Bruins Might Have a Winner With Nguyen

Ambling across UCLA’s campus in an Angel cap and a “Bo Knows” shirt, weeks before classes begin, Mike seems pretty much your basic, standard-issue football player, a fresh young freshman down from Oregon, signing up for engineering courses and sitting in at team meetings, not unlike the other guys Mike mixes with daily at practice who were born in Hollywood or Bakersfield or even places as distant as Fairbanks, Alaska, and London, England.

Only Mike was born in the Mekong Delta.

His surname is Nguyen, pronounced, “Win.”

His given first name is Huy, pronounced, “We.”

He was bundled at 2 1/2 in the arms of his parents as they fled Saigon, the night the city fell to the attacking Communist troops of the North Vietnamese.

And if, as an almost-All-American boy of 17, Mike sets foot on the field Saturday to play some football for UCLA, he will become, so far as anybody is able to tell, the first Vietnamese refugee at any major American college to do so.

Mike Nguyen has made the squad. This much he knows. The wide receiver knows that he will wear jersey No. 81--just like his favorite pro, the Raiders’ Tim Brown--at the Rose Bowl for the Bruins’ season opener against Oklahoma.

What he won’t know until he gets to the stadium is when he will see action--now, or a year from now.

“I just talked to the coaches,” Nguyen said Thursday in Westwood, “and they said they might not be able to save me.”

No, they might have to use him. Let him play right away, less than four months from his high school graduation in Portland.

Some freshmen get a year off. They redshirt. They apprentice for a year, then stick around for four more. And UCLA’s coaches might not mind doing that with Mike Nguyen, especially if they want to spend the next four seasons saying, as often as possible,”We Win.”

But the player cupboard is only so deep. An injury already has cost the Bruins one of their best big-play receivers, Scott Miller. Another ailment is nagging split end Paul Richardson. The new starting quarterback, Jim Bonds, will have enough on his mind solving Oklahoma’s defense without having a shortage of targets.

So, Nguyen will stand on the sideline and see what happens.

Nobody has to point the way to the huddle. Nguyen has been a linebacker, a running back, a defensive back and a receiver in his scholastic career. As a senior at Franklin High School, he caught 53 passes, rushed for nearly 400 yards, scored 14 touchdowns, returned kickoffs and punts and played free safety on defense. Stanford recruited him to play in the secondary. His qualifications to enroll there included a 3.9 grade-point average, which got him into the National Honor Society.

And without even being aware of it at first, Mike Nguyen was becoming a heroic figure to others of Vietnamese origins, near and far. Sometimes his mother made him aware of it; other times it was his teachers or friends, who had heard tales of Mike’s growing popularity, a state of affairs that startled him more than anybody, since Mike thinks of himself as little more than just another student-athlete and Oregon teen-ager.

“I never give much thought to being Vietnamese, but I’ve been made to see how much it matters to some people,” he said. “The other day, I think my mother heard from somebody in Pennsylvania, wishing me luck or something. I don’t consider myself all that unusual.”

Among the allies Mike will have, whether he plays or not, in the stands Saturday will be Hoang Tran, his mother. Someday she will move permanently to the Los Angeles area, her son believes, because of its large Asian populace. Until his sisters finish school, she will remain in Oregon, where more than 13,000 Vietnamese refugees reside.

Mike is no expert on his heritage. He doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t make a special point of keeping up with it, or looking back on it. He wasn’t particularly aware of the Little Saigon community in Garden Grove, but seemed pleased at the mention that he might find his UCLA career of interest there.

When Mike’s mom was his age, she married a South Vietnamese naval officer, Hung Nguyen. When she was 6, she was bloodied and nearly killed by shrapnel from a bomb.

Her son was born in wartime. Around midnight on April 29, 1975, Saigon came under siege. Reluctant to leave her homeland, Hoang Tran obeyed her husband at gunpoint. They carried Mike and his baby sister to the river, where a ship was about to set out for the South China Sea. They had to fight their way on board, nearly becoming separated in the process.

The family sailed to the Philippines, then to Guam, then to California. For six months, they called Camp Pendleton their home. Then they moved to Oregon, where Mike’s parents worked as gardener and maid to a wealthy family.

It has not been an easy life. Mike’s father died at 39 of injuries suffered in a motorcycle spill, but not before spending 2 1/2 years immobilized and mute. His mother had a highway accident of her own that required back surgery.

Through sheer will and hard work, the Nguyen family persevered. Now Mike’s mom runs her own business, an employment agency. His sisters are straight-A students. And Mike is about to begin a collegiate career that he hopes will take him to the National Football League.

Getting there won’t be easy.

But that has never stopped the Nguyen family before.