Smith Didn’t Come to USC to Rebuild

Maybe if it hadn’t been 6:45 in the morning when Larry Smith’s Cadillac pulled into the Pacific Dining Car’s parking lot, a few more booths might have been occupied in the restaurant, a few more bloodshot eyes might have been open when he walked in, and some customer might have nudged another and whispered: “Hey, there’s USC’s new football coach.”

Had this been Tucson, rare would be the taco stand, doughnut shop or fancy chop house where the University of Arizona’s football or basketball coach could enter a room unrecognized.

This, however, was downtown Los Angeles--city of the padded shoulders, stacker of Wheat Thins, butcher of damned few hogs--where a face in the crowd does not become a star on the sidewalk overnight.

Larry Smith has yet to coach his first game at USC, but, for those not conscious of how these things can sneak up on you, it is less than six weeks away. Prime time awaits the Trojans, in a Monday night game Sept. 7 under portable lights at Michigan State, and although we do know that the home team has a Heisman Trophy candidate, Lorenzo White, we have no clue what to expect from the visitors, except that they happen to have this new coach.

The guy is up early and eager to get to work. “I’ve always been a firm believer that you don’t just go out and win a game. You win a game because you’re prepared,” Smith said over breakfast Tuesday, talking about how he intends to tackle USC football in the weeks to come. “You reach your level of consistency of play early.

“People are still all hung up on ‘fight’ speeches and halftime talks, and there is a time for that. But it shouldn’t be necessary every week. To me, a football player is prepared properly, physically and mentally, so that when game time hits on Saturday afternoon, he pushes a button and it’s there. It doesn’t have to be a super-emotional thing. It should be a super-intensity thing.”

Opponents shouldn’t worry USC.

USC should worry opponents.

In the task at hand, Smith succeeds a man who did not succeed, a man, Ted Tollner, whose last team had the bad taste to go 7-5. Great things are expected from a USC football coach, you see. He is employed by a school that, in the last quarter of a century alone, has mass-produced winners of four Heisman trophies, nine Rose Bowls and five national championships. In Troy, 7-5 feels like 5-7. Any place but first feels like last. The white horse must not go lame.

Smith already understands that. A guy does not have to be a doctor to recognize bruised pride. Nor does he need to be reminded that Tollner’s first year on the job, 1983, was the “Heaven’s Gate” of football seasons, a 4-6-1 flop that included a 24-point loss to South Carolina, a 20-point loss to Arizona State, even a one-touchdown beating by Kansas, the lunch meat of the Nebraska-Oklahoma sandwich. It was a bad start from which Tollner never truly recovered.

Smith could hardly be blamed if he persuaded the athletic director to hurry up and schedule South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, or Houston Baptist, or, even better, Columbia, before the Michigan State date, just to give the coach a gimme before the real games got started. Quite the contrary, though, he wants no such thing, and believes any Trojan worth his helmet wants no such thing.

The coach doesn’t even fret that five of the first seven games are on the road. He welcomes a hard start.

“The thing I like about it is that it excites the players,” Smith said. “A USC football player is a person of great pride. He really is. That’s the No. 1 thing I found out when I first started interviewing these kids back in February. They have tremendous pride. They came here because this is what they wanted. They wanted the prestige of USC football.

“When you put them on national television, they expect to be there. And, when you look at last year, and how they finished up against Notre Dame and UCLA and Auburn, these kids really want to show people that: ‘Hey, we are not just somebody to line up and run over.’ So, I look at this first game as a motivator. I think we can use it to our advantage.

“In fact, I look at the Michigan State game and the Boston College game, our home opener, and those could be the two most important games of our season. They can set the tone for the whole year.

“There’s no question that fan-wise, pressure-wise, prestige-wise, for our people, the two most important games are UCLA and Notre Dame. But, you can win or lose people real fast. I’ve never been a real fast starter anywhere I’ve been, but I’m not sitting here saying, ‘Let’s take a year and get to know ourselves.’ The last jobs I took were rebuilding jobs. Here, I think, I would hope to come out of the blocks a lot faster. I expect more of myself.”

Michigan State is supposed to be solid this season, right up there with Michigan and Ohio State, so, in a best-case scenario, Smith would not mind opening and closing the season against the same team. He would be just as happy to run into Michigan, having once served on Bo Schembechler’s staff there, or Ohio State, having been born and raised in that state. It would mark the end of a pretty fair first year.

In a couple of weeks, Smith can begin to assemble what he’s got. Before then, he will take his assistants, including the eight guys he brought along from Arizona, on a retreat to Lake Arrowhead, spending a few days examining the roster from top to bottom. To break up the monotony, Smith and his coaches usually hold their own mini-Olympics, competing in anything from swimming to trivia. You know, the sort of stuff men usually do in beer commercials.

Being the new guy in town, Smith is glad to have some old friends around him. He remembers when Arizona hired him, and he called up an old friend, Willie Peete, and invited him to come be the Wildcats’ backfield coach. Peete accepted, and before long the two families lived in the same part of town, and their children played together.

Peete’s son was the leader everybody else followed. He was also a great athlete, at anything he tried.

“His sophomore year of high school, he threw for over 4,000 yards,” Smith recalled. “One time I went to one of his games, and he passed for over 400 yards. He kicked a punt and it went something like 80 yards, tied an Arizona state record. He played point guard on a state title basketball team. Then he went out for baseball and played shortstop and that team won the state championship. I’m telling you, that kid owned the whole town.

“And when Willie took a job out of state and his son went with him before his senior year, it was like cutting the heart out of Tucson. We got him to come back when we recruited him, and it was like the President of the United States returning, the reception Rodney got. We tried like heck to get him, but he got away from us again.”

Rodney Peete enrolled instead at USC, where he has been, and continues to be, the starting quarterback. The player couldn’t come to the coach, so the coach came to the player.

When you’re new in town, it’s nice to see people you know.