COLLEGE FOOTBALL ’87 : COACHES, PLAYERS, TEAMS AND TRENDS TO WATCH THIS SEASON : SWEENEY’S RECORD IN SIGHT : Santos: More Proof That Quarterbacks Are Grown on Vines

The lunchtime crowd is filtering into Sal’s.

There’s Pat Thornburg. Her son, Andy, played football with Todd Santos at Selma High School. Andy caught that rub-their-noses-in-it pass on the last play against Chowchilla. Santos, a cocky sophomore quarterback in 1979, was supposed to run out the clock.

“How about we go for it?” said a voice in the huddle.

“Yeah,” Santos said. “Go deep.”

So he threw deep, and the deflected ball fell into Thornburg’s hands for a touchdown.

Here come Leslie Nabors and her 10-month-old son, Tyler. Nabors was a junior when Santos was a senior at Selma in 1981-82. She was Leslie Johnson then.

Look who’s pulling up a chair. It’s Karl Salazar. He played guard when Santos was at Selma. His father, Sal, opened this restaurant 45 years ago.

Once the site of pregame team meals, Sal’s is a place to renew acquaintances and eat what almost anyone in Selma will tell you is the best Mexican food in Fresno County.

“Hey, Todd, how you doin’, man?” Salazar asks. “That Sweeney, he’s going to eat your dirt.”

Big laughs all around, a fresh basket of tortilla chips and another glass of water for Santos, the quiet, record-breaking San Diego State quarterback.

Around here, they figure it’s only a matter of time before Santos, their small-town hero, breaks the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. record for passing yardage set by another quarterback from the San Joaquin Valley--Kevin Sweeney, that city kid from Fresno.

Sweeney finished his career at Fresno State last season with 10,623 yards passing. Santos will begin his senior season Saturday against UCLA at the Rose Bowl with 7,493 yards. He needs to average 261 yards a game in the Aztecs’ 12 regular-season games to surpass Sweeney and become only the fourth player in NCAA history to throw for more than 10,000 yards. Santos, who missed one game with a broken wrist, averaged 255 yards a game last season.

“Todd, he’s going to get that record,” Salazar said. “Everybody in Selma knows that.”

And everybody in Selma, it seems, knows Santos and his family.

The Santos clan is something of a sports legend in this farming town of 13,500, located 15 miles south of Fresno. That’s what happens when you have one or another of three sons start at quarterback for five consecutive seasons for the Selma Bears.

Bob and Nita Santos’ parents grew up in Selma. They raised their children there. Now, Bob and Nita have raised their children--Jill, 29; Todd, 23; Rob, 22, and Ron, 20--in Selma. It is a town where on Friday nights most everyone turned out to see the Santos brothers lead the Selma Bears to victory and where folks have been planning for weeks to drive down to the Rose Bowl just to see Todd open his senior season.

To say that Selma, with its stifling summer heat and acres of raisin farms, has small-town charm might be stretching it. But it does have a simplicity that makes San Diego or Los Angeles seem a long way from home.

Selma is the kind of place that forms a bond with its residents, especially such a favorite son as Santos. It draws them back, if only for a short visit.

Santos came home last month, and his two-week vacation meant simpler times. This was his last summer back in Selma before the hype of the record chase builds momentum, before professional football turns from a dream into a job, before it might seem a little silly for a big-time quarterback to drive his 1981 Honda Civic down McCall Street to Foster’s for a shake. “I love San Diego,” Santos said. “But Selma is where I see my family and friends.”

So, Santos was back in Selma--eating at Sal’s, sweating in the 104-degree heat, hanging out in his parents’ living room, lifting weights in the gym, playing catch on the high school field, walking around downtown, stopping at Rob’s roadside stand for a fruit-flavored shaved ice, playing a round of golf at Selma Valley Golf Course, loafing with his boyhood friends.

Raisins are everywhere in Selma. Drive south from Fresno down U.S. 99 and it doesn’t take long before nothing but vineyards stretch along both sides of the freeway. In Selma, an errant tee shot can land among grapes. No wonder the signs read, “Welcome to Selma. Raisin Capital of the World.”

Downtown Selma is a few shrinking square blocks. A couple of stores are vacant, and a few more are going out of business. It has drug, hardware and gift stores, and a J.C. Penney. It has a video store but no movie theater. That burned down a few years ago.

“There’s not much to do around here,” Santos said. “You have to go to Fresno.”

When Bob and Nita Santos were growing up in Selma, there was plenty to do. There were the movies, the Tip Top Drive-In and the Den, a teen-age hangout across from the old high school.

The high school was torn down to build a supermarket, and the Den was torn down to build a Foster’s. The new high school, the one where Santos led his team to a 13-0 record as a junior, is just 2 1/2 blocks from the Santos’ home.

When Todd was old enough to drive, the brothers would pile into their first car, a Pontiac Firebird bought from the neighbors.

There was Ron Santos, now a sophomore at Kings River Junior College. Ron was a freshman when Todd was a senior. He started at quarterback at Kings River until his playing career ended when he suffered head and other injuries when struck by a hit-and-run driver after a game last September. There was Rob, who was a junior when Todd was a senior. He had hopes of playing at Kansas, but academic difficulties forced him to transfer to Fresno State. He has given up football, and now is a co-owner of a shaved-ice stand called The Big Chill.

“I keep telling Todd he should come by for a personal appearance,” Rob said. “We could put on a sign, ‘Come meet Todd Santos, star quarterback.’ ”

That, of course, would be an NCAA rules violation. Still, Santos didn’t go unrecognized on this afternoon, as the honks from passing cars demonstrated. Santos is becoming as widely known in this town as Selma’s biggest athletic hero, General Manager Bobby Cox of the Atlanta Braves. Santos is probably the best-known resident of Northhill Drive, which is saying something, considering that Mayor Pat Helm lives next door.

Playing in the same county, although never against one another, Sweeney and Santos were always being compared. When Santos was deciding which college he would attend, he considered Fresno State. When Sweeney chose Fresno State, Santos backed off. After all, Sweeney’s father, Jim, was the Bulldogs’ coach.

But had it not been for an offer from San Diego State, it might have been his only shot. Not many college coaches thought enough of Santos’ talent to offer him a scholarship, especially after a senior season that did not live up to the promise he had shown as a junior. When your team has had three coaches in three seasons and you come from the Raisin Capital of the World, it’s hard to sell a coach on the idea that your team played serious football. Santos, a Mormon, wanted to play at Brigham Young. He took an official visit but was heartbroken when Ted Tollner, then a BYU assistant, told Santos there would be no scholarship. That left him with offers from Fresno State and Northern Arizona.

Only later did former San Diego State coach Doug Scovil come along. He told Santos he was welcome at SDSU but not until the spring. All the fall scholarships were gone.

Santos accepted the offer. But that left him out of school for the fall. To keep busy and earn some money, he took a job in Fresno at a cotton plant, where his brother-in-law worked.

So while Sweeney was picking up the first of his passing records, Santos was tossing bales of cotton on another side of town.

When Santos enrolled at San Diego State for the 1983 spring term, he found himself in competition with a much more celebrated recruit, Jim Plum, who had been a Parade All-American at Helix High School in La Mesa.

Plum earned the backup job, leaving Santos to sit out the 1983 season as a red-shirt. But he came back in the spring and earned the top spot, becoming the first freshman to start at quarterback for the Aztecs in the 1984 season opener against Air Force.

Santos showed he was ready for major college football when, the next week, he completed 13 of 18 passes for 247 yards as the Aztecs scared UCLA before losing, 18-15. He had two more spectacular games that season, completing 26 of 33 passes for 418 yards against Colorado State and 24 of 42 for 311 yards at Hawaii.

In a 45-14 loss to UCLA last season, Santos eclipsed former Cleveland Browns quarterback Brian Sipe’s school record of 5,707 yards passing. He did that the night after his brother, Ron, had been struck by the car. His family did not tell Todd of the accident until after the game.

Ron has recovered and was back working at a lumber yard this summer.

Bob is a quality control inspector with a tire company. Nita is a secretary in the Selma school district. They have built a comfortable life for their four children. Their two-story home is on a quiet residential street on the north edge of town.

Family portraits line the living room walls and a scrapbook of Todd’s achievements is prominently displayed in the dining room. The family photo album is filled with pictures of the boys playing baseball, basketball and football.

“They were always out back with their father with some kind of ball,” Nita said. “It didn’t matter what kind. They all loved to play.” Some things never change. At 4 p.m. on a day in which the temperature reached 100 degrees, Santos and four friends teed off for a round of golf. “Football is my game,” Santos said. “But golf is my first love.”

Santos said he tries to play at least twice a week during the off-season in San Diego, but these hometown rounds are becoming fewer, though no less competitive.

Ken Stephenson, a former Selma High teammate of Santos’ and a member of the golfing fivesome, is private pilot. He flew a four-seater down to San Diego last season to watch the Brigham Young game and was at the Holiday Bowl game against Iowa.

Saturday, he will be one of the Selma rooters cheering for Santos in the Rose Bowl. That may be as close as he gets to Santos and Selma for some time. By this time next year, Santos probably will be completing his first pro football camp. That next game of golf among hometown friends might just have to wait.