Quarterback Who Broke the Mold : USC: Tim Green, who led Trojans to Rose Bowl victory in 1985, has found contentment in the business world.

It was the night before the 1985 Rose Bowl game, and Tim Green couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. He was nervous and sick. Nervous sick, he called it.

It was a terrifying feeling, that so many people were interested in this game, and that he had to play. Had to carry the ball every count. Had to win. People at USC hate to lose.

In the USC locker room before the game, he kept thinking about those last two games of the season, losses to UCLA and Notre Dame. And now it was Ohio State, a team stacked with Keith Byars, Tom Zack, Cris Carter, Chris Spielman, Mike Tomczak. The Buckeyes were favored to win.

And Green was a little shaken. He had never been favored to win. He simply did. And now there were 102,594 people out there in the Rose Bowl waiting for the show to start. These are the things pregame thoughts are made of.

Then before he put on his helmet and ran out on the field, Tim Green had a talk with himself. He told himself that this was his last college football game. He asked himself what he wanted to do with it: “Do I want to win, or be a sniveling little brat worried about all this stuff?” And that’s when he decided to do it.

Warming up before the game, Green felt good. He was on, and confident, and ready to play. In fact, he never felt more ready to play than he did that day.

Then Tim Green, starting quarterback for USC, went out and played the game of his life, a 20-17 victory over Ohio State.

“Our defense was just too tough,” said Green, who shared most valuable player honors with Jack Del Rio. “I got a couple of quick scores in the first half on a couple of touchdown passes, and our momentum, well, we wanted that game. There was no question.

“As close as the score was, it was no indication of how we played that day. We really kicked their butts.”

Green completed 13 of 24 passes for 128 yards and two touchdowns.

“I finally proved that by going out and winning the Rose Bowl, I went out a winner,” Green said. “Getting to play those games at USC, I proved to myself that I could do it and that was a big thing. The press asked me if I had the last laugh. Well, I guess I did.”

USC hasn’t had a Rose Bowl laugh since.

The irony of all his worrying is that Tim Green appeared to be one of the most confident, cocky quarterbacks ever to play at USC. He was the opposite of the traditional, reserved USC quarterback. This left-hander was a cowboy kind of guy.

The press loved him, because he said whatever he wanted. The school hated some of the things he said, so they banned him from talking to the media, the first ban in a decade. “Since Charles White,” Green said with a smile. “They (school officials) teach you what to say to the press and it’s so boring. So boring.”

Ted Tollner recruited him, then couldn’t control him. If Green didn’t like a play that Tollner called, he’d call his own play. If it worked, he got away with it. If it didn’t, he would pretend he had missed the signal. He was an independent spirit, much like Jim McMahon, whom Tollner coached at Brigham Young.

Like a student getting sent to the principal’s office, Green wore a path to Tollner’s office. “You could say we had a lot of office meetings,” Green said.

Green was a quarterback with a defensive mentality--he hung out with the linemen. He was a junior college transfer who started at quarterback at USC--unusual in itself.

Of his ability as quarterback at Aviation High in Redondo, Green said he was a star only in his own mind. He passed on scholarship offers from schools such as Boise State and Idaho and enrolled at a local junior college.

Meanwhile, in Escondido, Sean Salisbury, the most highly recruited quarterback in the country, chose USC.

In his two years at El Camino College, Green set 12 national junior college records at quarterback, passing for 5,448 yards and 49 touchdowns.

Then as a junior at USC, he sat on the bench and watched Salisbury lead the Trojans to a 4-6-1 season. Green was miserable. He hated playing cleanup and wanted to start. He even told the press that he was a better quarterback than Salisbury. What he said he meant was that he was a better quarterback at the college level and that Salisbury would be better at the pro level. Regardless, it did not sit well with his teammates.

Green intended to redshirt during the 1984 season, his senior year, but changed his mind when Salisbury was injured in the second game of the season against Arizona State. Still, Tollner gave the ball to freshman Kevin McLean, who started the next game against LSU.

But Green didn’t give up. He says he used some manipulative tactics on the young quarterback. “I’d say stuff to Kevin like, ‘There are only going to be 85,000 people out there today, so don’t be nervous,’ ” Green said. “I wanted that job, and I knew I could do it.”

McLean faltered. Green entered the LSU game in the second half, and, although the Trojans lost, 23-3, Green played well enough to earn the next start. He never looked back.

With Green in the starting role, USC won its next seven games and had clinched a Rose Bowl trip with UCLA and Notre Dame left to play.

The next thing Green’s teammates knew, he was mixing drinks for them on the team plane. Green would leave his clothes at the team hotel and fill his travel bag with liquor. When the flight attendant would come around with soft drinks, Green would secretly turn them into hard drinks. “It was like an adult thing--we won the game, let’s party, because we were going to be on the plane for five hours,” Green said.

“That football team was a combination of great junior college players and all of John Robinson’s last recruiting class, so we had a nucleus of rough characters. These guys were from the old school, and we all would have lost our scholarships under Larry Smith. We were rough cowboys and we did what we wanted to--nothing illegal. But kids today are much more restricted. I got away with as much as I could without being illegal.”

And what did Tollner do?

“Tollner didn’t have a choice,” Green said. “As much as he wanted to control what was said and what was done, his job was at stake, too. He got another year because we won the Rose Bowl. Other than that he probably would have been fired that year.”

With the Rose Bowl victory, USC finished 9-3.

THE COLLEGE LIFE

Green was a college kid. And he pushed his role to the maximum. He surfed. He lived in the Sigma Chi house. And, ironically, he studied public relations.

“I’ve always been the honest type,” Green said. “I believe in saying what is on my mind, and how I feel about certain situations, and it cost me a lot at certain times.”

Such as the time Green told reporters a week before the UCLA game that the Bruins were going to get a whipping.

“We had just beaten the No. 1 team in the country--Washington--and clinched the Rose Bowl berth with UCLA and Notre Dame left to play. We were in the locker room after the game and at that point I would have said we would beat the Raiders, or the Rams. I mean, bring on anybody. We were on cloud nine.”

UCLA won, 29-10, its biggest victory in the series in 14 years.

With Green at quarterback, Tollner condensed his offense and had Green throw safe, medium-length passes, as opposed to the long ball of Salisbury, and relied on the running game and defense. The game plan took some getting used to by Green’s teammates, but no more than it took to get used to Green’s intense personality in the starting role.

In the huddle, he was known to yell at the players if they made mistakes. “I was hyper, I wanted to win,” Green said.

It was also Green’s desire to win that eventually served as the catalyst to bond him with his teammates.

He was a competitor. He still is.

PURSUIT OF THE PROS

Before Tim Green could sit down for this interview, he had to make a phone call. He is a business man now and doing well enough that a competitor, Title Land Company, hired him away last month and made him a supervisor of its South Bay area, which is Green’s home turf.

Yet the road from star Rose Bowl quarterback to contented businessman wasn’t easy for Green. He says he had some difficulty putting his USC experience into perspective after he graduated.

“I completely dropped off the face of the earth after school was out and went into hiding, “ Green said. “I was extremely tired and sick of the whole thing. For one thing, my 10 tickets to the Rose Bowl for my family came Jan. 2 to my house. I’m the starting quarterback on the team and my parents had to scalp tickets to see their son play. My grandparents had to watch it on TV.”

Green wasn’t drafted by an NFL team. So he worked jobs that allowed him to keep training for NFL camp tryouts. The L.A. Express held his rights, but folded. He tried out with the Winnipeg Bluebombers in Canada, and they liked him, but couldn’t find a place for him. A quarterback named Salisbury has that job.

Green believes his defiance of the unwritten rules at USC didn’t help him. His desire to be so different from Salisbury might have been a little too much, he says in retrospect. If he had to do it over again, maybe he wouldn’t be such a rough character.

“I had a real tough time dealing with all of it after I left USC,” Green said. “I felt I had built a bad reputation, and that cost me in the pro ranks a little bit.

“I was kind of a rough cowboy style of guy. I was coined as not being your typical USC milk-and-cookies quarterback like Rodney Peete, Pat Haden, Paul McDonald and Salisbury. I liked to put on my helmet and go to war. And I had a real tough time adapting to doing something else with my time because I was so in love with this silly game.”

Green had thrown a football since he was 3, and he had always been a quarterback. But a lot of soul searching, and rejection, after college brought him to the realization that although he might have been a great college quarterback, he wasn’t a pro quarterback. He finally gave up his dream two years ago, after he failed a tryout with the Cobras of the Arena Football League.

“There are still guys from my team in ’85 who come in every year to camp and get cut,” Green said. “Now my fragile male ego couldn’t stand that, so I had to call it quits.”

With that quest behind him, Green moved on to a career in public relations in the land title business. He says the job is tailor-made for him and he loves it.

“Now I can look back at those days at USC as something I did well, instead of something I want more of,” Green said. “There will never be anything like it, but there will be other things.”

“Now I go back to workouts and visit the players, and it’s a great feeling to see the guys and wear this (Rose Bowl) ring and say to them, ‘Guys, let’s get it done Jan 1. You want one of these rings, right?’ ”