20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY may 16-22, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com Canada, where he played in the Canadian Football League for the next eight years before finally landing in the NFL with the Minnesota Vikings in 1967. Two years later, he led them to the Super Bowl. Will Kapp, Kapp’s youngest son, says growing up with his father “was like growing up around a superhero.” And despite the brain damage his dad suffered as a result of playing the sport, Will, who also played football at Cal, is sure his dad wouldn’t have changed a thing, even knowing the outcome. “He called it ‘the call of the ball,’” Will says. “Smashing people, throwing the ball and scoring.” That tracks with a statement Kapp made in 1970, fresh off a season in which he led the Minnesota Vikings to the Super Bowl, when he told a journalist from True magazine, “It’s an animal game. I’m an animal. Any guy good at it is an animal.” In his memoir, Kapp also includes a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian—arguably one of the greatest novels ever written, but which is also among the most violent. It reads: “‘Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth of the game is not inherent to the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard.”’ The character who said that was Judge Holden, a murderous sociopath who was the story’s charismatic, well-educated villain. Literature critic Harold Bloom wrote that Holden’s character in the book was, “short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature.” But Kapp wasn’t a sociopath, he was channeling Holden as a graduate of the school of hard knocks, of which Kapp took plenty. The first line of Kapp’s memoir reads, “I’ve never liked bullies,” which leads into a description of a dustup he had with a fellow football player in the CFL, Angelo Mosca. They were both invited onstage at a banquet in Vancouver in 2011, celebrating retired CFL players, and Kapp saw fit to settle a score about what he believed to be a late, dirty hit from a Grey Cup game in 1963. (The Grey Cup is the CFL’s Super Bowl.) Mosca didn’t hit Kapp, he hit star running back Willie Fleming, putting him out of the game. So Kapp, at age 73, waved some flowers in Mosca’s face in a provocative peace-making gesture, and Mosca—who required a cane to get around—whipped his cane at Kapp’s head. Kapp reflexively punched Mosca in the jaw, knocking him down. It may not have been a good look for anyone involved, but that’s who Joe Kapp was—he had no tolerance for bullies. The NFL was a bully in Kapp’s mind. In a time of civil rights ferment, and galvanized by the work Chavez was doing on behalf of farmworkers, Kapp fought the league in an antitrust lawsuit over player contracts, and in 1974, he won. The lawsuit called into question the power that teams, and the league, had over players’ contracts—in a free market, players would be free to play where they wanted and not be forced to sign a contract they felt was unfair. While he never got any money out of it—a federal court jury in 1976 decided he wasn’t financially hindered by the contract rules, as they existed at the time—his lawsuit helped pave the way for modern-day free agency, in which players have more control over where they play, and in turn, how much money they make. “He was tough enough to give up his career to do the right thing. That’s unique, that’s unusual,” his son J.J. says. “No one else was able to take that fight…he decided enough was enough.” Kapp was vilified by some in the sports world during that lawsuit but, J.J. says, “He wasn’t afraid to fight for a cause that was just.” J.J., like Will, says nothing could have kept his dad from playing football—Kapp proudly played through injuries throughout his career—even though Kapp encouraged other parents to have their kids take piano lessons instead. “He loved doing it,” J.J. says. “He made a good living for his family, and that was his number-one priority.” Or as Will says, he was called to the ball. As Kapp aged, dementia set in, and his memory and faculties started slipping over a decade before he died last year. But he lived long enough to see the athletic field at El Sausal Middle School named after him in 2022 with a sign that reads: “Joe Kapp Field - ‘The Toughest Chicano’ - Leadership - Grit - Ganas.” The latter word roughly translates from Spanish to “a desire to win,” and that was always Kapp’s primary drive. And it was in Salinas where that drive was instilled in him, in a community that helped shape him into a competitor. Ornelas Rodriguez, who spearheaded the effort to name El Sausal’s field after Kapp, thinks there should also be a local school—not just a field—named after him, like Kapp’s middle school friend Everett Alvarez, who became a lifelong friend. At the very least, though, it seems Kapp should have a greater stature in local lore, and in hearts and minds. When he was addressing a crowd of 15,000 in L.A. in 1970, he urged protesters to “fight…fight the bastards!” Al Stump, the journalist who wrote the profile of him for True magazine that year, wrote, “You could feel the building shake before Kapp finished.” That was the power of Joe Kapp. His former teammate on the Minnesota Vikings, Alan Page, who would later serve more than two decades as a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court, told J.J. in an interview that’s the foreword to Kapp’s memoir, “Who he was and what he did as a football player made us better than the sum of our parts…His spirit and focus were magic.” That’s the magic being celebrated at the Steinbeck Center on May 18 to honor a singular man. The lessons Kapp learned playing football—and that he taught to players he coached—are timeless, and he exuded them. “What you looked like didn’t matter to me,” Kapp wrote. “I cared about what kind of person you were. Did you pull your weight? Did you give your all for your team? Did you help others to do their best? Playing football, I wasn’t concerned with the skin color of a lineman or what side of the tracks he grew up on. I was more concerned about whether he could stop a defensive end from throwing me into the cheap seats. Growing up in Salinas did help me appreciate people from the inside out.” That said, no one was going to try to throw Kapp, who stood at 6-foot-2 and weighed 215 pounds, into the cheap seats, not unless they wanted their jaw to collide with his fist. Meet the co-authors of the second edition of Joe Kapp—“The Toughest Chicano” in an event 5:30pm-7pm on Saturday, May 18 at the National Steinbeck Center, 1 Main St., Salinas. Free. steinbeck.org/event. Kapp and Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez, a Salinas native and Stanford historian who’s moderating a panel discussion among the authors at the May 18 event at the Steinbeck Center. “We had to be resourceful because we couldn’t afford sporting equipment. Sometimes we used lettuce heads instead of footballs.” Courtesy of Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez
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