Roy Riegels, Meet Ronnie Harmon

For Wrong Way Roy Riegels, for the last 57 years, it’s been lonely at the bottom.

Now Riegels has company.

Roy Riegels is the Cal center whose wrong-way run with a recovered fumble in the ’29 Rose Bowl led directly to a loss to Georgia Tech.

For 57 years, Riegels’ run has stood as the standard of futility against which all other bonehead plays and nightmare performances are measured. For 57 years, none could compare.

Now . . . Roy, meet Ronnie.

Ronnie Harmon, All-American running back for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes.

Harmon fumbled his way into sports infamy Wednesday afternoon at the Rose Bowl. In the first half he fumbled away the ball to the UCLA Bruins four times--twice on running plays, twice after catching passes.

The fumbles led to one UCLA touchdown, one UCLA field goal, and a ton of extra energy expended by Iowa’s defensive unit.

In the second half, all Harmon did was drop a wide-open, 34-yard touchdown bomb that would have put Iowa within two touchdowns with 11 minutes left.

“It was just one of those things,” Harmon said, facing the media after the game.

Just one of those things. But not exactly a trip to the moon on gossamer wings.

This was the worst performance by a pair of hands since Dodger center fielder Willie Davis made three errors in one inning in the 1966 World Series.

Compared to Harmon’s day of horror, Ralph Branca pitched a pretty good game that day back in ’51.

The funny thing is, Harmon is normally a sure-handed guy. He is a senior, Iowa’s all-time leading pass receiver and second-leading all-time rusher. And as near as anyone with the team can remember, Ronnie had one fumble this season.

And now, one day into 1986, his year is shot to hell.

After Harmon’s fourth fumble, one sportswriter speculated that the real Ronnie Harmon was being held captive somewhere as Cal Tech’s annual Rose Bowl prank.

Maybe the law of averages simply caught up with Harmon, although if there really is such thing as the law of averages, the Big Ten will own the Rose Bowl the rest of the 20th Century. Another funny thing is, if the Hawkeyes were too tight, too grim, going into this game, it wasn’t Ronnie Harmon’s fault.

This guy is so loose and cool he could get Chick Hearn to relax. Harmon came to Iowa from Queens, N.Y., with a confident, breezy attitude and a wardrobe that caused folks all over Iowa City to do quadruple-takes.

They weren’t sure whether Ronnie was a new student in town or a gaily wrapped Christmas present with legs.

On a team where most of the players look as if they just walked in off a Midwest corn field, because most of them just did, Ronnie Harmon stands out.

How did a hip city dude like Ronnie wind up playing at Iowa?

“That’s a good question,” Harmon said during the week. “I was looking for someplace that fit my personality. But I didn’t know my personality was that bad.”

Choke? Well, as a freshman, Ronnie Harmon caught 19 passes for 299 yards and scored 3 touchdowns. He also tied a Peach Bowl record with two touchdowns.

For four seasons, he has been Iowa’s big play man. And he loves the spotlight. Wednesday, for instance, he came to the game dressed to kill, although surely it wasn’t his own team’s dreams he was intending to kill.

Emerging from the locker room after the game, Harmon wore a pair of wrap-around shades dark enough to use while arc-welding. He wore leather pants and red accessories--red leather tie, red belt, red leather slippers.

Party togs. But no party. All dressed up and no place to hide.

To his credit, Harmon didn’t try to hide. Smiling, cheerful, he answered questions until a team P.R. man hustled him away.

“They (Bruins) did a real good job stripping the ball,” Harmon said. “I don’t think I was holding on as well as I should.”

Did he feel personally responsible for his team’s loss?

“Responsible?” he said. “Maybe I should.”

If Harmon was responsible, which he was, credit an assist to Ken Norton Jr., the UCLA linebacker who separated Harmon from the ball on two of the fumbles.

“We’re supposed to wrap up the ballcarrier, and yank the ball out at the same time,” Norton explained. “Part of tackling is stripping the ball.”

The Bruins didn’t strip it every time. Harmon carried 14 times for 55 yards and caught 11 passes for 102 yards.

And Roy Riegels probably played a decent game in ‘29, except for that one play.

After Harmon’s brief postgame press conference, he was led away, like a blind man, down to the team’s buses that were waiting at the end of a dark tunnel in the bowels of the Rose Bowl. He was carrying a small bag with “Speed City” written on the side and a portable tape-player box.

Even in the dark tunnel, even when he took a seat on the bus, he kept his shades on. Ronnie Harmon had seen about as much of Pasadena as he cared to see.