The action was fast and furious when De La Salle and Long Beach Poly played their legendary “Game of the Century” 25 years ago in Long Beach. Photo: Football Depot / YouTube.com.
Before an October night in 2001 in Long Beach, there had never been a matchup of No. 1 vs No. 2 teams in U.S. high school football history, going by the major national rankings people were looking at in those years. But the matchup between De La Salle of Concord vs Long Beach Poly had a bunch of other storylines. De La Salle’s ongoing national record win streak at 116 games and counting was just one of them. We have all the details about the Spartans’ winning on that night and what people were saying afterward.
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Editor’s Note: Most of the following account is from a story we did for Student Sports Magazine that appeared in the November 2001 issue, which is perhaps the best single issue of a national high school sports magazine ever produced. The cover story about an upcoming junior basketball star from Akron, Ohio had the headline “King James – The New Version.” Yes, it was about LeBron James. Our colleague at the time, Brentt Eads, now the editor of the Line Drive Media national softball site, also was co-author.
Saturday, Oct. 6, 2001 was a big day in American sports. After 3,001 major league baseball games, Cal Ripken hung up his spikes for the last time. In college football, two Big 12 powers, Oklahoma and Texas, squared off with the Sooners coming out on top.
But the real happening in athletics wasn’t at the pro or college level. It was at Veterans Stadium in Long Beach, Calif., in front of 17,321 fans who were fortunate enough to witness an historic, long-anticipated, sold-out high school football game, a 29-15 win by De La Salle of Concord, Calif., over Long Beach Poly. It was a game that had implications for years to come.
The Happening
So hot was this ticket that many people drove several hours only to be turned away at the gates. Fans showed up hours early for college-like tailgate parties. By kickoff, the stadium (which is about to be torn down and replaced by a new facility for Long Beach City College) was so packed that many people were forced to sit on a wall surrounding the track or stand shoulder to shoulder against a chain link fence separating the crowd from the field.
Important or well-connected celebrities from the sports and entertainment world, including rappers Warren G and Snoop Dogg (both from Long Beach), made their way onto the sidelines more and more as the game went on.
By the fourth quarter, you could field a pretty good college team with those in attendance. Future NFL players Mark Carrier and Marques Anderson of Poly, both defensive backs, and Demetrius Williams of De La Salle, a wide receiver, were among them. Others who were college teammates of the alums also came, including future UCLA head coach DeShaun Foster, who was a recent State Player of the Year from Tustin.
All over the nation, interested parties were watching, including a pair of teammates with the New York Giants, receiver Amani Toomer and defensive back Omar Stoutmire. Toomer, who finished his high school career in 1991 on the last previous De La Salle team to lose a game and also was a State Player of the Year by Cal-Hi Sports, and Stoutmire, a Poly grad, had a bet. The player whose alma mater lost had to wear the other’s high school jersey for a day.
It wasn’t just former players and fans who were in attendance, either. At least 120 media credentials were issued, including those from ESPN and the New York Times. One person attending, author Don Wallace, later wrote a book, “One Great Game: Two Teams, Two Dreams, in the First Ever National Championship High School Football Game.” It is still available on Amazon. The New York Times had writer Jennifer Allen attend, the daughter of longtime NFL head coach George Allen, which is who we sat next to in the press box. The late, great Leon Davis, who they named the gym after at Whittier Christian, was on our other side. He would later free-lance for us covering softball tournaments and softball state finals in Arizona and Texas.
The History
So why was this game so big that Chris Berman of ESPN put it on his “Top 10” list of sports events for the week, that “Sports Center” showed highlights of De La Salle’s win, and that college players took early flights home to attend?
It wasn’t for a state title. The California Interscholastic Federation did not re-start its state football finals for five more years and this game and the attention it received was part of the impetus for that happening.
Yes, the game had so many fascinating story angles, it would make a soap opera writer’s head spin.
The lines were long hours before the legendary 2001 DLS-LB Poly showdown. Photo: Brentt Eads
*It was clearly the first time two teams entered a game ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in the nation. That was confirmed by one of the people who first began doing national rankings, Doug Huff of Wheeling, West Virginia, who also started the National Federation of State High Schools football records and who we worked with on our Student Sports’ FAB 50 national rankings at the time (which also were carried by FOX Sports). Barry Sollenberger of Arizona, who had taken over the first national rankings that were started in the 1930s by hobbyist Art Johlffs in Minnesota, also agreed about the No. 1 vs No. 2 fact.
*De La Salle had already played and beaten some of the top teams from the CIF Southern Section in 1998, 1999 and 2000, including Mater Dei of Santa Ana in both 1998 and 1999. The Spartans had not yet played Long Beach Poly, which won the CIFSS top divisional title in 2000 and was going to be loaded with top-level college recruits. As talk about the two playing in 2001 began to heat up, it made sense to put the two right next to each other at the top of the Student Sports’ FAB 50. In those days, national rankings had almost an unwritten rule that if a California was No. 1, for example, a top Texas team would be No. 2. Poly was just so impressive and DLS had so much historical significance at the time that it just made too much sense to not do it that way.
*The FAB 50 came out first in early August and had DLS at No. 1 (since it also was No. 1 at the close of the 2000 season) with Poly second. USA Today had perhaps the most followed rankings at the time, and it had it as a No. 1 vs No. 2 as well, but it had Poly first and DLS second.
*Then there was De La Salle’s incredible winning streak. Coming into the season, it had stood at 112 games, with the last loss coming back in 1991 in the CIF North Coast Section championship game to Pittsburg. The Spartans had extended it to 116 by the time they played the Jackrabbits. It already was 44 games longer than the second-longest win streak on the all-time U.S. list for 11-man teams. Poly’s record in the previous five years, which even the most ardent De La Salle fans agree came against a much tougher schedule, wasn’t exactly bad, either, at 57-1-1.
*The game also featured a huge disparity in head coaching experience. De La Salle’s Bob Ladouceur, who started his career at the school in 1979, entered the matchup with a career record of 252-14-1, a winning percentage of 94.7 percent at the time. First-year Poly head coach Raul Lara, an alumnus of the school, had all but three games under his belt. Lara would later enjoy getting a win over De La Salle in his first season as the head coach at Mater Dei in the 2024 CIF Open Division state championship.
*The talent factor for the two teams also was off the charts. Poly has always had that kind of talent and 25 years later still has the most graduates go on to the NFL than any other school in America. At the time of this game, Willie McGinest was playing for the Patriots and Marquez Pope was on the Raiders, among a group of six. De La Salle had Toomer in his prime playing for the Giants, lineman Aaron Taylor had recently won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers and lineman Dave Loverne was playing for the Jets.
*The 2001 Poly team would later make history as becoming the first team in the nation to have five Parade Magazine All-Americans. They were defensive tackle Manuel Wright, offensive lineman Winston Justice, safety Darnell Bing, tight end Marcedes Lewis and running back Hershel Dennis. Lewis, at age 40, is still playing in the NFL and is listed on the roster of the Denver Broncos. The Jackrabbits had 41 players on their roster, counting underclassmen, who were college recruits. That’s the type of talent that State Teams of the Year in recent times at Mater Dei and St. John Bosco have had.
*De La Salle has never had that type of talent on a roster, but it had a lot of great players in those days as well. Two-way lineman Derek Landri off of the 2001 team is still regarded as the best lineman the Spartans have ever had, future NFL QB Matt Gutierrez also is still regarded as the best quarterback the Spartans have ever had. No one knew it coming into the Poly game, but DLS also would have the best running back that they’ve ever had. More on him later.
Terry Eidson, the athletic director and defensive coordinator of the Spartans, remembers that even though he thought the 2001 squad had the talent that could play on even terms or better than the Jackrabbits, he had some reservations when looking at all of the Poly players warming up.
“We only had tape to look at in those days, but they had some impressive guys,” Eidson said at a recent De La Salle game in Stockton. “I thought, ‘Maybe, we might have put ourselves in harm’s way.'”
Yes, any way one looked at it — rankings, records, recruiting — this game had it all.
The Game
Matt Gutierrez of De La Salle gets hands the ball off to Maurice Drew during 2001 contest vs Long Beach Poly. Photo: Ray Vidal
Before the season started, there was apprehension that a loss by either team would take the air out of the matchup, but De La Salle rolled in its first three games by scores of 56-14, 34-6 and 42-0. Likewise, Poly was barely challenged in its opening games as well, blowing out opponents 37-0, 28-6 and 70-0.
Impressively, neither of the juggernauts’ first team defenses had given up a point in the six games they collectively played before facing each other. De La Salle also had scored at least three touchdowns in every win in its 116-game win streak and had four touchdowns in every game but one. Poly, too, was a threat to pile up the points as evidenced by its 45 points per game average in its first three games and for many of its games in the 2000 season.
With all the big-name seniors suiting up, few would have thought that a relatively unheralded 5-foot-7 junior running back named Maurice Drew would be the difference maker, but that’s exactly what happened. Perhaps it’s a sign of Ladouceur’s genius that he knew which weapon to unleash and at which time. He launched Drew in this biggest of games and he responded by scoring four touchdowns.
Maurice, who became Maurice Jones-Drew at UCLA and later would become one of the top running backs in the NFL for the Jacksonville Jaguars, was not the showcase running back for the Spartans in their first three games. Senior Alijah Bradley was the one who rushed for 204 yards in a victory over Mater Dei two weeks earlier. Drew was, in effect, hidden from Poly’s coaches scouting the Spartans. The DLS coaches came up with a game plan that got Drew the ball in key spots with Poly linebackers covering him.
“All week I knew I was going to be the focal point of the offense,” Drew said at the time. “I thought it would be a real close game, like 14-13, but we all stepped up and did what we had to do. This was my coming out party.”
The stocky, compact athlete (his son Duece Jones-Drew is De La Salle’s top running back this season and also is going to UCLA) had an impact literally on the game’s opening play, when he returned the opening kickoff almost to midfield. Minutes later, quarterback Gutierrez tossed a short pass to Drew in the right flat on a third-and-eight play from the Poly 25-yard line. He broke one tackle and somersaulted in the end zone for a touchdown. He was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct, but that turned out to be Maurice’s only questionable move he made all night.
After Poly got on the scoreboard on a 42-yard field goal by Jeff Hasting, Gutierrez and Drew struck again on a 29-yard touchdown pass. On that play, which came on a fourth-and-three, Drew ran a circle route out of the backfield down the left sideline and hauled in an over-the-shoulder touch pass from Gutierrez.
Drew’s third touchdown came in the second quarter when he took a handoff on an off-tackle play, broke through two Poly tacklers, and hit paydirt on a 17-yard run. His final score salted away the De La Salle victory. It was a similar effort to his third score and came on a 22-yard run with 6:57 left. He ended the night with nine carries for 86 yards and three receptions for 75 yards.
Despite the final 15-point deficit, Poly certainly had its chances in the showdown and came within two dropped passes and a few inches on a key fourth-down play of really putting the pressure on the Spartans.
Maurice Drew, now known as Maurice Jones-Drew, NFL rushing champion, gets interviewed after De La Salle victory vs Long Beach Poly. Photo: Brentt Eads
After halftime, the Jackrabbits had two drives that potentially could have given them a 22-21 lead. On one, Dennis, who like Drew had a phenomenal game and had 158 yards rushing on 20 carries, was stopped short of a first down on a fourth-and-one from the DLS 46-yard line.
“You have to give credit to De La Salle,” Lara said. “We knew coming in that if we didn’t control the line of scrimmage we’d be in trouble. We tried and tried to make adjustments, but couldn’t do it.”
All-American Derek Landri of De La Salle also had a dominating game in the trenches. In the eyes of then Student Sports recruiting director Greg Biggins, the future NFL player was the star of the game. After battling head-to-head against Winston Justice when he was on defense and then Manual Wright when he was on offense, Biggins proclaimed Landri the top lineman in the nation.
“This shows that a good team will beat a team of individuals any day,” Landri said after the game. “Not that Poly isn’t a team; it’s just we kept hearing about they had all these All-Americans. We feel we have some pretty good players on our team, too.”
Jones-Drew also was asked about his memories of that night before helping coach the Spartans in their recent game in Stockton.
“We knew long before that night who we were going to play and it was all about preparation in the off-season,” he said. “Coach had a lot of good running backs that season. He went with whoever had the hot hand, which was Alijah Bradley against Mater Dei. It just so happened on that night I had the hot hand.”
The Aftermath
The win gave De La Salle the inside track to end the season as the nation’s No. 1 team for the fourth time in eight years and that’s what happened when the Spartans rolled to another CIF North Coast Section title. The win streak was extended to 125 games after the season and it would continue to 151 until the first game of the 2004 season. De La Salle’s 2001 team, due to the presence of players like Jones-Drew (the best RB in school history), Gutierrez (the best QB in school history) and Landri (perhaps the best lineman), also has been recognized as one of the greatest teams in state history.
Part of the reason for the DLS 2001 team being so high is that Poly’s 2001 team is also among the greatest in state history. The Jackrabbits went on to win their third straight CIFSS title in the top division. The number of top players they had and how they did against the rest of their opponents was further proof. Poly also had a 30-0-1 unbeaten streak ended with the loss to the Spartans.
“What happened?” Justice said. “I don’t know. We were blowing them out of the box and they still found a way to stop us. I don’t know what happened. They weren’t superior athletes. We were. I don’t know how they did it.”
Other Poly players were more impressed by the Spartans.
“In the first half, I think we were a little scared,” Lewis said. “We felt we had opportunities on offense, but didn’t execute. They’re an excellent football team just like we expected they would be.”
“We would’ve been just as happy tonight if the streak had ended at 116 because our kids played hard and we were happy with our effort,” Ladoucuer said after the game. “Sometimes I thought, ‘It’s just a game,’ but I realize that when you put two programs like these together it would draw a lot interest to high school football.”
Now that might have been the understatement of the year.
Mark Tennis is the co-founder and publisher of CalHiSports.com. He can be reached at markjtennis@gmail.com. Don’t forget to follow Mark on the Cal-Hi Sports Twitter handle: @CalHiSports
