Trojans Finally Find a Use for a Quarterback

The Pac-10 beat the Big Ten in the Rose Bowl New Year’s Day.

And the earth is round, the sky is blue, water is wet, ice is cold and the Pope is Catholic.

But wait a minute. It wasn’t that easy. This wasn’t one of your basic morality dramas where the big hulking team comes out of the Midwest, chewing nails and combing coal dust out of its hair and growling, only to run into a fancy pack of beach boys who turn the game into a Tom and Jerry cartoon and win dancing out of a range with a “Ha! You missed me again!” spoof as they aired out the football and ran rings around the troglodytes from the heartland.

This was a role reversal, a plot switch, an audience surprise. Marilyn Monroe playing a nun.

The USC Trojans won this game by going down in the cellar with the big, bad bullies, locking the door and turning out the lights. It was like the matador mixing it up with the bull and throwing away the cape. It was inartistic, unstylish, counter-history. Four quarters of broken-nose football. A dock fight.

It was Dempsey-Firpo, not Sugar Ray giving a recital just out of reach of the other guy. Even the score had blood on it. 20-17. Not one of your vintage Pac-10 wipeouts. It was up for grabs with 30 seconds to go.

The Pac-10 beating you with hard-nosed plowshare football is like the Yankees beating you with the glove, Muhammad Ali beating you in the corners, Babe Ruth outbunting you.

The Trojans have a style, a mystique all their own and it doesn’t include arm wrestling at the line of scrimmage. The image calls for this graceful, swift, smart student to take the ball and follow the senior class around end in ballet-like dashes on his way to the Heisman.

Everybody agreed that Tuesday’s Rose Bowl game introduced a new USC into the plot, a band of ruffians who broke up the furniture with the best of them. The losing coach, Ohio State’s Earle Bruce, set the stage early after the game when he admitted gloomily: “They were very physical. They backed us up all day.”

The losing quarterback, Mike Tomczak, agreed. “USC is a tough team,” he said. “The toughest we faced all year.”

The losing linebacker, Chris Spielman, acted like a man who had just fallen down a flight of stairs. “This is the toughest team I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I never played anybody in the world as tough as these guys.”

It is kind of a dirty trick, getting knocked on your pantaloons by a guy you’re expecting card tricks from. It’s like getting treed by your own cat.

The Big Ten might have been expecting to lose. After all, there’s plenty of precedent for that. Big Ten teams have lost 14 of the last 16 Rose Bowl games. But, they usually lose in a manner that can leave them shaking their fists and snarling: “Why don’t you stand still and fight like a man? Get up here where I can hit you.”

This time, USC didn’t outpass ‘em, outslick ‘em, or outrun ‘em. It outslugged ‘em. It traded bites with the lion. And out-ate him.

USC might not have done this entirely out of free choice. This is a team that still had student-body right--but didn’t have this Heisman lock to take advantage of it.

And, then, there was this quarterback . . .

Tim Green is, for USC, quite a specimen. You have to know what USC quarterbacks are basically like. Historically, they’ve been kind of introverts, semi-studious types. Quarterbacks might be big men on campus at other institutions but at USC, they’re kind of like second-class citizens. They’re not expected to do windows but USC expects them to shape up.

They’re supposed to hand the ball off to the Heisman winner and get out of the way. No one precisely says, “Shut up and hand off,” but they get the idea early.

At USC, they’re kind of like punters and kickers. They don’t practice by themselves but they don’t figure prominently in the game plan. No one is ever real sure what they sound like except for guys at the line of scrimmage. “Hut, hut!” Even there, they do what they’re told. The coach sends in the plays.

As a result, being a quarterback at USC is a little like riding in an open carriage with the Pope. It’s hard to get noticed. Not too many USC quarterbacks make Who’s Who.

Until Tim Green. You see, no one ever made this clear to Tim Green. No one ever told him this was a position in society close to spying.

USC never bothered to because no one there thought he’d be playing this year. In fact, they all but insured it by redshirting him. This is man talk for holding a player out of the lineup permanently to save his eligibility for another season. They redshirted Tim because they had two guys they thought were better.

When one of those guys, Sean Salisbury, came down with a knee injury in Game 2, they gave Tim a proper shirt with a number on it and reactivated him.

They took it for granted that he understood vows of silence went with the job, that it was like joining an order of monks who just made wine and didn’t talk to strangers--or even to themselves.

Tim Green missed the point. He thought the world was waiting for what he had to say. He thought his opinion might have some bearing on the conduct of the world--like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or some of Churchill’s utterances.

What Timothy had to say ran largely to a commentary on the aptitude, or lack of it, of the UCLA varsity. Or the Notre Dame secondary and competency thereof.

It was pretty quotable stuff but Timmy’s off-the-cuff remarks didn’t make Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or major anthologies. They did make locker room walls, where the literary critics were all hostile.

USC didn’t lock Tim Green in a room or cut off his telephone but the folks there did arrange to keep him out of shot of a microphone or camera for the Rose Bowl. Ohio State, they reasoned, was already mad enough. Losing four of their last five Rose Bowl games made them cranky enough.

It was a good thing, as it turned out. Tim Green arose New Year’s morning, pulled the drapes and looked out the window of his hotel room. “I thought, ‘What a beautiful California morning. What a wonderful day for a football game. What a great day for a Rose Bowl game.’ ”

The coach, the staff, the squad might have been horrified. You’re supposed to have your nose in a playbook the morning of the game. You’re not supposed to notice whether it’s even morning.

Tim Green admits he finally had the last laugh. He lofted 24 passes in the Rose Bowl game, and completed 13, 2 of them for touchdowns.

“I didn’t make any mistakes, I didn’t throw any interceptions.” he said after the game. “You know, we’re not BYU or the San Diego Chargers. We don’t throw long but we’re better than people think.”

Clearly, Timmy is sorry he couldn’t have let the world know what it was in for before the game. If Ohio State also found out in the process--well, that’s the price you have to pay in a democracy for freedom of information.