By admin 
It was not hard to find Xavier Becerra at Sacramento’s C.K. McClatchy High School in the mid-1970s. Every lunch, Becerra and half a dozen friends would around a picnic table, huddled over a deck of cards. Becerra was the one with long, wavy hair, flared pants and a poker face that his old friend Steve Franco will never forget.
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“He’s the best poker player I’ve ever met in my life,” said Franco, who’s been playing cards for decades and has known Becerra since seventh grade. “He knows when to play the hand that he should, and then he’s aggressive in his betting.”
Those qualities served Becerra well five decades later in his race for governor. Lagging in polls and fundraising ahead of the June gubernatorial primary, Becerra was an afterthought for much of the primary, dogged by a federal probe of a former staffer and advisor accused of siphoning money from Becerra’s dormant campaign account — despite prosecutors saying he was a victim in the scheme.
But Becerra’s campaign began investing its modest war chest right before Democratic rival Eric Swalwell’s campaign imploded. Becerra surged, won the primary, and now holds a wide lead in polls ahead of the November general election.
On the campaign trail, Becerra has emphasized his working-class roots as the son of a union construction worker, and of parents who grew up in Mexico. But the Democrat, with his vague platform and measured rhetoric, gave only flashes of unscripted personality. In a moment when voters increasingly reward populist firebrands, Becerra presents as calm, workmanlike, and maybe a little boring.
High school friends — who are gathering in September for their 50th reunion — help flesh out a picture of Becerra before he was subject to the glare of politics. They describe an amateur trumpet player and self-taught golfer who took school and family seriously — studious, with a hint of swagger.
“He always seemed like a guy who was going to go places,” said Karen Skelton, a political strategist who has worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and who was a freshman at McClatchy during Becerra’s senior year.
“I thought he was cute,” she said. “I think I had a crush on him when I first met him.”
A storied high school
Becerra’s high school years coincided with a tumultuous time in U.S. politics: the 1973 U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation and the nation’s 1976 bicentennial.
“All of us knew people who had gone to the Vietnam War,” Skelton said. “Bell-bottom pants were the least of it.”
Inside the halls of McClatchy, the school was becoming more diverse. Skelton said she believed white students were a minority by the time she attended, foreshadowing a change that would come to California some 25 years later.
Students were aware of their storied predecessors at Sacramento’s oldest high school, which will celebrate its 90th birthday next year. Joan Didion wrote for the school newspaper, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was valedictorian, and former Rep. Robert Matsui graduated in 1959.
McClatchy students came from both well-heeled families in Land Park and more working-class neighborhoods like Becerra’s Hollywood Park. That house, built by Becerra’s father and uncles, “seemed like a mansion” by neighborhood standards, recalled Don Thomas, a friend who was wowed by the family’s work ethic.
The reality, as Becerra recalled to The Sacramento Bee a decade ago, was more modest: Becerra, his parents, and three sisters packed into a 700-square-foot house near Hughes Stadium. To escape, the future U.S. secretary of health and human services said he would roam on his bike through south Sacramento.
Becerra was quiet and serious when Franco first met him in junior high school, but slowly warmed up to other students.
“By 10th grade he was a different person — you know, fun, laughing, started getting along with everybody,” Franco said.
Trumpet player for Los Survivors
Both boys were members of the unofficial lunchtime poker crew. Their preferred game was called 7-27, where players try to get as close as possible to either of those points. The bets were small, committed to memory to avoid scrutiny from teachers and administrators, with pots of around $20 settled at the end of the week.
Eventually Franco convinced Becerra to join his band, Los Survivors, as a trumpet player. The group played a mix of boleros, rancheras and cumbias at weddings and quinceañeras across Northern California. Occasionally they’d crash the party portion of a wedding hosted by some acquaintance in the Mexican-American community, a practice Franco said was common at the time. Once in a while, the vibe would shift as an argument broke out or someone drank too much.
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“He’d say, ‘Steve, you like it?’ and I’d say, ‘No, let’s get out of here,’” Franco recalled.
None of Becerra’s friends recalled him drinking or, as Skelton remembered it, joining the group of students smoking cannabis beneath a tree outside the school — a practice she blames for her spotty memory of the era. Nor could anyone recall a rich romantic life, aside from a girl Franco remembered Becerra dating toward the end of senior year.
More often, Becerra and his friends would simply sit around someone’s house, snacking or playing cards. Parents were always referred to as “mister” or “misses,” and the gatherings were often family affairs.
A few of Becerra’s friends were golfers, and he eventually decided to learn the sport and join McClatchy’s team. Thomas took him to McIntosh’s Sports Cottage to help him select a batch of used clubs, and Franco lent him Ben Hogan’s “Power Golf” (“He still has my book,” Franco said). Becerra’s initial forays into the sport were “a struggle,” Thomas said.
Becerra spent a summer reading and playing 50-cent rounds at William Land Golf Course.
“The next time I played him, he’s as good or better than I am,” Thomas said.
A chance application to Stanford
The future state attorney general never partook in student government, and no one could remember him being especially politically active. But in his senior year, Becerra was selected to join the conflict-resolution cadre, a pilot program launched by the school district designed to bring 25 student leaders from different communities.
Becerra was also a member of Maya, a Mexican-student club. The group’s excursions included a camping trip where the students embarked on an ill-fated attempt to make chorizo over the campfire. Franco recalled the ravenous group staring at the half-done meat, cackling as they waited and waited for it to cook.
Becerra always had an academic bent. But he said he applied to Stanford on a whim, when he intercepted a friend who was about to toss the application after bombing a test.
“He said, ‘Well, I was going to apply to this college but no reason to do that anymore,’” Becerra told The Bee in 2016. “I said, ‘Don’t throw it away. Give it to me.’”
Becerra’s acceptance — to a campus he’d never seen — would make him the first in the family to attend a four-year college. To celebrate, Becerra’s father gifted him his maroon 1968 Buick Riviera, according to Thomas.
“That Rivi could tell lots of stories,” Becerra told then-Bee columnist Dan Morain in 2015.
Franco has one: a time they stopped at an A&W drive-in for a quick meal, and he had only a quarter to tip the server who brought them food on a tray. As Franco recalls, she glared at him and Becerra laughed the whole way home.
“I can still picture him laughing at me,” Franco said.
Becerra and his friends drifted apart after high school. At Stanford, the Democrat scrapped plans to study biochemistry to pursue politics. His career included stints in the Legislature, Congress, as state attorney general and in former President Joe Biden’s Cabinet.
But the friends also recalled chance — or more purposeful — encounters in the years since. In 2018, Becerra, while serving as state attorney general, popped by Thomas’ golf tournament retirement party, ditching his security detail and fielding work calls from the links.
Becerra’s old crew said those encounters show he’s fundamentally the same person: grounded, smart and unassuming.
“Xavier didn’t bring attention to himself, and he didn’t go out searching for attention,” said Kevin Davila, another McClatchy friend. “He never forgot where he came from.”
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