Even at 50, Donahue Remains Everybody’s All-American Boy

Just imagine the TV teasers. “Donahue exposed! Next on . . . Donahue.”

It’ll never happen. At least not to the Donahue who has been head football coach at UCLA for the past 19 seasons.

Friends who knew him as a teen-ager say any dirt on Terry Donahue is best captured under a water slide. He wouldn’t spark enough controversy for a tell- all talk show to hold a viewing audience until the first commercial break.

What you see is what you get. Impeccably well-groomed and trim, his angular face invariably tan, Donahue is, at age 50, impossibly fit and youthful in appearance.

“Terry always looked like the All-American boy,” a friend says. “Still does.”

Looks the part, acts the part, lives the part. Donahue, who sends UCLA against USC today at the Rose Bowl, grew up in North Hollywood. He is a 1962 graduate of Notre Dame High, which then was an all-boys’ school of 1,200 where his father was a personal physician to the school brothers.

Young Terry was not a natural athlete. Cut from the Notre Dame basketball team, he also dabbled with distance running and pole-vaulting without much success.

As a high school freshman, Donahue packed all of 115 pounds on a gangly frame. Wearing football gear, he resembled a toy replica of a player--the kind with a bobbing head occasionally seen resting on a car’s rear shelf.

“He was a string bean,” says Tom Vessella, who was Notre Dame’s football coach from 1960-66. “It was almost impossible to fit him he was so small. Terry’s helmet looked like it would have spun around his neck.”

Vessella, now an assistant principal at Toll Middle School in Glendale, initially attempted to discourage Donahue from playing football.

“I said, ‘Terry, get a little bigger first,’ ” Vessella says. “He wouldn’t hear of it. His heart and his size were two different things. I couldn’t measure the size of his heart.”

Truth be told, the coach didn’t do a real accurate job on size, either.

A check of the school’s 1961 varsity football roster shows Donahue listed at 180 pounds, a considerable exaggeration.

At weigh-in prior to the season, a couple of buddies covertly slid two 10-pound weights into the back of Donahue’s baggy shorts. When he climbed onto the scale, Notre Dame coaches couldn’t believe the reading.

“They were shocked,” says John Cicuto, a teammate who helped orchestrate the spoof. “But all they knew is that he’d been lifting weights all summer. They said, ‘Way to go, Donahue. You’ve really been working hard.’ ”

Typically, Donahue nodded, smiled . . . and kept his mouth shut.

Friends say Donahue survived Notre Dame football on guts and guile. He played two years on the varsity and cracked the team’s lineup as a senior. He started at offensive guard and also played linebacker.

Donahue describes himself as “a solid little high school player,” adding, “I played more on emotion and desire than talent.”

Former teammates define Donahue in terms such as “scrappy,” “committed” and “hard-nosed.”

“Terry was the classic over-achiever, a guy who got the absolute maximum out of his ability,” says Cicuto, who is the football coach at Glendale College.

Adds Vessella: “He would compete over the flip of a coin.”

Bill Stifter, Notre Dame’s quarterback in ‘61, remembers Donahue as “tough as nails, determined, persevering, a guy who wouldn’t quit on anything. The tougher it got, the more he loved it.”

On and off the field.

Although he declines to provide specifics, Cicuto says Donahue was somewhat of a roughneck outside of the school grounds.

“Guys would try to pick on him because he wasn’t quite as big as us other guys,” Cicuto says. “He never went out looking for trouble, but he was never one to run away from a happening, either.”

Pressed for details, Cicuto says, laughing, “Those things aren’t printable. It wouldn’t be good for Terry.”

Stifter allows that Donahue was “no saint,” but adds, “He knew his boundaries. Notre Dame would not have put up with poor behavior, and neither would his parents.”

Donahue’s tenacity enabled him to compete in high school football’s upper echelon, but it wasn’t enough to earn him the attention of major-college football recruiters.

Several of Notre Dame’s players earned Division I football scholarships, but Donahue wasn’t among them. He enrolled at San Jose State, where his older brother, Dan, went to school, and tried out for the football team as a walk-on.

Convinced that he didn’t fit into that team’s plans, Donahue left San Jose after redshirting as a freshman. He attended Valley College for one year, then was accepted by UCLA.

After earning a football roster spot as a walk-on, Donahue did not play his first season with the Bruins. But by the time his playing days were over, he was a starter on the defensive line in 21 consecutive games. UCLA had a 17-3-1 record in his final two years, including an upset victory over Michigan State in the 1966 Rose Bowl.

Donahue’s playing weight: 197 pounds.

His former high school teammates could hardly believe it.

“Terry was probably the biggest surprise (of the Notre Dame players who played in college),” says Stifter, who earned a football scholarship to Washington. “But that just goes back to his determination and work ethic. He’s just a very strong-willed guy.”

Donahue and UCLA might have earned yet another Rose Bowl victory were it not for the effort of Jim Sartoris, another former Notre Dame teammate.

In 1966, Donahue’s senior season, the Bruins’ chances for a second consecutive trip to the Rose Bowl and a shot at a national championship were foiled by Washington, which upset UCLA, 16-3, in Seattle.

The Bruins led, 3-0, early in that game until Sartoris sparked the Huskies by returning a kickoff 87 yards to set up Washington’s go-ahead touchdown. “He (Donahue) couldn’t believe I would do that to him,” says Sartoris, who preceded Cicuto as football coach at Glendale and is now that school’s athletic director.

To this day, Donahue informally introduces Sartoris as “the guy who knocked us out of the Rose Bowl.”

As a coach, Donahue has guided UCLA to four Rose Bowls, winning in 1983, ’84 and ’86. His 143 victories places him 13th among active Division I coaches.

Going into this season, Donahue had developed 32 first-team All-Americans, dozens of professional players and a quick wit.

Asked if any of his players have reminded him of himself he replies, “Not any that I kept on the team. I cut those guys.”