John Elway had just done what he would go on to do countless times throughout his Hall of Fame NFL career, leading Stanford on what appeared to be a game-winning drive that ended with a go-ahead field goal with four seconds left in the game against rival Cal.

All that was needed was a tackle on the ensuing kickoff for the Cardinal to win the “Big Game” in 1982 and become bowl eligible.

Then, what followed, in the words of Cal radio play-by-play announcer Joe Starkey, was “the most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heart-rending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football!”

The squib kick on the ensuing kickoff was recovered by Cal near midfield. Then came a lateral, then another. The game nearly ended on a tackle before the third lateral kept the play alive. The Golden Bears had the Cardinal outflanked after a fourth lateral. After a fifth and final pitch at the 25-yard line, Cal looked primed to score, “and the band is out on the field!” screamed Starkey in disbelief on the radio call.

Kevin Moen evaded the members of the Stanford band, and jumped and crashed into trombone player Gary Tyrell in the end zone. The “Big Game” was won on “The Play” that has been immortalized in college football lore for more than 40 years.

Amid the chaos unfolding at California Memorial Stadium on the Cal campus in Berkeley, then Cal linebackers coach Bill Cooper — now a Bend resident and father of Bend High head football coach Kevin Cooper — rushed from the coach’s box and down to the field, trying to get the players and coaches into the locker room before the officials had a chance to overturn the call or replay the kick.

“It was pandemonium,” recalled Bill Cooper, 86, this week.

That year, the Golden Bears were led by a new head coach in Joe Kapp, who quarterbacked Cal to its last Rose Bowl in 1959 and is the only football player to play quarterback in the Rose Bowl, the Grey Cup (the Super Bowl of the Canadian Football League) and the NFL’s Super Bowl.

Kapp accredited the outcome of the game to a drill the team practiced on Sundays in which players would jog around and lateral the ball constantly in order to loosen up after Saturday games.

But the linebackers coach believed there might have been some magic in the team’s new helmet logo.

“We could say that the Bear Claw had something to do with it,” Bill Cooper joked.

In the same year that Kapp took over as head coach, Cal debuted a new look to its uniforms, with a helmet decal that differed from any decal that Cal had ever worn, dating back to the 1930s. It was navy blue like so many helmets before. It even had the same “Cal” written in cursive.

But the Cal script was written on the inside of a yellow bear claw with five sharp, pointed claws.

Only one other school in the country had the exact same logo, which it still uses today — Bend High.

Kapp died at the age of 85 on May 8 after battling Alzheimer’s disease for nearly 10 years. The passing of Kapp reminded former Bend High head football coach Matt Craven of a letter sent from Kapp to then Bend High athletic director Joe Miller, in which Kapp responded to an inquiry from Bend on whether the Lava Bears could use the same logo.

“After clearing it with our AD, Dave Maggard, Cal Football grants your request,” Kapp wrote in the letter dated July 11, 1982, a few months before Cal’s historic win over Stanford. “Please honor the uniqueness of this logo, when placing it on your uniforms. At this juncture, there will only be two Athletic Departments using the ‘Bear Claw’ logo. Those teams will be the California Golden Bears and the Bend High Lava Bears! Best of luck this coming season.”

But the letter was more than just a permission slip for the Lava Bears to use the same logo. In many ways it serves as the connective tissue of the history of the town’s original high school, its present and future.

“This Bear Claw logo created so many things for so many people over the last 40 years,” said former longtime Bend High head football coach and athletic director Craig Walker. “It is much deeper than a rebranding.”

Birth of the Bear Claw

Given the physical intimacy of the relationship between the center and quarterback positions on a football field, it is no surprise that Joe Kapp and Bill Cooper became fast friends when they joined the freshman football team at Cal in 1955.

Cooper was the center, Kapp the quarterback.

After helping the Golden Bears to a Pacific Coast Conference championship and a Rose Bowl berth (Cal’s most recent trip to the Granddaddy of them all) in the 1958-59 season, Cooper began teaching and coaching at Mira Costa High in Manhattan Beach, California, where the school’s football field is now known as “Bill Cooper Field.”

Kapp went on to have a decade-long professional career, winning a Grey Cup in the Canadian Football League in 1964 with the BC Lions and then in 1969 was the quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings when they reached Super Bowl IV, falling 23-7 to the Kansas City Chiefs.

Capp and Cooper remained close friends before and after teaming back up at Cal in 1982 and stayed close up until Kapp’s death. Kapp, after all, was Kevin Cooper’s godfather, and Kevin’s kids called Kapp “Papa Joe.”

When Bill Cooper was coaching in his final game at Mira Costa, Kapp was there for the celebration. When Kapp would visit the Coopers in Bend, he would come to local football coaches clinics and share some of his wisdom on the sport. And when Kapp’s memorial service was held a few weeks ago, Bill, Kevin and 15-year-old Kaden Cooper (Kevin’s son) made their way to Berkeley to pay respects to the dear friend of nearly 70 years.

“It was such a close family,” Bill Cooper said. ”You build relationships with the people who you work with. We were both from Southern Cal, I was the center, he was the quarterback. All the way through his professional career we remained friends.”

Bear Claw on a napkin

As the legend goes, Cal held a contest prior to Kapp’s first season coaching at Cal in 1982 to come up with a new logo for its football program. One of the backup quarterbacks on the team was an artist and rendered a rough sketch of a new logo. But the early reviews of the initial drawing were not well received.

Bill Cooper’s wife, Pat, stepped in to make some tweaks. Mainly, the bear paw print needed claws — sharp ones.

It was how they defended themselves against predators, “it is what makes them fierce,” Pat said.

On a napkin at the dinner table, she altered the logo to give it fiercer-looking claws, and that was how the logo came to be.

“She deserves a lot of credit for that,” said current Bend High head football coach Kevin Cooper. “Joe took it and said it was amazing. It was sad when Cal rebranded and went away from the claw. But now it lives in Bend.”

Pat could have no idea that she was designing the logo for the team where her then grade-school-age son would go on to spend more than 10 years coaching and become the school’s head football coach 40 years later.

Bear Claw lands in Bend

Bend in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a much different town from what it is now.

The mills, where many of the roughly 15,000 Bend residents worked, began shutting down, and the downtown stores on Wall Street were boarded up as people began losing their jobs.

Meanwhile, the Bend High football team was playing in uniforms that resembled the old Los Angeles Rams uniforms, which Walker said were “terrible at best.”

Unlike how it was when Caldera High opened in Bend in fall 2021, when only freshmen and sophomores made up the student body in its first year, Mountain View had all four classes when it opened in 1979, becoming the town’s second high school.

It did not matter whether or not a student had spent multiple years at Bend High. Splitting time between the two high schools in the four years was not uncommon.

“They were making everyone go to the new school,” Walker said. “My brother has a Mountain View diploma and a Bend High letterman jacket.”

“We were dying for some identity at Bend High,” said Matt Craven, who graduated from Bend High in 1993. “With the opening of Mountain View, everyone was excited about the new school.”

Once again, relationships formed in the Golden State helped forge that identity.

Mick Craven and Bill Cooper go way back, long before Cooper joined the Cal football staff and before Craven started his 25-year stint at Bend High coaching football and track and field.

Cooper was Craven’s football coach at Mira Costa from 1961 to 1965. After an athletic career at San Diego State in which Craven was a pole vaulter on the Aztecs’ track and field team, he returned to Mira Costa as the head track coach and assistant football coach in 1971 and even lived for a brief time with the Coopers.

Craven moved to Bend and began coaching there in 1978, while Cooper joined Kapp’s coaching staff at Cal in 1982.

In the summer of 1982, Cal was holding a football camp, and Craven was invited to help coach at the camp and made the drive from Bend to Berkeley.

Two of the youngest campers — Matt Craven in second grade and Kevin Cooper in kindergarten, who were roommates at the camp — would go on to be the two most recent head football coaches at Bend.

It was at that camp where Mick Craven got his first glimpse of Cal’s new logo, when he went into Kapp’s office and saw a dozen or so different options for the logo. One of them was the bear claw that Pat Cooper had sketched out on a napkin, which stood out to Craven.

“We were looking for something just like that,” Craven said. “We were looking for something to build some fire under our program. Something to get the kids excited and something that was recognizable.”

Craven asked his former coach if Cal would consider sharing the logo. Bill Cooper ran the idea by Kapp, and Kapp and the Cal athletic department obliged.

Bear Claw comes full circle

In Kapp’s initial letter to the Bend athletic department, one requirement was for the team to “honor the uniqueness” of the logo when placing it on the team’s uniforms.

While Craven and Walker, then assistant coaches for Bend, liked the logo, head coach Gary Mires did not share the same enthusiasm and was hesitant to make the change.

Craven had returned from the Cal football camp with a stack of the bear claw helmet stickers. They did not yet say “Bend” and still said “Cal.” Still, Craven and Walker began placing the logos on some of the players’ helmets before practices.

“After two or three weeks,” Craven said, “Gary decided to make the change.”

The Bear Claw logo would then be given to the varsity players after they had completed daily doubles.

“You had to earn the Bear Claw,” said Walker, who was Bend’s head coach from 1988 through 2011.

Once the claws were handed out, Walker would take a full day to teach and give out detailed instructions on how to properly apply the logo to the helmet — where the heel of the claw goes in relation to snaps on the helmet and how to get all of the air bubbles out.

The logo has remained the same throughout the past 41 years and is worn by all the sports teams at Bend High.

Who could have predicted in 1982 that the logo for a college football team would be so vital to a high school in Central Oregon more than four decades later?

Pat Cooper is credited with designing the logo for the team her husband coached. Bill Cooper shared the logo with a school where one of his former players was coaching. Mick Craven’s move from Southern California to Central Oregon helped bring the logo to Bend High, where his son and grandson each wore the Bear Claw while playing football for the Lava Bears.

Bill Cooper’s son Kevin is starting his first year as the head football coach at Bend High, his wife Kristin has coached the Lava Bear volleyball team to two state titles, and their first of three kids, Kaden, will be a sophomore at Bend this coming fall.

While Cal has moved away from the logo it wore when pulling off one of the iconic plays in college football history, the Bear Claw remains alive and well at Bend High.

“I’m proud of the logo and what it represents,” Bill Cooper said. “It represents the value of athletics and the value of competing, and the value and importance of teamwork. The logo represents many things, it is not winning a football game, it is the value people get from competing in athletics. We are all part of the big picture.”