A perfect Berkeley paradox: Big-money college football and an antiestablishment protest

JEFF TEDFORD LOOKED out of his office window and saw helicopters circling. Below, a crowd had gathered to watch the last holdouts finally descend from an oak tree beside California Memorial Stadium. TV news vans lined Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley, and rooftops across campus filled with people hoping for a glimpse of what was happening.

Tedford, Cal’s most successful coach of the modern era, had grown accustomed to the odd scene. Twenty-one months earlier, activists began a tree-sit in December 2006, with some actually living in trees, to protest the removal of an oak grove next to the stadium, part of a long-planned seismic retrofit and facilities upgrade project. The demonstration called itself Save the Oaks.

The patch of campus had embodied one of the many contradictions of Berkeley — a place where an environmental protest and big-time college football could unfold on opposite sides of the same stadium wall.

“It was like a fricking circus,” Tedford said recently. “My office was about a hundred feet from the trees, so I got to see most of it and hear most all of it.”

Over time, the grove transformed into a small treetop village. Platforms appeared between branches. Ropes and pulleys dangled from above. Zip lines stretched from tree to tree, connecting the makeshift outposts like a canopy freeway. Eventually, the tree-sit had become an international curiosity.

The impasse had lasted nearly two years — from the 2006 Big Game to the start of the 2008 season. Cal football surged at the time, entering the top 10 in 2006, and rising to No. 2 nationally following a 5-0 start in 2007. Meanwhile, there was a photo shoot of naked protestors in the trees.

As Save the Oaks entered its final stage, university workers surrounded the last occupied tree with scaffolding, layering it upward until it reached the lingering protestors, with tarps above to shield them from whatever might fall. When the scaffolding rose, so did a temporary staircase inside. UC Berkeley police chief Vicky Harrison was lifted into the air in the basket of a cherry picker, and addressed the demonstrators.

“I said, ‘OK, guys, you had a good run. Let’s do this the easy way,'” Harrison said recently. “And then, of course, I did a little threatening where I basically said, ‘I’ve already talked to the district attorney. If anybody gets hurt, if any of the officers get hurt, if any of the tree guys get hurt, there’s going to be not misdemeanor charges, but felony charges.'”

The last protestors conceded. It was over.

“It ended very peacefully,” Harrison said.

Seventeen years later, as Tedford is set to be inducted into the Cal Athletics Hall of Fame when the Golden Bears host North Carolina (10:30 p.m. ET, ESPN), the memory still feels surreal. Tedford, Cal’s all-time winningest coach, built a team that, at times, hovered on the cusp of national contention, all while yards away from one of the strangest protests in college sports history.

---

CALIFORNIA MEMORIAL STADIUM is nestled into Strawberry Canyon, butting up against the Berkeley Hills. On clear days, fans in the upper rows get views of the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge. The stadium opened in 1923, and it sits atop the Hayward Fault, regarded as one of the Bay Area’s most serious seismic threats.

In February 2005, Cal announced plans to “renovate and seismically strengthen” the stadium, citing both safety due to the fault line and the need to modernize its athletic facilities, which were located within the stadium. These facilities, used daily by Cal athletes, included weight training, nutrition and sports medicine areas.

The proposal called for a 142,000-square-foot training facility along the west wall of the stadium, which would service football and 12 other Cal athletic programs.

“The everyday facilities, what we now call football operations building, wasn’t up to par,” said Sandy Barbour, Cal’s athletic director at the time. “There were life safety issues, and there were football day-to-day conditions for student-athletes — frankly, day-to-day conditions for student-athletes across the 31 sports at Cal.”

There was another incentive for Cal to accelerate the stadium project: Keeping Tedford. Cal won 10 games in 2004 and nearly reached the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1959. Tedford had become one of the nation’s hottest coaches, and his contract had a clause that if Cal hadn’t broken ground on a new facility by a certain date, his buyout to leave would drop significantly.

“We needed to be able to show the commitment to Jeff, to our program and frankly, to the community, that Cal was going to be serious about having sustained success in football,” Barbour said.

But this is Berkeley, a college town where placards and megaphones trump helmets and shoulder pads. Pushing through a major athletics facilities project wouldn’t be so simple.

First came the lawsuits. In the fall of 2006, the city of Berkeley, the California Oak Foundation and the Panoramic Hill Association, a neighborhood group, all filed suits related to the project. (They would later be consolidated into one.) A fourth lawsuit would be filed by Save Tightwad Hill, which represented fans who watched games from the hill overlooking the stadium, without paying for tickets.

The lawsuits led to a temporary restraining order from the Alameda County Superior Court, which effectively protected the grove from being demolished as hearings, filings and appeals followed over the next year and a half.

“The court cases just kept dragging out,” said Nathan Brostrom, Cal’s vice chancellor at the time.

The resistance took a turn on Dec. 2, 2006, Big Game day, when Cal hosted rival Stanford. That morning, several people came to the oak grove marked for removal and made camp. Among them was Zachary RunningWolf, a local activist who had run for mayor in Berkeley. He told The Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper that if University of California regents approved the removal, “They’re going to have to extract me from this tree, because that’s the only way I’m going to leave.”

Brostrom was living in a house above Memorial Stadium with his wife and six kids. On Big Game morning, Brostrom was making pancakes when Harrison called: Nathan, we’ve got a couple people up in the trees.

“I was thinking it was fans from the night before or something,” Brostrom said. “She said, ‘Well, they’re protesting.’ I said, ‘Let’s just get them down. It’s Big Game. There’s going to be 70,000 people there in a few hours.’ And she said, ‘Well, it’s not quite that easy.'”

Brostrom walked to the grove and spoke with RunningWolf and another person. There was nothing to indicate this would be an extended protest.

“We thought it was going to be short-lived,” Brostrom said. “We really thought it was starting to be the cold, wet winter, and it wasn’t going to last.”

That analysis turned out to be a significant miscalculation.

---

THE PEOPLE WHO climbed up, and ultimately lived in, the oaks outside the stadium would become the faces of the movement. But the protest had several layers.

“It had nothing to do with support or lack thereof for the university athletes, much less the teams,” said Karen Pickett, a longtime forest activist who assisted with Save the Oaks. “While the campaign was at odds with the university’s decision-makers, the Board of Regents, et cetera, there was never an issue with the students, much less the players.”

The organizers viewed the removal of these trees as symbolic of how Cal operated, and if no one stood up, Cal would continue to “plow over the city government,” Pickett said.

The grove also held significance for different groups. Some claimed it was located on a Native American burial ground. Others reasoned it was a wildlife corridor. The trees were planted as part of the stadium’s original construction that honored World War I, which carried significance for some in the community.

“These former faculty and current faculty would talk about how it was like this last quiet, peaceful spot that was on the edge of campus where they could go,” Pickett said. “It was a small area and yet, biologically and in other ways, it was very important to a lot of people, and a lot of other species.”

Kingman Lim, a recent Cal grad working as an arborist, saw members of the Save the Oaks group on campus and immediately became interested. Lim cared deeply about the environment, and also had tree-climbing and safety experience.

He began setting up platforms and assisted those climbing up.

“The beginning felt so exciting and inspirational,” Lim said. “The students were there and we had the local community coming out. There were biologists and ecologists. We saw foxes coming through when we first started, and birds and deer. I would go up regularly, weekly, for months and months.

“The beginning was a good feeling. The big, bad university looked like the bad guys for a little while.”

Jack Gescheidt was a photographer living in San Francisco, and he had started taking nude pictures of people in and among trees. He came across a New York Times story about the oaks demonstration in Berkeley and drove over to check it out in early 2007.

Gescheidt met an organizer who loved the idea of a photo shoot and the media attention it would generate.

“I said, ‘Look, they don’t need to be naked. If that’s too kind of outrageous and too stereotypical and kind of distracts from the point of, we need to save these trees, it’s not about getting people naked,'” Gescheidt recalled. “But he’s like, ‘No, you’re gonna do it. Let’s do it.’

“God bless Berkeley.”

They set a date: March 17, a Saturday morning. Gescheidt arrived early to set up and met with a campus police officer, who politely said that any demonstrators, including Gescheidt, could be subject to arrest. Gescheidt relayed that message to the group of about 150 demonstrators and asked who was still willing to participate. About 75 hands went up.

Then came what Gescheidt calls the “dressed rehearsal,” where subjects assemble for the photo with their clothes on. Mindful of the television news cameras and police, Gescheidt wanted to minimize how much time the demonstrators were actually naked. He then instructed them to remember their spots, undress and return for the shoot.

“There was one woman living on a platform and she naked-hugged the tree that she was on,” Gescheidt said. “There was another guy who came down lower, get this, he’s hanging upside down, with one leg, not both legs, like a trapezoid, one leg hooked over a branch, about 15 feet in the air. If he fell, he’d break his neck. And he was just comfortable doing that, because he was living in the trees. They are in the photograph at the top of the frame, still in the trees.

“When that happened, I’m like, ‘This is so f—ing cool!'”

Gescheidt titled the photograph “Last Stand.” The shoot went off without any outbursts or arrests.

There were other notable scenes at the grove, including one in January 2007 when former Berkeley mayor Shirley Dean, then 71, climbed up to a platform, and sat there alongside Berkeley city councilwoman Betty Olds, 86, and Sylvia McLaughlin, 91, co-founder of the environmental advocacy group Save The Bay.

They had a bullhorn to communicate to the crowd and media below, and held a “Save the Oaks” banner.

“We have 250 years of life experience between us,” Dean told the media that day. “Nobody’s going to cut us down, and no one’s going to cut down these trees.”

---

WHEN THE 2007 season arrived, the protest outside Memorial Stadium had become part of daily life on campus — and few people were subjected to it quite like Tedford, who would sleep in his office up to five nights a week.

“It wasn’t a nuisance at first, but then it became one, because we had constant patrol and police down there and they had spotlights on them,” Tedford said. “The generator was running all night long and all the noise that they’d make, beating the drums.

“You could see all kinds of crazy stuff going on, these people in the trees and going on their zip lines from treehouse to treehouse.”

The proximity to the football offices made the spectacle impossible to avoid, but the coaches tried to minimize the distractions. It soon became a problem in recruiting.

“You have a prospect and his family sitting in my office talking,” Tedford said, “and [outside the window] they were filling up these large five-gallon buckets of feces and pouring them down on the cops or whoever was down below, and they had to wear rain gear down below, because of the stuff being poured down on them.

“So the stench was kind of just blowing into the office and drums are banging and they’re screaming, and you’re sitting there with a prospect and their family like a hundred feet away from it trying to say, ‘Oh, this is a great place.’ It was just one of the obstacles in trying to recruit that I’m positive no one else had to deal with.”

While Tedford did his best from his office to keep the football program on track, Harrison, the university police chief, was trying to manage what was happening below. Efforts to limit the protest — cutting off ropes or supplies — weren’t greeted well.

“They would drop their personal waste onto the officers or the folks that we had that were going in to cut the lines,” Harrison said. “And that was not very pleasant, as you might imagine.”

That dynamic led to an unusual truce.

“If they would lower their waste every day so that they couldn’t be hoarding it to use against us, we would allow their ground support to provide them organic fresh food,” Harrison said. “That’s the kind of thing I never thought that I would be negotiating.”

Cal meanwhile entered the season ranked No. 12 in the AP poll — its fourth straight appearance in the preseason top 20 — with a team that featured several future NFL Pro Bowlers, including receiver DeSean Jackson, center Alex Mack, safety Thomas DeCoud and running back Justin Forsett. The Bears would open the season against No. 15 Tennessee, who had an estimated 20,000 fans travel to Berkeley.

Heading into the game, Harrison said the police department received all sorts of suggestions for how to deal with the protestors.

“We were getting postcards and letters from all across the country,” Harrison said. “We got a lot from the Tennessee fans — a lot of comments about chainsaws and fire hoses.”

Upon arrival, Vols fans couldn’t believe what they saw.

“I literally remember them standing on the sidewalk, looking up and going, ‘This would never happen in Knoxville,'” Barbour said.

The Bears won 45-31. On a national prime-time broadcast, ABC’s Brent Musburger gleefully said, “There’s a little bit of a controversy here. There are some aging hippies in the oak trees right here behind me and one of the spokesmen is Chief RunningWolf.”

ABC aired a short interview clip with RunningWolf, and Musburger referred to the university’s offer to plant three new trees for every old one removed.

“Three-for-one is a very good deal if you are a tree-hugger,” he quipped.

It was a perfect Berkeley paradox: big-money college football and an antiestablishment protest, unfolding in the same space.

Over the next few weeks, Cal built momentum and rose to No. 2 in the AP poll — its highest ranking since 1951 — right behind LSU after three more straight wins. But junior quarterback Nate Longshore went down with an ankle injury that would keep him out of a pivotal game against Oregon State and severely limit his mobility for the rest of the season.

Led by true freshman quarterback Kevin Riley, Cal took a 14-13 lead over Oregon State at halftime. Then, the stadium received an update from across the country.

“We come out after halftime, and I hear on the loudspeaker that LSU had just lost,” Tedford said. “And so the fans kind of went crazy because that meant we’re in line to be No. 1.”

But Cal couldn’t close out Oregon State, losing 31-28 in one of the most disappointing games in program history. The Bears would lose five of their next six games to finish 7-6.

Through it all, the tree protest dragged on. What began with a few demonstrators on Big Game weekend in 2006 stretched through two winters. Brostrom remembers many conversations with Harrison and Cal chancellor Robert Birgeneau about removing the demonstrators, but they concluded there wasn’t enough police to keep people out of the grove.

Without legal approval, Cal couldn’t begin construction, either.

“I remember thinking to myself one night after we’d done a big community group or a booster group or something, if I have to stand up in front of a group one more time and say, ‘As soon as the judge gives us the go ahead, we will be underway,’ I’m gonna puke,” Barbour said.

---

AS TIME WENT on, the core group who started the movement began to thin out. Many of the final holdouts were no longer locals or Cal-affiliated. They had come from other parts of the country, drawn by the media attention and the symbolic weight of the standoff. It became increasingly difficult to argue their continued presence represented people in the community.

Lim witnessed the demographics and vibe change in the grove. A split occurred between those who lived in the trees, like RunningWolf, and other organizers who dealt with public/media messaging but weren’t there around the clock. Lim felt caught in the middle.

“Over time, that inner division and the deterioration of our image ended up giving us a lot harder time gaining support for the movement,” Lim said. “It turned into this anarchist kid homeless camp in the trees, which was OK, but took away from the message, so to speak. It was like, ‘We’re never going to leave?’

“It turned into this attrition thing that no one liked.”

By the end of the summer of 2008, the various court cases had finally run their course, and on Aug. 28, a superior court judge ruled the university could proceed with its project, and an appeal was denied the following week.

As Cal prepared to leave for a game at Washington State on Sept. 6, Tedford was told to expect the grove to look much different when he returned. When the trees were taken down, the final four protestors migrated to the last oak standing — where the scaffolding was erected to allow police to fetch them from the top.

“It was so cool to watch how they did it, because they built the scaffolding all the way around the tree, all the way up, and then they just peacefully walked up, got them and they peacefully walked down,” Tedford said.

At the bottom, the final four holdouts were arrested on misdemeanor charges of trespassing, violating a court order and illegal lodging.

“Once we won the court case, we had bulldozers ready, and we just started to bulldoze the site,” Brostrom said. “The team was coming back from an away game, and I remember the players were so excited to see the tree coming down and construction starting.”

The university won. The protesters lost. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Pickett was on the East Coast when the final oak came down, but she would eventually visit the site.

“I think it was [famed environmentalist] David Brower who said that all our victories are temporary, but our losses are permanent,” Pickett said. “It was a righteous campaign. There’s no doubt in my mind that it was worth fighting, even though it took a big chunk of people’s lives.”

Lim also attended the final tree removal, mainly to ensure the arborists were operating correctly and safely. He still works in Berkeley as an arborist.

“Twenty years later, I’m looking back on it and thinking, the public, regular people, thought that the whole fight was absolutely ridiculous and everyone should just go home and let the trees get cut, you’re wasting everyone’s time and money,” he said. “I admit now that I understand that perspective, where at the time I was sure this was the most important thing, ‘Why isn’t everyone getting behind this and speaking up?’

“I’m sad the students won’t experience the trees the way that I did. But that’s also what happens in life. People adapt, people move on.”

---

WHEN TEDFORD RECRUITED Mack in 2003, he told him about Cal’s facilities plans and Mack bought in. But because of the years of lawsuits and protests, construction didn’t begin until 2010, and the Simpson Center and renovated Memorial Stadium didn’t open until 2012 — long after Mack had graduated and begun his 13-year NFL career.

On Friday, Mack and Tedford will both be honored as they enter Cal’s athletics Hall of Fame together.

“He jokes with me that I told him we were going to have a new facility, and his career came and went, and there’s still no facility,” Tedford said. “But I think the protests were kind of proof that we were moving forward with something.”

The university ultimately got what it wanted. Yet even with all the upgrades, Cal hasn’t finished a season ranked in the AP poll since 2006 — the same year the tree-sit began.

There have been flashes — a few hot starts, some Jared Goff magic, the occasional upset — but not the sustained success that once seemed inevitable under Tedford.

After being fired from Cal in 2012, Tedford spent five seasons, over two stints, as the head coach at his alma mater, Fresno State, before stepping away due to health concerns before last season. By eliminating the stress and anxiety that came with coaching, Tedford said his health has improved dramatically.

Last month, Tedford traveled to see Cal play at Boston College and attended some Cal events leading up to the game. He spoke at a tailgate and traded stories with several longtime fans. Inevitably, the tree-sit came up several times.

“It’s nice to get back acquainted with the Cal people now … and kind of relive some of those great memories that we had there,” Tedford said.

Tedford can laugh about the protests now. For Harrison, the police chief, they stand as a parody come to life.

“How Berkeley can you be?” she said. “You couldn’t have scripted that.”