UCLA’s Jim Mora goes back a long way at Washington, Bruins’ next foe

The man from Seattle is going home.

Jim Mora coaches football at UCLA, but his roots in the Northwest run deeper than those of a western hemlock. (That’s Washington’s state tree, for those from sunnier climates.)

He was a walk-on linebacker for the Washington Huskies from 1980 to ‘83, and his wife, Shannon, was a Huskies cheerleader.

Mora says he was in Husky Stadium the day “the wave” was invented, and don’t try to tell him that Oakland was the real birthplace.

He is as Seattle as Starbucks. His brother, Mike, is even friends with Pearl Jam bass player Jeff Ament.

“If you get really close and take a deep breath, he smells like an evergreen,” joked former Washington quarterback Tim Cowan, a longtime friend of Mora’s.

Yet, Mora declined a chance to return home as Washington’s coach last winter. Instead, he will be guiding UCLA on Saturday inside what was once his beloved Husky Stadium.

A sentimental journey?

“It doesn’t matter to me one bit,” Mora said. “There is no emotion attached to it. There is no sentiment attached to it. It’s just a team that we’re getting ready to play. I couldn’t care less.”

At least one friend is skeptical of that characterization.

“I have to think this is an important game for him,” said former Washington quarterback Hugh Millen, Mora’s college roommate. “I think his compulsion, that ‘Hey, this is a game we must win,’ won’t allow him to say it. What’s best for UCLA dwarfs any feeling he has.”

Occasionally, though Mora offers peeks into his past. He had tickets to see Led Zeppelin perform at the Kingdome in 1977, but said, “Some Nostradamus person predicted that the decibel level would be so high that the roof would crack. I didn’t go. It is one of the regrets in my life.”

The Moras made Seattle home after Mora’s father, also Jim, was hired as a Washington assistant coach in 1975, then moved over to the Seattle Seahawks. Stephen Mora, a brother, went into acting. Mike Mora, now an architect at a Seattle firm, worked as a busboy with Ament.

At the time, Ament was trying to make it with a band called Mookie Blaylock. Eventually, that became Pearl Jam.

“My brother has all these postcards from Jeff that trace the history of the band,” Mora said. “It goes from ‘We sold 50 T-shirts at our show tonight’ to ‘We’re on a private jet with Bono.’”

In college, Jim Mora’s hyper-compulsive personality made him a coveted roommate.

“Most college guys have pizza boxes and beer bottles laying around the apartment,” Millen said. “Not us. Jim kept that place shipshape. When I needed to think about things, I’d go shoot baskets alone. Jim’s sanctuary was vacuuming.”

Even then, Mora was a point-A-to-point-B person. As a sophomore, he saw his future wife for the first time at a party and told a friend, “I’m going to marry her.” Soon they were dating and, Mora now confesses, he “would often turn around and check out the cheerleaders” during games.

Among other fond memories at Husky Stadium was a victory over third-ranked USC and Marcus Allen in 1981, and handing UCLA its only loss in 1982.

And there are things his friends remember that Mora omits.

In 1983, Mora, a backup, was rushed into a game against No. 8 Michigan. “Jim is on the sideline checking out his girlfriend and the guys he backed up got hurt,” Millen said. “Jim had no idea what was in store.”

Michigan had Stefan Humphries, an All-American lineman, who engaged Mora most of the game. “One time, he got a hold of Jim and put him in the moat behind the Gatorade table,” Millen said. “But Jim hung in there.”

Mora finished with four tackles and Washington rallied from 14 points down in the fourth quarter to win, 25-24.

“He has always been tenacious,” Millen said.

Or, to put it another way, stubborn. Just ask Mora about “the wave.”

He will tell you it was invented in Seattle, by Washington fans, during a victory over Stanford in 1981. End of story.

Of course, many believe it began at an Oakland Athletics baseball game two weeks earlier.

“That is not true,” Mora said adamantly. “Robb Weller, who had been a Washington cheerleader, got our crowd going.”

Cowan backs Mora up on that one. “Robb invented it,” Cowan said. “I remember John Elway stopping at the line of scrimmage because of the crowd. Jim and I looked at each other like, ‘What the heck is going on?’”

Another Mora recollection about Husky Stadium involves trash bags. Fans wore them over their clothes when it rained, then shed them, leaving players to wade through a sea of plastic on the field.

“That,” Mora said, “was home.”

Not this weekend.

“I’m pretty good at disconnecting in these situations,” Mora said.

Still, over the years he has often been asked about going back to coach at Washington.

In 2006, while he was the Atlanta Falcons’ coach, Mora joked during an interview that Washington was his dream job. The comment stirred controversy because Tyrone Willingham, the Huskies coach at the time, was on the hot seat.

Mora issued an apology, but his comment kept resurfacing. After he was fired as coach by the Seattle Seahawks in 2010, Mora was thought to be next in line to become coach of the Huskies, and rumors were fueled when he was seen on campus constantly.

In fact, he was rehabilitating an injured knee and visiting his peers.

“He spent an entire season with us,” said USC Coach Steve Sarkisian, who was then the Huskies coach. “He would sit in meetings, converse with us. We talked quite a bit about the difference between the NFL and college and different things.”

When Sarkisian left for USC last winter, Mora was Washington’s first call. He listened, but chose to stay in Westwood.

“I texted him that night saying, ‘You made the correct decision for you and your family,’” Cowan said. “He said UCLA had given him so much that he couldn’t walk away.”

Now Mora returns to Husky Stadium with UCLA.

“We wish him nothing but the best,” Cowan said. “Except on Saturday.”

chris.foster@latimes.com

Twitter: @cfosterlatimes

Times staff writer Gary Klein contributed to this report.