Laufenberg Fits Mold of Staunch and Able Leader

To appreciate Babe Laufenberg’s spirit is to appreciate the time he told his high school football coach to stick his playbook where the sun doesn’t shine.

Laufenberg is the much-traveled quarterback of the San Diego Chargers who makes no excuses for the fact that he is among the National Football League’s most unproductive starting quarterbacks according to the league’s complicated rating system. He could whine about an inexperienced offensive line. He could whisper “off the record” remarks--and hope they found their way into print--about how his young receivers have not yet learned to run disciplined pass routes.

But he won’t.

Anyway, to appreciate this story about Laufenberg and his high school coach one must understand the absolute power high school football coaches wield over athletes hoping to get to college. This was a case where absolute power corrupted. Absolutely.

It was the late 1970s and the good fathers of the Carmelite Order at Crespi High had hired the Marinovich brothers--Gary and Marv--to take over the football program. Gary would be the head coach. Marv, a former USC guard and assistant for the Oakland Raiders, would be his aide de camp. To say the Marinoviches were driven is to say Patton and MacArthur were soldiers.

Crespi was 2-0 when it showed up on a Thursday night for a grudge match at Bishop Amat. Gary Marinovich had coached at Bishop Amat when that school’s high-powered passing attack featured Pat Haden, the future Ram, and J.K. McKay, the son of former USC and Tampa Bay Buccaneers Coach John McKay.

This would be the game in which the Marinoviches showed the west San Fernando Valley what high school football was all about. Laufenberg was a senior and the Crespi quarterback.

“I think they wanted us to go 11-0 and the whole nine yards,” Laufenberg says. “And there was nothing wrong with that. Except we weren’t that good.”

Crespi had Laufenberg and Willie Curran and Tom Sullivan. Curran was later good enough as a UCLA running back to get a look from the Atlanta Falcons, and he caught on as a wide receiver. Sullivan played wide receiver for the Denver Gold of the USFL. But Crespi had little else.

Near the end of the game, they trailed by eight points. And the Marinoviches were disgusted. So they stopped sending in plays. Instead, they sent in a substitute who delivered this message to Laufenberg: “Call ‘em yourself.”

Laufenberg did, and Crespi didn’t make a first down. Moments later, time expired. Crespi had lost.

Things went from bad to worse. According to Laufenberg, the Marinoviches stood at the front of the team bus and unloaded on the players.

“We were being called everything,” Laufenberg said. “They called us things you couldn’t print in the newspaper.”

Laufenberg, the team leader, decided he had heard enough. “I felt like they had deserted us ,” he said. “So I stood up and had a few choice words. I said, ‘You guys were the ones that gave up, not us. We didn’t give up. We were out there.’ ”

The Marinoviches got off the bus. The next day, they gathered the team for its normal postgame, informal, walk-through practice. Many of the players were wearing street shoes. It was September in the Valley. It was hot and smoggy. The Marinoviches ordered the team to run up the hill behind the school to a water tower. At the base of the tower, they began conducting 100-yard sprints.

“I remember this vividly,” Laufenberg says. “Some guys were in bare feet. We must have run six miles. It was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever come across in my whole life.”

Laufenberg was outraged. He ran like a maniac--”about four million miles an hour. I just killed my body.” The Marinoviches promised bad things would happen to anybody who stopped.

“So like an idiot, I just kept running harder and harder,” Laufenberg says now. “It was like, ‘You’re not gonna bring me down.’ ”

And Laufenberg was one of the players the Marinoviches liked . “Babe was a very gifted athlete,” Marv Marinovich said recently. “We didn’t have a problem with Babe. But that team lacked discipline and hard work and effort.”

By the time Laufenberg got home that night he was, in his words, “strung out.”

“My parents looked at me and it was like, ‘Oooohh, our kid’s on drugs.’ ”

By the time Monday rolled around, the Crespi powers-that-be had decided the Marinoviches would no longer coach their football team.

“It was one of those resignation things,” Laufenberg said.

Actually it was more than that.

“We have a rule here at Crespi that you don’t punish kids if you’re going to run a good program,” says Paul Muff, the school’s athletic director and basketball coach. “We don’t go for any type of punishment that’s outside your normal preparation for a game.”

Crespi replaced the Marinoviches with freshman coach Charlie Schuhman, who led the team to the playoffs that year. The athletic program survived.

And Laufenberg survived. He enrolled at Stanford, then transferred to Missouri. Missouri had just shifted to the veer offense, so Laufenberg spent a year at Pierce College before settling on Indiana University. There, he broke several of that school’s passing records.

The incident at the water tower is history now. Marv Marinovich, whose heralded freshman son Todd is one of quarterback Rodney Peete’s backups at USC, insists he does not remember leaving Crespi before the season ended. But he does remember Laufenberg’s arm strength.

“He knocked a couple of kids out,” Marinovich says. “One was on a curl pattern. The ball hit the kid in the head and knocked him right out. That wasn’t uncommon.”

But when the coaches tried to walk over Laufenberg’s teammates, they found they had to walk over Laufenberg first. They might intimidate and make threats about taking away starting jobs, but they could not intimidate a boy who instinctively knew where the line between discipline and humiliation was drawn. And anyone who knows him will tell you he has his family to thank for that.

“We were all real tight,” says John Laufenberg, 23, the youngest of the four Laufenberg brothers. “He was just another guy in the family. But he has always been level-headed.”

“Babe doesn’t do anything halfway,” Jeff Laufenberg, 33, says. “It’s something that probably our parents instilled in us. My dad basically said if you go out and give it everything, then it doesn’t really matter what happens. Or at least you’re never going to regret what happens if you’ve given it your best.”

Jeff Laufenberg, the oldest brother, is a Los Angeles lawyer and Babe’s agent. He was a junior varsity quarterback at Crespi. Dan Laufenberg, 30, also played quarterback at Crespi, two years ahead of Babe, who played quarterback at Crespi five years ahead of John. Bill Laufenberg, the boys’ father, still shows up for games at Crespi, although his sons have all graduated and despite the fact that a bad back prevents him from sitting through a full four quarters.

The brothers had some fierce touch football games in the street in front of their Canoga Park home. There were trees and fire hydrants out there and the kind of vehicular traffic that made the Raider secondary look tame by comparison.

“If you had Babe playing quarterback for you, you’d be seeing the ball come down after it had gone over the trees,” John says. “Hopefully you hadn’t run into any cars while you were looking for the ball.”

One of Laufenberg’s closest friends is former Crespi basketball teammate Ed Marek, a commercial real estate salesman in Encino. Marek’s favorite Laufenberg story, however, has to do with towels. Seems Laufenberg had been snapping rolled up, wet towels in the locker room after practice one day when two of his victims confronted him.

Laufenberg’s only choice was to run. And the only place available was the nearest door. Fortunately, the door was open. Unfortunately, it led out to the track that ran around the football field. Trouble was that Laufenberg was naked.

It was late afternoon, and parents were picking up their children from school. Laufenberg did not go unnoticed. Lord knows he tried. He sidled up to a solitary jogger and took a lap with him. The teammates that had chased him from the building were so amused they let him back in.

“Babe’s a real character,” Muff says.

Of course, the world is full of characters. Characters with principle are rare. Rarer still are the ones who can complete passes over the tops of trees.