His parents were mayors. Can a Bay Area legend follow in their footsteps?

Cal Athletics Hall of Famer Ahmad Anderson, who famously created the school’s “Bear Territory” chant, now has a chance to leave his mark on another Bay Area institution: the Richmond mayoral office.

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The former Golden Bears defensive back is one of two candidates for mayor who seem certain to advance to a run-off election in the East Bay city of around 115,000 people, which doubles as his hometown. Out of five candidates in Richmond’s first-ever primary election for mayor, the unofficial results have Anderson in second place with 28.82% of the vote, behind City Council member Claudia Jimenez (37.55%) but comfortably ahead of the next-closest candidate, incumbent Mayor Eduardo Martinez (19.5%). While 55,200 unprocessed ballots remain in Contra Costa County, the latest vote count on Friday saw the gap between Anderson and Martinez grow from where it was after election night.

In a phone call with SFGATE after Tuesday’s election, Anderson said he’s grateful to have essentially advanced but stressed that the work is far from over now.

“It’s a rewarding feeling,” Anderson told SFGATE. “For me to be in the hunt, that says my voice resonates for people not only in my district but throughout the city.”

That resonation seems to run in the Anderson family. His father, Booker T. Anderson, a local minister, served as mayor in 1973-74 after spending time marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr., who once visited the Anderson family in Richmond. And even though Booker T. Anderson remains the namesake of a Richmond community center and park, Ahmad Anderson admits more people in the community today remember his mother, Irma. She was the first Black woman to serve on Richmond’s City Council (1993-2000) and later also served as mayor (2001-2006), at the time becoming one of the first Black women to serve as mayor of a major California city. 

“My father and my mother were incredible bookends to have to be resources to be understanding about what empathetic leadership is about,” Anderson said. “My dad was a minister, my mom was a nurse, and I’m a human resources professional. So, what a great combination of listening, being there for the people, doing all you can do, being all you can be by building relationships.”

Anderson played football for Cal from 1979 to 1982, during which time he came up with a cheer that can be heard far and wide after any Golden Bears win at Memorial Stadium: “You know it / You tell the story / You tell the whole damn world this is Bear Territory.”

Anderson came up with the chant in the spring of 1982 while taking a class on the history of jazz music from Africa to New Orleans, which required students to submit a semester-long journal of notes. One of those notes is now inscribed in Cal history.

“A lot of music, especially in jazz, there’s a whole story about it — it’s storytelling, whether the rhythms or the call and response,” Anderson said. “We were coming off of two crazy seasons, 3-8 [in 1980] and 2-9 [in 1981], and we heard a lot of songs and a lot of chants from a lot of other teams because they were just running up and down the field, scoring touchdowns. And I realized we didn’t really have a chant. We didn’t have a fight song, like other teams in the Pac-10.”

Forty-four years ago, he attempted to fill that void, writing the slow, melodic chant in his journal, which he then shared with his fellow defensive backs at spring practice.

“Most defensive backs, we walk around with a lot of swag,” Anderson said. “When I brought it back to them, they were like, ‘Yeah,’ and they picked it up, and the swag kicked it — as E-40 says, ‘You’re smelling yourselves.’”

At the urging of his teammates, Anderson introduced it to the rest of the team but added one extra touch to the chant — a response of “What?” from the rest of the team after each of the first two lines of the chant. He then brought the chant from the football team to the public later that fall twice, at rallies ahead of rivalry games against UCLA and then Stanford. Given how famous the 1982 Big Game became (see: The Play), the chant has become an indelible part of the Berkeley campus — and beyond.

“You can go to most sports games around the Bay, and you can hear cheerleaders and folks in the stands, and they’ve taken that,” Anderson said. “They go, ‘It’s the Friar territory’ or ‘the Gauchos’ territory,’ ‘the Yellow Jackets’ territory,’ whatever. But it’s out there, and that’s my contribution to Bay Area sports and to those Golden Bears all over the world.”

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Anderson was named the team’s most inspirational player after the resurgent 1982 season ended 7-4. (Booker T. Anderson died a few weeks after the 1982 Big Game — his son’s final game at Cal.) And the creation of the chant not only earned him a spot in Cal’s Athletics Hall of Fame in 2022 but also gave him an international spotlight moment when “College GameDay” came to campus in 2024.

IT’S 6 AM IN BERKELEY AND CAL IS READY FOR ITS FIRST GAMEDAY EVER 😤 pic.twitter.com/cuerU9DFe8

— College GameDay (@CollegeGameDay) October 5, 2024

The show kicked off at 6 a.m. local time with Anderson leading the raucous students in the chant, with the sound reverberating all across campus — and people watching all around the world. He heard from friends, families, old classmates and even from an old fraternity brother’s daughter, who was watching the show live from Paris. It showed just how much that chant connected with people, something he finds out frequently on the aptly named “Tell the Whole Damn World” podcast he co-hosts. 

Even as he’s remained closely connected to Cal, Anderson has wanted to be a public servant in his hometown for some time now, volunteering his time on several committees and commissions in the city. But he’s yet to win a major election in Richmond, despite three notable efforts. He ran for a City Council seat in 1985 at just 25 years old, losing by 400 votes, and then twice more in 2020 and 2024 but lost both elections. But Anderson said, “I never felt like I lost; I felt like I only continued to learn more,” leading to his decision to try again — only this time for a citywide position.

Anderson has been called the “moderate” mayoral candidate choice by several local news outlets. He’s made public safety the top priority on his campaign website and says he wants to increase police staffing. He also told the Richmond Confidential he supports the city continuing to use Flock, the company whose automated license plate readers have sparked controversies all across the Bay Area. Richmondside reported Anderson has received significant financial support from the Richmond police union’s political action committee, which spent more than $41,000 to support his campaign. 

Anderson has also campaigned on increasing economic development in the city, with the aim of making the city less dependent on Chevron and its refinery. He was seemingly critical of the city’s current progressive-leaning leadership, which includes Eduardo Martinez and Claudia Jimenez, in an interview with the Contra Costa Pulse last month.

“Too often, city leadership focuses on global political issues instead of focusing directly on the people of Richmond and their everyday concerns,” Anderson told the Pulse. “My father told me something years ago that always stayed with me. He said, ‘Before you go taking care of everybody else in the world, take care of home.’ That’s what Richmond needs right now. We need leadership focused first on the residents who live here every day.”

Anderson believes he can be that leader he says Richmond needs. And if you need proof of his leadership abilities, he thinks voters can see how the “Bear Territory” chant has resonated with Cal fans for decades.

“It really says a lot to who I am and my character, being able to motivate, being able to inspire, being able to move the crowd,” Anderson said. “I am in that position now to be the brand ambassador for Richmond, an advocate for improving the quality of life, networking with community members, regional members, state, federal members, to really be the conduit. And to electrify and energize the city of Richmond with pride and purpose.”