WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: ANTHONY DAVIS : A.D.’s Past Always Present : Notre Dame Nemesis Treasures Long Run as USC, Valley Legend

Anthony Davis, perhaps the greatest college player never to win the Heisman Trophy, tucks the football under his right arm and a giant grin explodes across his face.

Although he’s wearing a blue suit with a double-breasted jacket, and his black shoes carry a Saturday-night-on-the-town shine, Davis looks at home carrying a football. He has drawn a small crowd on a recent afternoon in a Chatsworth baseball card shop, and a group of 10-year-olds flock to his side even though they have little idea that they’re looking at arguably the best athlete in San Fernando Valley history.

After Davis drops his shoulder, feints and glides to his right to avoid an imaginary tackler, he stops his pantomime and tosses the ball casually from hand to hand. The grin fades to a distant smile, as though he’s reacting to the faint cheers of a far-off crowd that only he can hear.

“That’s the frustrating thing about former athletes,” he said, half to himself. “Mentally, you can do the same things as you used to, but now your body says no.”

At 37, Davis is little more than 15 years removed from his glory days at USC, but it’s been a long time since he squeezed his body into a football uniform. He’d make a tight fit today. He carries 215 pounds on his 5-foot 9-inch frame, 30 pounds more than his playing weight.

But the extra weight fails to dim the Davis magnetism. The disappointment of failing to win the Heisman and bad luck that characterized his professional football career may gnaw at him, but Davis masks the pain behind an upbeat exterior. He didn’t get a degree in drama from USC for nothing.

“I’ve been through my ups and downs, but I’m mature and have my direction,” he said during a recent interview. “My life is starting right now as we talk today.”

Davis ran second in the Heisman Trophy voting to Ohio State’s Archie Griffin in 1974, an outcome that still irks Davis. That setback seemed to presage an injury-marred career in pro football that spanned seven years and resulted in little more than the answer to a trivia question: Who was the first man to play in four professional football leagues?

In order, Davis played in the World (defunct), Canadian, National and United States (defunct) football leagues.

All during the time he struggled with football, Davis wondered if he should have pursued a career in what some say was his best sport--baseball. Along with two national championship rings that he earned as a Trojan running back, Davis added two more as a right fielder on USC’s baseball team. As a junior in 1974, he batted .269 with six home runs and 45 runs batted in and led the team in triples (four) and stolen bases (13). He was drafted three times, twice by the Baltimore Orioles and once by the Minnesota Twins.

“There is a great void in my life because I didn’t pursue a baseball career,” Davis said.

Davis, who starred at San Fernando High in football, baseball and wrestling, has returned to the Valley after living in Pacific Palisades and Bakersfield since his football career ended in 1983. He lives with his wife and three children in Sylmar and works for a real estate company in Van Nuys. He also plans to resume an acting career that included roles in movies with such stars as Charlton Heston (“Two-Minute Warning”) and Bill Murray (“Loose Shoes”). Sometimes, he thinks about a career in the Senior Professional Baseball Assn.

Whatever the future holds, Davis has embedded his name--or, better, the initials A.D.--into the Southern California sports consciousness. USC fans forever will remember him as the Notre Dame nemesis, the man who scored 11 touchdowns against the Irish--six in the 1972 game alone. In 1974, he returned the second-half kickoff 102 yards to spur USC’s most stunning comeback in its colorful history, a 55-24 victory in which the Trojans erased a 24-0 Notre Dame lead and scored 49 points in less than 17 minutes in the second half.

John McKay, the winningest coach in USC history, handed the storied Trojan tailback job to Davis in his sophomore year after starter Rod McNeill was injured. Although Davis hadn’t played running back since his Pop Warner days in San Fernando and seemed too small, McKay saw a power back concealed in that short frame.

“Well, we sure didn’t recruit him as a quarterback or rassler,” McKay said from his home in Tampa, Fla. “We could see in practice that Anthony could play. He was plenty big and strong and had all kinds of power. He proved that against Notre Dame and lots of other teams.”

Davis, a garrulous man with a storyteller’s instincts, loves to point out that his start in football at San Fernando was largely accidental. He claims he was a third-string player for the Valley Chargers in Pop Warner ball, and his first love was baseball.

“I was too little when I was in high school,” he said. “But one day I was playing catch on the baseball field and Pat Harrington, an assistant football coach (at San Fernando), saw me and asked me to come out for the team.”

Davis made the team--as a sophomore bench warmer--and was satisfied to caddy for starting quarterback Harvey Sneed. But on the first play of the team’s first scrimmage in 1968, Sneed sustained a broken ankle and was lost for the season.

“I was sitting on the sidelines, proud to just be there when the coach told me to get into the game. I didn’t even know any of the plays,” Davis said.

Davis needed to know little more than Manfred Moore’s number. Moore, who later blocked for Davis as a fullback at USC, carried San Fernando to the playoffs. However, Davis, who had blossomed under the nurturing of Coach Howard Marcus, clashed with the coach and was kicked off the team for the playoffs.

“The team really needed me in the playoffs and it embarrassed me to get kicked off,” Davis said. “Marcus was a disciplinarian and one of the big people in my life. I understand now what he did, but it bothered me for a long time.”

Despite that conflict, Marcus handed the offense to his star quarterback for the next two years. In the newly designed attack, Davis seldom took the ball directly from center, instead playing like a tailback in the old single wing, in a modified shotgun formation.

“We had to figure out how to utilize Anthony,” said Marcus, who works as an administrator with the Los Angeles Unified School District. “We didn’t want him just handing the ball off to an average athlete.”

As a junior, Davis led San Fernando to a 6-2 regular-season record, a share of the Mid-Valley League title and a berth in the playoffs. In the first round, Davis passed for 289 yards and rushed for 169 more as San Fernando pummeled Hollywood, 51-24. A rib injury sidelined Davis for the second round and the Tigers were eliminated.

The following year, Davis was the City Section’s most dominant player. He led the Tigers in rushing with 1,566 yards and passing with 1,673, and remains the school’s all-time leading rusher (2,732 yards), passer (2,937) and scorer (332 points). He even kicked two field goals as a senior.

San Fernando and Granada Hills, behind prolific passer Dana Potter, were the City’s top two teams and played a pair of memorable games in 1970. San Fernando fans still refer to the regular-season matchup as the Dream Game.

“I remember I couldn’t get a ticket and had to get a special pass to get in,” said Tom Hernandez, the current San Fernando coach who attended that game as a grade school student.

Davis dominated Granada Hills in the first matchup, leading San Fernando to a 40-15 win. Less than a month later, the teams met again at Birmingham High for the City title. When San Fernando struggled on offense, Marcus asked Davis to return punts. He returned two for touchdowns, but Granada Hills prevailed, 38-28.

Perhaps only John Elway and Charles White accomplished as much as Davis among Valley athletes at the high school level. Davis is the only player in City Section history to win the Player of the Year award in two sports during the same academic year. He shared the City football award with Potter, and won the award in baseball after batting .488 as a switch-hitting center fielder during his senior year. He turned down a signing bonus of $37,500 from the Orioles to attend USC on a football scholarship.

In between football and baseball seasons, Davis wrestled for San Fernando to keep in shape. City wrestlers competed through a youth services program in those days and Davis won City championships in the 170-pound class as a junior and a senior. In the lone season he competed in track, he was a league champion hurdler.

Davis takes pride in his high school accomplishments and his standing among the great athletes in Valley history.

“I was with Charlie White at the fights the other night and he was telling everybody that I was his idol,” Davis said. “He was telling people that I put San Fernando on the map. That kind of stuff makes me feel honored.”

Davis left San Fernando for USC, where he vaulted onto the national scene and dominated local headlines with his flamboyant running style and Hollywood lifestyle. Personality profiles at the time devoted nearly as much space to his love of vintage cars and his acting aspirations as to his athletic abilities.

Davis started his Trojan career on the bench but left USC as the school’s third all-time rusher with 3,724 yards, trailing only Heisman winners Charles White (6,245) and Marcus Allen (4,910). Davis is USC’s all-time leading kick returner, averaging 34 yards, and his six career touchdown returns and three in one season still stand as NCAA records.

Despite those impressive accomplishments, A.D. is forever linked with ND.

As a sophomore, Davis accounted for 368 yards in all-purpose rushing in addition to his six touchdowns in USC’s 45-23 win over the Irish at the Coliseum. Little more than a month later, USC routed Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, 42-17, to clinch the national championship.

The Notre Dame game made Davis a star, but had he known the stakes beforehand, he might not have entered the game so relaxed.

“Before the game, the locker room was real quiet and everyone was nervous,” Davis said. “I walked in and said, ‘Hey, what’s with everyone? We’re going to beat them just like we beat everyone else.’ What did I know about pressure and the game? I was just 18 years old.”

A year later USC lost at South Bend, 23-14, in a game that springboarded Notre Dame to the national title and exposed Davis to zealous fan behavior, Irish style.

“It was a monster,” he said about South Bend, a town he hasn’t visited since the 1973 game. “They were hanging me in effigy. This lady walked up to me and, I don’t know if she was serious or not, but she was carrying a crucifix and waved it in front of my face. She said I must be the devil.”

Imagine what Notre Dame fans thought after the 1974 game.

The Irish entered the Coliseum with a 9-1 record and were ranked fifth in the country behind the nation’s top defense. Notre Dame hadn’t beaten USC in the Coliseum since a 51-0 humiliation eight years earlier, but the Irish bolted to a seemingly unassailable 24-0 lead in the first half.

Thousands of USC supporters bolted for the parking lot. Included in the exodus was Rick Fields, now a tennis and girls’ basketball coach at Simi Valley High but then a dejected Trojan loyalist. Outside the stadium, he heard the roar of the crowd as the remaining USC fans reacted to a seven-yard scoring pass from quarterback Pat Haden to Davis with 10 seconds left in the half.

“We were disgusted and discouraged and wanted to beat the rush to the parking lot,” Fields said. “We heard the crowd and decided to check it out. What happened was the most awesome thing in sports I’ve ever seen. It was the California earthquake.”

The quake--a 35-point third quarter and two quick scores at the start of the final period--started to rumble when Davis fielded the opening kickoff two yards deep in the end zone and stunned the Irish with his third kickoff return for a touchdown against them in three seasons. Notre Dame never recovered. Davis’ quote made all the papers the next day. “We turned into madmen,” he said.

Mal Florence, a Times sportswriter and USC’s unofficial football historian, called that game the most remarkable he’s ever seen, a mind-boggling event.

Just as mind-boggling to Davis was the Heisman vote, released in the days after the game. Eager to meet the Heisman deadline, many sportswriters cast their ballots before the USC-Notre Dame game. At least a few Griffin supporters acknowledged afterward that they voted for the wrong man.

“That’s what’s frustrating to me to this day,” Davis said. “People think I won it. It bothers me and irritates me that after what I did and what I did for the team, I don’t have the trophy.”

Further disappointment awaited Davis in the pros. The Rams, with three first-round picks, passed over Davis in the NFL draft, so Davis passed on the NFL and signed a $1.7 million contract with the Southern California Sun of the World Football League. As a rookie tailback, Davis was on the top of the World--he was leading the league in rushing with 1,200 yards and loved his life in Los Angeles.

“It was perfect,” he said. “The endorsements were coming in and I was playing for a great coach, Tom Fears. And then the league folded. I was devastated.”

Davis then signed with the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League but quit in his first year. “They wanted to make me a receiver and I didn’t want that. My attitude got bad and my heart wasn’t in it,” he said.

McKay, then the Tampa Bay coach, brought Davis to the NFL but traded him to Houston where Davis broke the same leg in the same spot twice in one season. The Rams signed him as a free agent but released him in 1979 before he played a down. Four years later, at 30, Davis came out of retirement for a season with the L. A. Express in the USFL but he saw almost no action.

Davis took his last acting job in 1985, a part on the TV drama “Hotel,” and then withdrew from public life, jumping into fatherhood with a passion. “I never shine on a kid, man. I never deny a child,” he said.

Although Davis talks enthusiastically about his real estate career, he seems to miss the spotlight. Perhaps as compensation, he has become an avid fan of memorabilia, particularly his own. The theft of all four of his national championship rings hurt him deeply.

The rings might be gone and the new generation of sports fans might view him as a stranger, but Davis rarely drifts too far from acclaim. As long as people remember his Notre Dame games, he’ll apparently never be lonely.

“The thing that amazes me is that in 1990, nearly 20 years after those games, people come up to me wherever I am, Chicago, New York, wherever, and point at me and say, ‘Notre Dame.’ They don’t even say my name sometimes, just ‘Notre Dame,’ ” he said.

Sure enough, during a recent lunch in Chatsworth, as if on cue, a fan ambles over to Davis’ table and extends his hand toward the Notre Dame nemesis. Before greeting the man, Davis gives a lunch companion a quick look as if to say, “See, what did I tell you?”

Davis quickly assesses his audience and has no intention of holding anything back. Both are ready to indulge in Davis’ favorite subject: the Notre Dame games.

“Oh, it was legendary. . .” he begins, as both men grin wildly.