Warming to the Task : Perak, Nelson Shake Off Cold Feet to Help Colorado Grab No. 1 Ranking

BOULDER, Colo.--The Chinook winds that shriek down off the Rocky Mountains are biting hard and the temperature has tumbled into numbing single digits.

The University of Colorado campus is blanketed with a foot of snow and squirrels are frantically searching for down jackets and wool socks.

At twilight, as the moon rises and sends its white light dancing off the jagged, snow-covered mountains and the mercury continues its free fall, a shivering photographer has persuaded two of the school’s football players to climb halfway up the bleachers to pose amid the snowy seats.

John Perak of Granada Hills and M. J. Nelson of Simi Valley, senior starters on the top-ranked Colorado team that will seek the national championship in the Orange Bowl on Jan. 1, appear to be balancing precariously on that fine line between pneumonia and freezing to death as they accommodate the photographer.

Their heads are soaked with sweat. Ice is actually forming on their hair.

Suddenly, from out of the near-darkness down on the field, a voice booms. It is Colorado assistant coach Ron Vanderlinden, and he is steamed.

“Get down here, now ,” he bellows at his players. “Stop taking those pictures. Get down here!”

Concern for his players’ health in the sub-freezing temperatures?

Hardly.

“No snow pictures,” he screams at the photographer. “No snow pictures. You want pictures, take them inside. We’ve gotta recruit in California. I mean it. No snow pictures!”

Perak grins. Nelson laughs.

“Uh-oh,” says Perak, the team’s tight end. “It’s Mr. 360 days of sunshine.”

Huh?

“He told me and M. J. and every recruit he’s ever talked to that Boulder gets 360 days of sunshine a year,” Perak explained. “That was the first thing he told me four years ago. He says it all the time.”

Down on the field, Vanderlinden is asked to further explain his objections to snow pictures.

“We don’t want kids in California thinking it snows here,” he said. “Did you know that Boulder gets 360 days of sunshine a year?”

Later, Colorado Coach Bill McCartney commented on the subject.

“We get more days of sunshine in Boulder than they do in Southern California or Arizona or Miami,” he said. “About 360 days a year, I think.”

OK, already. But why, then, are the bodies of Perak and Nelson vibrating like jackhammers? Explain, please, why a real goose could fit behind the players’ goose bumps? Why are Nelson’s teeth chattering like a set of those novelty wind-up dentures you send skittering across a table?

Is CU--as the school is known to the locals--really PU, as in Propaganda University? They don’t want kids in California thinking it snows here? In the middle of winter? In Colorado? Just how much damage to the brain do these folks think Southern California teen-agers have sustained?

“They told me the climate was really nice, but I knew what I was getting into,” said Perak, a former standout at Notre Dame High. “I thought it would be fun to play football in the snow. Boy, did the novelty of that wear off in a hurry.”

According to the National Weather Service in Denver, the Boulder area does get a lot of sunshine, an average of 345 days of rays. That is not 360 days, but it is not exactly Seattle, either.

What the coaches fail to tell recruits such as Perak and Nelson, however, is that during winter in the Rocky Mountains the sunshine has little to do with the temperature. Many are the days that, when viewed from inside a warm house, look marvelous. But one frozen step out the door into lung-burning temperatures that can hover near zero make a Southern Californian realize that in some places, sunshine can be vastly overrated.

Thus, just a few days before departing for Miami, as night falls hard over the Colorado campus, the heads of Perak and Nelson are starting to resemble mini-glaciers as they finally bid a photographer adieu, leave the biting arctic air and retreat to the warm locker room.

So just how did a couple of palm tree kids--Perak used to spend a few hours each Christmas eve on the beach at Malibu and Nelson, who attended Simi Valley High, says he still thinks about the feeling of a warm Los Angeles winter sun on his face--end up huddled against the base of the Rocky Mountains in temperatures that can freeze the hair on a weasel?

“Everything they did when they recruited me really impressed me,” said the 6-foot-6, 240-pound Perak, who also had scholarship offers from USC, Stanford, Cal and Arizona after catching 55 passes for 765 yards during his high school career.

“Another factor was that if I got hurt, where did I want to spend four years just as a student?” he said. “Boulder seemed like the perfect place. It’s cold for a California boy, no question about that. I had never seen snow fall until I moved here, and there are no bonuses to practicing and playing in sub-zero temperatures. But considering all the factors, this has still been a perfect place to be.”

Funny what playing for a national football championship can do for a person’s thought process.

Nelson, Colorado’s leading kickoff returner this year and the No. 2 wide receiver, said he was amazed that he ended up at the school.

He had offers from Stanford, UCLA and Utah and put the initial letters from Colorado in a special basket in his room that previously was reserved for things like used tissues and broken shoelaces.

“Colorado? I didn’t even know what it was, other than a state,” said Nelson, a running back who earned the Marmonte League’s MVP honor as a senior after rushing for 1,107 yards and 13 touchdowns.

“To be honest, I figured it was one of those places with nothing but cowboys,” he said. “I just knew I didn’t want any part of it. But Coach Vanderlinden kept calling and writing letters, and I eventually started listening. And then he convinced me to visit the school, and I did. In January. And it was snowing.”

But he still decided that Colorado was the place for him.

“Some other California guys on the team talked to me and convinced me the weather wasn’t really that bad,” he said. “And then I thought, ‘Why not?’ I wanted to get away, be on my own and see something different than Southern California.”

In the past four years, the feeling hasn’t been an uncommon one among Southern California high school players. There are 29 Southern Californians, including quarterback Darian Hagan--who played at Locke High in Los Angeles--on Colorado’s football team.

And while the accomplishments of Perak and Nelson have not approached those of Hagan, both have contributed heavily to Colorado’s wishbone attack as the Buffaloes captured only their third Big Eight championship in the team’s 41-year affiliation with that conference.

Perak, who has started every game for the past two seasons, was a proven pass catcher in high school. But at Colorado, a team that throws the ball roughly one time for each palm tree that grows in Boulder, that ability was stashed away. Hagan has attempted just 85 passes in 11 games this year, completing 48. Just four passes have gone for touchdowns, while the Buffaloes’ powerful rushing game has churned out 55 touchdowns.

And so Perak, who went along with this transition four years ago from pass catcher to blocker because he said he could see big things in store for the team, has caught a grand total of eight passes this season and scored no touchdowns. Last season he caught four passes.

“I was hesitant to come here out of high school because I knew we wouldn’t be throwing the ball very much,” Perak said. “I loved to catch the ball and really only blocked when I had to. But I saw that blocking was much more important in the Colorado offense than catching passes, so I changed my game.

“Now, as it (his career) comes to an end, I look back and wonder what might have been at another school, on a passing team. . . . But with all that’s happened here, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

A biology major, Perak hopes to begin a career as a marine biologist next year. Unless, of course, the NFL wants to give him a chance.

“I made it a point not to waste my entire college career dreaming of the NFL,” he said. “It would be dumb to turn down $200,000 a year to play this game, but I’m not planning on it. If I get drafted or get an offer to try out, I’ll take it. But three years from now, I see myself working as a marine biologist someplace, not playing football.”

The football that he has already played, according to McCartney, has been memorable.

“I believe John Perak is one of the premier blocking tight ends in college football,” McCartney said. “Everyone wants to catch the ball, but blocking is much harder. John has been a major force in our offense for two years.”

Contrary to the college career of Perak, who came to Colorado as a tight end and will leave as a tight end, Nelson’s four-year stay has been one of great change and upheaval. He was a brilliant high school running back who went to Colorado with intentions of continuing to tuck the ball away and search for those narrow gaps in the offensive line.

In his freshman year at Colorado, he played at halfback but got less than a dozen carries. He was also given his first chance at being a kickoff returner. As a sophomore, his value as a kickoff returner increased, but the coaches decided to also try him at split end. And they discovered a very sticky set of hands.

As a junior, Nelson led the Buffaloes in kickoff return yardage and was also the team’s third-best receiver.

This year, Nelson has returned nine kickoffs, averaging more than 24 yards a return. And he has also caught nine passes for an average of nearly 30 yards a catch, the highest average among the team’s receivers. He has caught two passes for touchdowns, including one of 48 yards, Colorado’s longest passing touchdown of the season.

“M. J. has been a big-play guy for us,” McCartney said. “As both a kickoff returner and a receiver, he has been a major part of this team for two years. The thing I regret with M. J. is that it took us two years to find his real position.

He’s such a tough guy that he made a good halfback, but it wasn’t until we turned him loose as a receiver that he became a great player. I just wish we had figured it out sooner so he could have had four years at that position instead of just two.

“Because he was a late-blossoming kid, I really think M. J. has a chance to play in the NFL. Big-play guys are so hard to find, and he is a legitimate one.”

And despite not getting many passes directed at him, Nelson--like Perak--said he would not have changed a thing.

“I would have caught more passes at other schools, but right now I’m on the verge of playing for a national championship team,” Nelson said. “Nothing can beat that.”

Of course, a little heat now and then wouldn’t have been such a terrible thing.

“Sometimes, when I’m walking across campus and I think that day just might be the day I actually freeze to death, I get homesick and I think about Southern California,” Perak said. “I think of palm trees. I think of the beach. I think of a lot of things like that.

“But mostly . . . I wonder how quickly I can get across the campus and get back inside a warm building.”