A GAME CHANGER

By ERIC SONDHEIMER

Dec. 16, 2008 12 AM PT

Sondheimer is a Times staff writer.

Seven years ago, only weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Long Beach Poly and Concord De La Salle played a football game that changed high school sports forever.

De La Salle came in ranked No. 2 in the nation and owning a 116-game win streak. Poly was ranked No. 1 and boasted one of the most talent-laden teams in Southland history.

With a crowd of 17,321 packing Long Beach Veterans Stadium and many more across the country watching the FSN broadcast from their living rooms, the teams played a game that lived up to its weeklong hype and buildup.

De La Salle won, 29-15, but that was only a fraction of the news.

The excitement that matchup created and delivered helped convince television executives that high school sports could attract a national audience, setting the stage for ESPN to air games a little more than a year later featuring a high school basketball player from Ohio named LeBron James.

“With the concurrent rise of LeBron James on the high school basketball scene, ESPN put two and two together,” said Don Wallace, who wrote the book “One Great Game” about Poly-De La Salle. “It set a model for how to do these games.”

It also set a template for the creation of the state bowl championships, with the latest version to be played at the Home Depot Center on Friday and Saturday.

The five games -- two Friday and three Saturday -- feature a similar north-south format, weeklong buildup and television audience on Prime Ticket.

Poly and De La Salle are involved too. Poly (14-0) will be playing Sacramento Grant (13-0) on Saturday in the open-division game. De La Salle (12-1) will meet Corona Centennial (14-0) for the Division I championship Friday.

But even though the teams won’t be facing each other this time, their presence in Carson serves as a reminder of the significance of the game they played on Oct. 6, 2001.

Wallace, a 1970 Poly graduate, recognized the importance of the game six months before it was played, convincing a publisher to go ahead with his idea for the book.

“I just could see where everything was going on the Internet and television, that high school sports was on the verge of arriving as a national spectacle and national obsession,” he said.

The Poly-De La Salle game showed that high schools could travel long distances from their neighborhoods for matchups with other highly ranked teams and still attract plenty of media attention and a large crowd.

“From that game came about these ‘classics’ and out-of-state games,” Poly Coach Raul Lara said.

A year later, Poly and De La Salle both traveled to Hawaii to face different opponents in one such “classic” -- a football doubleheader against top teams from the islands. They also played each other again that season, this time in Berkeley, and Poly went on to travel to Washington, Ohio and Florida for games in subsequent seasons.

“What you have are barnstorming, money-making teams,” Wallace said. “It’s like the BCS now. The evolution of the game is going to be teams that have the money to travel. If you don’t have the money to travel, you won’t be ranked that high.”

De La Salle and its coach, Bob Ladouceur, became the focus of curiosity, study and imitation as their record winning streak reached 151 games by the end of 2003.

“What that game brought about is an epidemic of 12-month conditioning and single-sport specialty,” Wallace said. “That’s the De La Salle gift. That was their thing. They were the most disciplined and most fanatic [team] . . . where there’s no individuals and no dissent.”

That 2001 game might also have set a standard for NFL talent. Nine players made it from that game to the top level of professional football, and seven are still in the league -- four from Poly and three from De La Salle.

Poly’s team included four players -- running back Hershel Dennis, linemen Winston Justice and Manuel Wright and defensive back Darnell Bing -- who signed with USC and became the backbone of future recruiting classes that propelled the Trojans to the upper echelons of college football’s national rankings. Tight end Marcedes Lewis signed with UCLA and became an All-American.

De La Salle unveiled an unsung 5-foot-7 junior running back, Maurice Drew, who went on to star at UCLA -- and with the Jacksonville Jaguars as Maurice Jones-Drew.

Jones-Drew’s Jacksonville teammates this season include Lewis and lineman Derek Landri, a former De La Salle star who played in college for Notre Dame.

De La Salle’s quarterback in 2001 was Matt Gutierrez, now a backup with the New England Patriots.

“It was one of the most memorable games we’ve played,” De La Salle defensive coordinator Terry Eidson recalled. “You use the expression, ‘Leave it on the field,’ and we did.”

Behind the scenes, Wallace said there was an emphasis on sportsmanship after the Sept. 11 attacks. Firefighters used boots to collect donations in the end zone.

“There was no trash talking before or after the game,” Wallace said.

And Wallace’s wasn’t the only book the game helped inspire. There was also Neil Hayes’ “When the Game Stands Tall: the Story of the De La Salle Spartans and Football’s Longest Winning Streak.”

Two books chronicling one high school game? That in itself speaks volumes about the impact of De La Salle’s playing Poly in 2001.

eric.sondheimer@latimes.com

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Before they were pros

The 2001 Long Beach Poly versus Concord De La Salle game featured teams that were Nos. 1 and 2 in the national rankings -- and plenty of future NFL talent. Among the players:

LONG BEACH POLY

Darnell Bing; DB, USC, Detroit Lions

Winston Justice; OL, USC, Philadelphia Eagles

Marcedes Lewis; TE, UCLA, Jacksonville Jaguars

Pago Togafau; LB, Idaho State, Arizona Cardinals

Manuel Wright; DL, USC, New York Giants

Hercules Satele; OL, Hawaii, Arizona Cardinals

DE LA SALLE

Derek Landri; OL, Notre Dame, Jacksonville Jaguars

Maurice Jones-Drew; RB, UCLA, Jacksonville Jaguars

Matt Gutierrez; QB, Idaho State, New England Patriots

Source: Don Wallace