Fractured Fairy Tale : UCLA’s Rod Smalley Gets a Break His Way for Once

Rod Smalley’s hip bone is connected to his wrist bone, and although that refutes Gray’s Anatomy and messes up some song lyrics, it gives UCLA an inside linebacker.

Smalley bears matching scars on his wrists, each of which is held together with pins, plates, wire and surgical magic, and he has probably played more games with a cast than without.

He has learned enough about bones to be an orthopedic surgeon. His case history is a medical

student’s dream.

First, there was the broken right wrist, suffered during spring football practice of 1992, then shattered in the season-opening game against Cal State Fullerton.

After it was set in another cast, Smalley played the rest of the game and the season.

Then the wrist was examined again.

“I went several months with it in a cast, and the bone died,” Smalley said.

To revive it, three plugs of bone from his hip, each about the diameter of his little finger, were transplanted into the wrist. He was ready to play again.

“Except for the hip,” he said. “That hurt worst of all. I couldn’t stand up straight, couldn’t run, couldn’t go to school, couldn’t do anything.”

Then he broke his left wrist this past spring.

“We decided to pin it right away,” Smalley said. “Pin it and screw down a little plate on it so it wouldn’t die and it would be ready for the fall.”

By then, his fall plans had changed. Smalley had spent two seasons caddying for Jamir Miller at outside linebacker, and Miller was gone to the NFL. Logic and seniority told Smalley it was his turn at the defense’s glamour position--at UCLA, they call their pass-rushing linebacker the “stud”--but Coach Terry Donahue told him something else.

“He said, ‘We want to get you, Shane (Jasper) and Donnie (Edwards), everybody that will help us play, on the field at the same time,’ ” Smalley said. “Then he said, ‘Would you mind moving to inside linebacker?’

“I said, ‘I’d love to.’ ”

The change had its roots in meetings of the coaching staff in the weeks after the Rose Bowl loss to Wisconsin.

Inside linebacker coach Tim Hundley asked for Smalley.

“It wasn’t a difficult thing,” Hundley said. “You had Anthony Jones coming back off a redshirt year, and you had a lot of other outside candidates. Phil Ward was back.”

And Nkosi Littleton and Carrick O’Quinn weren’t back at inside linebacker. Moving Smalley into one of their spots seemed natural.

“He’s got good physical skills,” Hundley said. “He’s strong, he’s tough and he’s a nasty kind of a guy. He could play inside, and if you look around, you’ll see there weren’t a lot of other candidates. We’re thankful we have him.”

The skills are different--there’s more pass coverage than pass rush--but at least the position is his after two seasons of waiting for coaches to take roll, determining whether Miller was there, and then deciding what Smalley would be doing that day.

That’s because Miller was perhaps the best pass rusher in UCLA history. In two seasons, he led the Bruins in sacks and last year as a junior, was an All-American. Then he left school and became a first-round draft choice of the Arizona Cardinals, the 10th player chosen in the NFL draft.

From the decision to start him in 1992 to the time he left in late ‘93, Miller was often injured, occasionally indifferent and, on two occasions, in trouble with the law, all with a smile and a certain shyness that seemed to make everyone willing to accept him for what he was.

He was an enigma, no sure bet to be at practice from Monday through Friday because of illness or, at least once, because his car was towed away. But on Saturday he was a defensive force that last season helped put UCLA in the Rose Bowl game.

“They couldn’t move me because whenever Jamir was hurt or he was in trouble, well, they just didn’t know,” Smalley said. “I started the Cal game (because Miller was suspended for one game after pleading no-contest to a charge of receiving stolen goods), and the Nebraska game because we used two studs.

“Then I was down. He’s an incredible athlete and he needed to play. He’s a great pass rusher, and we needed that. So every week I tried to prepare like I was starting, because you never knew.”

Smalley started four games, adding Oregon State because of the two-stud lineup and Arizona State because Miller had pinched a nerve in his neck. Smalley made 24 tackles, got two sacks and broke up two passes. He sat out the Brigham Young and San Diego State games because of a neck injury that seemed minor, at least in his mind, after what he had gone through with his right wrist.

Smalley played in the Rose Bowl game, then got ready for his senior season, which begins Saturday evening against Tennessee in Pasadena, determined that 1994 would be his best year.

His switch to inside linebacker in the spring lasted four days before he broke his left wrist. But the transition was barely affected.

“He picks up things extremely fast,” Hundley said.

The lack of spring practice made Smalley eager for two-a-day workouts to begin this summer. “Everybody thought I was crazy,” he said, laughing.

That’s not a bad attribute for an inside linebacker.

His wrists ache daily, something he will have to deal with as long as he is playing a position that puts a premium on the arms and hands.

“But it’s a small price to pay,” he said. “I love football and it’s getting me a free education.”

No, he has paid plenty for it.