DUELING PUNTERS : Richardson Has a Rival in Sperle for Opportunity to Kick for USC

Forget about the home-field advantage because it won’t decide this game.

It’s there all right, but not in the way you’d expect. Here, in a setting serene enough to put insomnia to rest forever, both of the contestants are in their element.

It’s maybe a 20-minute ride down the 405 to get from the schools they used to play for--perhaps the biggest football rivals in Orange County--to the school that doesn’t even have a football team, yet is the site of a rivalry of prodigious proportions.

The scene: UC Irvine.

The principle characters: Troy Richardson and Chris Sperle.

The premise: the intense and ongoing struggle for the USC punting job.

It’s actually been underway since spring practice began, but war wasn’t officially declared until last Monday, when the Trojans opened training camp in Orange County.

Aside from the gliding hum of an occasional plane leaving John Wayne Airport and the instructions barked by the coaches, the fields behind Crawford Hall seem to have a sleepy, almost pastoral quality.

Then you blink your eyes, glance at a blackboard on the edge of the field that spells out STUDENT BODY RIGHT in huge letters, with Xs and Os underneath, and you remember where you are.

And you look out on the field and focus your attention on two players wearing cardinal jerseys, one number 99, the other, 15. With an entire field to themselves, they stand side by side.

If you know what’s going on here, you know that the feeling of peace is deceiving. There’s a battle being fought, and there’s no end in sight. Even when Ted Tollner, USC’s commander in chief, decides which punter will be assigned to the front this season, Richardson and Sperle still will be at it, ready to move in if the other fails.

The ball is snapped, the stillness is shattered.

Richardson, built like a Sherman tank at 6-feet 5-inches, 240 pounds, drops the ball, and it explodes off his foot like a grenade. It travels maybe 35 yards before crashing to earth.

Sperle retaliates, but with a different approach. At 6-2 and 170, he is lean and streamlined, a nuclear missile. He strikes quickly, launching a long, high salvo with an impeccable spiral that descends gracefully.

They alternate, trading volleys.

Neither seems to gain much ground on the other. Richardson, a senior, has had the job for nearly all of his two seasons as a Trojan. No matter. It’s not his now. Not yet, anyway.

A redshirt freshman, Sperle has recovered from injuries and displays the better form of the two. He thinks he’s capable of doing the job.

The coaches don’t know what to think.

“Troy has the edge,” Tollner says.

“If we were gonna play a game today, I’d probably pick Chris,” says special teams coach Russ Purnell.

They keep on kicking. And the coaches, ever vigilant, keep on watching.

Chris Sperle remembers when he was a sophomore at Fountain Valley and watched from the stands in Anaheim Stadium as Richardson, a senior at Edison, kicked against his school. He didn’t know Richardson then, but he envied his hang time.

It wasn’t until Sperle made a recruiting trip to USC that they met. But they’ve long since made up for not knowing each other despite living only a few miles apart and pursuing the same route to success in athletics.

In his first semester at USC, Sperle joined Delta Chi, Richardson’s fraternity. They go golfing, go to the beach, go to parties, go over to the other’s house. They watched together as the Olympic torch passed through Newport Beach last summer on its way to Los Angeles. They watched Carl Lewis win a medal in the Coliseum, the same place one of them will have a starting job this fall and one won’t.

They are friends. Off the field.

Then it is time for practice. They lace up their shoes. Strap on their helmets. And the friendship is over.

They don’t pretend otherwise.

“As soon as we’re kicking,” Richardson says, “I don’t care if it’s my brother . . . my attitude is, ‘It’s my position.’ I’m gonna do everything I can to keep it. There’s no way I wanna give it up. If it means competing your hardest against your friend to get the job, I’m gonna do it. Football’s first. I want that spot.”

And so does Sperle.

“We’re competitors, and you have to separate that from being friends,” he says. “Off the field, you become friends again. You become yourself. It’s a whole different ballgame when you step on the field. It’s difficult. But when you’re competing for a job, it’s something that’s gotta be done.”

And on Tollner’s shoulders also rests the weighty burden that something’s gotta be done.

On Sept. 7, in Champaign, Ill., the Trojans will meet the Fighting Illini. Sean Salisbury will not convert on every third-down pass. Fred Crutcher and Kennedy Pola will not run for first-down yardage each time the need arises. Tollner emphasizes the significance of the punting game, but that doesn’t make the situation any less cloudy.

“We’re trying to really focus on that position,” he says, before adjusting the picture so that it is totally out of focus.

He admits he favors Richardson. Still . . .

“I always lean toward the incumbent,” Tollner says. “The job is open.”

Correction, says Russ Purnell, making things fuzzier still. “The job’s wide open.”

Tollner again: “It’s very wide open.”

The two whose futures hang in the balance because of this madness don’t provide any help.

“It’s up for grabs,” Sperle says.

“I don’t really know,” Richardson adds. “I don’t know how the coaches think.”

Nor does he know when their thoughts will become action. Nor does Sperle. Nor do the coaches themselves.

Richardson: “Hopefully by September 6.”

Sperle: “It’s gonna come down to the wire. But it could go all the way into the season.”

Tollner: “It should be decided about 10 days prior to the Illinois game. But it’ll be a game-to-game situation that determines who ultimately has the job.”

You can’t blame Tollner if his words are vague. He’s being diplomatic, but not on purpose.

Who knows how long this will go on? The question may not be answered once and for all until the Trojans’ season is over--either in Tokyo where they play Oregon on Nov. 30, or in Pasadena on Jan. 1, or in another postseason game somewhere else on some other date. Whichever comes first.

Perhaps it is only fair that the job becomes Troy Richardson’s. He is, after all, a senior, while Chris Sperle will have another three years at USC after this season. And then there is the matter of his first name. It’s inaccurate to say he was born to be a Trojan. The real story is even more dramatic.

He was Tad Richardson the first day of his life, before his father came to his senses. Having always been a USC fan, his father scribbled out “Tad,” wrote “Troy” in its place and carved his son’s destiny.

“I thank him to this day for that,” Troy says, laughing, happy that his name is not Tad. “It wasn’t the reason I came here. But my neighbor always used to say I’d go to UCLA, and it would be ‘Troy beats Troy.’ I just kinda laughed and said, ‘No way.’ ”

And that’s the way it turned out, but not before he had overcome some major obstacles. After averaging 41.8 yards per punt his senior year at Edison High, he elected to go not up the road to the place he was named for, but to a place half a continent away--the University of Kansas. That’s where a number of former Edison players had gone, and that’s where he thought he’d be comfortable.

Two days before his departure to Lawrence, he realized Kansas wasn’t his kind of place. Recalling the 70-below temperatures (with wind chill) he learned about on a recruiting trip the previous winter may have had something to do with it.

So instead he chose Cal State Long Beach.

And the same thing happened.

He even checked in, stayed a night and went to a team meeting. Then, against his parents’ wishes, he said “forget it.”

“I just didn’t like it,” he says. “So I got in my Mustang, went down PCH, and went home.”

He called a couple of junior colleges and wound up at Golden West, right back where he started, in Huntington Beach. And he actually stayed a year.

He was the top junior college punter in the state and fourth best in the nation in 1982, averaging 43.3 yards a kick. But there were only 500 people in the stands at LeBard Stadium, and it was time to move on.

In his first year at USC, Richardson moved into sixth place on the all-time USC single-season list with a 41.6 average. It was a miserable year for the Trojans, but a memorable one for Richardson. Things were going smoothly. The job was his.

Then came 1984, a year he’ll remember because of the Rose Bowl. And because of the shanks and the rolls and the criticism.

It started off well enough, but somewhere along the way, for some reason his punting went awry.

Inconsistency plagued him. Every punt became an adventure. He became known for kicking the ball poorly, but getting great rolls. “The best 25-yard kicker in the league,” Washington State Coach Jim Walden called him.

“It was the result of erratic kicking,” Purnell says. “People didn’t know where to put the return guy. One he’ll kick right, and one he’ll kick left, and one he’ll kick short. It was damn good for the team.”

But it wasn’t good for Richardson.

“I lost my confidence,” he says. “It was shot to hell.”

And eventually, the team suffered.

With a trip to the Rose Bowl at stake on Nov. 10 against previously- undefeated Washington, Richardson’s ineptitude cost him his job. Late in the game, tight end and reserve punter Paul Green, who’s got an outside chance at the punting job this year, took over.

“I was afraid we were gonna lose that game ‘cause of me,” Richardson recalls. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m costing us (a chance at) the Rose Bowl.’ It helped me to shake myself and wake up. The best thing that could’ve happened was being taken out of the Washington game.”

And although he was given a chance to redeem himself when he was put back in late in the game against UCLA the following week and started the week after against Notre Dame, it was a traumatic period for him. Wherever he went, it seemed, people were talking and laughing about Richardson’s Rolls.

“They were acting as if every kick went 20 yards and rolled,” he says. “They said, ‘Your punts roll and roll and roll.’ But they never say that a punt can roll backwards. They just called it a lucky bounce.”

But when it counted the most, in the Rose Bowl, Richardson bounced back. He averaged 42.1 yards in the Trojans’ victory over Ohio State. His season was salvaged.

In the short time he has spent at USC, Chris Sperle has traveled a road no less rocky than Troy Richardson’s. While Richardson was sitting on the bench last season, Sperle couldn’t play, whether he wanted to or not.

At Fountain Valley High, Sperle was an All-CIF Division 1 punter, averaging 39.5 yards a kick. As the team’s placekicker, he made a 43-yard field goal to defeat top-ranked Loyola in the final minute of the 1983 CIF Big Five quarterfinals. In his sophomore and junior years, his holder was Bruce Tollner, Ted’s son.

Don’t count on that influencing the decision, though. As a Trojan, Sperle has yet to prove a thing. Richardson has punted 122 times for USC, which is 121 more than Sperle’s number.

They took a look at him in the first game of last season. On the last of his three punts (only one of which counted) against Utah State, he was roughed, injuring his right hamstring, which was sore for about five weeks.

That healed, but then the real trouble began. Tendinitis developed in his left knee, and he was forced to redshirt. He still dressed for all but one of the games, but only in case of an emergency. There were no real plans to play him.

The condition of his knee worsened, and it wasn’t until after the Rose Bowl that it began to feel somewhat better. Two months before the beginning of spring practice, he started training again.

Then the tendinitis flared up a second time, and he was back where he started. After missing the last two days of spring practice, Sperle rested his knee until the school year ended, was given more treatment for it during the summer to reduce the swelling, and began to work out at the beginning of July.

A brace protects the knee now, but he says it feels OK, that it shouldn’t affect his kicking.

A soft-spoken 19-year-old who measures his words with the utmost care, Sperle says it will hardly come as a surprise if he finds himself on the bench this season.

“Troy might have an edge, since he started for two years,” he says. “I think he’s probably on the top of the list right now. I’m not out to prove anything.”

In the 17-year-old football rivalry between Edison and Fountain Valley, Edison is in command, 12-4-1.

And Troy Richardson, more outspoken than his subdued opponent and teammate at USC, is proud of that.

“We owned ‘em the year before I got there until the year after I left,” he says. “Whoever wins has bragging rights for the next year. Those are his now, but not next year.”

Richardson says he and Sperle have fun with the notion that their respective high schools always have competed against each other with rare intensity, and that now he and Sperle are doing the same for the same team. They kid each other, and make a dollar bet on the Edison-Fountain Valley game, says Richardson.

But Sperle, with an air of innocence about him, denies the existence of such a bet.

“Betting’s illegal,” he says quietly. “I don’t gamble.”

The statement reflects Sperle’s freshman naivete and is a stark contrast to Richardson’s “the-job-is-mine” boldness. It simply is another example of the noticeable distinctions between the two--their ages, their physiques, the manner in which they kick a football.

But for all the differences, a crucial similarity remains in place.

“We both have a ‘coastal-type’ personality,” Sperle says. “We’re both happy-go-lucky. We just take things in stride.”

They’ve done so thus far. Against all odds.