Garfield-Roosevelt is a rivalry with few peers at the high school level

Tommy Lopez and Javier Cid were football rivals in the East Los Angeles Classic in the mid-1980s who went on to play on the same defense at East Los Angeles College. Yet the teammates didn't exactly give it the old college try when it came to forging a friendship.

"I didn't really care to talk to him," recalled Cid, who had been an All-City Section linebacker at Roosevelt High. "He was a Garfield guy."

So it goes in one of the longest, most emotional rivalries in Los Angeles high school sports, one that is expected to draw a crowd of about 25,000 to East L.A. College tonight for the 74th regular-season meeting between the schools' football teams.

Mike Garrett, Roosevelt class of 1961, won a Heisman Trophy as a USC tailback and is now the Trojans' athletic director. He compares the high school game favorably to USC's against crosstown UCLA and to what is generally considered college football's greatest intersectional rivalry, USC versus Notre Dame.

"The teams might both be great or they might both be down, but it's always a big game and extremely important to the fans of each team," Garrett said. "That game is like a season within a season."

For Lopez and Cid, the rivalry took on a new meaning more than a decade after their playing days ended. It wasn't until they became assistants on the same coaching staff that they realized they had more in common than East L.A. roots.

"Once we got on the field and I saw how he coached and how we worked together," Lopez said, "I figured we were kind of the same."

As colleagues, they spent endless nights munching on chicken enchiladas and breaking down film at Lopez's Monrovia home. It was at one of these marathon sessions in 2001, when they were assistants at Los Angeles Cathedral High, when Lopez pulled out a black-and-white photo depicting his touchdown in the 1983 East L.A. Classic on a blocked field goal.

Cid gazed at the photo and couldn't believe what he saw. Sure enough, there was another familiar figure in the frame -- about five yards behind Lopez giving chase.

"He looks at it," Lopez recalled, "and goes, 'That's me.' "

Funny seeing you there.

"That's a cherished moment he has and I just happened to be in that shot," said Cid, now the head coach at Roosevelt. "It's an amazing thing, really, because here we are now."