Jeff Tedford eclipsed it in 2010 — 54 years after Waldorf retired.
After a college coaching career that spanned more than 30 years, Waldorf spent time as the 49ers’ head of scouting and personnel.
Statue of Pappy Waldorf at the Faculty Glade.
Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics
He was inducted into the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame in 1966 and joined the Cal Athletic Hall of Fame and the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame in 1987.
Pappy’s Boys, who reluctantly disbanded a couple years ago, endowed a scholarship in their coach’s name and in 1994 erected a life-size status of Waldorf in the Faculty Glade on campus.
“To me, he was the image of everything a football coach could be,” Hart told Mercury News columnist Mark Purdy in 2013. “I think he was Cal football.”
Cover photo of Pappy Waldorf courtesy of Cal Athletics
Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo
