LORENZO WHITE : Noblest Spartan

When Lorenzo White runs, he glides more than he strides, cutting and veering and swerving and never seeming to be where the defense thinks he is. His style is deception.

When he talks, he picks his words carefully, the way he chooses openings in a broken field. His voice is so low that sometimes it is almost inaudible, forcing listeners to press in around him--the way tacklers would if they could.

His answers, and his reasoning behind them, however, are straightforward. He is not a man for alibis, not a man for lamenting when things don’t go his way.

Lorenzo White is, though, a man with lofty goals.

Before his senior year began at Michigan State, White said that he wanted to win the Heisman Trophy, to go to the Rose Bowl and to break Marcus Allen’s collegiate record of 2,342 yards gained in a single season.

One out of three, in that league, isn’t bad.

And he got the one he says he wanted the most--the Rose Bowl.

“My goal when I was recruited by Michigan State was to lead my team to a (Big Ten) conference championship and the Rose Bowl that goes along with that,” White said during a lull in preparations for Friday’s 47th annual New Year’s Day game against USC. “I always considered it my primary goal. The Heisman was my personal goal.

“Getting to the Rose Bowl was the best Christmas present I could give my mother (Gloria Golden of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) and my daughter, Monique Octavia. My mother is my No. 1 fan and she’ll be here for the game.”

Monique is 3, and will remain in Florida with her mother, White’s girlfriend.

After White had run for 1,908 yards in regular-season games in 1985--a record for sophomores--it was almost as if Lorenzo became his middle name. He became Heisman candidate Lorenzo White. He and his mother, who is the head cook for the Broward County schools, felt so strongly about it that they prepared a spot on the mantle for not one, but two, of them.

It never happened. Twice, he finished fourth in the balloting, in 1985 to Auburn’s Bo Jackson, Iowa’s Chuck Long and Brigham Young’s Robbie Bosco, and this year to Notre Dame’s Tim Brown, Syracuse’s Don McPherson and Holy Cross’ Gordie Lockbaum.

“I dreamed of the Heisman for three years, sure,” he acknowledged. “I think I had a good shot at it, I did all I could possibly do and I just didn’t win it. Now that’s over with and I’ve still got my No. 1 goal ahead, to go out and do my best to win my last game with the team.”

Pressed to further explain his feelings, his disappointment, perhaps even frustration at not winning the Heisman, White sat silent for a long moment, looked at his interviewers and said, slowly and deliberately:

“It depends on what the award is about. Over the three years I was up for it, I don’t know what it took. I thought I had a chance, a shot, but now I know it takes some luck to win it.

“My sophomore year, I go ahead and have the best year but I don’t win it because they say I’m too young. (No sophomore has ever won the Heisman. White gained 2,066 yards, Jackson 1,786 and each scored 17 touchdowns).

“OK, in my junior year I come out and am the leading candidate and I get hurt. But I got all the hype in the world and they say hype wins the trophy, but I didn’t have the yards because I didn’t get in that many games. (He missed two games and played sparingly in three others because of knee and ankle injuries, and gained only 633 yards.) That was fine. I was glad when (Miami’s) Vinny Testaverde won it. He’s a good guy.

“In my senior year, I think I had some hype, not as much as my junior year, but some. I think I had a good enough season to be a contender for the Heisman. I came back and had a good senior year, I had 1,500 yards (1,459 to be exact), that’s pretty good.

“And if you want to talk about overall career, none of the four candidates could touch my record. Over the four years I was in college, they were nowhere close to me.

“So I don’t know. I guess you have to be favored, be liked a lot. I don’t know what it takes.”

George Perles, White’s coach, is not so diplomatic.

“I don’t put as much value in it (the Heisman) as I once did,” he said. “It seems to be a flexible thing. What does it really mean?

“This year, it went to a special-teams player who had a big junior year. They said he earned it because he made the defense afraid of him. What are they going to do next, give it to a decoy?

“The vote was held before the season ended. That’s stupid, that’s when what a player does in the big games takes on added importance. It seems to me it’s all screwed up. I lost all interest in it. I’d rather have a Rhodes Scholar on my team than a Heisman winner, anyway.”

What it all came down to was Sept. 19, a single afternoon in Notre Dame Stadium in front of a national TV audience--including many Heisman voters.

Brown was electrifying, running punts back 71 and 66 yards for touchdowns and catching 4 passes for 72 yards.

White had his poorest day of the season, netting only 51 yards in 19 carries as Notre Dame buried the Spartans, 31-8.

If White could play against Indiana all season he might have won the Heisman and broken Allen’s yardage record at the same time.

In 1985 he gained 286 yards rushing even though he played less than a minute in the second half. This season, with the conference championship on the line, White raised his career best to 292 yards in 56 carries as he scored twice to lead his team to a 27-3 win.

“That was a Heisman performance in the clutch,” Perles said. “He’s just a great back. A great kid. He’s carried the ball more than 1,000 times at Michigan State. That’s like getting beat up 1,000 times. The yardage he gets, game after game, is tough yardage.

“If there’s anyone he’s like, it’s (former Pittsburgh Steeler All-Pro) Franco Harris. They’re both hard to get a clean shot at, they’re always moving and they’re both strong.”

White, 21, carries a muscular 208 pounds on a 5-foot 11-inch frame.

“One of Lorenzo’s great gifts is that with all the attention he gets, he is not envied by his teammates,” Perles said. “He’s the guy who gets all the national attention, but with the other guys on the team he never ruffles anyone’s feathers.”

White came out of the Wisconsin game, the last of the regular season for the Spartans, with a sore hamstring, but both he and Perles say it will not bother him Friday.

“It’s fine now, but if I had kept playing in the game I might have messed it up,” White said.

Perles said: “It wasn’t really a pulled hamstring, but we pulled him out when he said it was bothering him. A pulled ham takes six, seven weeks to heal, but Lorenzo’s been running at full speed this week. He’s had some good workouts.”

What about his wanting Allen’s single-season yardage record. What happened?

“I didn’t get enough yards,” he said. As simple as that.

When Michigan State beat USC in the opening game, 27-13, White scored twice and gained 111 yards in 22 carries, but he discounts any meaning it might have on the coming game.

“Well, as far as what it means to me, I’m taking the approach that we never played against USC,” he said. “We starting all over again, just like preparing for a new team.

“I think they’re going to do a lot of things differently. I know they kind of feel at home playing in the Rose Bowl and I guess, after they lost the first game, it’s going to motivate them to work hard. The thing I remember about their defense is that they always have a lot of guys swarming to the ball.”

Next spring, White is expected to be one of the first players picked in the National Football League draft, but he says he doesn’t care which team gets him.

“I don’t have any favorites, but I’m not thinking about it now, anyway. I don’t want to look too far ahead when I’ve got my last game with my team coming up in the Rose Bowl. I want my juices to be going when my number is called the first time.

“It’s going to be emotional, but I can’t imagine how it could be any more emotional than the Indiana game. I don’t know, though. This one will be awful sentimental, playing with my team for the last time, wearing the Michigan State uniform for the last time.”

Rose Bowl Notes

Players from both USC and Michigan State will be drug-tested again in the next couple of days by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. That’s an NCAA policy for all Jan. 1 bowl teams, even though they were tested before leaving home. Starters on offense and defense and other players picked at random will be tested.