1981 prep football all-star teams

As the 2017 Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s football All-State team release draws near, periodically we are going to ask a spreadsheet to generate a random number between 1947 and 2016.

Whichever year pops up, we will post that season’s all-star pages here.

In this edition we get one of the most magical seasons in high school football. Radford miraculously won the Prep Bowl under interim coach Waldemar Doane, who took over when longtime coach John Velasco died the day before the Rams beat Waianae for the OIA West championship.

Thanks to a roster of great players and the ‘blind man in the bleachers,’ as Velasco was referred to, Radford went on a historic run for the title.

The Rams were led by George Ruff and Sydney Sims on the offensive line and Tavita Sagapolu in the trenches on defense.

They were the epitome of a team, able to overcome one of the greatest players in Hawaii high school history: Kurt Gouveia of Waianae. Gouveia was the defensive player of the year on the Honolulu Advertiser’s All-State team and OIA West offensive player of the year by the Star-Bulletin.

The Star-Bulletin’s All-State list is missing, if anyone has it in their garage we would certainly appreciate it.

Kaiser quarterback Clifford Kaneaiakala and McKinley’s Benson Maafala were the top talents in the East with McKinley’s Kaiser Iuta judged the best defensive player. See if you can find a couple of future coaching legends in the OIA West honorable mention.

Doubleclick the images to zoom in.

Subscribers to the Star-Advertiser can search full-page archives going back two years for free (pages are not available on the archive for 30 days after publication) at Newspapers.com. To access digitized newspapers from farther back — all the way to 1840 — subscriptions to staradvertiser.newspapers.com are available for $7.95 per month or $29.95 for six months.