What to Do on a Hot Day: Watch Rams Butt Heads

What do you do on a hot summer day in Orange County? Well, if you’re a tourist, you probably go to Disneyland, where half the civilized world has preceded you on this day and is standing in line to ride the Matterhorn.

Or you may carry a ton-and-a-half of gear from a distant parking place to one of Orange County’s magnificent beaches and try to stake out a square yard for your very own.

But if you’re a native and an indigent bum like me or can sneak away from work for a few hours, you might very well head for the campus of UC Irvine--as I did last Thursday--and follow the signs that say “Ram Football Parking.” Then you pay four bucks--to UCI, not the Rams--and walk a quarter-mile or so through a wonderfully quiet campus to UCI’s intramural playground behind Crawford Hall. And there--padded and helmeted in the scorching heat--are 80 or so Orange County Rams who are still listed in the standings as belonging to Los Angeles.

There is a kind of summer torpor about the onlookers, the sort of thing I remember from midweek, daytime baseball games at Comisky Park in Chicago many years ago.

The torpor doesn’t extend to the playing field. There, several dozen inordinately large young men--those on the fringes of making the team--are fighting one another for high-priced jobs. There are three groups on the field. Two are running--and defending against--pass patterns. The third is concentrating on running plays. Defensive specialists wear blue jerseys, and the offense wears white--except the quarterbacks, whose bright red jerseys imply: “Danger: Hands Off.” Quarterbacks come high these days, too high to be put out of action by an overachieving rookie from some mail order junior college in Texas who wants to impress the coaches with his aggressiveness.

The four quarterbacks--Jim Everett (The Star), Chuck Long (The Pretender), Mark Herrmann (The Second Banana), and Rick Johnson (The Rookie With Very Little Chance)--move from group to group, football royalty passing or handing off while they are protected or threatened by the men in the trenches.

This is a high-tech business today. Three towers are positioned about the field, each holding a man under a canopy operating a video camera. Every detail of the workout is filmed and presumably someone will look at all this footage. A veteran may be cast aside or a rookie hired on the basis of some mysterious revelation that shows up in the film.

Head Coach John Robinson is in the thick of the action on the field, striding from group to group, exuding a kind of portly authority and trailing an entourage of assistant coaches. All are dressed in powder blue slacks and white polo shirts with the Ram insignia.

The team works out twice a day, usually at 9:30 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. There will be a hiatus next week while the Rams go to Berlin to play an exhibition game against the Kansas City Chiefs on Aug. 11; then practice will resume at UCI until the Rams break camp on Aug. 17. This is a morning workout I’m visiting, and more spectators arrive as the workout progresses. The audience is heavy on kids--fathers and mothers and even a few grandfathers herding small groups of kids up and down the field. There are a few lawn chairs, but mostly the crowd is mobile. The last 20 minutes are spent in an honest-to-God scrimmage in which everyone but the quarterbacks is fair game.

Along the way, I see two fathers holding their ground, and I stop to chat. Frank Malcon of Garden Grove has brought his two sons, Marcus and Brandon, to the workout. The 4-year-old has been named for Marcus Allen of the Raiders, but--says his father--it’s Brandon, a wiry kid of 8, who has the toughness to be a football player. Frank, who has the day off from work, admits that the boys’ mother, a librarian in Santa Ana, takes a dim view of football, but Frank has a plan for Brandon: “He’s going to get an athletic scholarship to an Ivy League school. Then he’s going to be a judge.”

The other father apparently has different plans. His name is Paul Snow and he “owns some health clubs around Orange County” and once played linebacker at the University of Oregon. His son is a stocky, barrel-chested 8-year-old named Sean who is being worked out along the sidelines by a speed development coach named Kevin McNair. Sean and his coach met at a football camp at UCI earlier this summer. I ask idly if Sean will be playing for the Rams someday, and his coach says earnestly and a little grimly, “He’ll be playing for somebody. “

So goes the American dream. On my way back to watch the scrimmage, I pass Frank Malcon once again. He, too, has been watching Sean, and as I go by, he says: “That kid’s going to be ahead of my boy. But not for long.”

When the scrimmage breaks up, the players pour off the field through a tunnel formed by the spectators. Most of the attention centers on the four, red-jerseyed quarterbacks--and especially on Jim Everett.

He turns out to be a pleasant contrast to often surly, high-priced athletes. He signs autographs on cards and sleeves and notebooks cheerfully until everyone is satisfied, actually looking at the kids individually and talking with them. Then he looks around and says, “Anybody else?” before he clatters down the runway to the locker room.

We all break up and go home then. And walking back to my car, I reflect that in the 10 days I’ve been home after our trip to Europe, I have seen two fine productions of Shakespeare in Garden Grove, a play at South Coast Repertory, “Show Boat” at the Performing Arts Center, two Angel games and a Ram practice.

Not bad for a hot summer in Orange County, California.