He Steals Show After Five Years

It was the start of the fourth quarter when the Trojan horse threw his helmeted, sword-waving rider.

It was a bad omen for the Trojans, a reminder again that the original Trojan horse was bad news for those earlier Trojans.

So was this one.

This Trojan team got unseated, too.

The original Trojan horse was full of Greeks. This one was full of enemies, too. Bruins.

Here was the picture: With one minute to play, these Trojans had the ball on the UCLA three-yard line, first down and trailing by only six points.

Game’s over, right? Four plays to go three yards.

No trick at all for Tailback U., Student Body Right and the Thundering Herd, right?

Forget it. Howard Jones probably would never believe it, but these Trojans could move the ball only one yard in two plays. In fact, they moved the ball only seven yards net on the ground in the whole game.

They had to take the wimp route. Try a pass.

Oops! Shades of Achilles! Right into the wooden horse full of Greeks--er, Bruins. The pass was intercepted.

Why throw a pass when you can almost fall over the goal line? I mean, come on, how come the school of Cotton Warburton, Jon Arnett, C.R. Roberts, O.J. Simpson, Mike Garrett, Marcus Allen and Gus Shaver has no one who could make three yards in four tries? This is also Heisman U., remember?

It was probably fitting. UCLA was probably two touchdowns better. USC had to be resourceful to keep the score as close as it was.

But USC was pesky. It was a little like those TV crime dramas. Every time UCLA left the Trojans for dead--as in 14-0, right away, and 17-0 at the half--USC, like those movie villains who won’t stay dead, kept rising up and lunging.

The Bruins are hardly Tailback U. They are not supposed to win these things by plowing over the Trojans behind the student body. They are the “gutty little Bruins.” Not so little anymore, but still more apt to resort to finesse, a Troy Aikman, Gary Beban, Billy Kilmer, Tommy Maddox type of onslaught. Go over ‘em, not through ‘em. Fool ‘em, don’t flatten ‘em.

Well, UCLA rolled over them Saturday. They hit Tailback U. with a tailback.

Ricky Davis will get no Heisman votes. He won’t make All-American.

Unless the Trojans get a vote.

You know, when a guy rolls up 153 yards in a Rose Bowl-deciding game, you go to the locker room figuring you are going to find some 6-foot-3, 220-pound athlete with his eyes on the side of his head, a black beard scowling down his cheek, a menacing look in his eyes. You figure he runs the 40 in 4.2, has massive shoulders and would be scary to look at even if he didn’t have a football in his hands.

Davis fits none of these categories. He is small by tailback standards. But he makes up for it by being slow.

But he put UCLA in the Rose Bowl on Saturday as surely as anybody. If USC could have stopped him, it might not have needed that pass in the final seconds that cost it New Year’s Day in Pasadena.

It’s easy to see how USC took him lightly. Only 5-8, barely 190, he has this almost baby face, smiles a lot and plays football as if it’s fun.

But he can find a hole like a mouse. He has such great vision that he doesn’t really need breakaway speed to break away. He starts quicker than a guy leaving a bank robbery in a getaway car. He doesn’t need the hole very long.

Ricky Davis (real name: Dachary Duane Davis, triple D) has always had trouble getting UCLA to give him the ball. He has stayed at UCLA five years and as a tailback last year he carried only 17 times.

That would not be a good quarter for O.J. Simpson or Marcus Allen--or Gaston Green--but UCLA thought Davis would make a great special teams player. This meant largely returning kickoffs.

Davis, who had been an outstanding high school runner--38 touchdowns, 2,005 yards--resented the demotion. He had even been relegated to the “scout” team. “Scout” team players are kind of complicated tackling dummies--guys who impersonate the opponent of the week for the varsity to practice on.

Even when he was promoted to the regulars, Davis played only slightly more than kick holders. Standard procedure for the Bruin coaches has been to start Davis, but his job was to soften the opposition, get them to reveal their defensive patterns--and then the coaches would put in the younger, faster players, Skip Hicks and Daron Washington. He was kind of a one-man shock troop, a weakness prober.

If that was the game plan Saturday, it went awry. It would have been like taking Red Grange out. At the half, he had 90 yards and the USC players were asking themselves where this guy came from.

Davis managed to look as if he had swallowed the canary as he came up the tunnel after the game. A lone rose was clenched in his fist, and the happy fans were clapping him on the back.

“I always felt I had ‘football’ speed,” he said, smiling. His time in the hundred was 10.4, he said. “And I have ‘football’ vision, which is as important. “

Was he bitter to find his role reduced? Davis smiled. “Oh, I thought about 1,000-yard seasons when I came to UCLA. I mean, I’d been a starter all through high school and in fact all my career. I think this shows what I can do and I would expect attention from the pros. This rose symbolizes all the hard work I’ve done, all the time I’ve put in to be a top player.”

Was his role previously to test the opposition and then let the glamour runners take over? Davis smiled. “You’ll have to ask the coaches that,” he said.

His coach, Terry Donahue, was asked about Davis’ surprise performance. “He’s a fifth-year senior and he was fourth on our depth charts a few weeks ago, “ Donahue said. “He has felt all along he should be our tailback, and today he was right. We’ve been starting him, then playing our younger players. But he was hot today, so we let him play. “

Not quite “Rudy” maybe--but a heart-warming story all the same of a young man who plugged along for five years, did what he was asked, dreamed of 1,000-yard seasons and got 300-yarders instead--and then bloomed like, well, a rose--in the biggest game of his career.

Whoever plays UCLA in the Rose Bowl better not treat Davis as a trouble-shooter or a plumber poking for leaks. If they do, he might be coming up another tunnel with a rose in his teeth then, too.