Cal Has Greatest of Expectations for Russell White in ’91

Russell White can see it coming. One eye twinkles eagerly, the other narrows circumspectly as he watches the curtain rise above him on center stage.

The University of California sophomore will share time at tailback with senior Anthony Wallace in Monday’s Copper Bowl against Wyoming, an arrangement that enabled both players to rush for 1,000 yards this fall as the Bears compiled a surprising 6-4-1 record. But the acclaim that enraptured and enslaved White during his high school years is quickly returning, whether he likes it or not.

“Coming out next year, people might put my face of the cover of some little magazines,” he says. “I don’t want that. I want them to premier Cal, not Russell White. But it won’t happen that way. I’ll probably be a preseason All-American.”

Modest in one breath, cocky in the next, White is something of an enigma. The same fellow who came to Cal proclaiming his desire to win at least one Heisman Trophy now wishes Wallace rather than himself had been named to the All-Pacific-10 Conference team.

Washington tackle Steve Emtman was put off by White’s arrogant attitude when the Huskies whipped the Bears earlier this season. No question, White moves with a certain swagger on the field. Yet he is popular with his teammates and coaches, who enjoy his company as well as his undeniable physical gifts.

“This guy’s a player, but I knew that would be the case,” coach Bruce Snyder says. “What I didn’t know about him was how he’d be as far as the team concept was concerned and how he’d respond to pressure. He’s got a great sense of team unity, and he’s an iceman. He is terrific in terms of pressure.”

Two games illustrate Snyder’s point about the manner in which White responds to pressure. After sitting out the 1989 season as a Proposition 48 exile, White felt understandably anxious before Cal’s home opener against defending national champion Miami in mid-September.

So anxious, in fact, that he returned a kickoff 99 yards for a touchdown the first time he touched the football.

By the time the Big Game against Stanford rolled around, White had established himself as one of the best backs in the conference. But he was outstanding in a 27-25 loss, scoring two touchdowns and rushing for 177 yards to finish the regular season with an even 1,000.

“It was very tough to handle,” White said. “I had the best game of my life, when you have an ‘L’ next to your stats, you think that you didn’t do enough.”

What makes all of this particularly intriguing is the growing notion that this season represented little more than a teasing glimpse of White’s talent. Having missed the previous season, without the benefit of a single spring practice, White sees 1990 as an extended tuneup.

“I don’t think I’ve reached that peak I had in high school, when I was so confident I thought I could do anything,” he says. “This year wasn’t a Russell White year. I think I can bring my game up another level.”

It was during his sophomore year at Crespi High in Encino, when he rushed for 2,339 yards and 31 touchdowns, that White assumed larger-than-life proportions. He sees a parallel between then and now, and hopes he handles the expectations better than he did then.

“I don’t want to get to the point where I got in high school, when I got cocky,” White says. “I want to be humble about it. I have more control of myself now.”

Bill Redell remembers the first time he saw the magical instincts. It was the fall of 1985, when White was a freshman at Crespi and Redell was the varsity coach biding time before the main event.

“He was playing for the freshman team,” Redell says. “They punted the ball to him and he went 80 yards for a touchdown. I said to one of my assistants, ‘Geez, next year, we’re going to win it all.’ ”

When he was 14 years old, White high-jumped 6 feet, 8 1/2 inches, a national age-group record. For all of his early accomplishments, White never really saw himself as a childhood prodigy.

“I never was most valuable player on my team until the ninth grade,” he says. “It didn’t come early.”

Regardless, White turned Redell’s vision into reality as Crespi won the Southern Section Big Five Conference championship during his sophomore season. In the second quarter of a first-round playoff game against Edison, he left the field with an injured ankle. Crespi held a tenuous 14-8 lead in the fourth quarter when White walked up gingerly to an assistant coach and said, “I think I can go one more play.”

Eighty yards and six points later, Crespi had a more manageable lead.

“It was a well-blocked play for about two yards,” Redell recalls. “The rest was his. I coached Marcus Dupree with New Orleans (in the United States Football League) and I’ll say this: I have never seen a player of Russell White’s status.”

But White felt out of place at Crespi, an all-boys Catholic school of approximately 500 students. He went there at the suggestion of his cousin, former UCLA star Kermit Alexander, and Helen White agreed that her only son would be better off away from his neighborhood buddies in Van Nuys.

“I didn’t want to go there,” White says. “It was tough at first, but it got easier and easier as time went on. Eventually it got a little too easy.”

Ninety-eight percent of Crespi’s graduates go on to college, and White always knew he’d be included in that group regardless of his study habits. He finished his three-year varsity career with a state record 5,998 yards and 94 touchdowns while doing just enough class work to maintain a C average.

To be eligible for competition as college freshmen, athletes must score at least 700 points on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. White took the SAT “four or five times” without reaching that cutoff score. Each failure received considerable attention in the newspapers, being that he was the best-known prep athlete on the West Coast.

“Russell is not a dumb kid in any way, shape or form,” Redell says. “I personally feel he tightened up on the SAT. If I had to take the SAT and the whole United States had to know what my score was, I’d probably tie up, too.”

Many universities backed off from White during his SAT struggles, but Cal promised him a scholarship regardless. Signing an athlete who failed to meet the NCAA’s Proposition 48 guidelines caused a stir at Berkeley, where 4.0 students are occasionally denied admission.

White nearly flunked out during his first semester and was not declared eligible for the 1990 season until he passed an English course in summer school. But to his immense relief, White learned during his first year at Cal that he had a legitimate excuse for his SAT woes.

He suffers from dyslexia, a learning disability in which letters and numbers often appear backward on the printed page. A ‘3’ might look like an ‘E’, a ‘9’ resembles a ‘P.’

“It was nice to learn that I wasn’t dumb,” White says. “It was something I had no control over.”

When his running backs met for the first time during fall camp in Santa Rosa, Cal assistant coach Ollie Wilson noticed with a smile that an eager sophomore by the name of Russell White had arrived a full 20 minutes early.

“That Proposition 48 is such a mental thing,” Wilson says. “Once Russell got through that, I knew he’d be fine.”

For perhaps the first time in his athletic career, White had doubts. He wondered how he’d move at 200 pounds, an increase of 20 pounds from his high school weight. When the Bears traveled to Wisconsin for their 1990 opener, he asked Wallace whether the Badgers would hit hard.

To which Wallace replied: “Man, everybody hits hard in college.”

White gained 78 yards in 16 carries as Cal beat Wisconsin 28-12. The next week, he made his electrifying debut at Memorial Stadium.

“I think the Miami run will hold up as far as Russell White is concerned,” White says. “People came to that game wondering what I could do. To touch the ball for the first time and go 99 yards, a lot of people were shocked.”

The Wallace-White combination wound up making history, becoming the first Pac-10 teammates to rush for 1,000 yards in the same season. White technically remains a reserve, the first to earn all-conference honors, but not once did he express even a hint of displeasure about his secondary status.

“It encouraged Anthony and me to jump a little sooner,” White says. “You can’t sit around and wait 10 or 11 carries to get in your groove. You have to do it right away.”

Still, there are those who at least partially blame Cal’s loss to Stanford on the fact that Snyder played Wallace rather than White for the first 20 minutes of the second half. White averaged 5.6 yards a carry this season, a full yard better than Wallace.

“White has the ability to go the length of the field at any time,” Oregon coach Rich Brooks says. “I think Wallace is in the same category.”

Wilson is one of those people who envision greater things -- much greater things -- from White.

“I think we’ll eventually see him play on Sundays,” he says. “Physically, he is still maturing. He’s like a 225-pounder from the waist down and 170 pounds from the waist up.”

As for playing on Sundays, White says that will have to wait until 1993. He has no intention of leaving school early for the NFL.

“No way, no chance,” he says. “I can’t do that. I’ve got to have a degree.”

Besides, he still has to bring his game up another notch or two.

“You can always do better,” White says. “Make a move a little quicker, use my peripheral vision a little better. Hey, Joe Montana can get better, Bo Jackson can get better.

The 20-year-old smiles.

“Bo better get better, getting caught from behind like he did (on an 88-yard run against Cincinnati),” White says.

Russell knows humble.