Note: This post originally appeared on February 26. I took it down a few hours after posting it after I gave in to my misgivings about an accurate recollection of events. It reappears in the wake of Chuck Pettersen’s well-attended funeral, yesterday, at the request of a key member of one of his football teams, who said my memories (below) jibe with reality, at least to his knowledge. PO

The second football game I covered as a professional journalist featured a team coached by Chuck Pettersen. That was in September of 1976, and Pettersen already was in his seventh season at Cajon High School in San Bernardino, California.

I saw many more games that he coached, and he won nearly 200 of them over a 31-year span.

He was, along with Dick Bruich, Tom Hoak and Don Markham, one of the most prominent high school coaches of the final quarter of the 20th century in what was then a football hotbed, the San Bernardino County portion of the Inland Empire.

Pettersen died Tuesday, at age 71, according to this account, and thinking back on all the games I saw him coach leaves me a bit frustrated, because I would like to be more factually specific than I can be, from the other side of the world, left to rely mostly on what information I can pull out of my head.

As a coach, Pettersen was a bit of a rarity in that part of Southern California in that he liked to throw the ball. The IE, back then, believed in 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust; the area was the Big Ten of California high school football. It was a blue-collar area, and most coaches thought their talent was best suited to lining up and going at it, hammer and tongs, till only one team was left standing.

I remember a bit of that first game I saw, at Cajon. I don’t recall who provided the opposition, nor who won the game, but I do remember that I was impressed by Cajon’s offense.

They passed often, and they had some really good skill players. A kid named Craig Gerber, who later would play briefly with the California Angels, was the quarterback. He had two good receivers, and I am going to say they were named Tony Goolsby and Mike Savage, the former being the deep threat and the latter more of a possession receiver. And they had a tailback named Fred Washington, a good-looking kid with speed and toughness.

Kids liked to play for Pettersen for several reasons, but one of them, certainly in the 1970s and 1980s, was because he threw the ball and was good at it, in an era when passing generally was considered what bad teams did.

He had a big playbook when other coaches focused on perfecting a handful of plays. Pettersen always was sure he could coach a complicated system; most of the time, he was right.

He had been a lineman at the University of Redlands under Frank Serrao, who believed in pounding the ball, and I don’t remember asking Pettersen about his preference for the forward pass. Maybe he just thought it was fun.

He was old school, however, in most other ways. He did not suffer screw-offs. If he was unhappy, you knew about it. He dressed like coaches of that era dressed — white socks nearly up to the knee; polyester shorts, golf-style shirt. For a long time he had a perm, too, which was perhaps a concession to the style of the late 1970s/early 1980s.

I remember asking him, when doing a story about summer practice in extreme heat, about withholding water from players and he conceded he was one of the coaches (and players) who considered it a sign of weakness to have water during two-a-days in August. (This was standard, pre-1980 or so.)

He had been in Vietnam in the 1960s, and he was a big guy. I imagine some kids found him intimidating, well into his career.

I liked him. He was always honest, especially after games, when sometimes it is best to do some self-censorship. He was liable to say something controversial. He wasn’t one of those guys who would call up the next day and insist he had been misquoted.

If he lost, he often was ticked off, and he would vent a little. Which is great for reporters.

For about the first 15 years of his career, he was hampered a bit by being at Cajon. That meant he was in a multi-school district (San Bernardino’s) when most of the communities around him still had only the one high school, and anyone who knows  high school football understands it is a huge advantage to be in a one-school town. Also, Cajon had some race-based tension, early on, that the football team probably helped solve.

He picked up steam in the 1980s, after San Bernardino went from four high schools to three, and in 1987 his Cowboys trashed Arroyo, I think it was, 44-6 (yes, it was), or something very close to that, and I believe a running back named Mike Beauregard had a big game. It might have been a 300-yard game.

It was a significant achievement for Pettersen and Cajon, but it was overshadowed a bit by Fontana’s top-division championship the same night, at Anaheim Stadium, completing an unbeaten season and ending the season ranked No. 1 in the country. Our newspaper covered both schools, but Cajon played in a slightly lower division.

At the San Bernardino Sun, we dealt with the two champions by running a banner headline suggested by Gil Hulse, the assistant sports editor: “The Inland Empire strikes back” — which reflected the second Star Wars movie of a similar name, as well as giving the sense of all the close calls the IE had suffered in football finals for the previous decade or so. Fontana’s game story was on one side of the page; Cajon’s was on the other.

In 1990, Pettersen moved to Pacific High School, also in San Bernardino, which reopened after being closed for seven years, and he did some of his most consistent winning there, as football coach and athletic director.

Like many guys who coach decades, he seemed a kinder, gentler guy later in his career. He credited his wife, Sandy, with suggestions for motivating the team, which included an annual slogan and journals in which players recorded their thoughts. It was almost New Age-y, and it was fun.

When he got to Pacific, it seemed as he made the playoffs every year, and in 1996 Pacific reached the championship game of the CIF Southern Section Division VII, pitting Pettersen against Don Markham’s Bloomington, and it was a hell of a game.

Pettersen had Ryan Nece, Ron Lott‘s son (and a future UCLA and NFL linebacker), at quarterback, and Bobby Burries, who was later a fine college basketball player, and Pacific led 35-20 early in the fourth quarter. But Bloomington’s ground-pounding double-wing offense calmly reeled off three touchdowns to win 40-35 in what must have been among Pettersen’s toughest losses.

A few years later, he had a heart procedure (a bypass? an angioplasty?) and started the season in a golf cart or on a stool. I was impressed by his dedication, and by the end of the season he was back on his feet.

I remember asking him, probably around 1990, about how guys in their 50s and 60s dealt with the pressure of coaching football (which even as a reporter seemed overwhelming, particularly during games), and he told me something like, “Well, we all have a little chest pain, now and then.”

It looked like he would roll right past 200 victories, which is a significant achievement at any level of football, but his final team won only a few games and he finished at 198-136-6.

We were sorry to see him go, but it was getting hard to win at Pacific, and pretty much has remained that way, and he went into retirement.

I talked to him a few times after that, and he seemed to enjoy himself, and I’m glad he did. He put in a lot of years, in a district that wasn’t always easy, and he was a straight-shooter who didn’t recruit kids from other schools, and he coached thousands of guys, who no doubt remember him better than I do.

I would quote him … except that what is left of my old paper doesn’t include anything online, not even from a decade ago, and I am not quite sure what happened to the clip file. It was donated somewhere, I think. Certainly, it is out of reach here in Abu Dhabi.

The story on him in what is branded as The Sun does not have his overall record — which the Riverside paper’s story does — probably from taking it from The Sun a decade ago.

That means Chuck Pettersen and perhaps most of the prominent citizens of that era, 1970-2000, will not get quite the notice they deserve (or would get, going forward, if websites don’t crash). I am annoyed by this; people who were community leaders from that era run the risk of falling through the cracks of the print meltdown — through no fault of their own.

Pettersen was a good guy, a very good coach, and I wish I could recall more specifics.  Take my word for it, then.