COLLEGE FOOTBALL : For Joe Kapp, These Are Not the Best of Times : Golden Bears’ Coach Is Under Increasing Pressure to Step Aside at Berkeley

Joe Kapp is the football coach at the University of California. He is also a man who appears to be bailing a sinking ship with a rusty tin can while hurricane winds send 15-foot waves over his decks.

Indeed, in the face of Hurricane Alumni and Hurricane Public Opinion, Coach Kapp sets his jaw, smiles and keeps on bailing. The rusty tin can kept right on dipping here Saturday, even after UCLA had blown Cal away with a 36-10 victory that left the once-proud Golden Bears with a 1-5 record.

“I enjoyed myself in the game today,” Kapp said in his press conference afterward. “The players competed hard, played with their hearts all day. I absolutely don’t enjoy the loss, but I do enjoy the going.”

For Kapp, this is the stiff-upper-lip approach. His contract runs through the 1988 season, and his deportment is that of a man who expects to be here at least that long, even if others are already ordering flowers for his wake.

Kapp’s positive stance is understandable, considering the background and nature of this proud man.

He quarterbacked Cal to the 1959 Rose Bowl, its last such appearance. He was a star quarterback in Canada for eight seasons, then a star quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings of the National Football League for four seasons. In fact, he is the only man to lead teams to the Rose Bowl, the Grey Cup (Canadian title game) and the Super Bowl.

In football circles, he is a man possessing considerable charisma.

As a player, his skills were a poor second to his fiery style. He was a renegade, a Mexican Rambo. The imagery remains clear. You just knew that Kapp would storm a fort. Or wrestle bears. In the NFL, he was a cross between Bobby Layne and Jack Tatum. They didn’t call him an assassin, they just looked for bullets a lot. He was kind of a Dick Butkus that they let handle the ball.

Football has always been a game of men’s men, where talk is brave and action speaks loudest. It is a game where Kapp thrived.

He has a presence that says he’s a leader, a presence he used wile moving from a football career into success in business and the movie industry after his days with the Vikings ended in 1971.

And so, after the 1981 season, when Roger Theder had just completed coaching seasons of 3-8 and 2-9, the Joe Kapp groundswell took on earthquake proportions. Everybody short of Theder’s closest relatives wanted Kapp to take over and return the Bears to the days of Craig Morton and Jackie Jensen and Les Richter and Steve Bartkowski and, yes, Joe Kapp.

And so Kapp came, saw and--at least for a while--conquered. He was 7-4 in 1982, his first season, and was selected Pac-10 coach of the year. Then he was 5-5-1 in ’83.

But in the ’84 season, the conquering hero started slipping off his white horse a lot. He went 2-9 and, even worse, got handled easily by hated Stanford, 27-10. Even the Stanford band couldn’t bail him out in that one, try as it certainly must have.

And when last season produced an only slightly better 4-7, the same kind of public groundswell that got Kapp here started to rumble with suggestions that he take the same road back out of town.

So, going into Saturday’s game against UCLA, Kapp was, indeed, a man in need. An upset would get the restless alumni off his back, not to forget those who write newspaper sports columns in the Bay Area. Even a good showing against a highly regarded Bruin team might take some of the heat off.

Kapp got neither. Instead, he got predictable inconsistent play from his freshman quarterback and unpredictable temper tantrums from veterans.

Troy Taylor, Cal’s young quarterback, completed 14 passes for 123 yards but threw a terrible pass that was intercepted and set up a fourth-quarter UCLA touchdown just when it appeared that Cal had a chance to make the final outcome look respectable.

The score was only 23-10 when Taylor, in the grasp of the Bruins’ Terry Tumey, tossed a littled floater in the left flat that hit the Bruins’ Billy Ray in the hands. Had Ray tried to get out of the way, the ball probably would have stuck in his face mask. Three plays later, Matt Stevens passed to Willie (Flipper) Anderson for a touchdown that made it 29-10. So much for Kapp’s respectable defeat.

Earlier, one Kapp’s star defensive players, noseguard Majett Whiteside, apparently taking exception to some rough tactics on the UCLA side of the line, took a roundhouse swing at a UCLA player. Among the problems with that were (1) the swing was well after the play had been blown dead by an official’s whistle, and (2) the swing was within very close proximity and sightline of the same official.

So Whiteside was asked to spend the rest of the game watching from the sidelines, further adding to Kapp’s already severe manpower problem.

Later in the game, Kapp’s star linebacker, Hardy Nickerson, had to be physically restrained by officials and teammates when he wanted to fight a Bruin. Although he wasn’t ejected, Nickerson--whose fit included stomping and helmet-throwing but stopped short of thumb-sucking--left the game for a long period. Kapp missed UCLA’s final touchdown, a six-yard run by James Primus, because he had his back turned to the field, trying to calm down Nickerson.

“In any football game, you have body contact and lots of frustration,” Kapp said later. “It is both a luxury and a mistake to let your emotions go and strike back.”

That also applies to Kapp himself, even though striking back is much more his style than biting the bullet.

He was asked during his postgame press conference about his players’ morale.

“Ask them,” he said.

Then he was asked what he said to his players after the game.

“None of your business,” he said.

Those few testy moments aside, however, Kapp remained poised. He even wandered off into a few fits of fantasy, talking about the “beautiful symmetry” of the game of football, lovingly referring to his freshman players as “puppies” and telling the gathered media that he thought his team was in the game “right until the very end.”

Perhaps fantasy is Kapp’s best salvation these days. Perhaps it is the best way for him to weather the storm. Even better than a rusty tin can.