One Might Wonder Who’s Gutty Now : THE RIVALRY : UCLA vs. USC

Yale-Harvard, it ain’t. The Yale-Harvard game was 54 years old before the first USC-UCLA game was played.

The East didn’t even know UCLA existed. It did know about the USC Trojans, or Southern Cal as they have been identified by generations of sportscasters. The USC Trojans scared them. They beat Notre Dame in one of the blackest days Irish hearts had suffered since Cromwell. They used to win Rose Bowl games against the flower of the East by scores like 47-14 and 35-0. Easterners were sure they were all seven-feet tall, blond, ran the hundred in 9.5, threw the discus 300 feet and swam to Catalina every morning. A campus full of John Waynes.

But UCLA came into focus as a kind of ratty little streetcar university with no traditions or history or no indication of the luster it would later attain in the worlds of science and art, to say nothing of athletics.

It wasn’t much of a series to begin with. USC won the first game, 76-0, and the first two games by an aggregate 128-0.

USC’s head coach, Howard Jones, an austere, forbidding man, with his pick of the state’s football crop, was bored with UCLA. He considered the game a boring breather that could neither test his squad nor bring it much honor if it won. You knew his concept of football when you knew his team was known in the sports pages as “The Thundering Herd.”

UCLA easily slipped into the role as the people’s school, the sons of the poor, challenging the paladins of privilege, and sportswriter Mal Florence hit the right popular perception when he referred to the underdogs as the “gutty little Bruins.”

The facts of the matter were that the “gutty little Bruins” redressed the discrepancy in the best traditions of the proletariat. They found football players, and superb ones, in places the lordly Trojans never looked.

Black players had starred in collegiate ranks before. Indeed, USC’s first All-American, Brice Taylor, was a black player. But almost the only one.

UCLA achieved almost instant parity with USC in the late 1930’s with the legendary Kenny Washington and Jackie Robinson in the same backfield. They didn’t need much else.

The lesson was not lost on USC, which, to its credit, quickly discarded its elitist image--or, maybe, even preserved it--by leaping into the recruiting fray without pre-conceived notions and saw to it that future Jackie Robinsons and Kenny Washingtons had an option to wear the cardinal-and-gold.

The philosophical differences between the two institutions persevered--in one the parents paid their kids’ tuitions. In the other, the taxpayers did. The rivalry remained intense.

But, football is a coach’s medium, not a student body’s, and, when Howard Jones passed away, USC had a decade of floundering trying to find a new “Headman.” UCLA, meanwhile, came up with the dapper, flippant wizard of the single wing, Henry (Red) Sanders. Sanders fielded smart, fast, well-drilled, admirably-schooled teams that managed to make the Trojans look like clumsy Elks on a convention. Sanders beat them six out of eight tries, sometimes by 39-0 and 34-0. For Red, it was like playing poker with your grandmother.

When Sanders died, the pendulum swung again. The jaunty, quippy John McKay showed up at USC, and he restored Howard Jones football. Not that McKay ignored the pass. Some coaches use the run to bring the defense in so they can pass over it. McKay used the pass to keep the defense back so his runners could run around it. He called his tactic with typical wit “student body right,” but it was really the old Howard Jones sweep behind the biggest, fastest, most mobile blockers the game could find.

Today, USC’s coach, Ted Tollner, a product of the aerial circus of Brigham Young, appears to have over-relied on the pass on a team that is overloaded with runners--with results that would come as no surprise to Howard Jones. Or John McKay. Or John Robinson.

The gutty, not-so-little Bruins have the bright, resilient young Terry Donahue, a coach who has learned through nine years of on-the-job training. His teams win games the way Nick the Greek used to win pots. They play their cards right. UCLA doesn’t beat itself.

Both coaches showed up at the L.A. Bond Club annual lunch, a traditional rallying point for Big Game week, and the dialogue must have been confounding to Howard Jones or any of the early day coaches from either school.

When you hear Ted Tollner say, “You can’t help but be up when you play a team of UCLA’s caliber--when you have an opportunity to play a ranked team of their reputation, a team that is going to some (emphasized) bowl and is a national power,” and when you hear emcee Fred Roggin say, “You have your self-respect at stake,” you can almost hear the ghostly echo of Jones rising to ask, “Wait a minute, are you guys talking about Notre Dame? At least, Stanford?”

And, when you hear Terry Donahue say, “They are going to be a very formidable test for us,” you picture early-day Bruin coaches screaming, “Formidable test? They’ll bury you, won’t they?”

Football hasn’t changed. Coaching hasn’t changed. It must be that America has.