THE RIVALRY: USC vs. UCLA : There’s Nothing Like It : USC-UCLA Game Stirs Up Some Special Memories

Pepper Rodgers had been around football rivalries most of his life.

He had grown up in Atlanta and played for Georgia Tech, whose annual game against Georgia has been chronicled in the book “Clean Old-Fashion Hate.”

He had been an assistant at Florida, coaching against Georgia in a series called “The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.”

Then he came to UCLA.

“How different is this one?” he said. “When I was coaching at UCLA, we had Fred McNeill playing for us and his brother, Rod, playing for SC and they lived together in an apartment. You wouldn’t have that in any other major rivalry anywhere.”

It’s a series that both defies and defines the calendar. Forget the year. Remember the game.

Now at UCLA, Gary Bernardi coached at USC for six seasons, from “ ‘87, when (Eric) Affholter made the catch” to “ ‘92, the (John) Barnes game.”

The memories linger. So do the people.

UCLA won in 1982, 20-19, with Karl Morgan sacking USC’s Scott Tinsley on a two-point conversion try with no time remaining.

“I’d never been involved in a game as painful as that one,” said Artie Gigantino, then a USC assistant, now defensive coordinator at California.

“We went back to the locker room, and I really had my head down. I was one of the last to leave, and as I came out of the locker room with my suitcase, there stood Keyshawn Johnson, who was about 12 (10, actually) at the time.

“He asked me if he could carry my suitcase to my car.”

Johnson, a dozen years later, is USC’s leading wide receiver.

And there was the 1975 game, with Dick Vermeil as UCLA’s coach on the sidelines and angry because the Bruins were trying to beat themselves, fumbling 11 times and losing eight.

“Wendell Tyler was a fumbler and he fumbled it,” Vermeil said. “Then I went to my next running back, Carl Zaby, and he fumbled. Then I went to my next running back, Kenny Lee, and he fumbled it. I remember turning to my coaches and saying, ‘We had a black guy fumble it, a white guy fumble it and an Oriental guy fumble it. Let’s go back to the best running back and see what he’ll do.’ ”

Tyler ran for 130 yards in 17 carries and scored a touchdown in UCLA’s 25-22 victory that gave the Bruins a Rose Bowl berth.

Eddie Ayers added 98 yards in 21 carries for the Bruins. His son, Derek, will return kickoffs for UCLA on Saturday.

Perhaps more memorable, though, are the characters.

Marv Goux, a former USC player and a Trojan assistant for 26 years, is probably the record-holder for most appearances in the USC-UCLA series.

“My favorite is the ’52 game,” he said, recalling a 14-12 USC victory.

“It was just a huge game--both teams were undefeated and it was for the Rose Bowl,” Goux said. “And there I was, a sophomore linebacker, playing before this huge crowd. . . .

“When it was over and we’d won, I was walking up the tunnel and came up to Donn Moomaw, UCLA’s great linebacker. I’d known him since we were kids. We’d gone to the same church.

“I said to him, ‘Great game, Donn. You have a great team and we just happened to come out on top at the end.’

“And I’ll never forget the classy thing he said to me. He looked me in the eye and said: ‘Marv, I’ll always be a winner because I’ll always have my faith.”

Rodgers was a character, no matter where he coached. He had close games and exciting ones. One wasn’t necessarily the other.

In his first season as head coach at UCLA, 1971, the Bruins were 2-7 going into the USC game.

“We were underdogs, so we stalled,” Rodgers said. “We never ran out of bounds and we took the full complement in the huddle . . . and we pull off a major miracle in the worst football game ever played.”

UCLA, uh, won, 7-7?

“Well, that’s what I figured,” Rodgers said.

He had better luck as an assistant to Tommy Prothro.

Rodgers has fond memories of the 1965 game, in which Gary Beban threw a touchdown pass to give the Bruins a 20-16 victory over a USC team that got 210 yards from Mike Garrett, who won the Heisman Trophy and is now the school’s athletic director.

USC was ahead, 16-6, and Beban threw to Dick Witcher for a touchdown, then Byron Nelson for a two-point conversion. Dallas Grider recovered an onside kick for UCLA, and Beban threw two incomplete passes.

“Gary Beban comes to the sideline and I tell him to throw this pass we had been working on,” said Rodgers, then Prothro’s backfield coach. “In practice, we had been hitting Mel Farr coming out of the backfield. Gary goes back in the game and I tell him to hit ol’ Mel Farr, and he hits Kurt Altenberg for a touchdown. So that tells you what kind of coaching you need when you’ve got a great player.”

Rodgers’ story has a postscript.

“That’s when Terry Donahue learned that he couldn’t play pro football,” Rodgers said. “He was playing against Ron Yary, who outweighed him by 60 pounds, and he decided to be a coach.”

Yary went on to a 15-year NFL career and returned to Southern California to open a photography business, specializing in team pictures. Last season, he took UCLA’s.

“It had to kill him when we made the Rose Bowl,” said Donahue, UCLA’s coach for the last 19 seasons.

Prothro tends to remember the defeats more than the victories. There was 1949, his first season as an assistant to Red Sanders. And there was 1969, when a controversial pass-interference call set up Jimmy Jones’ 32-yard touchdown pass to Sam Dickerson with 30 seconds to play for a 14-12 USC victory.

And then there was 1967.

“O.J. Simpson broke for that (64-yard) run--I don’t know if you want to talk about him right now or not--and it was a great play and it beat us (21-20),” Prothro said.

It was a day of great plays, said Goux, now 62 and retired.

The first was a a 55-yard interception return for a score by USC’s Pat Cashman, whose son, Tyler, will play in Saturday’s game as a USC tight end.

Then came Simpson.

“O.J. scored on a 13-yard run on a play where I think six UCLA players had hits on him,” Goux recalled. “After that play and for the rest of his career, everyone was aware of the strength in his hips and legs.

“And the 64-yard run late in the game to win it, that was even better. For me, I think that’s the one game in the series where I was as excited coaching in the game as I was when I played in it.”

It’s a game for heroes and goats, sometimes both the same person on the same play.

Larry Smith, USC coach from 1987-92, recalled a negative play becoming an emotional game-turner for the Trojans in 1987.

On the last play of the first half, Rodney Peete threw a pass from UCLA’s four-yard line. UCLA’s Eric Turner intercepted and set sail for USC’s end zone.

He was tackled on the USC 11 by Peete. USC’s players ran into the Coliseum tunnel for halftime as if they had just won the game.

“It was a negative play for us,” Smith said. “You look at it on paper today, and it doesn’t look like much. But at the time it gave us a very big emotional lift. It’s certainly a play I’ll never forget.”

The lift brought the Trojans back from a 10-0 halftime deficit to a 17-13 victory.

Rick Neuheisel remembers that one. He remembers many games, both as a UCLA quarterback and assistant coach. Most recent is his memory of the 1993 game, won by UCLA, 27-21.

Actually, the memory is of the day and the night before.

“As a coach, you go to the various booster clubs at the end of the week, and I was always fortunate to get a chance to visit with the Westwood Bruin Touchdown Club every Friday before the SC game,” said Neuheisel, now an assistant at Colorado. “You talk about some people who were on the edge of their seat, ready to play almost. I used to go in with a kind of skit, and this last year I performed an exorcism. I got rid of all the Trojan ghosts of the past.”

That night, he thought one had returned. Neuheisel was awakened by a disturbance in his hotel room. His roommate, offensive line coach Bob Palcic, was having delusions of grandeur.

“Bob coached for SC the year we beat them, 38-37, with Barnes, and he joined our staff next year,” Neuheisel said. “There we were sitting over at the JW Marriott . . . and he couldn’t sleep. I woke up at like 2 in the morning and there he was at the window, looking over the city of Los Angeles. He looked over and said, ‘Rick, you know what? Tomorrow, I’m gonna own this town.’ ”

The next day, when tackle Vaughn Parker drove his USC defender through the end zone to lead Skip Hicks to a UCLA touchdown, Palcic did.