Florida Fans Won’t Rattle Miami’s Vinny Testaverde : Quarterback Is, Uh, Key to Hurricanes’ Season

Because of “Autogate,” a recent flap at the University of Miami, students at the University of Florida are being urged to rattle their keys at the visiting team during today’s football game at Gainesville whenever Hurricane quarterback Vinny Testaverde is calling signals.

“Very funny,” Testaverde said.

Testaverde was not involved in Autogate or any other highway mishap. But several of his teammates did have car trouble, of one kind or another, in recent weeks, which was good enough for the folks from upstate Gatorville to begin this business with the, uh, Florida keys.

“Remember to rattle those keys tomorrow,” a rock jockey at Gainesville radio station WRUF-FM reminded listeners Friday. “Vinny Testaverde is probably on his way up here right this minute in a leased Mercedes.”

Car jokes will be the in thing for Miami opponents this season. Three of Coach Jimmy Johnson’s players nearly got into hot water with the NCAA for driving expensive automobiles leased from a dealership run by a registered sports agent. A fourth player was ruled ineligible for one game for a similar infraction.

Miami’s troubles continued on Aug. 20 when wide receiver Brian Blades’ 1986 Toyota was involved in a Coral Gables fender-bender.

Fellow wide receiver Mike Irvin happened by in another vehicle and saw that Blades had been in accident. He stopped to see what was going on. Two campus cops accused Irvin of obstructing traffic and filed a report, claiming that Irvin and his passenger, an unidentified Miami teammate, had yelled obscenities at them from the car.

Irvin said it was the other way around. One of the officers, he said, told him to “meet him at 11:45 p.m., when he gets off work”--presumably not to talk football.

“It seems to me like they’re harassing us,” Irvin said.

This was not a charge made lightly, because these very same policemen, Sgt. Greg Mallinger and Patrolman Robert Remmen, had, on the day before the Blades accident and the Irvin run-in, been the ones who arrested Miami middle linebacker George Mira Jr. on felony charges of battery and unlawful possession of steroids.

Mira, the son of former Hurricane and professional quarterback George Mira, is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday. He will start against Florida today.

Such peccadilloes have, naturally, supplied pregame ammunition to Gator fans. Any sort of boost is welcome when two collegiate rivals meet, but these two happen to be regarded among the nation’s best teams. Miami is ranked third in a current poll, Florida 13th.

There also is a personal matter to be settled, since the quarterbacks, Testaverde and Florida’s Kerwin Bell, are among the early favorites for the Heisman Trophy.

Testaverde is not concerned about noise. He heard plenty at the season opener at South Carolina but engineered Miami to a fairly routine 34-14 victory.

Then again, he also heard plenty in the Sugar Bowl game last Jan. 1 at New Orleans, where Tennessee fans drowned him out repeatedly and defensive backs intercepted three of his passes in a 35-7 loss, which cost the Hurricanes their chance to be voted national champions.

They lost their last game of the season and their first game--to Florida--and none in between in a 10-2 season that included a two-touchdown victory over the eventual national champion, Oklahoma. Except for the Sugar Bowl, Testaverde and the Hurricanes did not play a game in which they scored fewer than 23 points.

“Vinny is the best quarterback I have ever been associated with,” said his coach, Johnson.

The coach when Testaverde arrived on campus was Howard Schnellenberger, who quit to coach a Miami USFL franchise that never got off the ground. Schnellenberger was paid for a full year without working, then became coach at the University of Louisville, where the available talent is somewhat less than he had once known here.

Case in point: There was a time, in 1982, when the quarterbacks on Schnellenberger’s Miami roster included Jim Kelly, who until Dan Marino signs his revised contract with the Miami Dolphins, is the highest-paid player in the National Football League for the Buffalo Bills; Bernie Kosar, now the starting quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, and Testaverde, who very likely will be the first or second player chosen in the 1987 NFL draft.

Testaverde, the 6-5, 220-pound, permanently 5 o’clock-shadowed New Yorker, intended to transfer from Miami had Kosar not turned pro before his senior year.

Because of such outstanding field leadership, the Hurricanes have become a major power in college football in this decade. Their record since 1980 is 54-17. They played in the 1980 Peach Bowl, 1983 Orange Bowl, 1984 Fiesta Bowl and 1985 Sugar Bowl. Their 31-30 win over Nebraska in that ’83 Orange Bowl earned Miami the national championship.

More memorable yet was a defeat--the 47-45 “Hail Mary” loss to Boston College in 1984 on Doug Flutie’s last-gasp pass. Miami’s next game after that one was almost as high-scoring and almost as disappointing, the 39-37 Fiesta Bowl loss to UCLA.

Last year, the Hurricanes started taking the measure of others. They beat Rice by 28 points, Boston College by 35, Cincinnati by 38, Louisville by 38 and Notre Dame by 51 in a game that brought out the fighting blood in people of Irish and other descent, it being seen as an unnecessarily cruel affront to the Mr. Rogers of football coaches, Gerry Faust, who was coaching his last game for Notre Dame.

Johnson felt no sympathy at all. “Nobody felt sorry for me when Oklahoma beat me, 63-14,” he said, referring to the final game of his 1980 season as coach at Oklahoma State.

Miami has been able to run up scores on people, voluntarily or otherwise, by virtue of an offense that last season averaged 461 1/2 yards of total offense a game, led by Testaverde’s 3,238 yards passing and 21 touchdown throws.

Miami’s linemen have big numbers, too. Their defensive tackles weigh 290 and 268 pounds. This team’s motto could be: “We Got Vinny and We Ain’t Skinny.”

But Florida’s offensive line is even larger. To get to Bell, the Hurricanes will have to get by offensive tackles who weigh 325 and 295 and guards who go 280 apiece. Florida has nearby islands that are not this big.

Unimpressed, Miami’s 290-pound tackle, Jerome Brown, said, “We think of ourselves as the best defensive line in the country,” and, “No one around can stop us from getting into their backfield.”

Brown was one of the players who had car trouble. No, not squeezing into one.

He and fullbacks Alonzo Highsmith and Cleveland Gary were found to be driving automobiles leased from a company owned by a registered sports agent. The NCAA excused this, however, since the players’ families were paying for the cars and since the players claimed they had no idea the gentleman was an agent.

Winston Moss was not so lucky. The senior linebacker was ruled ineligible for the opener at South Carolina because a man who employed him in a law office, a man who moonlighted as a part-time instructor in the university business department, also happened to be a registered sports agent. He had let Moss use a Nissan 300ZX in lieu of pay.

These players’ conflicts have been dealt with, but there remains the matter of Mira. What began as an argument with a girlfriend turned into a disturbance with police and a charge of possessing illegal steroids. Attorney Stanford Blake told the Miami Herald that evidence has been presented to county prosecutors proving that the steroids belonged to someone else.

Johnson, for his part, said he would be glad to get back to concentrating on football. “There have been a lot of distractions,” the Miami coach said. “If we can ever get around to business as usual on the field, it should be a very good season.”

Testaverde makes no secret of actively pursuing the Heisman Trophy. “I’ve wanted it since I was a kid,” he said. “I was 12 years old when I first heard about it, and I want one very much.

“Also, I don’t know if anybody’s ever done this before, but if I win the Heisman, I’m going to see if I can get a replica made, then melt it down and give pieces of it to everybody else on the team. You know, so they can make charms or necklaces out of it. I think that would be nice.”

Testaverde understands that he will be the focus of a lot of attention, on and off the field. His roommate this summer, John Routh, the man inside the furry Miami Maniac mascot disguise, got so tired of fielding Testaverde’s calls that he finally recorded an answering-machine message in a vocal impersonation of Mr. Rogers: “Hi, neighbor. I’m sorry, but Vinny is not home right now. Can you say unavailable? If you leave a message, I’m sure Vinny will get back to you, because you’re a special friend. Can you say friend? “

Testaverde’s friends from Florida are waiting for him today. But his friends from South Carolina were waiting a week ago, many of them with catcalls and what Vinny called “bad gestures,” the first time he found himself deep in his own territory, very near the fans.

He quickly completed a long pass to Mike Irvin, and the fans shut up.

“That’s how you handle a crowd,” Testaverde said.