Tackling Reality : While UCLA’s Werner Competes on Field, His Father Faces Different Kind of Battle

It was the first Saturday in September and Bob Werner reported to the Rose Bowl as he had for three years, binoculars in hand, ready to zoom in on the UCLA defensive line.

At home in Yorba Linda, the VCR was programmed so he could watch the backs and receivers and scoring plays.

“When I’m at the stadium, I just focus on Matthew,” Bob says, chuckling. “Then I can tell him how he has done.”

Matthew is UCLA defensive tackle Matt Werner, who looked forward to a senior season of his father’s critiques. But after the Cal game, he learned that Bob had never made it to his seat and that the critiques might be harder to come by.

“We had just kind of moseyed up to the gate, and I started feeling bad,” Bob Werner says. “I told my wife, ‘I think I’ve got a temperature.’ We left and went to the hospital and, sure enough, I was 102 degrees.”

Doctors say that a fever is the body’s sign of overload when you are going through chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease. Bob Werner learned he had it in the spring, a few weeks after beginning a new job.

He had thought he could make it to the games through his son’s senior season, but that became too much.

“He was really looking forward to making the Washington State or Oregon State trip,” Matt Werner said. “He had made the Bay Area games, at Berkeley and Stanford, and had gone to Arizona, but he and my mother had never gone to Oregon or Washington.”

And Bob was particularly looking forward to a Palo Alto family reunion while seeing UCLA play Stanford. Matt would start for the Bruins and his brother, freshman Bryan, would be on the Stanford sideline, recovering from an ankle injury that will sideline him all season.

Instead, the boys’ mother, Lynn, used Bob’s ticket to take Bryan’s girlfriend to the game, and Bob watched on television, making it more difficult to concentrate on the line play. Matt made it a little easier for his father, who got instant replays of his son sacking Cardinal quarterback Steve Stenstrom once and batting down two passes at the line of scrimmage in UCLA’s 28-25 victory.

Bob has his good and bad days, and Saturday was a good one. It was also a good one for Matt, who has 13 tackles--three of them sacks--in the Bruins’ three games in a scheme designed to sacrifice defensive linemen and make statistical heroes out of linebackers and defensive backs.

Matt Werner has learned to take happiness as he finds it, frequently without statistical support. It’s part of a game within a game.

“The biggest charge for a defensive lineman is probably a quarterback sack,” he says. “That’s the statistic everybody looks at.

“But I get a charge out of just beating an offensive lineman when he knows it, when he’s down and I’m on top of him after he’s been trying to knock the . . . out of me.”

In one of football’s little inequities, statisticians credit the guy celebrating the tackle for the camera. The defensive lineman who cleared his path gets ready for his next play in obscurity.

It is something Werner has understood since he began playing football as a youth in Rutherford, N.J., where he could see Giants Stadium from the roof of his house. The family moved to Yorba Linda after his sophomore season in high school, and he became a fixture in the defense at Anaheim Esperanza High.

He quickly drew the attention of college scouts, talking to Notre Dame until he remembered the weather there was colder than in New Jersey, and telling Stanford he was coming to Palo Alto. He changed his mind after a visit to Westwood and has been a starter for four seasons.

He has kept UCLA near his heart since the summer before his freshman year--about six inches from his heart, actually, in a tattoo with the UCLA emblem. A year or so later, he added a bear, presumably a Bruin.

“When I was 17-18 years old, it seemed like a cool thing to do,” he says. “If I had it to do over again, I might think it through.”

Including a redshirt season, this is his fifth year on the campus, and the arrival of freshman nose tackle Travis Kirschke from Esperanza made him realize it.

“In my senior year in high school, he was in the eighth grade,” Werner says. “He played with my brother. They’re just young pups.”

And it makes him realize that the end of college football, perhaps the end of all football for him, is near.

He talks of coaching, of perhaps playing in the NFL. But he sees an end and wonders how he will cope in what he calls the real world.

“It’s contact,” he says. “As a defensive lineman, you get hit on every play. Lord knows what I’ll do to keep myself occupied when it’s over.”

While Matt Werner muses about his football ending, he also talks about a beginning for his father.

“He’s going to have a chance to see my brother,” he says. “My brother’s going to be at Stanford for four years, so my dad will get a chance to see him play a few football teams.”

But Bob Werner talks of a closer day.

“I’ll be through with chemotherapy in November, and they say that there is a two-week recovery period,” he says. “Maybe if UCLA makes a bowl . . . “