Stakes Are High Enough for Them

Was that exciting enough for you? Want your money back?

So, it wasn’t for the Rose Bowl, the national championship. Even the Heisman wasn’t at stake.

Big deal! Who needs them?

USC 45, UCLA 42. Gotta love it! Dempsey-Firpo. Zale-Graziano. A barroom fight at 2 a.m. All offense.

What more do you want?

Did it matter it wasn’t for the AP, UPI or New York Times computer polls? Get outta here! This was, as they say in Hollywood, Picture with a capital P. Box-office, baby! A blockbuster.

SC and UCLA, two schools that share the same town but hardly the same philosophy, went at it like two stags after the same doe, two truck drivers after the same waitress. They’re as different in approach as, well, say, Pete Wilson and Dianne Feinstein, and they kept throwing Sunday punches at each other all afternoon. And landing. They were both staggering at the end. Another minute and it would have been a double-knockout.

This is the game they want to win. The one the coaches have to win. Los Angeles is at stake.

One school is Establishment, the other dedicated to making the Establishment miserable--or at least uncomfortable. It costs 20 grand a year to go to one. The state picks up most of the tab for you to go to the other. One band favors Sousa. The other plays Gershwin.

None of it mattered on Game Day. They were as equal as working stiffs on a picnic brawl Saturday. And they duked it out till the bell rang. SC didn’t so much win it as time ran out on UCLA.

What a game! What a finish! What a beginning, middle and an end! In a way, it was a good thing it wasn’t for any mythical national championship, polls or bowls. It made the teams more reckless. It was as spontaneous as a cat fight. They were going for the knockout punch all day. No clinches. No jabs. Bring it up from the floor. Moider-the-bum.

Item: On third and one from its 44-yard line in the second quarter, SC disdains the first down, throws the bomb. It was intercepted.

Item: the game was less than a minute old before the UCLA quarterback tries a daring screen pass on his 28-yard-line. It goes for a touchdown. For the other guys. It is intercepted.

That set the tone.

You know, this series saw Waterfield. Jackie Robinson first burst on the national consciousness in this game. O.J. Simpson clinched his Heisman here. And so on and so on.

Well, move over Bob Waterfield. Make way for Tommy Maddox.

Tommy Maddox is the most dangerous guy with the football in the land. He passed for five touchdowns Saturday--three to his own team and two to the other guys. He was like a baby with a machine. He could have got the game ball from either team. But what a quarterback he’s going to be when he grows up. What a quarterback he is now! Joe Montana stuff in the making.

He gave SC fits. He was the master of the one-minute, length-of-the-field touchdown. He could score from the balcony. He could take a team in Nevada and put it in an end zone in San Diego three plays later. He passed for more yards (409) faster than any quarterback in UCLA history. He made SC look as if it didn’t show up. He went through them like a bayonet through a parade-ground dummy.

I don’t know how many plays it took him to rack up 42 points. Not many. At a Rose Bowl game once, a pundit pointed out a Duffy Daugherty team wouldn’t have the ball much. Duffy retorted, “They don’t need it much.” Neither does Tommy Maddox. If he gets the ball a third of the game, the scoreboard is going to have a nervous breakdown. So is the opposition.

O.J. and Marcus Allen can look to their reputations if the SC tailback with the uniquely SC moniker, Mazio Royster, gets the ball much. He carried the ball so often--31 times for 157 yards--that he ought to join a union. He was as unstoppable as tomorrow on third-and-short-yardage Saturday.

So, one of these teams lost to Washington and Arizona and had trouble with Cal? So the other team lost five games to the Whodoyoucallems?

Trivia! The undercard. Prelims. This was the main event.

There were 16 seconds left to play when SC scored the game-winning touchdown, the 12th of the game. There finally wasn’t enough time for Maddox to return the insult.

This was a Toby Wing musical stuff, a script right out of Warner Bros.--One Minute To Play, with an all-star cast.

UCLA lost, in a manner of speaking. But, the Bruins are like the guy who shows up the next day with his nose broken and teeth missing and his ear bleeding. And he says “Yeah, but you should see the other guy!”

It was like one of those old movie fights between John Wayne and the town bully. You visualized them knocking each other through plate-glass windows all over town.

I don’t know if it was great football. But it was great theater. If they gave a Heisman Trophy for games, this one would win in a landslide. Even though it wasn’t for a title, it had the crowd standing from introduction to final bell. You can’t wait for the rematch.