Mirth at Moorpark : Quarterback Merrill Mixes Pleasure With Business in Leading Team to Bowl Game

Quarterbacks. They are the businessmen of football. They are usually grim-faced and spend half their nonplaying time accepting the blame for everything that went wrong in the game and the other half thanking God that no one has recently shredded the cartilage in any of their joints.

So just what the heck is Jayson Merrill, the quarterback at Moorpark College, doing with that silly grin on his face? Doesn’t he know that he is a quarterback and therefore required to view life as being about as pleasurable as 75 years of wearing very uncomfortable shoes?

“He was always laughing and smiling,” said Ken Cook, the coach at Newbury Park High where Merrill set a school record in his senior year by passing for more than 1,500 yards.

“He was never serious. Jayson always wanted to have fun. That was the most important thing to him. He was always looking for a good time.”

Merrill is not, however, all Howie Mandel in cleats. On the field, he can look as shell-shocked as Dan Quayle’s public-relations chief.

“When it’s game time, I get very serious on the field,” Merrill said. “This is no joke.”

Last month, Moorpark trailed Glendale College, 14-13, in the final quarter. But Merrill unloaded a 69-yard touchdown pass in the closing minutes to lift the Raiders to the victory, clinching a tie for first place in the Northern Division of the Western State Conference.

During the regular season, Merrill led Moorpark to a 4-1 divisional record, an 8-1 WSC record and a 9-1 overall mark. Merrill has completed 63 of 124 passes for 1,137 yards and 13 touchdowns in 10 games.

Moorpark will play Rancho Santiago College of Santa Ana, the Mission Conference representative, in the PONY Bowl at Orange Coast College at 1 p.m. Saturday. It will be the Raiders’ first bowl appearance in 3 years.

And that should wipe the smile off Merrill’s face. For about 60 minutes.

“Off the field, it was all laughs. But on the field, Jayson was all business,” Cook said.

And when he gets that serious look, the opponent seldom thinks it’s a laughing matter.

“Number one, Jayson was a leader,” Cook said. “Number two, he always found a way to win. He was just one of those kids, the rare kind that just has that knack of coming up with the big play.”

Merrill was not heavily recruited out of high school, partly because he weighed just 150 pounds. Moorpark showed some interest, but Merrill didn’t. He went to Ventura College, but didn’t try out for the football team.

And as the 1987 football season came and went, Merrill found that he missed the game.

“When I left high school, I figured that was it,” he said. “I had played football for eight years and was pretty burned out. I decided I had had enough. But that fall, I started to miss it. I realized that I didn’t have many years left to play any football, and I didn’t want them to pass me by.”

He was contacted again by Moorpark Coach Jim Bittner, showed up for spring practice and knew he had found a new home with the Raiders.

“We recruited him when he was in high school, but we didn’t get much of a response,” Bittner said. “Then we sort of lost track of him. Out of high school he said he was just not ready to play football. He felt he needed to get bigger. And he was probably right.”

And when Merrill decided to play football again, Bittner quickly realized that he had found his quarterback.

“We had seven quarterbacks in practice, and we were trying to sort them out,” Bittner said. “Jayson made it easy. In the first scrimmage, with nothing really glued together, he showed that he could move the football team up and down the field.

“It was evident he could move our offense, and he did it by scrambling and improvising.”

By the fall, Merrill had grown to 6 feet and weighed 175 pounds. And the arm that had passed for so many yards in high school was now considerably stronger.

“He’s not fully developed yet,” Bittner said. “He is getting bigger and stronger all the time. But the size is there now, and he has such a strong arm. He’s very serious about football and he puts a lot of pressure on himself. But he’s a happy kid. He should be. He has a lot to be happy about.”

And even though he tries to suppress it, sometimes the happiness even bursts through on the football field, right out there amid the slamming and bashing.

“Two weeks ago we beat L. A. Southwest College, 51-22, and it was so much fun,” Merrill said. “I tried to stay serious, but it was just too much fun, marching up and down the field all night. So I started smiling in the huddles and after big plays. And pretty soon the whole team was smiling.”

Even the linemen? The guys who normally exhibit on-field laughter only at the sound of snapping limbs?

“Yeah, even the linemen were laughing,” Merrill said. “I don’t think I’d ever seen that before.

“It was pretty funny.”