BRUCE HARDY : OK, He’s a Dolphin; OK, He’s in Super Bowl; but Once . . .

You never quite get over high school.

High school is learning to drive a car. It’s your first kiss, it’s pimples. It’s cheerleaders who don’t know your name. It’s Friday nights and drive-ins and sock hops. It’s spilling milk in your lap at lunch and wondering how you’re going to make it to the end of the day. It’s the last vestige of childhood.

High school was wonderful and it was terrible. But you know, for some, it was never quite so bad. They were the high school heroes. They didn’t get pimples and they dated the girl you dreamed about. You wonder how they turned out, which is why someone invented high school reunions--in the hope that the cheerleader he had secretly lusted after had gone to fat and had nine kids.

Bruce Hardy went to his 10-year reunion last summer in Utah. He was a hero in high school, and he still is. Hardy plays tight end for the Miami Dolphins and will represent Bingham High in the Super Bowl Sunday. At 6 feet 5 inches and 232 pounds, he looks the part. A likable young man, easy to talk to, he even acts the part.

The folks back home in Utah are proud, but some must wonder what happened to the Bruce Hardy they knew.

This was no ordinary high school hero after all, Hardy was special. He was Bruce Hardy, All-American boy. Three-sport superstar. Quarterback. Honor student. Dated cheerleaders. The best high school athlete in America.

It said so, right there on the cover of Sports Illustrated, April 29, 1974.

When a writer asked him where he kept the magazine cover, Hardy told him, deadpan: “It’s back in the hotel room. I take it with me wherever I go.”

Then he laughed. It’s not a sore point. But in one way, it proved to be an end point. Bruce Hardy, at 17, was burdened with expectations no one could reasonably meet.

Hardy went to Arizona State where in his sophomore year he was switched from quarterback to tight end. “Someone who had to block ,” Hardy said, aghast. He came to the Dolphins as an uncelebrated ninth-round draft pick. He has played well enough to stick for seven seasons, but Hardy is no star.

Those writers in search of stars Tuesday stood perhaps a hundred strong, surrounding quarterback and cover boy Dan Marino on the first day of the official Super Bowl media blitz.

“I don’t mind,” Hardy said. “I’m not exactly in great demand anymore.”

But once, back in high school, what they were writing about him then! Here’s the lead from the Sports Illustrated story:

“Bruce Hardy might have been dreamed up, along with his cereal-box name, to remind the world what an old-fashioned high school hero looks like. He might have descended on Bingham, Utah, appearing in the narrow canyon in the chalk-colored Oquirrh Mountains as in a vision. Somehow it all seems too perfect: that Bruce Hardy should throw touchdown passes and hit home runs on playing fields carved out of hillsides; that he should do wondrous things with a basketball in a dim, splintered bandbox of a gym; that Utah’s sportswriters should hymn the praises of ‘Bruce Hardy and the Mountain Men.”’

It is no wonder that Hardy thought he might someday be what Dan Marino has become. Here was a big window of opportunity for perspective to fly out of.

But Hardy never let it get too far out of hand.

Maybe when I was a kid, I thought that way,” Hardy said. “When I got to college and found out what that was about, I adjusted my goals.”

Not that the adjustment came so easily. He had started his first game as a sophomore at quarterback. Three games later, he had tumbled into the netherworld at the bottom of the depth chart and was being asked to fill in at tight end. That’s where he stayed.

“I always thought of myself as a quarterback playing tight end,” he said. “It was a blow to my ego ... I got used to it over a period of time. I gradually grew into it, I didn’t wake up one morning saying, ‘I don’t care anymore.”’

But neither did he pore over his clippings, looking for the star he had been. He was still a legend, at least in parts of Utah.

He had been player of the year in football and basketball in his junior and senior seasons. He was all-state in baseball, twice. The Sports Illustrated article pushed the legends nationwide--how he had thrown a pass so hard it had shattered the would-be receiver’s shoulder pad; how he was the first batter to hit a ball out of Century Field in nearby Tooele; how, as a junior on a team that finished 7-10 in the regular season, he took over and led the Bingham Miners to a state championship.

Among those who had seen the magazine cover--Hardy standing in the middle of Bingham Highway, dressed in full uniform, a football under his arm--were some of his future teammates at Arizona State. Not all of them took it so well.

“They thought that I thought I was some kind of hotshot,” he said. “It was a while until they accepted me as one of the gang.”

But back home, there were no problems. His mother bought 10 or 20 copies. His aunt had one made into a plaque and gave it to him. Hardy’s wife has it now, somewhere.

“It was pretty strange,” Hardy said. “In Utah, we don’t get a lot of national publicity. I never knew how they picked me or why.

“They must have taken 1,000 pictures. Three straight days. They used one on the cover and one inside. I didn’t know they’d put me on the cover. I guess they slipped me in on a bad week.”

Whatever, it was nice. Nothing, in fact, would ever equal it. He left behind a disciplinarian father, trading him for a disciplinarian coach. The All-American boy never saw eye to eye with Frank Kush. He still holds a grudge.

When someone suggested that some people like Kush and some don’t, Hardy said, “Who likes him?”

He got a laugh and then added: “I haven’t talked bad about him in a long time. It used to be that I jumped at any chance to give him a little dig.”

Hardy is beyond that now. He’s one of three tight ends who play a lot and catch a lot of Marino’s passes. As a ninth-round pick, he was a longshot to make the pros, but he has developed into a good blocker with good hands. Just nothing legendary.

“I was in Miami three or four years before I ever completely felt like I knew what I was doing,” Hardy said. “You need the repetition. You need the experience in the field.

“I’m just happy to have a job, as long as I keep catching them and they let me on the plane.”

When this is all over, he will go home to South Jordan, not too far from old Bingham High, which is now a middle school. There isn’t a city of Bingham anymore and hasn’t been for years. Bingham stood in the way of Kennecott Copper’s huge, open-pit mine, and so they tore Bingham down.

It was a storied town of saloons and storefronts, but it died in the early ‘60s. When Hardy went to Bingham High, it was one of the last remnants of what had become a ghost town.

The ghost of Bruce Hardy must rattle there still.

“You have to kind of put your feelings behind you of what used to be and think what will be,” Hardy said. “Looking back is for when your career is over.”

And for now, there’s a Super Bowl to play.