ROSE BOWL / UCLA Bruins vs. Wisconsin Badgers : Attitudes in Concert : Off-Season Exchanges Between Terry Donahue and His Players Helped to Reverse UCLA’s Fortunes and Silence Naysayers--at Least for Time Being

It all hit bottom on Sept. 18 at 12:32 p.m.

A bright, sunny Saturday had started miserably with ESPN’s pregame college football show featuring a few minutes of Terry Donahue playing defense in an interview, giving positive answers that didn’t quite fit the negative questions about the UCLA football program. Now, 3 1/2 hours later, as the teams lined up for the kickoff, a plane drifted overhead, from the Nebraska end zone to the Bruins’ end zone at the Rose Bowl, trailing a banner: “Donahue Football--Commitment to Excuses.”

Somewhere, a growing army of naysayers had enlisted an air force.

At day’s end, UCLA had lost, 14-13, but it was a feel-good defeat to the players, which might have been the greatest indictment of the program: a moral victory because they had played well in losing to the No. 6 team in the country.

“We heard people thought we were garbage, that people felt like UCLA was in the crapper right now,” defensive tackle Matt Werner said. “Donahue told us (after the Nebraska loss) the only way we’re going to get any respect was to win. We had lost two games by a total of three points and we were saying, ‘Hey, we’re a good team and people are still talking garbage about us.’ That made a point that it was all about wins and losses.”

After a 6-5 record in 1992 and an 0-2 start to ‘93, the wins and losses were even: 23-23-1 since Troy Aikman had taken his magic act to the Dallas Cowboys. But who was counting? Well, Sports Illustrated, for one.

In its preseason football edition, the magazine had this terse assessment of UCLA football: “Since ‘88, the Bruins are 23-21-1. How has Terry Donahue kept his job?”

Two games into the season, a story was being prepared to expand on that theme. “We knew Sports Illustrated was writing a story on the death of UCLA football,” Werner said. “We knew it was coming. And within a six-day period, they had to scrap it.”

He smiled, pleased at wasted effort.

Said UCLA Athletic Director Pete Dalis: “One of the things I’m most pleased about is, after we lost to Nebraska, Sports Illustrated sent out a writer to, in effect, write Terry’s and UCLA football’s obituary.”

So, a story that was still to be printed became, in effect, bulletin-board fodder when the Bruins went to Stanford. That story was, in journalistic terms, spiked after a 28-25 victory. Five days later, UCLA beat San Diego State, 52-13, and was off and winging toward seven victories in a row, an 8-3 record and its first Rose Bowl appearance in eight seasons.

“The slant was that this had been a good football program until a few years ago, and now we’re roughly .500,” Dalis said, sarcasm slipping into his voice. “So, I’m happy to see that we’ve taken what people perceived to be not a very good football team to a conference championship and the Rose Bowl.”

Through it all, Donahue had tried to stay upbeat, encouraging players and coaches and concentrating on the task at hand. Daily, he would retreat to his home, listening to the news, tuning out the sports. But doubt was creeping through a wall he has erected over 18 years as a coach.

“Coming off a 6-5 year and then going 0-2, you had to wonder if we were going to be able to make this work,” he said. “Could we get it back to where it needs to be?”

They could, and the relief was apparent at Stanford. “It was like going through labor,” he said. “We had to get a win born.”

Conception had occurred, perhaps fittingly, nine months before, in January when answers were being sought to the questions posed by the 6-5 season.

Change was needed, and it began with the coach.

At UCLA, it always does.

Donahue is basically a creature of habit. When the first question in a Monday news conference before the Stanford game dealt with Bruin injuries, and when UCLA then won, he would brook no other type of opening question the following Monday. It had to be about injuries.

This pattern continued the next week and the next, as the Bruins continued to win. And when the question before the Arizona State game was specifically about quarterback Wayne Cook and his kidney problem, Donahue said: “I’ll take that to mean you want to talk about injuries in general” and launched into an answer of his own question.

Thursdays are for dinner out with his wife, Andrea. Fridays are for walk-through practices at a certain time in a certain way. Everything is in a pattern, in a niche, from communion at St. Jude’s in Westlake Village to time to watch game film.

But the Bruins were barely above .500 over four seasons, and Donahue and his assistants met last winter to find out why. From that came a series of individual meetings between Donahue and the players.

“He spent anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours with every player on this team,” said Bob Field, the Bruins’ defensive coordinator.

“We’ve always had an open door between the coaches and players, but I think he felt we needed a new direction and a new commitment, new standards and better communication. Not one-way communication. Not just us telling them how it’s going to be, but us being open to the players and the players being open to us. It didn’t happen overnight, but I think the foundation was laid that we’re in this together and we’re staying in it together and fighting together.”

Asked their opinion, the players told Donahue to lighten up--that when a gold helmet was strapped on, nobody could tell what kind of hair was under it, or if earrings were hanging or if there was a beard.

The football coach is one of the last of society’s true autocrats, the players subject to his every whim and dictate, and one of the hardest things to change is a coach’s mind. Donahue had become a head coach in 1976, at 31. Did he have to come into the ‘90s?

“Maybe,” Donahue said. “Anything can become a distraction. Take earrings. We’ve never had a rule that players couldn’t wear earrings in the off-season, nine months out of the year. But we said that during the season, we didn’t want them to wear earrings, for safety reasons and also because I felt it distracted from the team concept. In visiting with my players in the off-season, they convinced me that it didn’t distract from the team concept, that the fact that they couldn’t wear them maybe distracted from the team concept. So, I listened to them and said I think the players can win with or without earrings. And we obviously demonstrated that. What you win with is attitude, and if the players’ attitude and my attitude and the attitude of the assistants were in concert, we would win.”

Score one for Werner, with a samurai hairdo, and for Nkosi Littleton and Jamir Miller, with shaved pates, and for James Milliner, with his sawed-off dreadlocks, and for Daron Washington, with jewelry wired into his left lobe, and for Troy Aldrich and Brian Richards, with beards.

And for a coach, who was reminded of something that coaches tend to forget over time--that a team is a group of individuals who wear the same uniform two hours a day, but who exist in a student body the other 22 hours. The Young Republicans were out. Mainstream student-athletes were in.

From those meetings came a reminder of the First Amendment and a democracy of sorts, with a players’ executive committee to address grievances--pregame meals, travel complaints, etc. With such distractions out of the way, it was easier to concentrate on winning football games.

“I think sometimes you’ve got to change defensively, sometimes you’ve got to change offensively,” Donahue said. “And sometimes you’ve got to change philosophically in how you try to get your people to work more efficiently and better and happier. I listened, and they helped me as much as anything, because it took away some of my distractions. Players can distract you, too. I was a happier camper.

“Change can be good. Have kids changed? Is it different in the ‘90s from the ‘80s? You betcha. Is it different from the ‘90s from what it was in the ‘70s? You betcha. Is it easy to change? No.”

But change he did. Still, earrings and hairdos don’t win football games. Players do, and the Bruins still had to win games, as they had been accustomed to doing.

Letters to the editor and to Dalis, one accompanying a book on fundamental football, said so. Because of UCLA’s national stature, talk shows all over the country posed the question: Is Terry Donahue in trouble?

The answer was and is no. “Two things I’ve always said were important to survive in this business are, No. 1, a strong contract, and No. 2, a good administration,” Donahue said.

His contract runs through 1997, and it would cost UCLA about seven figures to break it. And his relationship with Chancellor Charles Young, who--with the advice of Dalis--has hiring and firing authority over the university’s head football and basketball coaches, is a good one, built over time.

“Terry’s job has never been in serious jeopardy, as far as I’m concerned,” Dalis said.

That doesn’t mean it was easy.

“I think everybody in this business gets affected in some degree by a down period and negativism,” Donahue said. “I’ve existed in Los Angeles, which is one of the most competitive environments in the world, for 18 years. You don’t last that long by being thin-skinned. You don’t last that long by succumbing to all the pressure and criticism that comes with our profession.

“I’ve tried to insulate myself from exposing myself to unnecessary criticism, and yet I’ve tried to be receptive to criticism I felt was in my best interest or offered in a positive way from people who had me as a primary concern, not people who wanted to see me fail. There’s a big difference.”

As much as possible, he tried to keep the naysaying from his players, but as adults, they know. The airplane and the banner were vivid reminders. They read Sports Illustrated.

Quarterback Cook said: “(Donahue) said: ‘They can say what they want about me, but we’re going to keep working hard and we’re going to be all right.’ He didn’t say much about the criticism at all. He just kept plugging away. But, especially at the beginning, it was hard and he must have been feeling it.”

He was.

“In the early part of the season, I was certainly aware of the criticism,” Donahue said. “I know coaches who read the paper and who listen to the talk shows, and they expose themselves to all of that. I don’t. But I don’t read or listen when we’re doing well, either. I don’t listen to people who call up and just don’t like me as a coach, who want me fired. I just don’t listen to that.

“I learned early on. In a game at the Rose Bowl a few years ago, we were down at the half and were going through the tunnel to the dressing room. Two guys--I know they weren’t together and probably didn’t know each other because they were 10-15 yards apart in the stands--were yelling. One yelled, ‘Donahue, you blankety-blank-blank, why don’t you throw more?’ And the other yelled, ‘Donahue, you blankety-blank-blank, why don’t you run the tailback more?’ So I learned you can’t please everybody. And at the end of the game, when we won, I didn’t hear them anymore.

“But you’re not immune to it. I’m not deaf, and I don’t exist in a vacuum.

“It’s one of the things that’s good about living and working in Los Angeles, (rather) than say, in Lawrence, Kan., where I was an assistant coach. There are so many other interests that people have in this community, so many other things that take the focus away from just your little football world.

“There’s no less pressure, but it makes it easier to escape.”

But escape, like fame, is fleeting. You can run, but you can’t hide.

With each week of the seven-game winning streak that brought the Bruins from oblivion to the Rose Bowl race, the criticism eased, and so did Donahue’s demeanor. He does not wear his emotions on his sleeve, but they occasionally slip through his stoicism. After beating Arizona, 37-17, on Oct. 30, the Bruins were the lone Pac-10 team that could win its way into a conference championship without help.

But a 40-27 victory over Washington State was costly because Cook was injured in the first quarter. He didn’t play in a 9-3 loss to Arizona State. That defeat made UCLA’s season finale against USC the game for the Rose Bowl.

Donahue had beaten the Trojans in 1991 and ‘92, but he had lost nine consecutive games to the Trojans when the conference championship was at stake, a statistic often mentioned by critics who were again out in force. A season that had been turned around could be turned back by a loss to USC, and everybody knew it--Donahue perhaps most of all.

“I never feared for my job this year,” he said. “Have I ever feared for it? Yes, at the end of the 1979 season. We had been beaten by our cross-town rival four years in a row, and they wore us out that year (49-14, to give the Bruins a 5-6 record). Everybody in the media was telling me that I was going to get fired, and I felt that if we didn’t come back with a real good team in 1980, I might not make it.”

UCLA won the 1980 game, 20-17, to finish with a 9-2 record, and Donahue said he has never felt insecure in his job again.

With that in mind, he prepared the Bruins to win the conference title and Rose Bowl bid. They beat USC, 27-21.

“It was a huge win,” Dalis said, thinking ahead. “I think it will help season tickets (which had dropped from 27,000 to 21,000 over the past four years), and ABC is already talking about televising our Tennessee game (in 1994) on a sort of national basis.”

It was more personal for Donahue.

“I don’t monitor the talk shows, but I understand I’m not a hot topic anymore,” he said, smiling.

Vindication? Maybe not.

“I really don’t feel like I needed to be vindicated,” Donahue said. “I think I’m realistic about what I’ve accomplished at UCLA: When I look at the fact that my winning percentage is in the top 10 in the country (No. 8, at .684 with a 139-62-8 record); when I look at the fact that I’m on the verge of being the winningest coach in the history of the Pac-10 (91 conference victories, behind the 97 of former Washington coach Don James). I am the winningest coach at UCLA (his 139 victories are 32% of all of the Bruins’ 437) and I’ve got the second-best bowl record in the history of college football (.773, with an 8-2-1 record, behind Florida State’s Bobby Bowden’s .781 at 12-3-1). When I look at all of those things, I really don’t feel a sense of vindication.

“However, I’ve been in this business a long time, and I know no matter who you are, when you do not produce to the level of expectations that people have for you, you’re going to get criticized--and sometimes justifiably so. We established an extremely high level of expectations at UCLA, and we should have. Three out of the last five years, including this year, we haven’t met that level of expectations. And I’m the head of the program, so I’m going to get most of the rap for that. I’m really proud that we’re in the Rose Bowl and some of the critics have quieted down, you’re damn right.”

The air force has been grounded. The army of naysayers has stilled, awaiting the next false step. It will come. It always does.

But on Monday, Donahue will do what most valuable players crow about after a Super Bowl victory. He’ll go to Disneyland. It’s all part of Rose Bowl week.

Terry Donahue’s Bowl Record

Year Bowl Opponent Result 1976 Liberty Alabama L, 36-6 1978 Fiesta Arkansas T, 10-10 1981 Bluebonnet Michigan L, 33-14 1982 Rose Michigan W, 24-14 1983 Rose Illinois W, 45-9 1984 Fiesta Miami W, 39-37 1985 Rose Iowa W, 45-28 1986 Freedom BYU W, 31-10 1987 Aloha Florida W, 20-16 1988 Cotton Arkansas W, 17-3 1991 Hancock Illinois W, 6-3 1993 Rose Wisconsin ?