Bittersweet Years : Tom Bonds Endures Roller-Coaster Career as Cal Lutheran Quarterback

Let’s be completely honest about this right from the start. Tom Bonds doesn’t belong at Cal Lutheran. No more than a thoroughbred such as Temperate Sil belongs out on the north 40 hauling a moldboard plow.

A more suitable place would be Boston College--or any place, really, where a talented, Flutie-like 5-foot-9 quarterback could display his gifts in front of a national audience. Can’t you hear Keith Jackson drawling on and on about the way that dawggone, squirmy little fella’s only knee-high to a country hound doggy, but, goodness, he sure can fire ‘em up with the best of ‘em.

As it is, Bonds has carved out a name for himself in Thousand Oaks and the Western Football Conference, a decent but backwater Division II league that extends from Northridge to Portland. His dreams don’t include the Heisman Trophy, just something called the Harlon Hill, a 1-year-old annual award given to the player who supposedly is the best in Division II. If Bonds reels in the coveted Harlon, he’d join the lofty company of last year’s winner, Jeff Bentrim of North Dakota. Brings chills, doesn’t it?

Over the past four years, Bonds has been named WFC Player of the Week five times. He has completed 568 of 1,055 passes for 7,201 yards and 52 touchdowns, all Cal Lutheran records. He owns the Division II record for most completions (44) in a game and is closing in on the Division II career passing mark of 8,521 yards set by Jim Lindsey of Abilene Christian from 1967-70. Earlier this season, Bonds said he considered setting the career record “inevitable,” but now, with three games left, he would have to average more than 400 yards a game to surpass it. Not altogether out of the question, though, considering he threw for more than 400 yards twice last year against two of the teams remaining on this year’s schedule.

Either way, some say Bonds has been one of the best quarterbacks in Division II since his sophomore season. “He’s the best quarterback in this league,” Cal State Sacramento Coach Bob Mattos said last week. “He’s elusive and has a strong arm. He’s a great quarterback.”

So what’s he doing in this league, anyway?

He was, in a word, shortchanged.

“When I came out of high school,” Bonds said, “I got letters from coaches everywhere. As soon as I put my height on the forms, I never heard from them again.”

The exception was the Air Force Academy. Even that idea was short-lived, though, when it was discovered that Bonds is color blind. He couldn’t distinguish subtle differences between red and green. “I couldn’t become a pilot, and the thought of leaving home at 18 with a nine-year commitment to the Air Force was too much,” he said.

In a move that even Bonds says was one of desperation, he enrolled at Cal Lutheran in 1984.

That fall he began his big-number, but gyral college career when he became the Kingsmen’s starting quarterback midway through the season. He passed for 954 yards in ’84 and 2,427 in ’85. Bonds then started second-guessing himself regarding his decision to attend Cal Lutheran. Even though he was named an NAIA All-American in his sophomore season, the Kingsmen finished 1-4 in conference and 6-5 overall, by virtue of playing nonconference teams such as Western New Mexico State.

“We were struggling. I thought about transferring,” Bonds said. “It wasn’t enjoyable to lose.”

A stirring, season-ending 29-24 win over Cal Poly San Luis Obispo changed his mind.

Bonds dropped back to pass, looking left and right before finding receiver Joe Monarrez over the middle. Cal Lutheran was undefeated in 1986 after two games and a zillion passing yards. The prospects were wide open for a winning season. The quarterback had guided the Kingsmen to a first-half lead in their third game, at Cal State Hayward. During the first series of the third quarter, Bonds drilled the pass to Monarrez. While the receiver caught the ball and dove forward for a 10-yard gain, Bonds was knocked to the ground in a heap of pain.

“Their defensive end fell into my knee,” he said. “His helmet hit me on the outside of my knee and I could feel it pop. I was so worried that the season was lost. That’s all I could think of, ‘Oh, no, the season is lost.’ ”

Gone with the Bend.

“It was scary,” Bonds said. “I didn’t know what was in my future. I thought I’d be in a cast for eight weeks and rehabilitating my knee for the rest of my life.”

Even though the injury wasn’t as bad as feared--Bonds missed just three games--the season was all but lost. CLU managed to win just one more game, a 27-24 victory over Azusa Pacific. The Kingsmen finished 3-8 and 0-6 in WFC play and spirits dropped to all-time lows.

“The whole thing was discouraging,” the quarterback said. “I wouldn’t say people didn’t want to win, but there were people on the team who didn’t take it serious.”

While the team sang the blues, Bonds’ personal statistics continued to soar. Despite the injury, he finished last season with glossy totals, 198 completions in 350 attempts for 2,402 yards and 18 touchdowns.

Meanwhile, Bonds’s lingering questions about what life might have been like at a first-class Division I program were spurred on by the madcap recruiting experience of his younger brother, Jim, who was in his senior year at Hart High. After being courted by many major colleges, Jim ended up with a full scholarship to play quarterback at UCLA. According to Tom, his brother is “about an inch taller than me,” but, as it turned out, in a whole different world in terms of college football grandiosity.

While Bonds allows that his success at Cal Lutheran paved the way for his brother and “opened people’s eyes,” he nevertheless remains slightly bitter about the way Division I schools neglected him.

When USC was recruiting Jim last year, Bonds and brother went to the Coliseum to watch USC play Notre Dame. Bonds said that from his vantage point--the fifth row--”there wasn’t anything done that I couldn’t do. That might be naive, but I didn’t see anything they did that I couldn’t.”

Before the ’87 season began, then-CLU assistant Steve Hagen was in Tucson, visiting with a group of Arizona coaches. Basically, they told Hagen they wished they had a quarterback like the little scrambler from Valencia. Incidents such as these elicit little more than a chuckle from Bonds now.

“Everyone agrees. He’s got everything anyone could want in a Division I quarterback,” said Jim Buchheim, CLU sports information director. “Except three or four inches in height.”

Most of Bonds’ teammates say the quarterback has no shortage of arm strength, mobility and a certain stubborn quality of chutzpah. He’s a vanilla personality, they say, as long as you’re not trying to beat him at anything.

“There’s no doubt that he takes control in the huddle,” senior running back Tracy Downs said. “At Portland State this year, their guys were coming from all angles. They were beating us, 30-0. We were getting frustrated. But he took charge and told us to keep trying to do our jobs. Everyone respects him as a player and person.”

Beyond the anonymity that comes with playing at Cal Lutheran, the losing has provided Bonds with his lowest moments. So far this year, he has found little relief. The Kingsmen are 3-5 and 1-5 in conference play.

After one particularly ponderous loss, in which Cal Lutheran was beaten by Southern Utah State, 23-18, on a last-minute 63-yard pass, Bonds’ audacity drooped into defeatism. He sounded as if after four years of trying to win, he realized his efforts might be tantamount to straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.

“It seems no matter how we play, we’re always on the short end of the stick,” he said. “There wasn’t a player on our team who didn’t give his all in that game. When we weren’t the winners, we just stood there thinking, ‘What do we have to do?’ ”

It was a good question, really, but also one that bothered some CLU coaches.

But if Bonds has an attitude problem, it’s that he cares too much.

“I’m too hard on myself,” he said. “I blame myself for losses, personally. I always feel that I could have made the difference.”

The problem with such an outlook, beyond the fact that it could lead to a person jumping off a tall building, is that it’s unrealistic. Still, it begs other questions. How good could Bonds be if his offensive line actually blocked for him? How many yards would he throw for if a defense had to worry about Gaston Green carrying the ball instead of Noel Chesnut? What if he could aim at a receiver like Tim Brown?

Outside of the fact that Cal Lutheran has given him the opportunity to stare adversity in the eye and occasionally get the football crammed down his face by blitzing linebackers, Bonds gives credit to the program for providing him the chance to develop into a top-flight quarterback. If he had walked on at a Division I school, he undoubtedly would have carried clipboards for a couple of years. At CLU, he was thrown in the ocean--OK, the pond--to swim and scramble and stay afloat.

“I guess I’ve become a big fish in a little pond,” he said.

Bob Shoup, who has coached at the school for 26 years, put it this way: “Of all the people who have been important in our history, it’s been Tom Bonds who has done the most for us.”

And it was Bonds, after the Kingsmen won their first conference game in two years last week against Sacramento State during a tropical disturbance, who looked the most relieved. “It was pretty incredible just to sit out there in the rain and mud,” he said. “We just sat in the mud and enjoyed it.”

He was a big fish in a little mud puddle.

“Who knows,” he said, “I might have been a little fish in a big pond.”

Or maybe even a big fish in a big pond. No one will ever know.