Pourdanesh’s Travels Reach the Nevada Line : College football: After leaving strife-torn Iran for Irvine and University High, he has developed into an NFL prospect with Wolf Pack.

Shahriar Pourdanesh took a walk around his Tehran neighborhood one night in 1979 and ran into a couple of boys, one 16 years old and the other 17.

The teen-agers were setting up a barricade of sandbags and told Pourdanesh, then 9, that they were preparing to fight Iranian Army soldiers.

The next morning, Pourdanesh went back to talk to the boys. He found two dead bodies.

“It was pretty harsh,” Pourdanesh said of Iran’s revolution, in which the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. “I remember a lot of people dying.”

Their country was crumbling, and Azhdar and Mansureh Pourdanesh didn’t want their family to crumble with it. They sold whatever possessions they could and got out, first moving to Germany for 3 1/2 years and then to Irvine, where their two daughters attended UC Irvine and Shahriar went to University High.

Believing the political situation in Iran has stabilized with Khomeini’s death and a truce in the Iran-Iraq war, which claimed the life of Pourdanesh’s 15-year-old cousin, Azhdar and Mansureh returned to their homeland four months ago.

But not with Shahriar, a Nevada All-American offensive tackle who has built such a successful life here that he’d never consider leaving.

“I’ll never go back to Iran--how can I?” said Pourdanesh, a 6-foot-7, 290-pound senior. “Iran has a different culture than what I grew up in. It will always be my homeland, but I can’t see myself living there.”

He can envision himself playing in the NFL, and so can Nevada Coach Chris Ault, which says volumes about the strides Pourdanesh has made in recent years.

Pourdanesh was a better wrestler in high school and was planning to go to Oklahoma State on a wrestling scholarship until Nevada coaches persuaded him to try college football.

Nevada was the only school to offer a football scholarship--no one else even offered him a recruiting trip--and Wolf Pack coaches considered Pourdanesh a project.

“Shoot, when he got here (in 1988) he probably wasn’t sure how to spell ‘football,’ ” Ault said. “He wasn’t much of a player in high school. He was just a big kid running around, and we could see he didn’t understand the game very much. But we liked his aggressiveness as a wrestler.”

Pourdanesh signed with the Wolf Pack as a defensive lineman, but during his redshirt freshman year, coaches decided his physical skills were better suited for the offensive line.

Pourdanesh, who will return to Orange County when Nevada takes on Cal State Fullerton at the Titan Sports Complex Oct. 3, considered the move a demotion.

“When I was a defensive lineman, I hated the offensive line--they were the enemies,” he said. “In a defensive lineman’s mind, he figures he’s a skilled position lineman, more agile and quick. I hated it because I loved playing defense.”

But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Pourdanesh wasn’t quick enough to play defense at the college level. He was more of a thinking player than a reaction player.

“It was definitely a good move, because when I went to the offensive line. I could think through a defensive lineman’s mind and know what I was going against,” Pourdanesh said. “I knew from experience what guys were going to do, and that helped me a lot.”

Pourdanesh earned All-Big Sky Conference second-team honors as a sophomore and blossomed as a junior in 1991, allowing only one sack over his left tackle position in 13 games.

The Wolf Pack, an NCAA Division I-AA national finalist in 1990, went 12-1 last season, losing to Youngstown State, 30-28, in the second round of the I-AA playoffs. Pourdanesh was voted a first-team Division I-AA All-American by the Sports Network (I-AA sports information directors) and a third-team I-AA All-American by the Associated Press.

Two former Nevada offensive linemen are currently playing in the NFL: Derek Kennard with the New Orleans Saints and Eric Sanders with the Detroit Lions. Ault puts Pourdanesh in the same class.

“His forte is mental toughness and intelligence--he’s the ideal offensive lineman,” Ault said. “And he has a huge wing span. You may go through him, but if you’re going to go around him, it’s going to take awhile. He’ll definitely get drafted this year.”

Pourdanesh still approaches every game this season as if he has something to prove, though. Nevada, which plays Saturday at Tulane, has moved up to Division I-A and the Big West Conference, and Pourdanesh has had to elevate his game.

“Every week, I get to play against a quality player, and every game is a different challenge,” Pourdanesh said. “In the back of my mind, I think that people always said I was a great I-AA player. I want to show I can be a great I-A player. It’s a challenge for me.”

Life has been full of challenges for Pourdanesh, 22, and he has handled most as he would an undersized, freshman defensive lineman.

Pretty easily.

When his family moved from Iran to Hamburg in late 1979, Pourdanesh learned to speak German. He wasn’t fazed by the fact he had been uprooted from his home.

“It was kind of exciting moving all around,” Pourdanesh said. “It was fun for me because I didn’t know what was going on. I kind of looked at it as an adventure.”

When he moved to Orange County in 1983, Pourdanesh discovered an American culture that intrigued and frightened him. He loved watching television and eating American food, but he found that Americans, still resentful from the Iranian hostage situation in the late 1970s, didn’t love him.

“Every day people tried to start fights with me, just because I was Persian,” Pourdanesh said. “It was really bad when I was in middle school. I told these kids, ‘Don’t you realize I had nothing to do with (the hostage crisis)? The next year it got a lot better.”

He watched hours of television each day, which helped him learn the English language. He assimilated easily at University, where he made many friends and developed a reputation as a fun-loving guy who laughed as much when the joke was on him as when it was on someone else.

“One day we went out for football practice and one of the kids ripped his shorts off him,” said Chris Conlin, University’s wrestling coach and a football assistant. “He didn’t have a jock on, and we had all the stat girls there, and they were watching. He grabbed a garbage can to cover himself. Here was this big guy, 6-7, walking around with a garbage can in front of him.”

The transition to college was rough at first--he had a 1.7 grade-point average in his first semester as a starter--but he recovered. He has a 2.5 GPA and is on course to graduate with a marketing degree in the spring.

The transition from defense to offense went smoothly, and Pourdanesh has begun to master some of the tricks of the trade--namely, holding without drawing a penalty.

“Every offensive lineman holds--it’s impossible not to,” Pourdanesh said. “If an offensive lineman says he doesn’t hold, he’s not a very good one.

“It’s just a matter of holding the right way.”