COLLEGE FOOTBALL ’87 : COACHES, PLAYERS, TEAMS AND TRENDS TO WATCH THIS SEASON : WHITE HOT : Michigan State’s Determined Tailback Has Set Some Rushing Goals That Only He May Reach

Hot and sticky doesn’t even begin to describe South Florida in the summertime. It’s oppressive, almost unbearable. But to Lorenzo White, it’s home, and there was no place he would rather have been this summer.

The Michigan State tailback came here to visit his mother, who used to work two and three jobs a day to feed her family and to pay for the air-conditioning in their modest home in a part of town seldom seen by the thousands of college students that descend upon this city’s beaches every spring.

And he came to see his 3-year-old daughter, who lives nearby with his girlfriend’s family.

Mostly, though, he came to work and to erase the memory of his lost season of 1986, when ankle and knee injuries plunged him from Heisman Trophy aspirant to the obscurity of second-team All-Big Ten.

His mother had suggested that he stay in Michigan this summer and work with his coaches, but White quickly nixed that idea--and not just because he longed for the comfort and understanding he knew he’d find at home.

“What I put myself through is harder than what my coaches put me through,” he said, speaking--as usual--barely above a whisper.

And, likewise, what he expects of himself this season is more than most anybody, including his coaches, would reasonably expect.

White may speak softly, but he carries a big yardstick.

He talked this summer about eclipsing the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. single-season rushing record of 2,342 yards, set by USC’s Marcus Allen in 1981.

That would certainly make everyone forget last season.

And that, of course, is the point.

“I have to go out and prove myself again,” he said.

He proved himself once, running for 1,908 yards two years ago, more than any sophomore ever. Only three players--Allen, Mike Rozier and Tony Dorsett--had run for more yards, and all three did it as seniors.

So, when injuries limited White to a more pedestrian 633 yards last season, he was naturally disappointed.

But he wasn’t discouraged.

Instead of lowering his goals, he raised them.

He still wants the Heisman Trophy, but now he wants Allen’s record, too.

“I always shoot for the impossible,” said White, whose quest will begin tonight when the Spartans play host to USC on national television (Channels 7 and 10, 5 p.m., PDT).

His mother, Gloria Golden, whose success in keeping her family afloat as a single parent instilled in White the belief that hard work has its rewards, likes his chances.

One thing’s for sure, she said. “He won’t give up.”

Visitors last summer to Golden’s home were shown a small wooden table in a corner of the living room. On it, she told them, would sit the Heisman Trophy. Or trophies. A year ago, she and Lorenzo talked about winning two.

Their boasts didn’t seem so preposterous then.

In fact, using a poll of 100 voters as its guide, the Miami Herald last summer declared White a slight favorite over Vinny Testaverde to win college football’s biggest award.

Ohio State’s Archie Griffin won it twice, and he hadn’t had a sophomore season like White’s.

Nobody had.

“It had to be one of the top seasons of all time for running the ball,” said Gil Brandt, vice president in charge of player development for the Dallas Cowboys. “He gained all those yards with not a real good football team. I think what he did was remarkable.

“I would rank it better than anything Dorsett ever did.”

Running behind the White Knights, as his offensive linemen came to be known, and fullback Bobby Morse, whose father, Jim, blocked for Notre Dame’s Paul Hornung when Hornung won the Heisman in 1956, White virtually was the Michigan State offense.

Including a 158-yard effort against Georgia Tech in the All-American Bowl, he rushed for 2,066 yards and 17 touchdowns, carrying the ball 419 times, only 14 times fewer than Allen did in his record-breaking season. Only Michigan, which wound up second in the nation in total defense, held White under 100 yards. Four times, he ran for 223 or more.

And his durability was remarkable. In a two-game span, he carried the ball 102 times, including a season-high 53 against Purdue. Once, he carried 21 times in one quarter. In fact, he seemed to get stronger toward the end of the season. Certainly, he was more productive. In the last five games of the regular season, he averaged 215 yards a game.

Against Indiana, in a rainstorm, he ran for 206 yards in the first half and another 80 on the first two plays of the second half before Coach George Perles sat him down with 14 minutes 29 seconds left in the third quarter and Michigan State leading, 35-3.

“A franchise,” Indiana Coach Bill Mallory called him. “He makes you feel helpless trying to stop him.”

“Go Go Lorenzo” bumper stickers and “Lorenzo White for the Heisman” baseball caps popped up all over the Michigan State campus--and, thanks to his mother, all over the neighborhood back home in Fort Lauderdale, too.

Rival coaches compared his cutting ability to the legends, then-Georgia Tech Coach Bill Curry telling reporters he hadn’t seen anybody since Gale Sayers or O.J. Simpson who could make 90-degree cuts the way White could.

At the Spartans’ postseason banquet, Msgr. Jerome MacEachin opened his invocation by saying: “Dear Lord, thank you for Lorenzo the Magnificent.”

Discounting White’s lack of preseason publicity as irrelevant, Perles said White deserved to win the Heisman.

“I always assumed it was the most outstanding football player for one season,” Perles said at the time. “Look at the yards, the touchdowns, the carries, the other statistics. He had the best year, and he was the best player.”

In truth, White’s average gain of 4.9 yards was fairly dwarfed by Bo Jackson’s 6.4, which no doubt was a factor in the Auburn senior’s winning the award.

But, strong and compact at 5 feet 11 inches and 205 pounds, White has never been mistaken for a speedster.

Larry Bielat, Michigan State’s running back coach, refers to White as a “skater,” able to glide his size-12 1/2EE shoes effortlessly across the turf as if he were on ice. “His feet are seldom in the air,” Bielat said. “They drag, almost. He can make a short stride with one foot and a long stride with another.

“In the old days, they used to have running backs run through tires. They told them to keep their knees high. But I’ve never seen a great runner who ran like that. They run like skaters, sliding almost. And Lorenzo does that as well as anyone.”

But the skater is also a bull.

“He’s a little different type of runner than Gaston Green,” said Brandt, comparing White with one of this season’s other Heisman aspirants. “When Gaston Green gets the ball, you have a feeling that he could take it all the way every time.

“Lorenzo is more of a strong-legged type of runner, so what you’ll see is, he’ll have a play where he should gain one or two yards, but he gains six. Or he’ll have a play where he should gain three or four yards, but he’ll break three or four tackles and gain 12.”

White, when he watches himself on film, said he sometimes has a hard time realizing that what he’s viewing actually happened.

“I’ll see myself coming up to the hole and know I’m going to get tackled, and then I’ll bust through,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m still running.”

Perles, who was a Pittsburgh Steeler assistant for 10 years, compares White to former Steeler Franco Harris. “I don’t know how fast he is, but people don’t catch him from behind,” Perles said.

They caught him from the side last season, when a frustrated White was at full speed for only three games. In the fourth, as he turned to catch a screen pass, an Iowa defender dived at him, banging his helmet into the side of White’s left knee.

He was lucky that he wasn’t hurt more seriously, Perles said. White said he sort of jumped back as he was hit, and he was told later that his action might have prevented ligaments from being torn.

“I thought sure we were looking at an operation,” Perles said.

White missed the next two games with what was diagnosed as a knee strain but returned and gained 80 yards against Purdue. His knee was OK, but the next week against Minnesota, he sprained his left ankle.

White, who had averaged 35 carries a game as a sophomore, carried only 35 times in the Spartans’ last four games of 1986.

“His eyes could see the holes, but his legs couldn’t take him through,” Bielat said.

White was named second-team All-Big Ten, though he had gained an average of only 43 yards against six conference opponents and had missed two Big Ten games altogether.

After being flown to New York for the Heisman Trophy presentation the previous year, when he was fourth in the balloting, he watched this time on television.

As Testaverde’s name was about to be called, he phoned home.

“I asked him how he felt about it,” his mother said. “He told me, ‘I’ve got another year.’ He wasn’t depressed about it, and that made me feel good. It made me feel like, ‘Hey, he’s growing up.’ ”

White may have grown up in depressed surroundings, but there seems to have been nothing depressing about his upbringing.

Golden, 40, is a cheerful woman. White said that his mother, with help from her 13 brothers and sisters, provided a caring, happy environment for him and his 17-year-old sister, Carla, who is a high school senior.

Golden and Larry White, the father of her children, never married, and Larry left home when the kids were very young. White is now a recreation director in Atlanta and speaks frequently on the phone with Lorenzo and Carla.

There seems to be no animosity between father and son.

“I never tell my kids this, that and the other about their father,” Golden said. “I tell them, ‘It’s your decision.’ If they judge him, they judge him for themselves, not for what I have told them.”

As a single parent, Golden was protective of her children. And generous. She didn’t want them deprived of anything.

To that end, she took a job as a cook with the Broward County School District. Since her work was finished by lunchtime, she was free to take Lorenzo and Carla to the park when they came home from school.

But when the money she made in the kitchen wasn’t enough to pay the bills, she took on second and third jobs at night, sometimes working another eight hours.

Still, when Lorenzo offered to get a job and help out, she wouldn’t let him.

“I told him, ‘I will bear the load,’ ” she said. “I told him, ‘Just do what you want to do. If you want to put all your emphasis in football and you’re good at it, go ahead.’ I didn’t mind. As long as my kids are happy and achieving, I’m happy.”

In the case of Lorenzo, she said, “Sitting there on game day was my payback.”

Besides, she couldn’t have afforded to send him to college.

“I knew if he got a scholarship it would relieve me of a lot of pressure,” she said.

White made that a certainty in his senior year at Dillard High School when he rushed for 1,255 yards and 19 touchdowns and was the state’s player of the year.

All of the in-state powers came calling, including nearby Miami, which was coming off a national championship season.

But White, hoping to be a more integral part of the offense than he probably would have been with the pass-oriented Hurricanes, wanted to go to a school where he would have a larger impact on the program. And Golden wanted her son to get away.

“People had said he was his mother’s boy,” said Golden, who sat on the couch, her son’s arm draped around her, when recruiters visited. “But he went up to Michigan and stood his ground.”

He almost didn’t make it, at all.

His girlfriend, Cathreen Adams, was pregnant, and he didn’t feel right about leaving. His mother talked him into it, promising to bring his daughter to him when she was a month old. Monique Octavia was born the day after White left for Michigan State, and White saw her for the first time the day before the Spartans’ home opener that season against Notre Dame.

His mother, making good on her promise, had made the 24-hour drive from Fort Lauderdale to East Lansing, Mich.

White, best described as shy and reticent despite his cordiality, is reluctant to talk about his daughter, whom he sees almost daily during the summer.

Child care, for now, is happily shared by both families, and Adams is still White’s girlfriend.

“She puts a little more pressure on me,” White said of his daughter. “I want to do good. I want to be able to provide for her.”

White is said to be something of a straight arrow. His mother, he said, is his best friend and confidante. It was she who advised him not to get involved with controversial agent Norby Walters, with whom White’s name was linked last May.

White denied signing with Walters, whose payments to several players have threatened or ended their collegiate eligibility, and subsequent investigations by the NCAA, the Big Ten and Michigan State turned up nothing to indicate otherwise.

Perles, who describes White as unusually humble and “a great role-model for kids,” said his star tailback has never so much as cursed in his presence.

White said he smoked and drank once at a party, “but I was just doing it for my friends. It wasn’t for me. It didn’t do anything outstanding for me. It didn’t make me feel like I was running the football in front of 80,000 or 100,000 fans. That’s a better high to me.”

White had a lot of time to fantasize this summer about his idea of the ultimate head rush. Reporters, who had descended upon him last summer, mostly left him alone this year.

Perles, a no-nonsense type, doesn’t believe in pushing his players for individual honors, so Michigan State has taken a low-key approach to White’s aspirations.

“We’re certainly not going to get involved in promoting him for any award at the expense of the team,” Perles said. “We’re going to do what we have to do to win the football game, and if that means he has to carry the ball a lot of times, so be it.”

That’s fine with White. Fewer distractions this summer gave him more time to work out. With only infrequent interviews to worry about, he sandwiched morning and evening workouts around his job as a messenger for a law firm.

The extra running and weightlifting left him feeling stronger and quicker than ever. His knee and ankle haven’t bothered him in six months or more, he said.

“He’s in great shape,” Perles said after welcoming White to camp last month. “I’d classify him as 100%. He’s physically ready to play.”

Mentally, White says he’s ready, too, for a grueling schedule that could determine his chances for the Heisman by the middle of October. After opening against USC tonight, the Spartans face Notre Dame, Florida State, Iowa and Michigan on consecutive weekends.

“It’s my senior year,” he said. “I want to go to the Rose Bowl and I want to win the Heisman and I want Marcus’ record. And nobody can tell me right now, face to face, that I can’t do it.”