FRIDAY, OCT. 4
This date has been circled on a lot of calendars over the last few months. Long Beach Poly (2-3, 1-0) visits Wilson (6-0, 2-0) tonight for a meeting of the two best football teams in the city and a renewal of the oldest rivalry in Long Beach.
The game is so big that there were plans to move it to Cerritos College’s 12,000-seat Falcon Field to accommodate the expected crowd, but, those plans ultimately didn’t come to fruition, and the game will be played at the much smaller stadium at Wilson. Because of that, the game sold out days ago and no, WE CAN’T GET YOU TICKETS.
So, if you don’t have tickets (Asia), don’t bother going because, again, WE CAN’T GET YOU TICKETS, SO PLEASE STOP ASKING.
Now, regarding the game, WHICH WE CAN’T GET YOU TICKETS TO, Poly has been struggling a little this year, but still looked like a powerhouse in a 38-3 win over Millikan, last week. Wilson, meanwhile, is having the best season in school history, sitting at 6-0 for the first time ever. The Bruins are ranked No. 1 in Division 7 and could win the school’s first-ever football CIF-SS championship this year, but their fans are probably more excited at the prospect of beating Poly for the first time since 1991.
Another great thing: The rivalry series long known as “The Big Game,” dates back to 1932, just a decade or so after Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne revolutionized the game with the forward pass. Poly beat Wilson the first 11 times the teams played, but that didn’t stop the game from looming large in the minds of Long Beach football fans, with more than 30,000 flocking to the Rose Bowl to see them play in the 1930s and 1940s.
Giving us a moment’s pause: Because Poly has dominated the Big Game for so much of its history, Poly fans will occasionally turn their noses up at the idea that it’s a rivalry, citing how one-sided it’s been. That’s silly, of course. The game is older than the Cowboys, 49ers, Patriots, Colts, and a total of 26 NFL franchises. There’s too much passion over too much time wrapped up in it to call it anything other than what it is: Long Beach’s oldest, and best, rivalry to which WE CAN’T GET YOU TICKETS.
We’d usually write where Wilson is located here but, c’mon, if this game means something to you, you know very well where Wilson is located. And, honestly, we don’t want to encourage anyone to drive down to Wilson in the hopes of sneaking in, so we’re not going to do that. And don’t be coming down, hoping to see us and hitting us up for tickets since, as we’ve made perfectly clear …