Mark Patton: New Book Replays Glory Days of Santa Barbara High School Football

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Old football coaches never die, as one could misquote Gen. Douglas MacArthur as saying.

They just fade away with the ink of their old newspaper clippings.

But not so for the long-passed Clarence Schutte, Santa Barbara High School’s onery but iconic football coach from the first half of the 20th century.

And that’s because there’s no yellowing of the sports copy produced by award-winning journalist John Zant.

His writing touch is all golden.

I was sports editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press in 1996 when Zant brainstormed a 10-part series about the Dons’ record-setting coach.

Barry Punzal, our sports desk chief at the time, scheduled it for every game day of the high school football season.

Friday Night Writes, you might say.

As the season ensued, and one richly anecdotal segment followed another, I told Punzal that, “Our man Z thinks he’s writing a book here!”

And three decades later, that’s exactly what it’s been turned into: a 64-pager entitled Clarence Schutte: A Dons Football Legend.

It’s now on the shelves of Chaucer’s Books at 3321 State St., or click here to order it online for $10 from the school’s Alumni Association website.

The book seamlessly pieces together stories from Schutte’s colorful career at the historic high school at 700 E. Anapamu St.

He coached the Dons from 1925 to 1950, and then served as the school’s athletic director until 1965.

He guided the “Golden Tornado,” as the Dons have been known for nearly a century of playoff runs, to the California Interscholastic Federation’s Southern California championship in 1935, 1938 and 1940.

They made the finals five other times.

“That decade of the ’30s, Santa Barbara High had to be the foremost high school football power in Southern California,” Zant told Noozhawk last week.

The book germinated last fall after SBHS Alumni Association president Heidi Jensen requested news coverage of Santa Barbara High’s 150th anniversary celebration.

“I realized it was also the 100th anniversary of Schutte’s arrival at the high school,” Zant said. “I had hard copies of all those stories … had printed them out.

“So I told them, ‘You know, I could put it all together as a booklet.’

“One thing led to another, and Jim Buckley (of Shoreline Publishing Group) published it.”

The book — a historical account of the glory days of Santa Barbara High School football — is under the copyright of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

The museum had acquired the News-Press’ hard-copy archives as a donation after the newspaper went bankrupt in 2023.

The Write Stuff

Zant was no rookie serial writer in 1996.

His four-part series about gender inequity in sports won an award from the Associated Press Sports Editors Association in 1973. The CIF hadn’t yet even sponsored sports competition for girls.

His literary skills took legs in 1988, quite literally, for a “Coastal Walk” in a 10-part series that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

He hiked Santa Barbara County’s entire 110 miles of coastline, from the mouth of the Santa Maria River to Carpinteria’s Rincon Point, while describing the sights and sounds — and especially the people — he encountered.

Zant went the extra mile to get the complete scoop on Schutte, as well.

He sought out every living player, colleague, friend and rival of the old coach.

“Everybody I quoted is gone now,” Zant said. “Those guys from the 1930s, it was 60 years later, so they were all getting on in years.

“I’m glad I was able to capture their memories before they left the planet, too.”

The best insight, he said, came from Schutte’s widow.

“Interviewing his wife, Edna, before she died was a real key,” Zant said. “I did that for a story on her (in 1991) and used the material later when I wrote the series.”

Edna went the full nine yards of honesty while describing the good, the bad and the fiery.

“He’d get awfully mad and blow his top,” Zant quoted her as saying. “I told him there are easier ways to do things, but by the time he learned, he was old enough to die.”

Schutte died of cardiac arrest at age 69 on Nov. 5, 1970.

Zant had met him over lunch less than two months earlier. He was only two years out of UC Santa Barbara when he was assigned to write a story in the News-Press about an upcoming testimonial dinner for the retired coach.

Schutte’s words were as “pungent” as always, he recalled, as he diagrammed his spread-formation offense on the table.

“He sketched some of his plays, including a pass across the field on a kickoff return,” Zant said.

Schutte was known to draw plays even on his car’s visor as he drove players to out-of-town games.

One story, passed down to Doug Spence from Judge Charles Stevens, the team’s quarterback in 1929 and 1930, was that it once caused Schutte to drive onto the trolley tracks in Los Angeles.

When a trolley car driver asked him caustically, “Don’t you know how to drive?”, Schutte responded by punching him in the nose.

“Blood is running down his face,” Spence said, “and Schutte gets back in the car and starts drawing more plays on the visor.”

Young Blood

Schutte came to Santa Barbara straight off the playing fields of the University of Minnesota.

He’d gained national attention the previous fall for single-handedly beating Red Grange — the fabled “Galloping Ghost” — and his highly ranked Illinois eleven.

Schutte rushed for 282 yards — a Golden Gopher record that stood for 71 years — while scoring all three touchdowns in the 20-7, upset victory.

He arrived in town the following summer, just weeks after much of Santa Barbara’s downtown was leveled by a magnitude-6.3 earthquake.

Schutte caused his own disturbance on Day One after seeing the team’s equipment.

“It was so bad, he burned it all up,” said Chuck Sylvester, a star player in the 1930s and a future Dons’ coach.

Schutte operated with a scorched-earth policy throughout his career.

He once scheduled a “mystery road game,” refusing to tell anyone — not even his own players — where they were playing on one Friday in October 1927. He wanted to keep rival Santa Maria from scouting his team for their game the following week.

He also employed a “mystery player” in 1929 by having one of his receivers stay barely inbounds as he feigned leaving the field. The player then ran down the field, unguarded, to catch a 40-yard pass.

His Dons were called “Air Raiders” by the media for how often they passed the football — an uncommon tactic in those days.

A team from Tucson was bombarded by 41 passes in a 21-0 loss to the Dons when they visited Peabody Stadium in 1940.

Schutte’s combination of brilliance and toughness resulted in a career record of 171-47-12. It held up as the county record for coaching wins until last fall.

Tom Crawford broke it with win No. 172 at Bishop Diego High when the Cardinals defeated Lancaster High in last season’s opener.

Zant found the two coaches to be similar in their genius as offensive innovators. But the “even-tempered” Crawford, he said, was Schutte’s polar opposite in demeanor.

“I followed his team through a week of practice, and then to their pregame for a sort of football feature,” he said. “He was so easy to deal with.

“But every football coach has to have a certain toughness because you have to ask kids to do hard things.”

Championship Ring

When one of those kids got suspended for punching a teacher, Schutte responded by bringing a pair of boxing gloves to practice.

The player had to box his raw-boned coach as punishment.

“These kids were young and energetic rowdy boys,” Zant said.” It took a coach like that to discipline them.

“One of the guys, Lloyd Rossi, said, ‘I did some things when I was young that made me wonder what the devil got into me.’

“They might have wound up as criminals if they hadn’t played football for Schutte.”

But Schutte was as racially enlightened as he was irascible.

He started Tom Pruitt, a black center, on some of his first teams in the late 1920s.

Lou Tsoutsouvas, one of Schutte’s star linebackers in the early ’30s and his successor as the Dons’ head coach, said “He played who he thought was best … Red, white, whatever, we all got along.”

Zant got some of his best insight from Jerome Smith, an old Methodist preacher.

“I’d see him at jazz concerts,” he said. “He gave me some great quotes about his brother, James ‘Bosco’ Smith, who’d been one of Schutte’s players.”

One story he related was how Schutte once threatened to cancel a game in Phoenix.

“The hotel people told them, ‘The Negroes are going to have to stay somewhere else,’” Smith told Zant. “When Schutte heard that, he said there would be no game.”

The hotel manager relented and the game was played.

“He told me, ‘Nobody wore a halo, but coach Schutte had his way that worked,’” Zant said.

“It’s not in this book, but I think that’s how the tough tradition of Santa Barbara High coaches continued,” he added. “Sam Cathcart was tough. Lito Garcia was tough.”

Cathcart took the Golden Tornado to a CIF championship in 1960. Garcia won his title in 1989.

The football tradition that Schutte established at Santa Barbara High School lived on with the Dons’ alumni, parents and friends who helped raise the $39 million to rebuild Peabody Stadium five years ago.

The Bible instructs that “Pride goeth before a fall,” but it also still goeth at that stadium every fall evening.