Swanson Shakes Off Late Start : After Injury-Plagued Season, Alemany Lineman a Healthy All-Star

A couple of seasons from now, even if his playing status in college improves, Brian Swanson still figures that he probably will rate little more than a line or two in the UCLA football media guide. His senior year at Alemany High, he concedes, won’t give the public-relations folks in Westwood much to put in his player biography.

Interspersed among the pages, mixed in with a ton of high school All-American QBs, DBs, RBs, no-neck linemen and the like, will be Swanson’s mug shot. But other than height and weight, there isn’t much to include.

“Maybe they could throw in the high school I went to, but that’s about it,” Swanson said.

Sure, linemen are the pack mules of football and practically expect to be overlooked. But even so, Swanson is a guy with practically no credentials. Last fall’s crop of Bruin freshmen included seven players ranked among the top 100 nationally by The Sporting News, nine Super Prep magazine All-Americans and seven members of California Football magazine’s all-state team.

“I didn’t make all-anything,” Swanson said, smiling, something he did very little of last fall.

After Swanson’s injury-marred senior season, he’s just grateful to be ambulatory and playing again, mainly because it has been 20 months since he last played football while completely healthy. Swanson will start for the East team as a defensive lineman in tonight’s Daily News All-Star Football Game at 7:30 at Birmingham High.

Swanson shouldn’t be difficult to spot from the stands. He’ll be the guy with the earhole-to-earhole grin.

“It’s fun getting back to the game,” he said. “It’s kind of weird. I made the all-league team in my junior year, but I didn’t make diddly this year. Then I got this thing in the mail about the all-star game, and it really surprised me.

“Look at the year I had. I didn’t have an all-star year. I knew I could play with these guys, but I never expected to be out here.”

He almost wasn’t.

“We weren’t going to pick him because of the injury; we weren’t sure what was going to happen with him,” East co-Coach Jeff Engilman said. “We didn’t really know what his status was, but his coach said he was fine, so we added him.”

Subtraction, however, was the underlying theme in 1988 for Swanson, a 6-foot-4, 225-pound two-way starter. Swanson was recruited by UCLA and a number of other Pacific 10 Conference schools after an outstanding junior season, one in which he was selected to the All-Dey Rey League team. His senior campaign, though, was a pain, indeed.

Swanson’s injury trouble began in a summer league basketball game when he was kicked in the left shin while trying to draw a charging call. What he first believed was just a bad bruise soon turned out to be bad news.

The bone in the area of the injury began to calcify, Swanson said, and the pain was almost enough to deck him during the most mundane tasks.

“It’s a very painful injury, it makes it hurt to walk or do anything,” said former Alemany assistant coach Jon Mack, who also coached the school’s track team and is serving as an assistant coach for the West tonight. “It would be similar to the trouble that Mary Decker has had.”

The shin injury was aggravated in preseason football workouts, forcing Swanson to miss hell week and the season’s first game. For the next few weeks, Swanson’s effectiveness--he was a team captain and scheduled to start on the offensive and defensive lines--was nil and his time on the field was limited to cameo appearances.

Before Alemany’s game with league-rival Crespi, however, Swanson was almost fully recovered and expecting to again play both ways. But during practice, an Alemany lineman rolled onto Swanson’s right ankle, knocking him out for yet another game. Alemany lost, 49-0, to the Celts, whose running back, Russell White, broke the state career scoring record in the game.

Swanson, in full uniform, watched from the sideline.

“I remember his leg looked like it had a cast on it,” said former Crespi Coach Bill Redell, co-coach of the West team. “I’m sure that if he’d been healthy, it would have made a difference in their defensive line play.”

Matters got worse before they got better. The following week, against Loyola, Swanson started on the offensive line but was hardly an impact player in a 35-0 loss. USC Coach Larry Smith, whose son plays at Loyola, attended the game. Soon thereafter, Swanson’s correspondence from the school stopped and panic set in.

“It looked pretty scary at that point,” said Swanson, who won’t turn 18 until November. “After that game, USC stopped recruiting me. It all-out stopped. I thought, ‘This is horrible.’ I’d been getting letters and everything, and now, schools just started to drop out.

“I guess the problem was that I could do no run blocking. I had one step, struggle, one step, struggle. Someone told me the reason Smith dropped out was that he figured, ‘We’re recruiting him on defense and he’s not even starting on defense. He’s slow and he’s supposed to be quick. He’s quick off the ball, but that’s it.’ ”

The list of recruiters dwindled to UCLA, Oregon State and Oregon. When the season ended--Alemany finished 4-6 after a 3-0 start--Swanson took an official visit to Oregon and the following week went to Westwood. The latter was enough to prompt him to cancel a scheduled trip to Oregon State.

“There was no reason to go,” he said. “UCLA was where I’d dreamed of playing all along.”

Fortunately Swanson, like West quarterback Wayne Cook of Newbury Park, attended a UCLA-sponsored camp last July at UC Irvine. Cook, who also had an injury-plagued senior year, had made enough of an early impression that UCLA offered a scholarship. It was likewise with Swanson.

Now that his assorted leg injuries have healed, he is showing why he was recruited in the first place.

“He has extreme quickness for a lineman,” Engilman said. “He’s probably a little small for them right now, but I can see his potential and I can see what they saw in him.”

Swanson has been so aggressive during all-star workouts--a few players lazily snooze through practice or don’t show up at all--that Engilman instantly tabbed him as a sleeper. Engilman said Swanson’s more-than-open eyes opened his eyes.

“He is very mean, real mean,” Engilman said. “In fact, the first couple days of practice, he got into a couple of, well, altercations. He has that look in his eye. All coaches see that look and know right away that’s the kind of kid they want.”

Maybe Swanson has all-stars in his eyes. Once this game is over, maybe he’ll have something to bulk up his Bruin portfolio with after all.