It Has Been a Long Time for Oregon St. : Rose Bowl: The Beavers last played in the game in 1965, and even then there were many who questioned whether they should be the league representative.

The last time the Oregon State Beavers played in the Rose Bowl game, a football fan walked out early, muttering, “Betcha it’s a while before we see those guys down here again.”

On New Year’s Day, it will have been 25 years since the Beavers were blown out of the Rose Bowl by Michigan, 34-7. They haven’t been close to coming back.

The Beavers upset UCLA this fall, 18-17, but finished only sixth in the Pacific 10 Conference, their best finish since 1974.

Their Rose Bowl team might not even have been the West’s best a quarter century ago. They tied USC for first in the conference--which at the time was called, not Pac-8 or -10, but the American Assn. of Western Universities.

Familiarly known as the AAWU, the conference wasn’t then using, as it does now, a mathematical formula to determine Rose Bowl teams automatically. Instead, at the end of the season, AAWU members took a vote.

In 1964 they voted Oregon State to Pasadena after noting that the Beavers had finished 3-1 and 8-2 overall to USC’s 3-1 and 7-3.

Fair enough?

Not many in the Los Angeles area thought so, except, possibly, for a few in Westwood.

The screaming from USC was said to be heard as far away as Corvallis, Ore.

USC had upset undefeated Notre Dame, 20-17, coming from 17 points down to belt the Irish out of the national championship with a fourth-down, fourth-quarter pass: Craig Fertig to Rod Sherman.

Oregon State’s record included a 10-7 victory over Idaho-- IDAHO?

USC alumni questioned not only the judgment of faculty representatives who voted for Oregon State, but also their sanity. Several even questioned their academic credentials.

If USC had played Idaho, the fans shouted, could the Trojans have been held below 100 points?

Would Oregon State have lived through a game against Notre Dame?

The controversy was the second biggest in AAWU history.

The biggest had come earlier in 1964 when the league had voted to re-admit outclassed Oregon and Oregon State after ousting them years before in a reorganization.

That, some still say, was Western football’s darkest hour.

But the 1965 Rose Bowl was close.

The Los Angeles Times, in its main headline the next morning, even refused to identify Oregon State by name. The headline: “MICHIGAN, 34; AAWU REPRESENTATIVE, 7.”

John McKay coached the Trojans in 1964 when they lost three of their first nine games, falling out of the wire-service top 10 long before top-ranked Notre Dame came into the Coliseum on Nov. 28.

That was Coach Ara Parseghian’s first season at Notre Dame, which had finished 2-7 the year before under interim Coach Hugh Devore.

The Irish, who were to send eight seniors into the NFL, won their first nine games for Parseghian, and by halftime in Los Angeles they had a 17-0 lead.

A rout seemed in progress, but the Irish never scored again. In the second half, astoundingly, USC pulled it out, 20-17, prompting the Notre Dame president, Father Theodore Hesburgh, to look up McKay in the Trojan locker room.

“Congratulations,” Hesburgh said graciously. “But that wasn’t a very nice thing for a nice Catholic boy to do to us.”

As McKay tells it, he replied: “It serves you right, Father, for hiring a Presbyterian coach.”

McKay is living in retirement in Tampa, where he led the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers through their first nine years.

“All I do is play golf, read books and watch other guys try to make a living coaching football,” he said.

The return of George Allen, now coaching Long Beach, has made him edgy.

“Look around out there for me,” McKay said from Florida. “Maybe I can come back, too.”

Against Notre Dame 25 years ago, McKay recalled, the Trojans thought they were playing for the Rose Bowl when, in the last two minutes, Sherman suggested the winning play: Fertig’s clutch touchdown pass on fourth-and-eight from the Irish 17-yard line.

“I didn’t see the touchdown,” said Fertig, who was attacked by Alan Page as he let the ball go. “But I heard it.”

A moment earlier, Fertig, one of the three quarterbacks on USC’s 1962 national champions, had moved his team from the Irish 40 to the 17 with a pass to Fred Hill.

“I was standing on the sideline with Coach McKay,” said Sherman, a high school quarterback who had transferred from UCLA to USC, where he was converted to flanker.

“(McKay) had put in a full-house backfield for Notre Dame, but when we were still on their 17-yard line on fourth down, I told him that I thought ’84 Z delay’ would work. He sent me in with that play.”

As the “Z” receiver, Sherman flanked left, delayed for a count or so on the scrimmage line while halfback Mike Garrett circled into a short zone, drawing away half the Irish secondary.

Back in South Bend, listening in, several Notre Dame students were turned off football forever when Sherman zipped beyond Garrett, angled to the middle, and caught the game-winning pass inside the 5-yard line.

“He scored unscathed,” said Fertig, a Trojan fan for four decades. Fertig’s son plays Trojan baseball, his daughter is a USC freshman, and his nephew is the school’s quarterback, Todd Marinovich.

After coaching football for 17 years, Fertig is vice president of an Orange County insurance agency. Sherman, who played pro ball for seven years, four with the Raiders, is senior vice president of a sports and entertainment firm based in the San Fernando Valley.

Two and a half decades after they beat Notre Dame, the biggest disappointment of their lives remains the AAWU faculty vote for Oregon State.

“I’ll never get over it,” Sherman said.

Said Fertig: “It’s taken the edge off every Rose Bowl ever since.”

The 1965 Rose Bowl was exciting for awhile, no thanks to Oregon State. Or Michigan.

Surprising both teams, a lively white pig--somebody’s pet--appeared on the field, and, feet flying, headed for a touchdown.

After circling the goal posts, the shoat headed for a touchdown the other way when a fan ran out and curtailed another promising drive with a diving tackle.

The rest was an anticlimax. Bump Elliott’s fourth-ranked Michigan team rolled up 415 yards to 243 for Oregon State, and scored so often that almost everyone was bored.

There was, however, another winner that day, Tommy Prothro, the Beavers’ coach, who called every play from the press box.

Prothro lost in Pasadena for the second time in nine years at Oregon State, but several UCLA people were impressed. They concluded that anyone who could get that team into the Rose Bowl could help the Bruins, who, in a manner of speaking, hired him on the spot.

A year later, Prothro was back in Pasadena, leading UCLA past Michigan State, 14-12.

As a Bruin coach in the late 1960s, Prothro held his own with the Trojans, which pleased UCLA. But he wasn’t highly thought of at USC.

“Prothro punted on third down in the Rose Bowl,” Fertig said. “How you going to beat Michigan punting on third down?”

It was discovered that a California school cast the deciding vote to get Oregon State in the 1965 Rose Bowl. And there are Trojans who still think it was UCLA.

“Washington publicly announced that they voted for us,” Fertig said. “ Somebody down here was a rat.”

One other thing still rankles the Trojans.

“The conference was supposed to vote before the Notre Dame game, but purposely delayed the voting until afterward,” Sherman said. “The plain implication was that if by some miracle we beat Notre Dame, they wanted us. When they finally voted, it was a real downer.”

Nevertheless, the 1964 Trojans still have the memory of a 20-17 victory over Notre Dame and knocking the Irish out of the national championship for the fourth time in 33 years.

What made it sweeter, Fertig said, is that Notre Dame held a 17-point lead at the half.

Asked what McKay told the Trojans during the halftime break, Fertig said: “He walked in, held up one hand and said, ‘Boys, if we don’t score more than 17 points in the second half, we’ll get beat.’ ”