Mark Patton: The Ballad of ‘Big Bad John’ Tremblay Reaches Its Final Stanza

I flash back to my first football practice at Bishop Diego High School whenever I hear the song “Big Bad John” played on classic radio.

I was the new kid on Bishop’s block during the autumn of 1969: a pencil-neck, sophomore wide receiver who had just transferred in from La Cumbre Junior High.

Big Bad John Tremblay was a senior nose guard and fullback who was fast becoming a local football legend.

I didn’t know John from Adam, but he introduced himself during our very first drill by shoving my Adam’s apple a few inches farther down my throat.

He was, as Jimmy Dean once sang, “broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, and everybody knew ya didn’t give no lip to Big John.”

Everybody on Bishop’s team, in fact, gave Tremblay a wide berth when coach Mike McNeil ordered us onto all fours for a reaction drill.

Coach would point the football and we were to scramble in that direction like a synchronized pack of wild dogs.

I found an open area in the front next to Big John so coach McNeil could fully appreciate my cat-like agility.

And then the sound of coach’s shrill whistle was followed immediately by the snort of a frothing, human bison.

Tremblay trampled me as though I were a clod of prairie dirt.

As Jimmy Dean might’ve twanged, “a crashin’ blow from a huge right hand sent a sophomore fellow to the Promised Land, Big John.”

I gagged my mouthguard out of my esophagus and then spent the rest of the afternoon picking blades of grass out of my teeth. My face looked like I had painted it for St. Patrick’s Day.

Not even the groggy stupor that now fogged my brain could keep me from realizing I wasn’t impressing coach McNeil so much.

My next brilliant move was to wobble through several lines of Cardinals and into the back row with the rest of the underclass bobbleheads.

The reality check I received that day was matched only recently when Mike Smith — my future brother-in-law who was both John’s classmate and a defensive back with actual cat-like agility — called with the news:

Big Bad John, like the heroically doomed miner of Jimmy Dean’s country ballad, had died.

It came as a shock to all of us who thought him indestructible.

The family of 72-year-old John Charles Tremblay will celebrate his life at the Santa Barbara Mission with a funeral mass at 11 a.m. Thursday, April 4.

He is survived by his sons, Rocky and Max Tremblay; daughter Molly Tremblay; and his siblings, Swaneagle Tremblay, Tim Tremblay, Moira Barbara Ruiz and Margaret Mead.

Sit-Up and Take Notice

Many tales about that 6-foot-2 and 235 pounds of football fury will be told that day. Some, I’m sure, will stretch the limits of imagination.

But I swear I was an honest witness to most of them.

Like the time an extremely fit Bishop gym teacher challenged John to beat his personal best of sit-ups. Big Bad John ripped off 1,400 of them — and then did one more to prove that he didn’t have to stop.

He won the Tri-Valley League’s Defensive Player of the Year Award for football during the fall and a TVL shot put championship during the spring.

An injury, however, turned Big Bad John into an overheated pressure cooker when he was forced to delay his collegiate career for a season.

He had not a second to waste on his football mission:

“I’ve always dreamed about playing in the NFL,” Tremblay would tell me just two years later.

The pause did allow him to play two seasons with his younger brother at Santa Barbara City College.

Tim Tremblay was an All-CIF offensive lineman in his own right who would later play at Wake Forest.

They were inducted together into Bishop Diego’s Athletics Hall of Fame in 1993. They were also later inducted into the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table Hall of Fame — John in 2003 and Tim in 2008.

The first column I ever wrote as the sports editor of The Channels — SBCC’s student newspaper — was about these two Brotherly Brutes from Bishop during the season of 1972.

“We really inspire each other,” John told me. “You know, the night before a game, our old man would shell out $20 for us and we’d go to some hotel and get a room with double beds.

“We’d just psyche ourselves up, talk about our line assignments for the game, the other team, and such.”

I heard this and thought that Big Bad John needed about as much psyching up as that shark in Jaws.

Sign of the Times

He became infamous among friends, fans, foes and the police force alike for how he could knock down a stop sign with just one rip of his forearm.

Big Bad John snapped the wooden post of the first one on pure impulse while working out before his first Vaquero season of 1971.

“I was just revved up and running down the street,” he told me. “I saw a sign and I just —bam! — hit it.”

He treated quarterbacks and ball carriers the same way. He set school records during SBCC’s 1972 football season with 12 quarterback sacks and 46 unassisted tackles.

His 86 solo stops also broke the school’s career mark. He was voted to the Junior College All-America team both seasons.

“He’s rugged, tenacious and reads opposition plays like no other player I’ve coached,” said Bob Dinaberg, SBCC’s long-time head coach.

“And he’s a natural leader among his teammates — the guy who brings out the very best in every other man on our defensive squad.”

Big Bad John earned especial respect from 1971 teammate Booker Brown, who would later gain All-America honors as an offensive lineman at USC. They had some epic battles while scrimmaging during Tremblay’s freshman season at SBCC.

“He was so good and big, so I had to be crazy just so he wouldn’t get me,” Tremblay recalled. “We had some pretty intense contact in practice.

“Coach Dinaberg actually took me out of practice once because they couldn’t run the play over Booker’s hole.”

Brown later showed up at Big Bad John’s house just to tell Dorothy and Malcolm Tremblay that their son had made him a better football player.

“I considered that quite a compliment, because there was nobody better than him,” Tremblay said.

Showering Praise

He received another remarkable compliment after the second game of his sophomore season.

The head coach from Cypress College and two of his assistants sought him out in the Vaquero locker room after he’d thoroughly throttled their team, 28-7.

Tremblay had made 14 tackles — six unassisted, which included a sack of the quarterback.

“The head coach walked into the shower and shook my hand,” Tremblay told me afterward. “He said he never saw a display of football like that in his life.

“He was getting wet … but the rest of the coaching staff still followed him in there.

“I never heard of anything like that before.”

Carmen DiPoalo, SBCC’s defensive coordinator at the time, acknowledged the moment by calling Tremblay “the finest defensive guard we’ve had here … He’s an inspiration for the entire defense.”

The fire that Tremblay lit under the Vaqueros turned into a funeral pyre for rival Allan Hancock College during the fourth week of the season.

SBCC shut out the Bulldogs 27-0 before a La Playa Stadium crowd of more than 8,000.

When I entered the locker room to interview the victors, I found all the Vaqueros circled around Tremblay, hooting and hollering, as he danced to a tune from somebody’s boombox:

“I was slippin’ into darkness … When I heard my mother say … Hey, what’d she say? What’d she say? … You’ve been slippin’ into darkness … Pretty soon you gonna pay …”

Jimmy Dean, meet the rock group War.

When the team bus stopped for post-game meals, those same teammates would beg Big Bad John to knock down another stop sign. He never said no.

He estimated that he dropped 50 during his football career.

Word of his street-sign demolitions spread all over town. People were constantly asking him to prove it.

“He’d back up 30 yards and take off,” brother Tim recalled. “A sign never beat John.

“When a sign had gone down in town, the police would come over to our house. John would have to tell them he didn’t knock it down.”

No opponent could beat the Vaqueros over the course of their first nine games of 1972. They finally settled for a Western State Conference co-championship when College of the Canyons knocked them off in the final game.

By this time, however, SBCC’s Demolition Man had become known by college recruiters far and wide.

Signing with Colorado

Then-Colorado defensive coach Jim E. Mora, who later served as an NFL head coach with both the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts, was one of the many recruiters who showed up at Tremblay’s doorstep on East Cota Street.

He, like most everyone, wanted a demonstration from Santa Barbara’s human hatchet.

“They had heard about the stop signs all the way in Colorado,” Tim recalled.

“He said he didn’t believe it,” John chipped in. “He thought it was just a rumor.”

John’s father had heard the warnings from the police and wanted nothing done near their home.

“So we go across the street to a junior high,” Tim recalled. “John went ahead and knocked down a sign, and the coaches are yelling. They all think it’s great.

“They’re saying, ‘Oh, don’t tell our starting center what you just did!’”

That’s how Big Bad John learned that he had won their scholarship.

“A police car came up later, after John and the coaches had gone out for coffee,” Tim said. “An officer said that if they fix the sign, he wouldn’t cite them.

“My dad just happened to have some cement there at the house. So at 2 a.m., we got a post digger, dug up the sign, mixed the cement and got the sign back up.

“It was about three feet shorter, but at least we got it back up.”

Tremblay’s full-bore intensity got the best of him at Colorado, however.

One of the team’s offensive coaches got in his face after he kept knocking down his quarterback during a half-speed scrimmage.

“He knows only one speed and that’s full speed during a game or in practice,” DiPoalo explained. “He simply likes to stick people.”

And when the Colorado assistant challenged him, Big Bad John stuck him, too.

Head coach Eddie Crowder reluctantly sent Tremblay home to East Cota Street.

Tremblay headed instead to San Diego State where coach Claude Gilbert offered him a full scholarship.

He was hit with another bad break, however, when a blocker blindsided him early in the Aztecs’ 1975 season. The blow damaged the medial collateral ligament and cartilage in one of his knees.

“It was supposed to have been the end of my career,” Big Bad John said. “Coach Gilbert got emotional when I told him that I’d be back to play that year.

“He looked at me as though I were some poor bastard who didn’t quite understand the severity of what was going on.”

Tremblay was so intent on returning to the field, however, that he began isometric exercises as soon as he emerged from the anesthesia of his knee surgery.

“I developed a hematoma and they had to operate again to clear that up,” he said.

Getting Stares on the Stairs

That didn’t stop Tremblay from hopping up the stairs at San Diego State’s stadium as soon as the plaster hardened on his cast. The plaster would turn red after his stitches ripped open.

“I wanted to stay in shape and sometimes I’d bleed while doing it,” he said with a shrug. “Everyone thought I was crazy, I guess, but it did inspire the team.

“They gave me the game ball (after a win over North Texas State), saying that they’d seen me doing that.”

Big Bad John demanded that the team doctor clear him to play when 15th-ranked Arizona came to San Diego for a showdown with the No. 13, undefeated Aztecs.

“He was afraid to give me my release, saying that he’d never heard of anyone ever coming back so soon from that kind of injury,” Tremblay said. “So I told him to watch as I went into the weight room and challenged the entire team to a leg-press competition.

“I beat every one of them, and then I went out onto the field and did all kinds of circle-eights.

“The doctor watched with his mouth wide open —he just couldn’t believe it — but he handed me my medical release right there and then.”

Gilbert sent Tremblay into the Arizona game for every short-yardage situation.

The Wildcats wound up edging the Aztecs, 31-24, before a crowd of 53,611, but the story of Tremblay’s miraculous return spread as fast as the one about the stop signs.

“Parents with kids who had similar injuries were calling me from all over the country, asking what they should do to get them back on the field,” Tremblay said.

“I told them to listen to their doctors … but … that they had to go for it.”

Big Bad John played the final three games of that season — his last with collegiate eligibility — although the injury had ruined his chances for an NFL career.

“Before I hurt the knee, several pro scouts expressed an interest in me,” he told me, shaking his head in disconsolation.

And so he embarked on new careers as an automotive mechanic, and then as a car salesman. I heard he set a record at the old Graham Chevrolet by selling 33 cars in one month.

Picturing him in pursuit of some poor, unsuspecting clod on the car lot gave me a bitter taste of chlorophyll in my mouth.

Tremblay did make a comeback with the minor-league San Diego Sharks of the California Football League five years after leaving San Diego State.

He shored up his career as though it were a cracked timber in a mineshaft and was a starter by the third week. His teammates even gave him the new nickname of “Brutus.”

“The first month was hell because I was way out of shape,” John said. “But I lost 20 pounds and quit smoking.

“I felt so much better.”

Those who knew him best were sure of one thing about Big Bad John: He was never better than when on a football field.