Surf and Football Turf : On Either One, USC’s David Webb Prefers a Wild Approach

Everyone seems to think David Webb is a little crazy, and that’s fine with him.

“Kill, Webb, kill,” one USC teammate said after a recent practice.

“Grrrrr,” another growled.

“Hurt ‘em, Webb,” said still another.

Webb, a 6-foot-4, 225-pound senior who plays defensive tackle, smiled at his teammates’ comments. After all, it’s an image Webb goes out of his way to cultivate.

“I’m normal around the public, but I just go crazy around here,” Webb said. “You have to do something to change the pace.”

Maybe that’s why Webb provokes fights with his teammates during practices. Or why he wears that somewhat sinister-looking goatee.

“You’ve got to be a little off the wall,” he said. “There’s enough time later in life to be normal.”

He’s a wild man, all right.

But there are so many other ways to describe Webb, a former All-Southern Section linebacker from Irvine High. He’s talented, disciplined, bright, unselfish, hard-working and dependable. He also was USC’s co-MVP on defense last season.

USC Coach Larry Smith refers to Webb’s style of play as “run and hit.”

“He’s the kind of guy who just plays like hell,” said Kevin Wolthausen, USC’s defensive line coach. “He earns your respect. I don’t know if (opponents) know who he is, but they’ll find out at the end of the year.”

Webb’s attitude: Why run around them when you can run through them?

That style has served him well since the coaching staff asked him to move from linebacker to the line before the 1991 season. Webb was recruited as a linebacker but was a backup to Willie McGinest until the coaches offered him a chance to start in the line.

“I’m sure he came here thinking he’d be the next great USC linebacker,” Wolthausen said. “Whenever he was in the game, he was consistently one of our best. So we asked ourselves, ‘What’s the best place to put him?’ ”

Despite being dwarfed by opposing offensive linemen such as Washington’s Lincoln Kennedy, Webb has held his own. That’s where intensity, leverage and speed come into play, he said. Besides, he asked, is there a defensive lineman in the country who can out-muscle the 6-7, 325-pound Kennedy?

To increase his upper body strength, Webb spends hours in the weight room. Often, he’s the last to leave. And when weightlifting gets dull, he has his surfboard. Surfing keeps him in peak condition in the off-season, he said.

“I started getting into it my freshman year in high school,” he said. “I fell in love with it. It’s addictive.”

He likens the struggle against a heavy surf to play on the line of scrimmage.

“Only you can’t drown on the football field, like you can in the ocean,” he said. “When you’re out on a big day, you’ve got to paddle or die. Here (at practice), we’re just running to get into shape.”

It seems to work for Webb, but don’t expect Smith to start handing out surfboards anytime soon. Most of Webb’s teammates see surfing as further proof he is strange.

“These guys think I’m totally crazy because I hang around all the oddballs,” he said. “It rubs off on me. It’s the whole stereotype of surfing. It’s a crazy, long-haired, party-guy image.”

The truth is that Webb is just as disciplined as the next USC player, perhaps more so.

As a senior at Irvine, he played most of the season with a broken foot. When an opponent asked why he was still playing, Webb said simply, “I can’t stop.”

He said he wanted to help his overmatched team as best he could. Besides, he was having too much fun to quit. In those days, the South Coast League was one of the toughest in the Southern Section. Bret Johnson led El Toro. Todd Marinovich quarterbacked Capistrano Valley. Troy Kopp was at Mission Viejo.

“We had it pretty tough,” Webb said. “It was a ‘rad’ league. I think my junior year we went 1-9, and we had a lot of talent. We had a good team.”

He was a nose tackle as a junior but switched to linebacker as a senior. Webb said he made his reputation as a linebacker, but Wolthausen said USC began recruiting him as a down lineman.

“I got lucky because I was big and quick as a linebacker and I ran people over,” Webb said. “Then I came here and all of a sudden I was undersized.”

He has been even more so since he moved to the defensive line. But his emotional play seems to make up for a few pounds and inches.

“I’d have to consider myself one of those rock-’em, sock-’em kind of guys,” Webb said. “I have good technique, but I prefer to run over ‘em.”