This Time, ‘Rubes’ Play With Own Dice

Listen! Do you ever like to see a hustler get hustled? Like to see some guy climb off a load of pumpkins and pick the shell with the pea under it that the dealer thought wasn’t there?

You would have liked Saturday’s 80th Rose Bowl game. You get the sense that was the story of the New Year’s game?

The Wisconsin Badgers came out here and got a reception as the kind of guys you sell the Brooklyn Bridge or Florida swampland to. You know, guys you lure in the pool hall and say, “You wanta break, kid?” Or you pull out your deck of cards and say, “I’ll deal.” You sell them vegetable peelers that won’t cut carrots, watches that can’t tell time, rings that turn green on their fingers.

That was the image of Wisconsin. Cheeseheads. With brains to match. Guys who went around wearing a block of Brie on their haircuts and talking with the slow brogue of the town they pronounced, “M’wacky.” The original big butter-and-egg men.

The wise guys were rubbing their hands at the news they were coming to the Rose Bowl. They drove the price of tickets into the stratosphere. Rose Bowl ducats which went begging the last couple of years went for $500 a seat.

And then, look how they got flimflammed. They thought that just because they sent their checks, they got seats. Ha! Gullible, right? Marks. Pigeons.

But wait a minute! Listen to their football coach before the game: “They (UCLA) just have a different kind of athlete than the Big Ten has. They look like a bunch of thoroughbreds. I don’t mean to put the Big Ten down, but UCLA just doesn’t have pluggers like you see in our conference.”

Is that a perfect con? Is this guy onto them? Has he got his own deck?

Ah, yes. The stingers got stung. The slickers outslickered. The bumpkins turned the tables on the wise guys. They turned over their hole cards and they were aces, and they said wickedly, “Are these any good?” They ran the table on the Fast Eddies. Sneaked their own dice into the game and faded the shooter. Sold their vegetable peelers to the guy on the corner.

You have to think the Bruins went into this thing thinking they had all the edge. Their own deck, a mirror on the ceiling, a rigged wheel. Any time a Pacific Coast team looks across a line of scrimmage and sees Ohio State or Michigan is not there, it presses the bet. It relaxes. It got a bye. Wisconsin had never won out here. Why should it start now? Piece of cake.

So, UCLA started out with the kind of bored disinterest of a guy playing poker with his mother. The Bruins seemed more bemused than challenged. You would have thought it was San Diego State.

Wisconsin, meanwhile, had stacked the deck in another category. From the cascade of red that rose from the stands, it is safe to say three out of every four persons in the crowd was from or for Wisconsin. “I told the players this was a home game for us,” Alvarez boasted after the game.

It’s hard to say UCLA was overconfident. But every gambler in the country threw out the fact Wisconsin finished five or six places ahead of UCLA in the national polls and installed UCLA as a seven-point favorite. Rodney Dangerfield gets more respect.

Wisconsin beat the odds, beat the Bruins and left town with the pot, playing smart, quick, resourceful football.

They picked UCLA’s pockets. The Bruins turned the ball over six times. Some times it was their own fault. But just as often the fingerprints in the crime were Wisconsin’s. The story of the game was that the funny little team from the cornfields, the egg-candlers outwitted--and outplayed--the guys in the checked suits. The wise guys went home in the barrel. They never did get the egg money.

The game was ultimately decided by one of Murray’s Immutable Laws of Football. That is this: On an obvious passing situation in today’s game, a quarterback with the ball can help himself to 15 to 20 yards running the ball.

Witness Saturday’s Rose Bowl game. It is the fourth quarter, 11 minutes to play. The score is 14-10 but UCLA is coming. The Bruins have just opened the quarter scoring to close the gap to four points. A Wisconsin drive sputters and the Badgers have to punt. But UCLA fumbles. A couple of plays later, on an obvious pass setting, quarterback Darrell Bevell drops back to throw. About nine Bruins drop back to cover. Bevell pulls down the ball and sets sail. He goes 21 yards and into the end zone for the touchdown that wins the game.

So, Wisconsin called every hand, saw the raise, hid its openers, threw sevens when it had to. It made UCLA put the ball in the air 43 times.

And finally, the Badgers won the war with a surprise weapon.

Brent Moss couldn’t figure to terrify the Bruins in the exchange films. He might be a household word north of Sheboygan, but he wasn’t big in the Heisman balloting.

First of all, he’s only 5 feet 9. He doesn’t run, he scoots. UCLA had difficulty finding him--and difficulty holding onto him when they did. He ran through them for 158 yards and, as much as anybody, was the difference Saturday.

So, the guys from the place where they milk the cows and mow the hay had the last call. “I’ll play these,” they said, and UCLA had to fold. You had the feeling they had run in their own deck on the riverboat guys and every time the Bruins lost the ball--which was a lot--the “rubes” were the guys holding it up and saying sweetly, “Is this what you’re looking for? Aw, too bad. You should take better care of it.”