ROSE BOWL SHOWDOWN / UCLA vs. USC : Father and Son : Mike and Joe Barry Join Forces for USC

Football junkies.

No other term seems to fit Mike and Joe Barry. They are a father-son team, a couple of vagabonds serving life sentences in football.

And neither would have it any other way.

Mike, 47, is USC’s offensive line coach. Joe, 23, a USC senior, will start at inside linebacker Saturday when the Trojans play UCLA in the Rose Bowl decider at the Coliseum.

You would think these two would have wound up on the same team before this, but they missed connecting twice before.

“When Dad called to tell me John Robinson had hired him, I couldn’t believe it,” Joe said. “After all these years, we’re finally on the same team.”

Same team, different sides of the ball.

When Joe is on the field, Mike is on the sideline, preparing his line for the next offensive series.

But surely, you figure, Mike has sneaked a peek at his son during the games.

“No, I really haven’t,” Mike said. “I just don’t have any time while the defense is out there. When Joe got hurt in the Oregon game, I remember seeing him get treated on the trainer’s bench, and I may have asked someone what happened, but that was about it.”

Barry, previously the offensive line coach at Colorado, came aboard last January, shortly after Robinson replaced Larry Smith.

Mike started coaching high school football in Chicago 21 years ago. And not long after that, son Joe was a football tyke.

“Joe started hanging around football practice fields and locker rooms when he was 3 or 4 years old,” Mike said.

“I’m very proud of him, and I’m very happy to be at least on the same field with him his senior year.

“For a lot of years, because of my coaching jobs, it was his mom who was there for him at his games, not his dad. And he always understood that.

“I left college coaching for the (United States Football League) and for most of two years the family stayed behind, when I went to San Antonio, New Orleans and Portland.”

Even so, Joe has attended so many schools, he has forgotten some.

“People ask what it was like, moving around so much, but it’s the only life I ever lived,” he said. “I have nothing else to compare it to.”

When the USFL folded, in 1985, Mike Barry was in Portland, out of a coaching job.

“Until I got back into coaching, with Iowa State, I did cement work on construction jobs,” he said. “Foundations, sidewalks, curbs, gutters--I didn’t want to interrupt Joe’s freshman year in high school.”

When Barry landed at Colorado, his son was a Boulder high school teammate of Tony Boselli, now Barry’s USC teammate at offensive tackle.

Barry, a year older than Boselli, was recruited by both Michigan and USC, and chose Michigan.

“It was a mistake,” he said.

“Michigan led me to believe I fit into their plans, but when I got there it was apparent to me that their actions indicated otherwise. I redshirted my first year there, then in my second year there I was the No. 3 inside linebacker and never got in a game.

“So I transferred here, never dreaming Dad would wind up here, too. I sat out a year and backed up Brian Williams all last year.”

Barry, 6 feet 1 and 235 pounds, started this season as a backup linebacker, too, but became a mid-season starter, in the Washington State game. He sat out the Oregon State and Notre Dame games because of a knee injury, but regained his starting assignment two weeks ago against Stanford.

And it was Barry who made the clinching play in USC’s 22-17 victory over Washington last Saturday in Seattle, setting up Saturday’s Rose Bowl showdown.

With 41 seconds to play, Barry intercepted Eric Bjornson’s pass at midfield and returned it to the Trojan 40.

Johnson then dropped to one knee on the final play.

“All I could think of when I saw that pass coming right to me was all the . . . I took from my teammates when (quarterback) Steve Stenstrom hit me between the 4 and the 0 (his uniform number is 40) in the Stanford game,” Barry said.

“I never even got my hands on it. It looked awful on film.

“But all we’re thinking about now is UCLA. The last two nights, I couldn’t get to sleep just thinking about it. It’s what I came to SC for, to play in games like this.”

Barry starts for a defense that has given up one second-half touchdown in the last 10 games.

“It’s not just the second half, we’ve played some good first halves, too,” he said.

“We’re basically a senior group, with some juniors like Jeff Kopp and Brian Williams who’ve started a lot of games. We know each other well, we help each other out. We’re a close group. I don’t think any of us are surprised at how well we’ve played. We expected to.”

Ricky Hunley, who coaches the Trojan linebackers, was a two-year All-American at Arizona when Mike Barry was a line coach there, and Joe Barry was a 10-year-old, shagging practice balls. “He doesn’t have great size and he isn’t real fast, but he does a lot of little things very well. He’s always in the area of a play,” Hunley said.

Here’s how his father sizes him up: “He’s a smart player, he’s always aware of what’s going on. He’s a very competitive kid.”

Barry, despite sitting out two games and playing only a little in a third, has 21 unassisted tackles and was in on nine others.

He doesn’t expect to wind up in an NFL camp this summer.

His future? Need you ask?

“I want to coach,” he said.