Plucky Ngo a Big Catch for CSUN : College football: Slightly built receiver is a bright light who keeps his parents in the dark about his involvement as a player.

The phone company did not make a dime off Duc Ngo’s first college touchdown catch.

Although the sophomore walk-on caught a 14-yard pass to pull Cal State Northridge to within a point of UC Davis in the first half of CSUN’s win Saturday, there was no heart-tugging call describing the feat to his parents in San Jose.

Perhaps Duc Ngo (pronounced duck no) will tell Song and Nancy about it in a few years. With a shy, sheepish smile, he admits they don’t know he is playing football.

“They are scared I’ll get hurt,” Ngo said.

Small wonder. Ngo is listed at 5-foot-10, 170 pounds, though a 5-8 visitor towers over him. Duc lacks great speed too, yet he leads Northridge (1-1) in receptions with 13 and is ranked 16th among Division II receivers in receptions per game with 6.5.

To understand how a slight, inexperienced, relatively slow wide receiver can get to the verge of stardom, consider the obstacles that Ngo already has overcome.

The Ngo family escaped Vietnam two days before the fall of Saigon. Duc, the youngest of three children, was 3.

His brother, Phuc, (pronounced fook), then 10, vividly remembers the flight.

“We had to escape the bombing,” Phuc said. “People were scattering, running for their lives. The best thing to save yourself is to go to the middle of the water. They don’t fight in the water. There was a harbor near where we lived. We got on a large boat. We couldn’t bring anything, just ourselves to save our lives.”

Duc was terrified.

“I remember him crying,” Phuc said. “You hear gunshots and bombing. It is frightening.”

For three days and nights the boat bobbed in the ocean. Finally, an American ship took the passengers aboard and sailed to the Philippines. Three days later, the Ngos sailed to Guam where they waited for three months to return to Vietnam.

“We thought when the war was over we would go back,” Phuc said, “but it doesn’t happen that way.”

Instead, the family boarded a plane with dozens of other refugees and traveled to a camp in Indiantown Gap, Pa.

“We knew we were in a foreign land,” Phuc said. “It was like being born in a new world.”

After three months, a family from Lebanon, N.H., agreed to sponsor the Ngos. For the first time since their ordeal began, they were cut off from their culture, their language and the companionship of their countrymen.

“We tried to be like the rest of the people in American society but it was a shock,” Phuc said. “A weather shock and a culture shock. We could not speak English. We could only communicate by expression.”

An aunt, who also had fled Saigon, invited the Ngos to join her in San Jose where the weather was warmer and a Vietnamese community was developing.

The family completed its cross-country journey in February, 1976, 10 months after fleeing Saigon. Song, a former policeman, worked on an assembly line at an electronics plant and took a second job as a janitor. Nancy also worked at the plant.

They saved their money, dreaming of starting their own business. Six years later they opened a restaurant in downtown San Jose.

The three children worked at the restaurant and Phuc, a San Francisco State graduate, recently gave up a banking career in the Bay Area to devote himself full time to the family business.

Although he wanted to leave the area after high school, Duc was persuaded by his parents to attend San Jose State and live at home. He agreed on the condition he could transfer to Northridge after his sophomore year.

Though he played football in high school (with his parents’ grudging consent) and gained all-league honors, Ngo did not try the sport at San Jose State. Given his lack of size and speed, he said it was not a consideration. “It is such a higher level,” he said.

But after becoming a volunteer assistant coach at his high school, Ngo realized how much he missed the game.

“Being a coach,” Ngo said, “you get that itch to play.”

With encouragement from Dave Johnson, his high school coach, Ngo walked on at CSUN last fall.

Matador Coach Bob Burt took a look at Ngo’s boyish features and thought he was a freshman. Punter Albert Razo didn’t think Ngo was big enough to play football. Senior wide receiver Cornell Ward had doubts.

“When I saw him for the first time I didn’t know if he could play or not because you don’t see too many Asian guys in California high school football,” Ward said.

Ngo’s first name--rather than his pass-catching ability--initially drew attention.

“We asked him how to say his name and he said, “duck,” and the guys thought that was funny,” Ward said. “Then we used ‘Daffy Duck’ as one of our formations.”

After the departure of three seniors and junior Paul Peters (who passed up his final year for a pro league that disbanded), the contest to play wide receiver was wide open when spring drills began.

Ward, by then a graduate assistant coach, was the first to notice the diminutive Ngo.

“He had a starting position to lose in my eye,” Ward said. “But I don’t think the other coaches felt that way. In spring camp, he never lost his position. Other guys dropped down. . . . I felt it was really important to give him a chance.

“He was consistently doing the right things . . . following the blocking schemes, catching the ball, running precise routes.

“And he knows how to get open, how to read defenses. I haven’t told him, but I believe he catches the ball better than I did.”

Ngo has surprised coaches, teammates and fans. He also has surprised himself, according to Razo, Ngo’s closest friend on the team.

“He was saying he just wanted to be on the travel team for one game, to Santa Clara, near his home,” Razo said. “I said to him, ‘You’re the man. You’re going to be starting.’ I knew he had it in him. I knew he had the best hands.”