Keith Coury: Fullerton’s Link to the Past : College Football: Sophomore is great nephew of Dick Coury, current Ram quarterback coach and the Titans’ first football coach.

Keith Coury is only a sophomore on Cal State Fullerton’s football team, an outside linebacker who gets most of his playing time on kickoffs and punts.

But when he does something as simple as writing a check, many people in Orange County stop at the name.

Coury is the link between Fullerton’s first football season and its 20th, which ends Saturday when the Titans play San Jose State in San Jose, trying to finish with a victory and a 6-4-1 record.

Keith is the great nephew of Dick Coury, Fullerton’s first coach and now assistant coach with the Rams. Before starting the program at Fullerton, where he guided the Titans to a 31-0 victory over Cal Poly Pomona in 1970 in their first game, Dick coached Mater Dei High School to three Southern Section championships and was an assistant at USC.

Keith’s grandfather was Chuck Coury, the owner and manager of various Orange County bars and restaurants before his death last year at age 70. Chuck Coury was a close friend of the sporting community and local coaches, among them Gene Murphy, Fullerton’s coach for the past 10 seasons.

Now Keith has brought the Coury name back to Fullerton.

“It’s good to keep a tradition going,” he said.

Keith says he wants to become a coach, too, and would like to coach high school players because he likes to teach the game to young players.

Should he become a coach, he will be joining what amounts to a family profession. His father, Joe Coury, played for Dick at Mater Dei and is an assistant coach at Riverside Notre Dame High School, where he coached his sons, Keith and a younger brother, Kirt. A cousin, Danny Brown, is an assistant at New Mexico; two other cousins, Bill and Dennis Brown, coach at Riverside City College, and three more, Randy, Johnny and Jamie Brown, coach at Hemet High.

It might seem as if Keith was destined to play at Fullerton, but not so. Fullerton was one of several schools recruiting him during his senior season at Notre Dame High. But the Titans weren’t recruiting him hard, mostly just sending him letters.

One day, when Murphy was in the lounge at the Inn of Tomorrow near Disneyland talking to Chuck, Chuck challenged him about recruiting Keith, saying he hadn’t even seen him play. Murphy said he had seen him on film the previous year, when the Titans signed J.J. Celestine, a high school teammate. And before things went any further, Murphy picked up the telephone to call Keith and offer a scholarship on the spot.

“I believe in bloodlines,” Murphy said.

Keith was 1-year-old when Fullerton played its first game, so he has no memories of the two seasons that his Uncle Dick coached the Titans to records of 6-4-1 and 7-4. Nor does he have any memory of the plane crash in which three Titan assistant coaches and the pilot were killed while traveling to scout a game at San Luis Obispo in 1971. Rather than try to continue at Fullerton in the midst of reminders, Dick resigned.

“It was a tremendous thing that happened, something you don’t get over, and I still haven’t gotten over it,” Dick Coury said. “I felt it best to go from there.”

In the years since, Fullerton football has grown, shifting from a Division II program that played such teams as Cal Lutheran and Whittier College to a Division I program that is competitive in the Big West Conference and occasionally plays powerhouses such as Auburn, which is on the schedule next season, and Georgia, scheduled for 1991.

The Ram schedule keeps Dick from making it to most Fullerton games, but he does see the Titans practice during the Rams’ preseason camp, held on Fullerton’s campus. And he did make it to last season’s homecoming game.

“I’m excited that Keith is playing there,” Dick said. “I think Coach Murphy does such a good job and it’s such a good program. I’ve always followed the team. Now that I have Keith out there, the whole family follows the team.”