ROD DEDEAUX : Do You Measure This Man by Victories or Respect?

This is how it begins, more than half a century ago: A gnarled, wizened-looking man on a baseball diamond in Griffith Park, hitting pop flies to a 15-year-old boy.

The man manages the Toledo Mud Hens during the summer, but now he’s seasonally unemployed. The boy adores him, listens to his every word, sits at his feet for hours. The man has a funny, circuitous way of talking, but the boy always understands him.

Years later, he’ll remember how strong the man was, how his pop-ups seemed to bore holes in the sky. The man hits fungoes for hours and the boy chases them like a puppy after a stick, never tiring of the game, vowing that no baseball will fall to the ground. Sundays in the park with Casey.

The year is 1930, the sky is azure. It is before smog, before freeways and before Casey Stengel ever dons Yankee pinstripes. That’s Casey, the Mud Hen mentor.

That’s Rod Dedeaux, the boy.

And now it’s 56 years later, Dedeaux’s turn to bid the game farewell. He has long been away from Stengel’s protective wing. Casey, the Brooklyn scout, signed Dedeaux, and Casey, the Yankee manager, offered him a coach’s job and the chance to be groomed to succeed him. But that’s not how it went.

Dedeaux stayed on the West Coast with his wife, his kids, his trucking company and his other family, also known as the USC baseball program.

In his spare time, he built his company from one $500 Chevrolet truck into a five-company multimillion-dollar conglomerate.

Or, he managed USC in his spare time, take your pick.

Whichever it was, he and USC reached a glory of their own: 11 NCAA titles including five in a row from 1970-74, records that look safe for a century or two.

He passed it along, as Stengel had passed it to him. As Casey was revered, so will be Rod Dedeaux.

“The Tiger’s finally hanging ‘em up, huh?” says Paula Lee, the mother of former Trojan left-hander Bill Lee, from her home in San Rafael. “We’ll miss him. We really enjoyed him over the years.”

“With Rod, everybody’s Tiger, Tiger, Tiger,” says Tom House, another Trojan lefty, now pitching coach for the Texas Rangers. “I can still remember his sayings.”

“If he was good enough to beat a Trojan, he’d be a Trojan!

“Move those puppies, Tiger!

“He was a little ahead of his time,” House says. “In the ‘60s, they still had the blood-and-guts, go-get-’em type of head coaches. Rod had his Double Xers, his Bovard boners. He’d have everyone singing ‘McNamara’s Band.’

“Double Xers were the bench jockeys, the guys who didn’t have scholarships, who didn’t play much. We really had a reputation for being bench jockeys. The Bovard boners (USC then played at Bovard Field) was his little system of fines.”

That wasn’t all they did for fun, either.

“He liked to have a good time,” says Paula’s son, Bill, from Moncton, New Brunswick, where he has taken refuge in a Canadian senior league. “Whenever we’d go up to Palo Alto, we’d stop off at Dedeaux Island.

“Where is that? Right across from Big Al’s and Carol Doda’s place. You know, those twin 44s?”

Lee is referring to the North Beach area of San Francisco.

It was Dedeaux who talked House into going for his master’s degree. When Dedeaux made 9-year-old Sparky Anderson his batboy, circa 1943, he made Sparky bring him his report card to prove it wasn’t hurting his grades.

Playing for Dedeaux was like having another father . . . and more. Imagine getting your homework done so you can hit the honky-tonks with dad.

A DYNASTY FOR TROY

Dedeaux got the USC job in 1942, taking over from his coach, Justin Sam Barry. Dedeaux’s first son is named for Barry. Dedeaux’s program is like that, players sending their sons to him, brother following brother. The current roster has Don Buford’s son and Al Campanis’ grandson.

Actually, Dedeaux had had the job, unofficially, as a player. Barry was the basketball coach, too. His successor, Forrest Twogood, was another basketball coach who was also a baseball player and had to report to the Cleveland Indians. So the players helped run their own program.

In 1942, Dedeaux was returning to Los Angeles, his career having been cut short in the minors by a back injury. He spent the last $500 of his bonus on a Chevy truck and started hauling freight to Albuquerque. He earned spare change in the Pacific Coast League.

He also coached the Trojans.

“The truck business starts early in the day,” Dedeaux says. “It would be rare that I wasn’t there by 6 in the morning. By 2, I had put in a full day. And very often, it was coming down here (to his office in Commerce) at night. And a lot of the time, when we were hauling produce, I’d be here at 2 in the morning, so we could make the market.”

Says his wife, Helen: “It just seems like he should be tired once in a while. But he doesn’t ever seem to be.”

In the afternoons, he built college baseball’s first dynasty. Vigor and personality carried the day. That and the fact that this was Southern California, where the weather was warm year-round, baseball consciousness was rising and a mountain of talent lay waiting.

Once, for example, he had a struggling phenom from Long Beach, a shortstop named George Ambrow. So he got another shortstop from L.A. City College. That was Roy Smalley.

“Hey!” says John Scolinos, Cal Poly Pomona coach. “Remember! Greatest coach of all time! And I’m in position to make that statement.

“He had the ability to handle personnel. He could handle prima donnas. I saw that with the Olympic team (Scolinos was a coach on Dedeaux’s staff in 1984).

“And never negative. I never saw a guy like that. I never saw him--and we’re talking 40 years now--with his head in his jock. He was always a gentleman. You beat him? No complaints. I’ve never seen him complain. You know the old saying, ‘No matter what the score, maintain your poise?’ He wrote that.”

Scolinos’ rivalry with Dedeaux dates back to 1946. For this one, though, you don’t need a historian.

Dedeaux coached 53 major leaguers, enough for two big league teams with change left over. He coached Tom Seaver, Dave Kingman and Fred Lynn. Sparky Anderson was his batboy for five years.

He coached 214 players who signed pro contracts, enough to stock an entire eight-team league.

He coached Bill Sharman, Mike Garrett, Anthony Davis, Anthony Munoz and Jack Del Rio, who went on to star in other sports.

He coached Ed Hookstratten, the agent; Howard Weizman, the lawyer who defended John DeLorean, and a list of other notables-to-be that include the president of McGraw-Hill and the head of Coca-Cola of California. If they ever pass the hat at Dedeaux’s annual “I Played for Rod” golf tournament, they can probably buy two big league teams.

Dedeaux has never picked a best USC player, although Seaver, a certain Hall of Famer, wouldn’t be a bad nominee.

Seaver, of course, arrived as a breaking-ball pitcher who then grew stronger and faster. He was nowhere as blue chip a prospect as Bill Bordley, Mike Adamson or Randy Scarbery. All three were selected before any other pitchers in the big league draft. All three had arm problems and faded.

The naturals? Ron Fairly and Fred Lynn, who already had it all the day they walked up.

Then there were the players who needed some work, such as Kingman, who was kind of . . .

What?

“Dave was quiet in his way,” Dedeaux says. “He was a real fine boy. I’ve just felt, unfortunately, that people have taken the wrong slant. Not that he hasn’t contributed to it. My wife gets incensed when she hears anyone say anything about him. All of his big years, he never came into town without calling or coming over here. Sometimes I wouldn’t be here and he’d come over here and wait for me.

“He was an outstanding pitching prospect. He could throw. You talk about a major league slider, he had it. Plus a fastball. Of course, he didn’t throw it too straight. If you stood on the plate, you were reasonably safe.

“It’s no secret he fought the switch from pitching. It was a fight. His father used to call it the great experiment.

“One year, we were playing the Dodger rookies at Quigley Park and Dave struck out his first three times up. He came to me emotionally and said, ‘Coach, I don’t want to ever do this again!’ I said, ‘Davey, I have you penciled in next Wednesday to pitch.’ I’d work him in little spots. What he didn’t quite realize was I wasn’t using him too much.

“So he went up his fourth time. Joe Moeller was pitching and he threw him a low fastball. To this day, Joe Moeller says it was the longest ball ever hit off him, clear on the roof of a bakery that sits next to Quigley. It had to be 500 feet.

“So I was off the hook for another couple of weeks until he went bad again.”

The Trojan who surprised him most by making it?

“Don Buford,” Dedeaux says. “He was totally overlooked in every sense of the word. If anybody had said he could be a major league player, you’d have said no way, no way. But by sheer determination and hard work, he made himself into a major league star.

“He just had that great determination to play. It was the same thing in football. He was a neighborhood kid who wanted to get some (financial) help to come to USC. But there was no help available in baseball. So he said, ‘Maybe I could do it in football.’

“I had to argue with our football coach, Don Clark, to let him come out in the spring. He was the 17th -string halfback. Our equipment guy said, ‘Ahh, he can’t play.’ He gave him a uniform that was way too big, shoulder pads that made him look ridiculous. I had to argue with the equipment guy to get him half-way decently dressed.

“That year, Don Buford not only rose from 17th string, he made All-Coast halfback and was on Notre Dame’s all-opponent team. And it was the same thing in baseball.”

His greatest USC memory?

“We had a lot of comebacks but, no doubt, the greatest of them all would have been the one when we beat Minnesota in the 1973 College World Series. It might be the greatest comeback in SC athletic history, not just baseball.

“We’re behind 7-0, the bottom of the ninth, with one out and the great Dave Winfield pitching. Dave Winfield was the best athlete in college that year, drafted in football, baseball and basketball. He was not just a pitcher, he was an outstanding pitching prospect.

“We went into the bottom of the ninth, down 7-0, with one hit. And it was an infield hit. So, you know, a lot of people thought we were in trouble.

“And it was quite a testy feud going on. The Minnesota head coach had been ejected. The assistant coach later blamed himself--those were his words in the papers the next day--because they were kind of rubbing it in. There was kind of a verbal barrage going on.

“They were bunting to score more runs. We were telling ‘em, ‘You’ve got to play nine innings, you’re not playing Manitoba Tech, you’re playing the Trojans.’

“And we scored eight runs on ‘em in the bottom of the ninth, all earned. I can almost remember it blow by blow. Creighton Tevlin got an infield hit with one out. There was a key double by Fred Lynn. Richie Dauer got a big hit.

“Everybody had gone home. The place had been packed. Then as they were listening to the radio and started hearing the Trojans were rallying--we were known for our rallies--they started turning around to get back in the park. They said it was the worst traffic jam in Omaha history. People just left their cars where they were and ran into the ballpark.

“They had always booed us back there. We won pretty consistently. What was unbelievable about that was that we got a standing ovation. That was the first time they’d ever clapped for us.

“There were 5,000 people giving us a standing ovation and we said, ‘Man, history has really been made.’ The next day we came out to play the final game and damn it, they booed us! I said, ‘What happened to those 5,000 people?’

“We played Arizona State in the finals and they were beating us, 3-2. I had Marvin Cobb, who later became a great defensive back for the Cincinnati Bengals. We had men at first and third and I put Marv Cobb in. I took a gamble that we’d tie the game and I put him in to run at first. The batter hit a sacrifice fly and we scored the tying run.

“Now I give Marv Cobb the steal sign and he doesn’t go. They had a left-handed pitcher with a good move and a catcher who could really throw. Marv said later he just couldn’t believe I’d give him the steal sign in that situation, with all that pressure.

“I gave it to him again and he stole second in a bing-bing play.

“Creighton Tevlin was at bat. The outfield was drawn in because he was a punch hitter. Tevlin hit a ground ball over second base. The second baseman dove and couldn’t get it. The center fielder came in, picked it up and made a great throw to the plate, right on the button. And Marv Cobb--I counted--touched the ground eight times between second and home. That’s how fast he was going.

“He scored the winning run. The second baseman who’d dived was laying in the dirt. The catcher took the ball and threw it over the center field fence. It was a rather dramatic moment.”

Not all the memories are nice, though. Not all the tragedies concern anything as prosaic as the career curtailment of a sore-armed pitcher.

In 1971, one of Dedeaux’s former captains, Bruce Gardner, a pitcher who had graduated 11 years before and had floundered in the Dodger system, shot himself to death on the mound at Bovard Field.

Gardner was handsome, popular, president of his senior class at Fairfax High. He was an All-American at USC and a success in the investment field. He left a note that was never made public.

In a recent Los Angeles magazine article, Gardner’s friend, Marty Biegel, who gave the eulogy at his funeral, said the note had been directed at the three people who’d persuaded him to attend college rather than turning pro: His mother, his high school coach, and Dedeaux.

Dedeaux has always insisted that Gardner had a great time at USC, that the day he signed with the Dodgers was “the happiest day in his life.” Dedeaux remembers him asking for permission to report two weeks late, so he could make a last tour of Hawaii with the Trojans.

Dedeaux and Bill Schweppe, the Dodger farm director, remember Gardner as a player who got the most out of what he had, or as Dedeaux once said, a disappointment only in his own mind.

Said Dedeaux: “I can remember having a conversation with him where you could see that he was troubled. He wasn’t living in town then. Of course, anyone who’s ever had Psychology 100A knows you go back to where your love is.

“He stayed a day or two and said something about how it had straightened him out. Looking back, you wish you had followed up. So then, suddenly, there was the tragedy.”

SPACEMAN: THE FINAL FRONTIER

If you want to know about Dedeaux’s rapport with his players, you have only to look at the case of Bill (Spaceman) Lee, who tested the outer limits of his coach’s patience and found it a long trip.

Lee says Dedeaux suspended him for leaving practice at least once. Years after Lee left, he made remarks suggesting that he had smoked marijuana while at USC. Of course, he then counter-suggested that he might not have. You see how that goes?

But Lee and Dedeaux are still friendly. Lee paid his own way to Dedeaux’s last golf tournament and pitched in the last USC old-timers’ game. Lee still writes from whatever outpost he’s been allowed to pitch in.

“Freddy Lynn says he could still get people out right now,” Dedeaux said. “I was talking to Al Campanis about him the other night when I had dinner in Campanis’ box. I couldn’t sell him to Campanis, though.”

Tom Lasorda thanks you, Tom Lasorda’s family thanks you, Tom Lasorda’s friends thank you . . .

Lee is currently in New Brunswick, a little piece of paradise in the Canadian Maritimes which he says has the advantages of “cool nights, soft fields, short fences and $2 lobster.”

When reached last week in Moncton, he had just arrived home early from practice. He said he’d just “blown a (bleeping) fuse and just stomped right out,” vowing “never to practice baseball again as long as I live,” angered as he had been by “the inflexibility of people who have to do the same thing the same way every day.”

So if we can change the subject to Rod Dedeaux . . .

“I heard he’s leaving on the Bangor (Maine) news,” Lee said. “That’s the only news I get from the U.S. It was just like a shock to me. I didn’t really expect it.

“SC has kinda fallen from grace but I’ve kind of put my finger on that. It started with the batgirls--the cheerleaders. I’ve told him that before.

“Back in 1968 when we won the national championship, he used that as a rallying point when we played the Salukis of Southern Illinois. They had white shoes and batgirls. He thought that was a travesty to the tradition of baseball. I come back 15 years later and there’s batgirls at SC.

“But I told him, you know, I could come back to SC and we’d win national championships over and over again. I always wore No. 37. Casey Stengel wore 37. There’s just like a direct chain from Casey Stengel to Rod Dedeaux to me.

“I never forgot anything he ever told me. The greatest thing was not to think on the field. We were playing against Harvard. There was a runner on second base and I had a one-run lead with their big hitter coming up and a left-hander coming up next. So I was going to walk him and pitch to the next guy.

“He comes out to the mound and says, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ I had started to walk him myself. I said I’m pitching around him.

“He said, ‘Don’t think, Tiger. I’ll do the thinking. Just throw the ball.’ ”

And the famous drug scandal?

“I got traded from the Red Sox to Montreal and the first time in spring training when they played, the Boston writers all came up to me. They said, ‘Bill, were there problems with drugs on the Red Sox?’

“I said, ‘Yes, there was a big problem. They’ve been abusing alcohol, nicotine and caffeine for years.’

“They said ‘No, no, no, not those drugs. Marijuana!’

“I said, ‘Hell, I’ve used marijuana since 1968 and it’s never done me any harm.’

“Next day, the headlines say ‘Lee Smokes Pot’ and Bowie Kuhn comes and asks me about it. So I told him, ‘Nowhere in the body of that article does it say I smoked it. And I didn’t.

“He asked me how I used it. I said, ‘I put it on my buckwheat pancakes in the morning. It makes me so I could run 10 miles without getting tired. It makes me impervious to bus fumes.’

“I gave him more rope and more rope and more rope. And then I hung him.’ ”

Nicely done, but now surely the truth can be told. Did he smoke pot at USC?

“No,” says Lee. “Never on campus. See how that goes?”

THE END

No one gets everything he wants and Dedeaux could have thought of a better exit line.

He won his last national title in 1978. After that he had Pac-10 finishes of 4-5-3-6-2-2-6-4.

Dedeaux can do 30 minutes without pausing for breath on the NCAA dropping its scholarship limitation to 13 and catching the Trojans in the neck, the fact that USC is a private school with high tuition, which makes it tougher than at state schools, or better endowed ones such as Stanford.

Scolinos said: “You look at the big leagues, they draft some guys that turn out to be lemons. With 13 scholarships, if three are lemons, that leaves 10 ballplayers. Back when there were 22, you could foul up on three or four and still have the nucleus of a good club.

“What hurts him is being a private school. Of course, other private schools like Stanford hung in there. But a state school, they can get by by giving a guy maybe a half scholarship. If you give a half at USC, that still leaves him a lot of money to pay.”

But maybe it was more than that. USC might have invented the dynasty, college baseball division, but there are lots more powers now.

“It’s an era we’ll never see again,” Tom House said. “I hope whoever picks up for him, they don’t expect this. Because it’s not going to happen.

“It’s an awareness thing. For all those years, Rod was sitting on top and all those people were trying to emulate him.

“And the game has changed since I signed a pro contract in 1967. Then, there was just a trickle from the colleges. Now, the big leagues are getting more and more of their players out of the college ranks. I think Rod was perfect for his time but then tuition started going up and the NCAA started clamping down.”

Said UCLA’s Gary Adams, in 1982: “His biggest problems are things that are out of his hands, things he can’t control. He can’t prevent other schools from getting better.”

There was speculation this season that Dedeaux might retire. There was speculation that the new, tough athletic director, Mike McGee, might ease him out.

At the press conference announcing his retirement, both Dedeaux and McGee were asked if Dedeaux’s stepping down was voluntarily. Both said it was.

There does seem to have been a process of negotiation leading up to it, however. Dedeaux does not seem to have been averse to leaving, or to put it another way, acceding to McGee’s stated desire to employ a full-time baseball coach.

But he wasn’t going to just fade away. At his final Trojan game, at what has been called the House that Dedeaux Built, Dedeaux Field, he told The Times’ Bob Cuomo:

“I’ve been making decisions about USC baseball for 50 years. . . . I’m not going to stop.”

Dedeaux wanted his oldest son Justin, who played and coached at USC, to succeed him. McGee didn’t.

Dedeaux said: “That had always been Justin’s life ambition. But the timing just wasn’t right now to do that.”

Dedeaux was said to be adamant that his replacement be a Trojan. It was, Mike Gillespie, one of his players who’d gone on to coach College of the Canyons.

Were there negotiations?

“Doctor Zumberge (James Zumberge, USC president) who I feel is a very able president, was most generous,” Dedeaux said. “He seemed to feel that I did know enough about what’s going on at USC. He wanted me totally involved in helping in the selection of a coach.”

And McGee?

“I know he’s a controversial figure,” Dedeaux says. “I think he has a hard job to do. He’s the boss. I think he’s making a good effort.”

Does this man look retired? At 71, he has just come from two lunches, although he spoke at only one. He was supposed to be in Cuba this week on amateur baseball business, but that’s been rescheduled.

Remember, besides winning more games than any college coach and his myriad other records, he is also given credit for getting baseball into the Olympics.

And, of course, he isn’t retiring from the trucking company. This puppy, he owns outright.

“Got to make a living,” he says laughing. “Maybe I’ll get down to a 15-hour work day.”

“I have a feeling I’m going to become a golf widow,” Helen says.

Everybody has his day to become history. A thousand Tigers thank you for the memories, Tiger . . . whether Marvin Cobb’s feet actually touched the ground eight times between second and home, and everyone really deserted their cars in Omaha, or not.

‘We had a lot of comebacks but, no doubt, the greatest of them all would have been the one when we beat Minnesota in the 1973 College World Series. It might be the greatest comeback in SC athletic history, not just baseball. We’re behind 7-0, the bottom of the ninth, with one out and the great Dave Winfield pitching.’--ROD DEDEAUX USC BASEBALL TEAMS THAT WON NCAA TITLES UNDER ROD DEDAUX

YEAR RECORD FINAL OPPONENT, SCORE 1948 26-4-0 Yale, 9-2 1958 29-3-0 Missouri, 8-7 1961 36-7-0 Oklahoma State, 1-0 1963 35-10-0 Arizona, 5-2 1968 43-12-1 Southern Illinois, 4-3 1970 45-13-0 Florida State, 2-1 (15 innings) 1971 46-11-0 Southern Illinois, 7-2 1972 47-13-1 Arizona State, 1-0 1973 51-11-0 Arizona State, 4-3 1974 50-20-1 Miami (Fla.), 7-3 1978 54-9-0 Arizona State, 10-3

NOTE Dedeaux was co-coach with Sam Berry in 1948. Records are for games against college teams only. Source: USC sports information office.