Even Though They’re Ranked No. 1, Hurricanes Have Their Problems

It would be nice for the people at the University of Miami if they could sit back and smile while Vinny Testaverde tries to pass his way to a Heisman Trophy. But Testaverde has to share the headlines here with his teammates.

This season, you can read or hear about Testaverde’s exploits on the football field whenever his teammates aren’t being arrested, cited for carrying a weapon, fighting in public with girlfriends, siphoning gasoline from cars, driving an expensive sports model that belongs to an agent or charging thousands of dollars’ worth of phone calls to someone else’s MCI credit card.

You want “Miami Vice”? Here it is, in real life. All that’s missing are Crockett and Tubbs.

The telephone credit-card scandal, which hit the papers here last week just before previously top-ranked Oklahoma visited the Hurricanes, is the latest off-the-field crisis for the Miami team.

University officials have acknowledged that 34 players illegally charged more than $8,000 in phone calls to an MCI credit-card number that was posted on the wall of a dormitory.

About half of the players have paid what they owe. But school officials have had to work out a payment plan for the others to keep MCI from prosecuting.

This is not the most serious charge Miami players have faced in the past few months, during which:

--Willie Smith, last year’s starting tight end, was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine and a handgun.

--Miami had to declare starting linebacker Winston Moss ineligible for the season opener because he violated an NCAA rule by using a car leased by a part-time instructor (David Glassberg) who also has acted as a professional sports agent. The NCAA will examine the school’s review of the incident, and Glassberg’s grading procedures.

--Starting running back Alonzo Highsmith, starting defensive tackle Jerome Brown and future starting back Cleveland Gary were cleared only after the school was forced to check the validity of lease contracts on Corvettes and a Toyota Supra. It was found that relatives of the players leased the cars through Mel Levine, who represents two members of the Miami Dolphins.

--Starting linebacker George Mira Jr. was arrested Aug. 19 and charged with possession of an illegal drug (steroids), battery on a police officer, disorderly intoxication (argument with a girlfriend) and fleeing a police officer. The charges were dropped when a non-athlete told the Dade County State’s Attorney’s Office the steroids were his. Local police are furious.

--Melvin Bratton, the team’s best running back, was detained at a J.C. Penney store, where he went shopping with his mother and sister, when he walked out of the store with a pair of sunglasses. Bratton said he forgot he was wearing them; a trial is pending.

--Brown left a handgun in a shopping cart on campus.

--Dan Stubbs, a starting defensive end, ran out of gas and was caught siphoning some from a nearby car. Jimmy Johnson, the head coach, said he would have done the same thing if he had run out of gas.

“When it rains, it pours,” Miami’s director of athletics, San Jankovich, said in an interview. “It would be great if Vinny were getting all the attention now, but. . . .

“It’s unfortunate to have this series of problems,” Jankovich added. “But, thank God, they have been minor incidents.”

Mira, son of the former Miami all-America quarterback, called the questions about the troubles surrounding him and his teammates “nitpicking. . . . There was stuff said about me which simply wasn’t true.”

The whole thing seems a trifle overblown to Bratton, too. “I grew up in Miami,” he said. “There are a lot of, well, let’s say distractions here in Miami. But I think all the bad publicity has brought us closer now. I think it will help us more than it hurts in the long run. . . .

“We’re a combination of the Bears and the Raiders,” said Bratton, a brash but likable junior halfback. “We don’t dwell on the image around here. But if we sense fear (in a teammate), we’ll mess with him bad. You grow into it or you get drilled.”

It’s no wonder Miami plays best when the Hurricanes are told they are underdogs.

Nebraska discovered that penchant in Miami in the 1984 Orange Bowl, in which the Cornhuskers lost the national championship to the Hurricanes. Oklahoma learned it anew last weekend.

“When we hear that we’re supposed to be underdogs, that a point spread is in the other team’s favor, it ticks us off,” Bratton said. “That’s just the way we are.”

The Hurricanes have Highsmith and Bratton in the backfield. They have an all-America candidate in Mike Irvin at wide receiver. Stubbs and Brown are absolute terrors on the defensive front. And, Mira pointed out, “(Oklahoma’s Brian) Bosworth thinks he’s the only linebacker in the country, but I had as many or more tackles than he did last year (Mira: 76 unassisted; Bosworth: 73).”

And, of course, there’s fifth-year senior Testaverde, one of the most talented quarterbacks in the nation as a high school senior on Long Island. Maryland was among the schools strongly recruiting him, “but I didn’t have the grades to go to a Division I school,” Testaverde said.

After Testaverde spent a year at Fork Union Military Prep in Virginia, Maryland’s interest cooled, Testaverde said, and he took off for fun, sun and 35 passes a game in South Florida.

He knew Miami was recruiting another quarterback, but didn’t know anything about the other recruit, a guy named Bernie Kosar. “They told me they were recruiting some guy,” Testaverde said in an interview this week. “He just happened to be an all-America, a Heisman Trophy candidate and a pro prospect, that’s all.”

When Johnson replaced Howard Schnellenberger after the 1983 championship season, he was shocked to find a backup quarterback as good as Testaverde, who has thrown a ball 70 yards while standing flatfooted.

“I never had been around a quarterback that had this kind of talent,” Johnson said. “I’ve been around linebackers such as Hugh Green who had that kind of talent. I’ve been around defensive linemen such as Lee Roy Selmon who had that kind of talent. Vinny’s got that kind of talent at quarterback.”

Johnson stayed with Kosar in 1984, but the match wasn’t perfect. Kosar was a cerebral, almost Ivy League sort who wasn’t known as a big team man. It was well-known that Kosar picked up the offense quicker than Testaverde, largely the reason he started before Testaverde in the first place. But even now, the players hint at having liked Testaverde better.

“In the past,” Testaverde said, “it was always the head coach and the quarterback getting all the attention. . . . I didn’t like that, special attention for some. I just wanted everybody to be treated equally.”

Before Testaverde could transfer, Kosar told him to wait, that he might be leaving school two years early. Testaverde didn’t start in high school until he was a senior and here he was, sitting on the bench all over again. “My parents always told me, ‘Whatever God wants to be will be.’ I probably said that 50 or 60 times a week to get through that period.”

But once Kosar had passed up his junior and senior seasons and gone to the Cleveland Browns, Testaverde had his chance. After he had played one game, Johnson said Testaverde was the best quarterback he had ever been around.

Testaverde had spent years hanging out with the offensive linemen, lifting weights with them (at 6 feet 5, 220 pounds, he can do a squat with 500 pounds and bench-press 325) and taking part in some of their “grass drills.”

Johnson says, “Vinny’s worked at being a regular guy. When he says he doesn’t want the Heisman if it means he’ll lose the friendship and respect of his teammates, I believe him.”

“Vinny’s like a brother to me,” Brown said. “He told us if he wins the Heisman, we all do. We’ve been close with Vinny for a long time.”

Testaverde says it has always been his dream to win the Heisman, but because of all the demands on his time for appearances and interviews, “it’s not as important as it used to be.”

It is for his father, Al, a construction worker in Elmont, N.Y., who once said, “He wasn’t 2 hours old and already I was fantasizing about the great athlete he might become. . . . When he got home (from the hospital), I put a football in his bassinet.”

It was almost a year ago in Norman that Testaverde threw two touchdown passes to upset Oklahoma, the soon-to-be national champion, in what he calls “a game that came at the right time for me.”

He completed 61% of his passes for 3,238 yards and 21 touchdowns in 1985. He passed for 200 yards or more in every game and hit the 300-yard mark four times.