He’s the Quarterback of the Moment--Not By Accident, Either

When, after four years of waiting in the wings for his big chance, UCLA substitute quarterback David Norrie greeted his opportunity in spring training by getting in not one but two automobile accidents in a little more than a week, the campus wags were ready: “Johnny Unitas had such great peripheral vision he could see his ears. David Norrie can’t even see a Cadillac.”

Others saw the bright side of it. “Those were the first completions David had all year,” they noted. Still others viewed it as, “David Norrie can’t even drive down the street without being intercepted.”

The coach, Terry Donahue, was philosophical: “I might let him play quarterback, but I wouldn’t ride in a car with him.” The school paper weighed whether to salute the occasion with “David Norrie Sacked Again.”

Neither accident was Norrie’s fault. Of course, neither was the Washington game.

In the first accident, a lady came rolling out of a driveway and demolished his vehicle. In the second, 10 days later, a car came rushing out of a one-way alley, not realizing there was a street there. Norrie’s rental car was slammed into a telephone pole.

The same police officer responded to both accident calls. Said Norrie: “He must have thought I was either the world’s worst driver or he had stumbled on the world’s biggest insurance fraud.”

Both accidents were in broad daylight and they came at a time when they seemed to put just the right, fine, fitting climax to a career full of mishaps for David Doherty Norrie.

The lady in the Cadillac seemed to have totalled more than a Volkswagen Rabbit. She had taken out a career.

For four frustrating years, David Norrie had been trying to crack the varsity quarterback job at UCLA. He never made it. His only hope for playing time actually was that someone else would have an auto accident. He was the perennial third string. He had even red-shirted to outwait some of the talent the Bruins had at the passing game--the Tom Ramseys, Rick Neuheisels, Steve Bonos.

This was to have been his year. And he winds up as a hood ornament on a backing-up Cadillac. Coupe de Ville.

It was not fair. David D. Norrie with a football is a sight to gladden the heart of any red-blooded American football coach. Now 6-4 1/2 and 215 pounds, he played baseball, basketball and football in high school. He’s as unexcitable as a monk, strong-armed enough to have been a baseball pitcher, agile enough to have been a basketball guard, a good enough student to be a top candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship. A recruiter’s dream, he had his choices of places to play in colleges from Notre Dame to Alabama after an eight-letter career at Jesuit High in Portland, where he had been a High School All-American quarterback.

But his career at UCLA had ranged from disappointing to non-existent. He didn’t get in any games at all in 1983; he got to throw 2 passes in 1982 and 17 in 1984.

So, when he showed up at spring practice after missing a week with his shoulder in a sling, Norrie had a right to feel this is where he came in, he’d seen this movie before. The coach began to talk darkly of a “relief pitcher” theory of playing quarterback. “It’s not the kind of thing to make you aggressive,” Norrie admits. “You get tentative out there. You figure, one mistake and you’re gone.”

He figured right. In the opening game, against BYU, he got the hook. “I wasn’t making things happen. Matt Stevens came in. When I went out, we were down by four points. He won the game.”

But the Tennessee game, the following week, was Stevens’ turn in this intercollegiate gong show. The score was 26-10, Tennessee, with six minutes to go when Norrie came off the bench to lead the team to two eight-point touchdowns and conversions--and a tie game.

“I had decided after the BYU game that I had let myself be intimidated by the situation long enough. I had been very cautious, afraid to make a mistake. That hadn’t been my style in high school or throughout my career. I like to be aggressive, I like to make the risky throws, what Coach (Homer) Smith calls ‘shading the play.’ I was playing like a guy just hanging onto a job, trying to protect his pension.”

It was like answering phones and saying, “Yes, boss,” for a living, Norrie decided. In addition to everything else, it wasn’t much fun.

Norrie decided to stop counter-punching, to stop playing like a guy just trying to cut his losses. He started to drive with his foot on the floor.

It paid off. His record, including Saturday night’s Arizona game, is 106 for 171, a .620 completion record, with 9 touchdowns and 1,405 yards. That not only makes him No. 1 at UCLA and in the Pac-10, it makes him ninth in the country.

Blitzing linebackers have cut short many a quarterback’s career, but David Norrie is the only one who almost had it done by a blitzing Cadillac. Some passers have to worry about 300-pound human refrigerators, but Norrie has to keep a lookout for 300-horsepower, half-ton real hardware. He hopes that he only gets blindsided on street corners and not on third-and-long on his own 10. And that if he gets in another traffic accident, it’s on the way home from the Rose Bowl on January 1.