Football’s Boot Camp : Walk-Ons Battle for the Opportunity to Play on Fields Where Coaches Are Developing Their Own Recruits and ‘Everybody Else Has More Stripes’

UCLA football Coach Terry Donahue might have enlisted in the military in 1965. Instead, he walked onto the Bruin football team. Back then, he said, one blended into the other.

“I would associate being a walk-on as a player to being in boot camp in the service,” he said recently. “Everybody in the fort has stripes except you.”

Donahue soon earned his stripes and a starting spot at defensive tackle and remained there for two years under Coach Tommy Prothro. He was talented and fortunate.

Many walk-ons aren’t as lucky. They put in as much time as scholarship players, and sometimes more, but the walk-on accepts a monumental task when he says, “I want to play football here.”

He must catch the eyes of coaches who spend hours developing players they recruited--and minutes giving unrecruited players an obligatory glance.

Faced with such odds, few walk-ons become starters. But at some schools they reach hero status by accomplishing more than anybody expected. Four years after walking on in 1981, Mike Sherrard became the leading receiver in UCLA history and the idol of many Bruin walk-ons.

“Mike had difficulty walking and chewing gum at the same time,” Donahue recalled. But Sherrard soon figured that out. Then he walked and chewed his way to the first round of the NFL draft and a job with the Dallas Cowboys.

Rick Neuheisel had a little luck too. Four years after walking on the playing field in Westwood, the 6-foot, 190-pound quarterback threw four touchdown passes in the Rose Bowl, leading the Bruins to 45-9 victory over Illinois. That was 1984.

Neuheisel is now competing for a job with the San Diego Chargers, but he won’t soon forget playing at UCLA.

“It was a nightmare at first,” he remembered. “You have to kind of pay dues when you are a walk-on, and the hardest thing is gaining peer respect.”

What was true for Neuheisel isn’t necessarily true for all walk-ons. But then, all walk-ons don’t call signals in the Rose Bowl.

All players--scholarship or no scholarship--strive for acceptance from other players. Many find it, many don’t.

“Some scholarship players may think something is different about you,” said UCLA long-snapper Mark Selecky, a walk-on in line for a starting job, “and you may feel a little different, but it’s mostly in your own mind.”

“You can’t explain the feeling,” countered Brandon Bowlin, a walk-on from Blair High and USC’s No. 2 free safety. “It’s so hard to come as a walk-on and still not speak to anybody. No one talks. You throw and catch with the regular players, but you can never relax.”

Three years into his football career, Bowlin, a 5-10, 190-pound sophomore, still can’t relax. He and new Coach Larry Smith know he’ll get plenty of playing time this season, but neither knows whether USC will pay for Bowlin’s board, tuition and books anytime soon.

Bowlin said he could play one more season without a scholarship but that next spring he would have to think hard about continuing without financial help. Smith said Bowlin is a top candidate for a scholarship and may be the Trojans’ best walk-on.

Bowlin probably will see more action on special teams than at safety this season, as he did last year. But, despite his attachment to Trojan football, questions about his future never leave his mind.

In July he wondered: “If they have that much faith in me to put me in the game and play me second string, why is it that I don’t have a scholarship?”

The same question was put to Smith last spring. He said he couldn’t afford a scholarship because so many newcomers had been recruited. Bowlin saw no malice in that answer, just politics. Now he intends to overcome the bureaucracy.

“I hope I beat it,” he said. “If I do, if I get a scholarship and become a starter, it will be one of the major accomplishments of my life.”

Like many walk-ons, Bowlin was relatively unknown when he left high school. The Times included him on its All San-Gabriel Valley first team, but major colleges weren’t interested. And he was more concerned with getting into law school than making tackles.

At USC he is tackling school and split ends. The many days he spent on the scout team, preparing the first string for next week’s foe, are long gone. So is the loneliness. But, like Neuheisel, he remembers.

“The people in admittance knew me and my situation more than the coaches,” he said. “It was weird, frustrating.”

The one Trojan coach who did know Bowlin was Art Gigantino, now with the Los Angeles Rams. John Robinson, Rams head coach and former USC coach, also knew Bowlin because Bowlin had played with Robinson’s son, Chris, at Blair. Before he enrolled at USC, Bowlin asked Robinson for a letter of recommendation and Robinson convinced him to give football a try. Gigantino later gave Bowlin shoes and told him to visit USC for an informal workout in late July.

Bowlin’s initiation soon followed. Former quarterback Sean Salisbury threw him a pass “and it knocked me over,” Bowlin recalled.

“That was my first contact with USC football. I thought everybody was saying, ‘He’s a typical walk-on.’ I was very embarrassed. Guys laughed at me like I’d laugh now.” The laughing stopped when Bowlin shined on the scout team. He was put at running back but wanted to play defensive back. Either way, he understood his nickname.

“When we started camp, that’s when the ‘WOS’ got together. We were WOS,” he said, “because we were walk-ons, and we had a lot of woes.”

Bowlin maintains that there are two kinds of walk-ons. His kind intends to play. The others come only to practice with the team. Both suffer.

“You don’t limp until you go home,” Bowlin said. “But you definitely hurt. One of my favorite hitting partners would usually kill me.”

“I busted my butt in the beginning,” added Neuheisel, who saw some scout team and special teams play before he emerged at quarterback. “One guy beat me up until I was black and blue. I felt like a sledgehammer.”

UCLA’s Selecky never experienced such punishment. Nor did Bruin walk-on Marcus Patton, whose high school coach at Leuzinger High in Lawndale contacted UCLA to find Patton a spot on the roster in 1985.

Patton, like most walk-ons, spent time on the scout team before progressing to special teams and fighting for a playing time. The 6-1, 215-pound outside linebacker is No. 3 on UCLA’s depth chart. He worries little about the football scholarship he doesn’t have because an academic scholarship pays his way.

But Patton always battles and he says he hasn’t been beaten yet. “I wasn’t getting beat up,” he said of his tour on the scout team, “because our scout team was tough and I never liked to get roughed up. You can let that happen, but I would never let it. I went out there trying to be a tough guy.”

It paid off. His second year he saw action against Oklahoma, San Diego State and Long Beach, and from then he put distance between himself and the scout team.

It’s likely Patton will not start this season, but with three years left he expects sometime to hear his name over the Rose Bowl public address system before the game starts.

Selecky, a 6-2, 207-pound senior, has similar hopes. He graduates in December and plans on his last season being his best.

A premed student, Selecky didn’t begin his UCLA football career until the spring of 1986. He walked on as a freshman, but knee problems and difficult classes forced him to drop out of football. During the next two years he kept himself in shape intending to play again. Then one day. . . .

“He just came over from the fraternity,” said Donahue, “and heard we needed a long-snapper. He said, ‘Hey, I can be a long-snapper,’ and now he is in contention for the job.”

Attaining his current status would not have been possible if Selecky had joined the Bruins without an intention to start. He disagrees with Bowlin’s belief that there are two kinds of walk-ons.

“I think any walk-on is trying to earn a starting job,” Selecky said. “That’s his main goal. Most people don’t go out there saying I want to play on the scout team and I’m not really worried about starting. In my mind if you are going to put in that kind of time, you should put in 200% to try to get that starting job. If you don’t achieve it, that’s fine, too, but you have to know you gave it your best shot.

“There are walk-ons out there who don’t materialize into starting players, and that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something to help the team win because the team definitely needs people on the scout team.

“But you’ve got to get it into your mind that everyone’s gonna enter the race for a job, and you have to enter the race to win.”

Predictably, walk-ons usually lose the race. Selecky might win it. Patton and Bowlin might also. But none has a guarantee, and neither did Neuheisel or Sherrard.

All have worked hard. Selecky thinks many walk-ons have to work harder than scholarship players because walk-ons are never as naturally gifted. In Selecky’s case, however, his hard work will never earn him a scholarship because he leaves school in December and has told the UCLA coaches that a scholarship is unnecessary. Selecky simply wants to start. He did say if he never starts, the experience would still be worth the hard work.

Patton agrees, as does Bowlin. But a walk-on’s future seems much more uncertain than that of the scholarship player, and Patton, Selecky and Bowlin can attest to that also.

To curb the uncertainty, Donahue instituted a simple walk-on rule when he became head coach in 1976. He decided scholarships would be awarded to any walk-on who progressed to the first or second string. That rule stands today, but Donahue, the winningest coach in UCLA history, refuses to forget the hardships that belong to walk-ons.

“When you begin the adventure,” he said, “you feel very alone, very unsure and insecure. You know the coaches have recruited other players that they invested scholarships in and you know they are going to give the first and longest look to those they’ve recruited:

“You don’t feel like a part of the group. You don’t know the coaching staff, you don’t know the administration, you haven’t been given the formal campus tour.

“You just kind of get in the water for the first time and have to swim.”