BATTLE FOR THE ROSE BOWL: USC VS. UCLA : What Separates Aikman and Peete? : Saturday’s Game Should Go a Long Way in Providing an Answer to That

USC-UCLA games are never thinly plotted, the Rose Bowl often being on the line as well as bragging rights in a fierce cross-town rivalry. (When you think about it, how many college football games divide cities?)

But this year’s game has the added angle of two opposing quarterbacks, neither of whom has much in common except enormous talents, battling it out for the Heisman Trophy.

What a wealth of intrigue. It has been a long time, maybe forever, since this game has provided such a depth of antagonism. It’s no longer enough that the Nos. 2 and 6 teams play for a conference title, in a game with national championship implications, but the No. 1 and 1A quarterbacks in all the land must meet head on as well.

It’s a bit of overkill, don’t you think? But in a town where expectations are ratcheted upward seasonally--the Lakers always win, the Dodgers don’t even need to be good to win, etc.--this situation seems to be taken in stride.

That USC’s Rodney Peete, the man with the Tootsie Pop in his cheek, should be squaring off with UCLA’s Troy Aikman, the man with a pinch between cheek and gum, may be taken in stride. But it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

It took a remarkable and unlikely series of developments to match them this week. Never mind Aikman’s transfer from Oklahoma, where he was led to believe he would introduce the forward pass to the nation’s heartland. That transfer is not serendipity, just good sense. But how about Aikman nearly choosing Tulane because he thought he’d lost a set of golf clubs?

And, anyway, why is it that Peete, who was a water boy for the Arizona football team and a devoted fan, ends up at hated USC? Not only that, but ends up playing at USC for the man who wanted him to be a Wildcat? That could be serendipity.

They have been conjoined in this game by fate, no question. Yet, if we couldn’t have predicted this matchup 4 years ago, we at least saw it coming by the time this summer, and all the preseason magazines, rolled around. By then, after each quarterback had thrown for at least 2,500 yards and 17 touchdowns his junior season, it was sensible to pair them up for the 1988 arms race in their senior seasons. Many magazines did. And 10 or so games later, in a rare instance where predictions were served with performance, here they are again.

The magazine covers and the quarterbacks’ numbers throughout the season might lead you to believe they are on a parallel course. Peete, in leading the Trojans to a 9-0 record and No. 2 ranking behind Notre Dame, has thrown for 2,240 yards and 17 touchdowns. Aikman, whose Bruins are 9-1, has passed for 2,282 yards and 21 touchdowns.

But the two quarterbacks, whose only shared interest is a passion for golf, will prove to the rest of the world that they are not one bit alike on a day they take divergent roads, presumably to New York’s Downtown Athletic Club.

The truth of the matter is, they are more remarkable for their differences than their similarities. And their differences are not difficult to discern. Aikman is prototype pro prospect, 6 feet 3 1/2 inches, 217 pounds, strong-jawed and mostly silent. Although he spent his first 12 years in Southern California, his time in Henryetta, Okla., a town without even a McDonald’s, thereafter has colored his personality. And if he isn’t an actual good ol’ boy, he doesn’t mind your thinking he is.

“I haven’t fished once out here,” he tells you, for once permitting a tone of mild disgust into his voice. “I don’t even know where you’d go.”

Everything about him suggests that he would be happier back in that town of 6,000. The continuing references to his Blazer and his tobacco chewing are meant to exaggerate his rural instincts, a blue-collar guy caught by circumstance--the gift of his throwing arm--in a high-gloss town.

But he does not discourage the image. Last summer he “pipelined” for a crew in Fontana, bypassing more delicate work for his dad’s line. He knew better than to work for his dad, of course, but not enough not to do his kind of work.

“Now I know what I won’t do with my life,” he says.

Still, the company was comfortable. After all, here is a guy who hangs out with offensive linemen, rooms with them, plays golf with them.

“Their personalities and mine coincide,” he says. “Maybe it’s they don’t have much of an ego.”

Aikman’s ego is so undemanding that he might have stayed at Oklahoma to run the dreaded wishbone, Coach Barry Switzer’s assurances aside, except for the injury. It’s already a part of Bruin legend, how Aikman came from Oklahoma to UCLA. How Aikman was promised a chance to lead the Sooners into the 20th Century and how he slowly discovered it wasn’t to be.

“I thought that was the place to go,” he says.

Even though he began to worry that Switzer was not going to modify the offense, this by his sophomore season, Aikman had fully intended to stay.

“As long as I was playing, I would have stayed,” he says. In any event, he would have been in better shape than if he had landed at Tulane, where as a recruit he lost then-Coach John Cooper’s golf clubs briefly.

“If they had been lost, I might have had to go there,” he jokes. He found them, though, and was spared that choice.

Oklahoma, though, was looming as just as unfortunate a decision. He broke his ankle as a sophomore, gave Jamelle Holieway, a born wishbone quarterback, a chance to play and, instead of there being just one great quarterback, there were two. Though not right away, and not at Oklahoma.

So Aikman walked into Switzer’s office to give him the bad news. You could say Switzer took it well.

“It was like he was expecting me,” Aikman says.

Switzer got on the phone on Aikman’s behalf and placed him at UCLA, where there were no fishing holes but there was an offense that would attract pro scouts instead of Orange Bowl reps.

Whether Aikman’s arm would have been discovered at Oklahoma is open to question. Scouts have a way of discounting college game plans when presented with a physical specimen such as Aikman. Still, it’s not likely he would have been regarded as either a Heisman candidate or a National Football League jackpot if all he had done was pitch the ball laterally.

His exposure in UCLA’s offense has been titillating to the scouts and general managers. His talents have caused scouts to compare him not against quarterbacks emerging in the 1989 draft but those from 1983, the year of John Elway, Dan Marino and Ken O’Brien. A couple of weeks or so ago, President Tex Schramm of the Dallas Cowboys was asked what he thought of when he considered the team’s 2-7 record.

“I’m thinking of Troy Aikman,” he said, “I cannot tell a lie.”

His future is enough assured that Aikman can crab, mildly, about the NFL’s selection process, the luck of the draw, as far as he’s concerned. Still, the NFL is where he has wanted to play ever since he was a kid. Nice to know he has a future.

But between Oklahoma and the NFL, it has not been happily ever after, not exactly. A subpar performance in last year’s game with USC, which the underdog Trojans won, caused him some sleepless nights. He completed 11 of 26 passes and threw 3 interceptions, exactly as many as he had previously given up all season.

Aikman says he lamented that game mostly for the seniors, who left with that particular taste in their mouths.

“Me,” he says, “I get a second chance.”

Though it was not stretching it to pair them up on all the magazine covers, Peete was considered the lesser of the two prospects. Certainly he was the less physically imposing--6-2 and 195. And his team was rather more famous for producing tailbacks than quarterbacks.

And even at that, Peete was fighting the image of a scrambling quarterback, a euphemism in his mind for a black quarterback, which is hardly how he sees himself.

“Times are changing,” he says hopefully.

He was not considered the franchise player Aikman was. Even he allows that the most favorable description he could hope to achieve was multidimensional.

“I like to think of myself as a guy who can do a lot of things,” he says.

Shoot, didn’t he track down UCLA safety Eric Turner in last year’s game after Turner had been so bold as to intercept one of Peete’s passes? Peete ran him to the ground at the 11-yard line just as the first half ended, saving a touchdown that could have beaten the Trojans.

But this versatility is strictly a team blessing. It tends to obscure the fact that he can do one thing--pass a football, for example--extremely well.

Yet look what Peete has done the last few weeks, tightening up this Heisman race. Two weeks ago, he threw for 305 yards. Then, against Arizona State last week, he passed for 361 yards and, for the third week in a row, 3 touchdowns.

Suddenly, their numbers are making them more of a matched pair than anybody dreamed.

Yet just as Aikman veers off into a lineman’s anonymity, Peete seems to choose the better lighted path.

So, while Aikman is asking around where a good fishing hole is, Peete, a comparative city slicker, is filming a news feature, on the USC mascot, that is surprisingly professional given his level of experience. In fact, seeing the tape run between halves of a USC game, you do a double take. You know he’s a communications major with broadcasting ambitions. But still. That’s Rodney Peete?

At times it seems he’s everywhere, doing everything. Aikman may have his NFL ticket all but punched, yet what Peete lacks in commitment from the pros, he has in opportunity.

A talented infielder who hit .338 for USC last season, he has the option of major league baseball. He turned down a reported $100,000 contract offered last year by the Oakland Athletics, a team that was willing to grant him all kinds of concessions. Peete declined, the better to concentrate on football, but does not rule out baseball.

“My focus is on football right now. It’s getting all my attention,” he says. “So at the moment, I’m leaning toward football. But I know this, I can be happy playing either one. A home run or a touchdown pass, it feels pretty much the same.”

Does this sound like a negotiating ploy in the works? Peete winks.

“I don’t want to play football for peanuts. When you clear the smoke, you want to know who’s going to make the best offer. Hopefully, I’ll have my choice.”

In any event, he’s more likely to be a John Elway, playing one against the other, than a Bo Jackson, playing both.

“Impossible for a quarterback to play both sports,” he says.

If it’s hard, at this moment, to imagine him playing baseball, remember that it was once hard to imagine him playing anything for USC. He grew up around Arizona, where his dad was an assistant coach to Larry Smith. His loyalty was fierce. As a water boy in 1980, close to the action, he remembers a game with USC.

“They brought the band, I swear, 500 people, and it was so exciting and intimidating, there was a feeling the game was over before it started.”

Impressive, huh?

“I hated it.”

He did not land at Arizona, playing against the hated Trojans. Of course Smith, a longtime friend of the Peete family, made his pitch. But he didn’t call in any markers.

“My dad told me, ‘Coaches can be gone next year,’ ” Peete says, perhaps mindful that both his dad and Smith eventually moved on. “At SC, they’d always have that band.”

And, surprisingly, by the time Peete was ready to mature into a Heisman candidate, USC had Smith, too.

Peete, though he grew up in a coach’s house--a football-sophisticated place where stereotypes are impossible to find--did not get unilateral support in his choice of position. He remembers that some friends of his brother advised him to consider a fallback position, because black players were always shifted to defensive back or some other position. Peete wouldn’t hear of it.

“I guess I was greedy,” he says, “I wanted the ball in my hand all the time.”

As it turned out, nobody has been tempted to have him take the ball in any other fashion.

And he’s no less greedy these days. He confesses to dreaming of the Heisman, to really wanting it, which is not the same as expecting it. And he dreams of winning this showdown again, although he is careful to point out that it is not exactly one on one.

It is one way to watch this game, though, and pardon us, a lot of us, if we anticipate this game a little more because of the quarterback matchup. All this greatness, gathered on one field, in one game. It’ll be a long time before the USC-UCLA game will be as rich a battle as this.