USC-UCLA: This Isn’t a Rivalry, It’s a Revolution

Embarrassing, eh?

Never would have happened in Howard Jones’ day.

O.J. Simpson, where were you when they needed you? Mike Garrett? Marcus Allen?

How could we ever explain it to Orville Mohler? Cotton Warburton? Gaius Shaver? Marshall Duffield? Antelope Al Krueger? The Musick brothers?

UCLA rolling up 45 points on USC? Never! In Jones’ day, they wouldn’t have had the ball that much.

You remember how USC teams used to be? They just took the ball and started to mash you into a pulp. They had all these guys who could run the 100 in 9.3 or so, put the shot 70 or 80 feet, jump straight up 4 yards or tear a telephone book in half and bend a crowbar at the same time.

They had every able-bodied football player in the state of California and parts of Iowa and Arizona in the lineup. The “Thundering Herd” they used to call them. Howard Jones didn’t coach them, he trained them.

They wouldn’t have known UCLA when it showed up in those days. They mixed it up with Caltech. It was just a funny little building loft school in downtown Los Angeles, and the Trojans just treated UCLA players like complicated tackling dummies. The scores were USC 76, UCLA 0; USC 52, UCLA 0. UCLA got the message. It began to play Pomona and Loyola.

USC used to schedule the Bruins as a favor.

Oh, they beat USC here and there. When they had Red Sanders. Or the occasional great player like Jackie Robinson, Kenny Washington, Bob Waterfield. But order was quickly restored. The tradesmen were put back in their place.

USC has lost by more than 45-25 before. But, usually, to Notre Dame or Michigan. National champion teams. Not their former caddies.

They’re supposed to own this town. The Trojans weren’t America’s team but they were Hollywood’s team. Sunset and Vine’s team. This is where John Wayne came from and half the assistant directors and cutters of the sound stages.

But, more importantly, this is where football players came from. USC had only to crook its finger and it got any player it wanted from coast to coast. The scholarship came with the Rose Bowl attached. And who could resist a date with Jean Harlow and New Year’s in Pasadena? You were going to go instead maybe to Ames, Iowa?

USC lost Saturday precisely because it no longer gets the players it wants even from the neighborhood. They were done in Saturday by a local boy who made good, Gaston Green.

Gaston is as good a runner with the football as you will ever see. Swift, sure, shifty, he puts you in mind of the great Heisman winners of USC’s past, the ones whose statues grace the school’s Heritage Hall trophy room and whose backfield he would have been in himself 20 years ago. He would have been that athletic cliche, the shining star, the USC tailback, operating behind one of those lines that used to come at you like nothing so much as twenty tons of falling coal or a highway rock slide. He might never have been tackled.

A guy with a name like Gaston Green belongs in a USC backfield. That name was born for a USC backfield, born to raise the echoes of strophes of old and hit the glory road behind that other Trojan staple, Student Body Right. He would have been all-conference, All-American, all-world, Heisman winner, No. 1 draft, and, probably, doing Monday Night Football.

USC would have landed him then. It would have been as foregone as Simpson.

This time, it didn’t. Listen to Gaston explain his odd choice of UCLA: “When I was growing up, I always wanted to go to SC. But, then, UCLA started to come on strong and started to beat them every year when I was coming through high school. So I jumped on the bandwagon.”

Heads would roll in Howard Jones’ day. For, do you want to know what Gaston Green did to the former Thundering Herd Saturday? Well, in the first half of the game, he ran for 168 yards and 3 touchdowns. All day, he ran for 227 yards and 4 touchdowns.

The game was 31-0 at the half. It might have been 61-0 at the finish but UCLA Coach Terry Donahue, who would worry about a flood if he lived in the Sahara, or running out of ice in Siberia, got to fretting about what might happen if his team didn’t take the ball and try to bury it in the backyard. “The differential might have been different if I hadn’t gone into a stall,” he confessed after the game, a frown furrowing his brow (Terry is recognizable by his forehead furrows the way some people are by fingerprints).

Terry might also have given some consideration to the inadvisability of big score victories in this conference. In 1966, Notre Dame beat a USC team 51-0--and didn’t beat them again for seven years. In fact, Notre Dame would win only one game in the next ten. In 1954, Red Sanders at UCLA was to beat Stanford, 72-0--and all that did was inspire Stanford into busting up the whole conference two years later.

“I stayed with a running game to use up the clock,” Donahue admitted. When the score was 38-0, he decided to smuggle it into the hangar. He also elected not to rush the USC passer for the last 25 minutes of the game. This is the football strategy which is the equivalent of handing your adversary a loaded gun in a duel and gambling you can dodge the bullets at 20 paces.

So, Donahue let USC keep its dignity, let the Trojans wander off the field like an old dowager pretending not to notice the fingers are out of her gloves and the lace in her shawl is tattered and yellowing with age and her shoes don’t match.

UCLA used to have to beat USC by guile and speed, not personnel. But USC lost this one when it lost Gaston Green and probably a hatful of his peers who also read the Sunday scores.

This is the fourth time in five years the Trojans have lost this game. One of these years, UCLA may want them to take the first game on the schedule. So they can use USC as a tuneup for Oklahoma. Or Arizona State. Any team you can run up 512 yards on and score at will is a breather, not a rival. They may start to think of USC as that funny little school downtown at the other end of the freeway--and wonder maybe whether they shouldn’t schedule Pomona.