This Long Story Is a Sad One for Illinois

No one can figure out why Iowa’s all-everything quarterback, Chuck Long, had only three colleges after him when he finished his high school career.

All you have to do is look at him. No Big Ten quarterback ever came into focus like this.

You look at him and you want to say, “OK, Chuckie, where’s the surfboard? What’s the matter, the waves don’t have good shape at County Line this week?”

First of all, there’s that blond hair. Curly, at that. If he went on “What’s My Line?” the unanimous guess would be that he’s an Olympic swimmer. In the butterfly. You can almost smell the chlorine. “Uh, you’re Rowdy Gaines, right?” a guy might guess if he met him at a sports banquet.

But, the biggest scandal is not that Iowa was the only top Big Ten school to make a push for him, it’s that Illinois was not.

Chuck Long is from Wheaton, Ill. He was a star football player there, and the University of Illinois should go on probation for ever overlooking a football prospect coming out of Wheaton. You see, Red Grange was from there. Before he became the “Galloping Ghost,” Harold was the “Wheaton Ice Man.” In honor of his off-season delivery job there.

Chuck Long may be the second-greatest player ever to come out of Wheaton. He even won the Red Grange Award there. The University of Illinois should have sent a chauffeured limousine for him, they should have taken No. 77 out of retirement for him.

Why didn’t they? Long himself thinks he knows. “(Illinois) Coach Mike White likes all those California guys,” he said. “Coach White doesn’t think you can get a quarterback east of Fresno.”

White could have gotten one, though, if he had just picked up a phone four years ago. He must wish he had. Last week, White and his California quarterback were beaten by Long, the quarterback only two area codes away, 59-0. That defeat was only five points away from being the worst in Illinois’ football history, which goes back to 1890.

Long, who played for only a half, riddled Illinois for 289 yards passing, 4 touchdowns and 22 completions in running up a halftime lead of 49-0.

The irony is, if Chuck Long Jr. had walked into Mike White’s office four years ago, in a wetsuit, or a T-shirt with Redondo Beach lettered on it, White would have assumed Long had just gotten off the plane from LAX and would have hustled him into a uniform and hidden him out from USC or UCLA.

Big Ten quarterbacks are frequently indistinguishable from Big Ten fullbacks. And they’re expected to do the same things--like run and block. For years, the forward pass was considered sissy in the Big Ten. I mean, would BronkoNagurski pass? Would Grange?

Chuck Long not only looks like a California quarterback, he acts like one. He has put the ball in the air 1,102 times in his college career, with 712 completions and 72 touchdowns.

Long finished seventh in the Heisman Trophy voting last year. He probably should win it this year, but Heisman voters are as notoriously cautious of curly haired, blue-eyed quarterbacks as Big Ten coaches. Consider that Joe Namath never won the Heisman. Nor did Joe Montana. Otto Graham. Dan Marino. Sammy Baugh. Norm Van Brocklin. Sid Luckman.

Heisman voters like to have their judgment verified by a headlining pro career and the few times they have opted for throwers, they have been burned. Steve Spurrier, Terry Baker, Gary Beban, Pat Sullivan and John Huarte, for whatever reasons, never capped their college greatness with pro celebrity.

Also, the Heisman committee can never live down the notion that Jim Brown never finished higher than 5th, Gale Sayers 12th, and Walter Payton 14th.

The safe sop to history became to pick a running back--Herschel Walker, Mike Rozier, Earl Campbell, Billy Sims. The voters even picked Archie Griffin twice, to be on the safe side.

But, if the Heisman electorate doesn’t want him, most coaches in the NFL will. They are not about to make the same mistake the colleges did when only Iowa, Northwestern and Northern Illinois came tendering letters of intent.

And they are certainly not going to defy history, as did the University of Illinois, and consider him geographically unsuitable. If it weren’t for a player from Wheaton, Ill., the NFL might not even be here today.