TDs Don’t Always Go to the Swiftest : The Speed of SDSU’s Paul Hewitt Is Suspect, but Many of His Runs Wind Up in End Zone

For all the touchdowns San Diego State tailback Paul Hewitt has scored--so many that even he lost count years ago--it seems strange that his football career would be so shaped by the one he let get away.

But when it came time for college recruiters to decide if Hewitt was ready for the big time, his 37 touchdowns and 1,705 yards rushing as senior at Monrovia High School never quite measured up.

Instead they looked at his height and his speed.

To judge his height, they needed only to check the program (5 feet 9 inches). To judge his speed, they took one look, at one play, and decided they had seen enough.

It was in the last game of Hewitt’s senior season--a CIF playoff game against Antelope Valley. Hewitt appeared headed for a touchdown on a kickoff return when he was caught from behind and tackled at the 3-yard line.

“That play probably cost him a scholarship,” said his former high school coach, Richard Watson.

Watson recalls Hewitt being caught by a faster player who had on angle on him. Hewitt remembers it quite differently.

“He didn’t catch me from behind; I made a bad cut,” he says insistently. “Besides, I don’t see how that mattered. I had a lot of long runs in high school. I had kickoff returns and a punt return that I ran back for touchdown. I don’t know how he could say that.”

Watson said it because he dealt with college coaches and heard what they said. “A lot of scouts were at that game,” he said. “And they made up their minds right there.”

Watson wonders what some of those same scouts would say now.

Nearly five years after the play that possibly cost him his first shot at major college football, Hewitt is playing at that level and still scoring touchdowns at a record rate.

He might have taken him a few false steps, a detour here and there, but Hewitt is at SDSU doing what he always has done best--finding a way into the end zone.

“I don’t know what it is,” Hewitt said. “But something comes over me when I get down to the 5- or 10-yard line.”

In the 15 games since he transferred to SDSU as a junior last season, Hewitt has scored 29 touchdowns. He needs three more in the Aztecs remaining eight games to join Art Preston (1949-51) as the school’s all-time scorer with 192 points.

Last season, Hewitt led the nation with 24 touchdowns and rushed for 1,001 yards, becoming only the sixth SDSU runner to top 1,000 in a season. He has started this season headed in much the same direction.

Hewitt has scored 5 touchdowns and gained 319 yards on 63 carries in the Aztecs’ first three games. Most came in the Aztecs’ 39-36 victory against Air Force three weeks ago, when Hewitt rushed for a career-high 259 yards and 5 touchdowns on a school-record 45 carries. He enters Saturday night’s game against Oregon at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium averaging 106.3 yards per game.

Judging Hewitt by these numbers might be fairer than using the fading memory of one high school play. But it has taken Hewitt three colleges and a lot of hard work to put much of that rap behind him.

One Monrovia teammate, defensive back Chris Hale, went on to USC, and defensive lineman Willie Griffith accepted a scholarship to Nebraska. But Hewitt was left with only an offer from New Mexico State.

A member of the Big West Conference (then known as the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn.), New Mexico State is at the bottom of NCAA Division I-A football. But it was the only major college offer Hewitt had. It was either that or play at lower division or in community college.

“That was a personal hurt for Paul,” said Watson, now an assistant principal at Sycamore Junior High School in Anaheim. “Paul had all the touchdowns, all the statistics, but he wasn’t getting any offers.

“It was like, ‘I’m supposed to get something, and I’m looking and don’t see anything.’ When it came down to it, Paul accepted that offer from New Mexico State because he had to have something.”

His time there was brief. He quit the team once, was talked into returning, then quit again.

“We were losing, and I didn’t like the way the program was run,” Hewitt said. “But it wasn’t just the losing, it was the caliber of ball we were playing.

I thought I was better than that.”

His few months in Las Cruces where not made any easier by his personality. Reserved in public and family-oriented, Hewitt missed his home and never adjusted to life there.

“He didn’t seem overly happy from the time he got here,” said Fred Zechman, former New Mexico State coach. “He was homesick, and he never got over it. Most players in college quickly develop a close relationship with a coach, a player, girlfriend or a teacher, but that didn’t happen for Paul.”

Hewitt left after one semester, having never played in a game. He said he decided to transfer to Citrus College in Glendora because it was close to home, and he had several friends on the football team.

His success was immediate. He rushed for 956 yards as a freshman in 1985, 1,356 yards as sophomore. But when it time for recruiting, the same old questions were again asked, concerning size and speed.

“In our business, we stereotype people into those who can and those who cannot be successful based on such physical requirements,” Citrus Coach Mike Merandi said. “That was what happened to Paul.”

The recruiters, though perhaps more numerous then when he was in high school, were not fawning over Hewitt. Mainly it was the same group of lesser major-college schools who looked at him and passed the first time around.

Even the Aztecs might have taken a pass had it not been that Merandi once coached with Wayne Moses, coach of SDSU’s running backs, and insisted that Moses give Hewitt another look.

“I saw Paul practice, and I didn’t like him,” Moses said. “He wasn’t very big; he wasn’t very fast. I’m the kind of coach who looks at all the wrong things. I’m looking for a guy 6-2 who can run the 40 in 4.5 seconds. Paul wasn’t that.

“I told Mike, ‘Nah.’ But he said I had to see this guy play. So I went and watched him at a scrimmage. When the lights came on, he was a different guy. He was a player.”

Hewitt might not be tall or fast, but he is solid and, at 195 pounds, possesses a strong upper body and legs. Better yet, he knows the way to the end zone. Even in his days playing youth football in suburban Pittsburgh, before his family moved to California when he was 10, Hewitt was the team’s leading scorer.

“He owns the end zone,” Watson said. “He has a magnet that draws him him to it. He’ll hurt you. He hunts you out with those thighs and then punishes you with that leg lift.”

Once convinced Hewitt was the back he was looking for, Moses still had to go about recruiting him. Hewitt’s quiet personality came into play, making for some frustrating telephone calls.

“I’d call him up and everything would be, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ ” Moses recalled. “It’s hard to talk to someone like that. It was nothing disrespectful. But I’d ask, ‘How did the team do?’ and he say, ‘Oh, fine.’ I’d ask him, ‘How many yards did you get?’ And he would go, ‘I really don’t remember.’ Everything was just one-word answers.”

Moses said he spent more time talking to Hewitt’s younger brother, Craig, than to Hewitt himself.

“In fact, it was Craig who told me he was coming to school here,” Moses said. “One day I called up and asked Craig, ‘What do you think he is going to do?’ Craig said he was coming here.

“I asked Paul when he was going to get around to tell me, and all he said was, ‘When were you going to ask me?’ ”

A word here, a nod of the head there, an acknowledging smile. Try as one might to get him to, Hewitt just isn’t going to say a whole lot.

For someone who spends his Saturdays playing football before thousands, Hewitt is about as reserved an athlete as one will find. All of which makes him a difficult read, even for those who work closely with him.

To this day, Zechman still wonders about Hewitt.

“Tell me,” said Zechman, who was replaced as coach the season after Hewitt left. “Is he still so quiet?”

Assured that Hewitt has not changed much, Zechman sounds relieved.

“Great,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder if it was me.”

But Hewitt acts that way with almost everyone he meets--coaches, teammates and the occasional inquiring mind.

When Hewitt was asked by SDSU Coach Denny Stolz to appear on his weekly television show, he declined. “The first time that ever happened,” Stolz said.

When Hewitt was asked for an interview, he appeared 35 minutes late, offered no apologies, answered questions briefly and spent much of his time sitting at a desk, doodling inattentively on a pad of paper.

“I’m not shy about talking,” Hewitt said. “I’ve been on TV before. It just doesn’t excite me. It doesn’t matter if I go on or not. I just elect not to go on.”

Even Moses, who spends as much time with him as anyone on the coaching staff, found that it took him awhile to understand.

“He is in control of his emotions,” Moses said. “You can never tell if things are going good, bad or indifferent.

“Don’t get me wrong; he’ll tell you if he doesn’t like something. But his demeanor is such that he doesn’t get too up, and he doesn’t get too down. Maybe that is his key to success. He is not on a roller-coaster.

“But as good as he is, he is a very private person. He wants success, but he doesn’t like all the things that go along with that success. He just wants to do well, and that’s about it.”

With that, the Aztecs have no quarrel. Hewitt could not enroll at SDSU last year until he completed his associate degree at Citrus. He did not join the team until less than four weeks before the start of last season’s opener against UCLA. But by kickoff at the Rose Bowl, he was the starting tailback. And by the second game against Utah, he had his first 100-yard game (113 yards on 18 carries) and the first 2 of his school-record 24 touchdowns.

Those touchdown runs--13 and 25 yards in a 52-34 victory--would be his longest of the season; almost all the others came from inside the 10. Although he did add a 27-yard scoring run in his big game against Air Force this season, his longest run as an Aztec remains 41 yards.

But as long as Hewitt continues to score, his lack of breakaway speed no longer seems quite the concern it had been to those recruiters.

Maybe that is part of the reason his 40-yard dash time--the measure by which football speed is judged--remains carefully concealed.

Neither Hewitt nor any of his coaches, past or present, said they knew or would reveal the time. Watson went so far as to decline to say for fear of “embarrassing” Hewitt.

All Hewitt would say was that he hasn’t “been tested since the first day I came here, and I didn’t do too well in that.”

Moses couldn’t even remember that much. “I don’t think we’ve ever timed him here,” he said. “What it all comes down to, is that if we timed him, I’d probably say something stupid like, ‘I don’t know if he can play for us.’ ”

Moses shook his head at the absurdity of the statement. He shouldn’t have felt so bad. It wouldn’t be the first time someone made that mistake.

SDSU SCORING

Name Years Pts. Art Preston 1949-51 192 Kern Carson 1961-63 174 Gary Garrison 1964-65 174 Paul Hewitt 1987-88 174 Casey Brown 1982-85 152 Norm Nygaard 1952-54 150 Tom Reynolds 1969-71 150 Mario Mendez 1961-63 148 Chris O’Brien 1984-85 146 Chris Hardy 1983-86 138

FANTASTIC FINISHER Paul Hewitt is most dangerous inside 20. (Number of touchdowns from each distance.)

Length Run Pass Total 1 yard 9 0 9 2 yards 5 0 5 4 yards 1 2 3 5 yards 1 0 1 6-10 yards 2 1 3 11-20 yards 3 3 6 More than 20 2 0 2 Totals 23 6 29