Ken Garcia's Blog

A rich rivalry that really shouts San Francisco

By: Ken Garcia
Examiner Staff Writer
01/14/09 1:39 PM PST

A lot of San Francisco traditions have died out or vastly withered over the years, but one can still be found each October and January, jam-packed, color-coded and usually screaming from the rafters.

That would be the annual Bruce Mahoney games involving high schools St. Ignatius and Sacred Heart Cathedral, which have been battling each other since before the Spanish American War, reportedly the longest-running rivalry of its kind in the West.

There was barely space to grab air at the University of San Francisco Tuesday night, with approximately 6,000 people slammed together to watch (and shout) for their teams - a ritual that has been going on since the annual award was put together to honor Bill Bruce (SI) and Jerry Mahoney (SHC), two young men who were killed during World War II.

The trophy is given to the school that wins two out of three sports (football, basketball and baseball), something that St. Ignatius has had a lock on for a decade. But last night, both the girls and boys basketball teams from Sacred Heart Cathedral prevailed, giving the Fighting Irish hope that this year might finally see a breakthrough.

But the truth is, the competition between the two schools is not really about sports, it's about the spirit and honor and service that these two institutions - each more than 150 years old - have brought to the city over the generations, providing numerous mayors, supervisors, neighborhood activists, and more lawyers, police officers, firefighters and contractors than anyone could possibly count.

Everytime an out-of-touch newspaper like the Chronicle reports on a story involving the two high schools, it talks about the "politically-connected'' parents and alumni - as if that were a bad thing. Yet what they really miss is that the schools are "community-connected'' in that the families involved with the two schools are the very ones that helped build San Francisco and have remained the civic and social bedrock of the city.

Whole families have been split over the SI-SHC rivalry - in the most competitive, amusing, and ribbing ways. My brother attended SI, so naturally I went to Sacred Heart. My daughter is a student at SI - choosing against her father, in a cruel, last-minute switch.

Those of us who went to the schools have so many common friends and close relationships that the joke was always to say that we went to separate high schools together. And if you can understand that, you can understand why everyone from grandparents to grandkids make the trek out to the games each year - one of the most intense experiences you'll find outside of the Stanford-Cal Big Game.

I always tell people that if you want to understand San Francisco, go to the Bruce Mahoney game. Those that don't can never quite get the full picture of the local landscape.