The COMPETITION and the Conflict : Multisport Athletes Disappear as Coaches Press for Commitments

John Elway, Danny Ainge, Kirk Gibson and Willie Gault were considered anomalies because they managed to pull it off. So were Herschel Walker and Bo Jackson (who is seen as the ultimate anomaly because he’s still doing it as a professional). Each prospered in more than one sport as a collegian.

But if the once-plentiful two-sport athletes have become rare over the years, they are now disappearing altogether, according to some college coaches.

The reasons for the decline center on: 1) coaches placing increased demands on athletes’ time during the off-season; 2) coaches insisting that their athletes specialize in one sport; 3) longer seasons; and 4) increased attention on the academic standing of athletes.

“In most cases, athletes have to play one sport year-round to be successful,” USC football Coach Larry Smith said. “If they play football in the fall, I want them at spring practice, too.”

There are exceptions, however. Rodney Peete, the Trojan quarterback who has thrown for 5,413 yards in three seasons, also plays third base for USC’s baseball team. He’s good enough in his “other” sport to be listed as one of the top 20 college players in the country by a national magazine. Smith’s stance on Peete is this: “I’d like to have him at spring practice, but he’s a great athlete and he’s competing well in baseball.”

And he was told he would be permitted to play both sports at USC before he committed to play football. Moreover, Peete has beaten UCLA twice and has led the Trojans to the Rose Bowl. If Rodney wants to skip spring drills to play baseball, Rodney will skip spring drills.

It hasn’t always been that simple. After his freshman season in 1985, Peete was attempting had been granted permission to play baseball, he attended football practice in the spring, too. “I was trying to show them something,” he said. “I had to earn my spot. If you’re young, you have to do both. You’ve got to be out there.”

Now that Peete has carved out his domain, including Heisman Trophy candidacy in 1988, “it’s easier for me.”

Still, floating on a raft in repose isn’t on Peete’s schedule anytime soon.

USC baseball is in the middle of its 60-game season. Peete reported to baseball practice in January, only 10 days after capping five months of football by playing against Michigan State in the Rose Bowl. In USC’s first baseball game, he broke his hand while attempting a bunt.

Since returning 12 games ago--he missed 23 games--Peete has batted .330 with five home runs. When baseball ends in June, he will try to make up for lost football time by lifting weights and running. Fall football practices begin in August.

“He’s an outstanding athlete,” USC baseball Coach Mike Gillespie said. “It requires a person with special abilities to do what he does.”

That’s an assessment with which Peete agrees, but he adds that being able to pull double duty in two sports--without flunking out of school--has as much to do with effective time management as the power to hit home runs.

“I have to be disciplined and find time to study,” he said. “And you don’t have to be Bo Jackson, but you do have to work because you get behind in the sport you’re missing. It’s hard.”

Many athletes begin their college athletic careers intending to play two sports, but when they feel the pressure of keeping coaches, teachers and themselves satisfied, they bail out of one--even though they may lose scholarship money. Such is the case of Kathleen and Marianne Dixon, former volleyball-basketball players for Cal State Northridge.

The Dixon twins, both sophomores, recently quit the basketball team to concentrate on volleyball. “Doing both was too hard--mentally, physically and emotionally,” Marianne Dixon said. “We missed classes and couldn’t make up the work. We could never take a full academic load. And both coaches expected us to go 100% in both sports.”

Women’s volleyball Coach Walt Ker said the twins couldn’t manage their time well enough to play both sports, even though they wanted to.

The volleyball season ran from September to December and culminated in the NCAA Division II national championships, which Northridge won. Meanwhile, the basketball program, which was paying the majority of the Dixons’ scholarship money--$2,000 each annually, compared with $1,500 from Ker--missed them throughout preseason practices and for the first six games of the 1987-88 season.

“It’s not worth it for our program,” basketball Coach Leslie Milke said. “It’s not feasible. I think it’s detrimental to the team and to the athletes. We like to have players who are committed to just our sport. We won’t have dual-athletes anymore.”

The Dixons say they will make up for the loss of basketball scholarship money by taking part-time jobs, but they still expect to have more time for studying and socializing. “We were forced to make a decision,” Marianne said. “We were tired and burned out and we wanted to graduate.”

Milke said she had few problems with Ker--they had discussed the dual-sport dilemma in advance of recruiting the Dixons. But some coaches feel they are competing with each other for both the passion and attention of athletes who play more than one sport. And, as one athlete put it, “the player catches hell from both sides.”

Said Danny Fernandez, a quarterback-catcher at Northridge from 1985-87: “I had the feeling all the time that the coaches wished I’d play just their one sport. I definitely felt that. When I came to practice, the football coaches would say, ‘Here comes the baseball player.’ ”

CSUN football Coach Bob Burt said he teased Fernandez mercilessly.

“He’d come to spring practice after playing baseball and I’d tease him,” Burt said. “But I never thought his future was in football. He was never our guy at quarterback.”

Nevertheless, Fernandez wanted to be their guy. Burt was hired between Fernandez’s junior and senior football seasons. According to Fernandez, he was called into Burt’s office and told, “At this school, my starting quarterback is going to be there for spring practices.”

Fernandez had problems with that because CSUN was going full throttle in baseball during spring drills. As it turned out, Fernandez did start a number of football games during the fall of 1986, but the “prejudice” never let up.

“About the middle of that season,” he said, “I was sitting in the baseball office talking with Dave Stabelfeldt, an assistant baseball coach, when Burt saw me as he walked by. He gave me a hard look. Later, at football practice, he told me he didn’t want me in the baseball office. He said, ‘I don’t want your mind clouded.’ ”

Fernandez was a man without a home. In baseball, he never had a chance to show his skills during the regular season because he missed fall baseball practices. When he finally showed up for baseball, others had jumped over him on the depth chart. His senior season, he batted .400, but had only 20 at-bats. Baseball Coach Terry Craven said the would-be catcher had no one but himself to blame.

“He would get behind and then couldn’t catch up,” Craven said. “He wasn’t even second-string, he was No. 3. You could say it was his own fault.”

Fernandez is now playing professional baseball in the San Francisco Giants’ organization and scouts say he has a good chance of making it to the major leagues. “I saw his ability right away,” said George Genovese, a Giant scout. “He’ll be catching in the big leagues in two or three years.”

Although football may have set Fernandez’s baseball career back, he said he’d still play football, if he had it to do again. In simplest--and perhaps least-adulterated--terms, his reasoning comes to this: “I enjoyed playing both, that’s why.”

Others have a hard time understanding such thinking--especially when an athlete seriously impedes his progress in one sport by participating in another sport in which he does not excel.

“If you do two sports successfully,” Burt said, “that’s OK, but if an athlete hurts himself by doing it, then he should concentrate on one. You have to pick and choose. It’s like dating girls. If you want a serious relationship with one, you give up the others.”

USC’s Smith has a policy that requires a scholarship football player who plays another sport to attend football practices and attend to his training regimen unless he is a starter or a “major contributor” in the other sport.

Two other USC football players besides Peete are either on the verge of fitting into the major-contributor category or are already there--defensive back Ernest Spears and receiver John Jackson. Jackson was considered a fringe baseball player a year ago and was required by Smith to attend spring football drills. This year, he’s the Trojans’ starting center fielder and has been excused.

Spears this year was deemed by Smith not a good-enough baseball player to skip spring practice for baseball. Actually, Spears made Gillespie’s varsity squad and has impressed the baseball staff, but he was not released by Smith. “In a year,” the football coach said.

Smith, who said he thinks it is “refreshing” for an athlete to play more than one sport, admitted that he has faced situations where he has forced a player to drop another sport “because of a lack of progress” in football or academics. He also said that if an athlete is on scholarship, he has little choice but to listen to the coach.

Conversely, some two-sport athletes are precluded from scholarship money altogether. Greg Bratten, a backup quarterback and relief pitcher at CSUN, is one of a handful of Northridge baseball players who receive no money. He also has no scholarship in football. Bratten is convinced that if he settled solely on baseball, Craven would offer at least a partial scholarship. Craven says only that “Greg is hurting himself by playing both. I would offer money if having him with us all year would save me having to go out and recruit another player.”

The principle works the other way--an athlete can request more money--if he impresses coaches enough. Sherdrick Bonner, a gifted quarterback who also plays basketball for Northridge, came to the school with the understanding that he would play both sports, but he received money ($1,000) only for football. After redshirting in football and basketball in 1986-87, he played both sports this year. Though he reported for basketball a month late, basketball Coach Pete Cassidy eventually offered Bonner another $1,000. “I wanted to help him out,” Cassidy said. It is also possible that Cassidy wanted his team to be helped out by Bonner.

Burt, who compares Bonner to Philadelphia Eagle quarterback Randall Cunningham, seems baffled by Bonner’s desire to play basketball, but he accepts it--for now. “He’s an average basketball player, but he’ll never play in the NBA. He could play in the NFL--if he does what he should.”

Which, of course, is play football full time.

For his part, Cassidy has resigned himself to the fact that Bonner will never be the basketball player he could be because he’s “diluted.”

“Coaches prefer to have someone who thinks of little else but the one sport--during the season and the off-season,” Cassidy said. “Some athletes, I guess, don’t feel fulfilled unless they play two sports.”

And some regret that they didn’t.

Tom Bonds might have rolled up enough fulfillment to last a lifetime when he passed for more career yards (7,773) at Cal Lutheran than all but five NCAA Division II quarterbacks. He also holds the Division II record for most completions (44) in a game.

Bonds graduates from CLU in May, but he’s spent the last few months playing baseball. An outfielder, he has discovered he is good enough for scouts to show interest. After suffering an ankle injury before the season began, he is now batting .333 and proving to be something of a surprise. He considered playing both sports when he enrolled at CLU, but he wanted to catch the attention of the football coaches, so Bonds opted strictly for football.

“Football coaches don’t have time in the fall to decide who will play where,” he said. “They fill out the depth charts in the spring, so I had to do it. I didn’t want there to be any doubt.

“And once I got into studying, it was tough to find the time.”

Looking back, he says putting off baseball was a mistake. Whether Bonds is good enough to play professionally in either sport remains a mystery. Although his college football career is over and he has less than two months of college baseball left, the sports continue to collide and cause confusion in his life.

A month ago, he missed a Canadian Football League tryout with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers because he was playing in a doubleheader for Cal Lutheran. Later, Bonds discovered that Winnipeg coaches had asked about him at the tryout.

“I don’t know what will happen in the future,” he said. “But I wish I’d played baseball and football in college. Just for the fun of it. Just for the experience. You may only get to play sports for these four years and then it could be over. It’s better to make the most of it while you have the chance.”