Credit Ball With a Save in Bruin Win

If there’s anything I hate to see in football, it’s a “breather.” You folks all know what a “breather” is, a break in the schedule when a superior team schedules an inferior team to mark time for more important foes.

In other sports, they go to the driving range, or they hit the heavy bag or skip rope, lift weights, take batting practice. In football, they play Cal State Long Beach. Yale plays Arnold. Notre Dame takes on Juniata.

Well, it looked for a half as though that’s what UCLA did Saturday evening. Foisted a lemon on us, a team they could run up a score on, some college with a funny nickname out of a small town in Nebraska. It was embarrassing. It looked like the worst kind of mismatch. The score was 21-0 almost immediately. It was 28-0 by the end of the first quarter. You wondered if this was a Division I college.

Before the game, the UCLA coach had hyped up these guys. A couple of times when he played them before, he suggested, he began to get the feeling this wasn’t a “normal” team.

I don’t know whether they made his scalp prickle or whether he noticed they didn’t have any eyes, just holes where they ought to be, or whether they didn’t have any reflections when they looked in a mirror. The last time anything this big got loose, he suggested, it had escaped a laboratory and Dr. Frankenstein was looking for it.

His terror was understandable. Those guys ran up 42 points each of the last three times they faced his teams. They were in a rut. The time before that, they beat another coach’s UCLA, 40-13. The implication was, it wasn’t a team, it was a chemistry set. You don’t get that big on a farm, you did it in a laboratory.

Nebraska looked very normal in the first half at the Rose Bowl Saturday night. They looked like Ypsilanti Normal.

They turned back into the vestige of the monster that ate the Big Eight by the second half. UCLA scored exactly 3 points in that half. They prevailed, 41-28, but they owed the fact they were able to smuggle the victory into the clubhouse to the player wearing No. 21.

You know, the annals of football are fecund with the exploits of athletes who shone for one brief shining hour or even minute--then faded into the woodwork. Became just a picture on a wall. Notre Dame once had a guy named “One-Play” O’Brien who beat Army in his one carry one season and never did anything else in his career.

In the 1962 Rose Bowl, I thought a Wisconsin player named Ron VanderKelen was the best quarterback I had ever seen in my life. Certainly, the best passer. He riddled USC with a 33-for-48, 401-yard game, and the Trojans, who had a 42-14 lead in the fourth quarter, were on the ropes and looking over both shoulders at once when the game ended with the score 42-37 and on the verge of becoming 42-43.

I thought VanderKelen would go on to the pros and make the world forget Sammy Baugh. He made them forget Ron VanderKelen instead. A man who had played only 90 seconds before that season and had been recruited as a defensive back, he was the toast of the Coast for that one day.

Back in 1939, a fourth-string quarterback became celebrated in song and story when he came off the bench to pull out a Rose Bowl for USC with four consecutive forward passes and the winning touchdown. It would be nice to say Doyle Nave went on to become all-world. The truth is he went on to become third string.

In the 1986 Rose Bowl, I thought a freshman halfback for UCLA was going to be George Gipp. O. J. Simpson. Red Grange. He ran wild against Iowa in UCLA’s 45-28 win. He went in for an injured star (Gaston Green) and ran for 227 yards and 4 touchdowns.

He was as unstoppable as lava. He was strong, fast, tough, durable, and you figured his name would become a household word and he’d have a houseful of Heismans by the time he was a senior and he’d probably run wild in a Super Bowl some day, too.

And, then, Eric Ball disappeared. Shades of Doyle Nave, Ron VanderKelen, even Jacque Robinson, a Washington back who slam-dunked Iowa in a Rose Bowl, too, and then faded off-screen.

Eric Ball has escaped that melancholy company of One-Game O’Briens. Eric Ball is alive and well and still winning in the Rose Bowl.

Eric Ball didn’t win the game against Nebraska Saturday, he saved it. The circumstances were these: Once the initial shock was over, Nebraska shook its breather image, and the Bruins suddenly weren’t breathing, they were gasping. They were timorous about testing the end zone and only hoped to keep the ball away from the revitalized Nebraskans.

This is where Eric Ball came in. Thirty-five times he grabbed the ball and slammed into the Nebraska line. They may be “normal” and have a real pulse and heart and lungs but they’re no day in the park.

Every hard-won yard Eric Ball made--and he made 148 of them--every first down he reeled off was another precious minute Nebraska’s dangerous quarterback, Steve Taylor, didn’t have the ball.

In baseball, they credit a guy with a “save” when he holds off the trailing team from scoring. Eric Ball registered a major league save at the Rose Bowl Saturday. He, in effect, hid the loot. He protected the crown. He even ran 54 yards for a touchdown that was called back.

He was a workhorse, a stopper and the big reason UCLA was able to stay 13 points ahead. He didn’t erase his great Rose Bowl of 1986 but he made it just a prologue. Eric Ball didn’t just get a cameo part in history. He went out there as an understudy like the others but he came back a star. Eric (Just- give-me-the) Ball, a man not for one game but for all seasons.