O’Hara Owes Debt to Garrett

For an angry and agonizing year now, he has been thinking about it. About waking up in that hospital bed and spotting the massive bandage on his side. About the morphine injections every three hours. About the loss of weight that made him feel as though he were “shriveling away.” About the catheter he wore and the tubes up his nose and the screws in his knee.

He didn’t want to see anybody, didn’t want to speak to anybody, didn’t think he ever was going to be anybody.

“I felt like I was dying.”

Today, Pat O’Hara feels a lot more whole and a whole lot more. He considers himself lucky and loved and necessary, even though when he is standing there on the sideline at the Meadowlands of New Jersey next Friday in the uniform of the USC Trojans, ready to play quarterback if they should need him, he understands that they probably aren’t going to be needing him.

Much has happened to put at ease the mind of Pat O’Hara, who in the blink of an eye and the blur of a sudden tackle went from being the quarterback heir to Rodney Peete for one of America’s great football schools to the kick-holder and clipboard-holder who, apparently, can be little more than understudy to an overachieving underclassman, Todd Marinovich.

Watching another guy take the snaps that should have been his, take the bows in the Rose Bowl that could have been his, O’Hara’s ambivalence could hardly have been more acute. Whatever happiness he felt for his university was forever tempered by the same unpleasant thought:

“I felt like an outcast,” he said.

Why was his luck so bad? Why would he run the USC offense so well for the entire week of practice before the 1988 game against UCLA, only to have Peete make an amazing recovery from the measles and play the whole game? Why would he earn the first-string quarterback job the next spring, only to suffer a season-ending, career-spoiling injury 10 days before the season opener?

No wonder Pat O’Hara got so depressed that he didn’t even want to speak to his parents, who have been so supportive through it all.

“They say you always hurt the ones you love most,” Pat said. “Well, that’s what I was doing. Mentally, I was a wreck.”

The last few weeks, though, he has been re-evaluating his lot in life. Particularly the last few days, when some of the misfortunes that have been befalling others reminded the senior from Santa Monica that while he might not have been the luckiest boy in the world, he wasn’t the unluckiest, either.

“As soon as I heard about DeChon Burns, I forgot my troubles in a second,” O’Hara said.

The whole team was upset by the news that their teammate and friend, sophomore cornerback DeChon Burns, has been advised to give up football unless he wishes to risk paralysis from a hereditary spinal condition. Like O’Hara, Burns was being groomed to be a starter when this happened. He worked hard in high school and college to get to this point--and now someone is telling him to forget it.

To a lesser degree, the same thing just happened to the quarterback at UCLA, Bret Johnson, who was told by coaches that he wouldn’t be starting anymore. Johnson wasn’t hurt physically, but was hurt psychologically--so hurt that he immediately decided to leave school.

“I’ve met Bret, but I don’t know him,” O’Hara said. “He has to live his own life. But speaking only for myself, I couldn’t do what he’s doing.

“When I was a sophomore, USC went out and signed Todd. Everybody immediately started coming up and asking: ‘You going to transfer? Where you going to transfer?’ Well, I don’t think I would ever transfer unless the coach asked me to. I made a commitment to USC. To me, it’s like a marriage. Even when things go wrong, you stick together.”

It was exactly one year ago Sunday when things went wrong for Pat O’Hara. He was rolling to his left during a scrimmage. Near the sideline, somebody cannon-balled into the side of his right knee, helmet-first. Pat felt as though he had just been hit by a car.

Broken right tibia. Two torn ligaments in the knee. Bone chips. Nerve damage. Emotional scars. O’Hara wasn’t even aware until he woke up one day that doctors had gone ahead and grafted bone from his hip to strengthen his leg. He noticed the bandage and freaked.

“My weight fell from something like 205 pounds to 162,” he said. “I felt like I was dying. I was shriveling away. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t talk to anybody. I was wearing that damned catheter and had tubes going up my nose and was dizzy from the morphine and was totally messed up. From a knee injury. Imagine that. All that from a lousy knee!

“I couldn’t get over it for a long, long time. Then, one day Prime Ticket asked me on as a guest, and Mike Garrett was there. He wanted to say something to me. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to any football speeches. I was still, you know, sulking. But the man won the Heisman running the ball for USC, so I figured if he speaks, you should listen.

“He probably doesn’t even remember it. He said: ‘There are two things you can do. You can throw in the towel, give up, and everybody will feel sorry for you. Or you can get up and get on with your life.’ Well, it was the right person saying the right thing at the right time. I owe Mike Garrett a lot for that, and I don’t even know if he knows it.

“Something like this happens, you find out who your real friends are. When you’re on top, everybody wants to be your friend. Now, maybe I’ll be the No. 1 quarterback again, but maybe all I’ll do is hold for kicks. It doesn’t matter. The people who care about me will still care about me, whatever I am.”