Tupac expressed it with blunt verbal force in at least 50 of his songs during the early ’90s. There was always the fear of losing his life, of course. Tupac Shakur did not know he would be fatally shot that night. So Jaso made the decision to stop here to give his players a rest and to fork over $8 a head in the name of salvaging something from an otherwise miserable endeavor.Īfter the two buses pulled into the allotted parking spaces along the northern side of the In-N-Out, players wearily rose from the green vinyl seats, when Robert Hollie, the Jackrabbits’ backup quarterback, gazed out a window and said, softly at first, “Yo, it’s Pac!” Located 157 miles to the west of the strip, Barstow serves as an oasis to wearied travelers. The drive from Las Vegas to Long Beach is, under ideal conditions, an excruciatingly dull 283-mile slog that offers non-breathtaking views of dirt, sand, rock, dust and roadkill. So to kick things off with that sort of junk…well, no one on those buses was in a celebratory mood.” “We were far superior in all areas, and we knew it.
“The school we played was severely overmatched,” says Tim Richmond, Long Beach Poly’s then-assistant coach. More than a dozen players would ultimately receive Division I scholarships, and five of them- Marques Anderson, Larry Croom, Samie Parker, Ken-Yon Rambo and Darrell Rideaux-landed on NFL rosters. Though young and inexperienced, his roster was overflowing with talent. Seventeen hours earlier, on the night of September 6, 1996, the Jackrabbits opened their season with a performance as ugly as it was listless, falling to Las Vegas’ Green Valley High, 16-10, in a game Long Beach Poly coach Jerry Jaso had presumed to be an easy triumph. Yet here, off the Lenwood Road exit along Interstate 15 in Barstow, California, the 50 or so players, coaches and trainers were in anything but a celebratory mood.