The Catch Is Distant No. 2 for Sherman

The ball was right there where it had to be. It floated toward the receiver’s chest. He only had to leap three feet forward, tuck it in and dash across the goal line six yards away.

Rod Sherman put the ball away, wheeled and streaked through the end zone triumphantly. Behind him, the burned defender clasped his hands to his forehead and moaned. On the sideline, his coach did the same thing, and Life magazine forever captured the instant in a full-page photo.

When you beat Notre Dame with a touchdown with a minute to play, you never forget it. In this case, neither did anyone else.

The time was 1964, the circumstances were these: Notre Dame, in Coach Ara Parseghian’s first season, was undefeated. Its student body was shrieking, “We’re No. 1!” and so were the Cadillac alumni in the stands. It led all the polls, it had rolled over nine opponents without even breathing hard. It had a soon-to-be Heisman Trophy winner at quarterback (John Huarte) and two future Super Bowl players, defensive tackle Alan Page and linebacker Jim Lynch.

It was at least a 10-point favorite over a USC team that had been beaten three times and wasn’t even going to the Rose Bowl.

The game started out as if the oddsmakers knew what they were talking about. The anthem had barely died down before the Irish had opened a 17-0 lead. Page kept throwing ballcarriers around like sacks of mail. Lynch kept batting down passes, and Huarte kept hitting Jack Snow with long passes.

But in the second half, USC crept up and, suddenly, with the score, 17-13, and 1:33 left, it had the ball on the 15-yard-line, fourth and eight.

In Trojan lore, it will always be known as The Catch. There are many great moments in Trojan-Irish history. The Kick is one of them. That would be the fourth-quarter field goal Johnny Baker kicked to win the 1931 game at South Bend and end a 2 1/2-year undefeated streak by Notre Dame.

But The Catch is another of them. It is frozen in time. One of the watershed moments in a 60-game rivalry that had many of them.

The picture of that historic reception by No. 12 hangs in Heritage Hall but it’s engraved on every fan’s heart everywhere.

Rod Sherman, who caught that memorable pass, came to USC as a quarterback. He played that position in high school and at UCLA for one abortive year.

But, at USC, they already had a quarterback, Craig Fertig, and with 9.8 speed in the hundred, Sherman looked to Trojan Coach John McKay like a better bet at flanker.

McKay had just sent Sherman into the game at that critical juncture in 1964. Rod was on the bench as he watched Alan Page brutally sacking quarterback Fertig twice (once forcing the ball out of Fertig’s grasp, but it was ruled an incomplete pass).

Sherman sidled up to Coach McKay. “How about an 85-Z Delay?” he suggested. “Go ahead, try it,” McKay agreed, shoving Sherman into the game.

“You could do those things with Coach McKay,” recalls Sherman, who was only a sophomore that day. “Another coach might say, ‘Sit down and shut up, I’m running the team here!’ But not Coach McKay. He listened to you.”

It was a good thing. The fourth-down play worked to perfection. A short pass over the middle, a slip for Notre Dame defender Tony Carey--and The Catch went into the modern annals of the Trojan wars.

You might think that was the greatest triumph in the life and times of Rod Sherman. After all, it has grown in legend till in the retelling it has a nine-yard pass growing to a length-of-the-field bomb. “Everything but me throwing and then catching the pass,” Sherman said with a laugh.

But it is a distant second to the game-winning score Sherman racked up only a few years ago. It happened as he was sunning himself after a workout at the UC Irvine campus. “A friend of mine looked down on my thigh and he saw what looked to be two very dark freckles merging. He kind of frowned. ‘You ever get that looked at?’ he asked me. I said, ‘No, but I will.’ ‘You better,’ he said.

Sherman went to the hospital. “ ‘Ninety-five per cent of these things are benign,’ they tell me. But I hit the jackpot. A 90-1 shot came in. It was a melanoma. The Big C. When I woke up I had this divot in my leg that made it look like a satellite photo of the moon. The doctor told me any more time and they would have had to remove all the lymph nodes. It was malignant. Much longer and I would be dead.

So far as Rod Sherman was concerned, that was The Catch of his career. Cancer is tougher to get in the clear on than Tony Carey, tougher to beat than Notre Dame.

Rod Sherman has been in a Rose Bowl (1966) and a Super Bowl (Oakland, 1968) but the most critical seconds of his life were not spent in an end zone but on an operating table.

Next Saturday night, at the Rose Bowl, Rod Sherman and The Catch, along with Trojan football players Pete Beathard and C.R. Roberts, Cal’s Craig Morton and UCLA’s Foster Andersen will be honored at halftime and inducted into the Shrine Hospital Hall of Fame at the 38th annual Shriners North-South football game.

This is a game which pays for new legs for those who were born without any, new bones for those whose are so brittle they break on contact, new hands for those who didn’t form any.

Sherman played in this game 27 years ago. “When I see those kids, I don’t thank God I had the speed to make that catch. I thank God I had the arms and hands.”