One Man Makes Big Difference

One time, in the dim dawn of collegiate football history when it was the most important contest of the age, Yale Coach Tad Jones called his squad around him on the eve of the Harvard game.

“Gentlemen,” he told the team somberly, “you are about to play a game against the Harvard varsity. Nothing you do in life hereafter will be one-half so important as what you do on the football field today.”

Overblown? Hyperbolic? Perhaps. After all, he was talking to guys who would become Secretaries of State, heads of the Stock Exchange, or would corner the grain market.

But if someone were to apply the same emotional yardstick to USC-UCLA, who could laugh?

Consider that this was the game in which a magnificent athlete named Jackie Robinson first burst his way into the national consciousness. Without his exploits in this game and consequent notoriety, would he have been Branch Rickey’s choice to break the color line in major league baseball? Not altogether likely.

Before that, USC college football players stepped direct from the Trojan lines and backfields to movie stardom, movie production and direction. John Wayne comes to mind. Ward Bond. Aaron Rosenberg. Ben Hibbs.

It was this game, more than any other, that made O.J. Simpson a Heisman Trophy winner and a national symbol. Mike Garrett and Marcus Allen made their marks here. This game saw Bob Waterfield go from beating USC--for the first time ever for UCLA--to helping pro football move into the big time.

The game often decided the Rose Bowl and, sometimes, the national championship. It might not fit Tad Jones’ gaudy parameters, but it made its mark.

The 1994 USC-UCLA game hardly fit Tad Jones’ purple prose. It didn’t decide much of anything.

In a sense, USC came into the game with a puncher’s chance. It could have gotten into the Rose Bowl off it. All it had to do was beat or tie UCLA, then hope Oregon lost.

The trouble was, the Trojans behaved exactly like a fighter who over-relies on his knockout punch. They didn’t bother to duck. They thought they could trade touchdowns with UCLA the way they had with Arizona the week before. They figured six-times-defeated UCLA would be a stumblebum, a sucker for the right hand.

UCLA boxed their ears off. The Bruins took what USC gave them--which was points--and, like a barroom fight, they piled up plenty of them.

Then, they cut off the ring on USC. When the Trojans had the ball, UCLA rushed the passer, tied him in knots. They didn’t just slug it out. USC’s first-class thrower, Rob Johnson, was busy setting an NCAA record of 23 consecutive pass completions when UCLA suddenly noticed he was holding the ball far longer than the conventional 3.5 seconds John Unitas said you have to pass.

UCLA began to charge at the passer, and six times he went down under a stack of blitzing safeties, cornerbacks and down linemen.

It was the difference in the game. UCLA’s quarterback, Wayne Cook, bit the dust only once. USC didn’t bother with a pass rush. The Trojans seemed to be saving their energies for when they’d get the ball. They began not getting it. And USC without the ball is like an actor without his lines.

So, the 64th USC-UCLA game will have a minimal ripple effect, probably extending only to the Sun Bowl or next year’s Freedom Bowl. There probably wasn’t even a Heisman vote in the balance.

But, if there were, it would go to an elegant 6-foot-5 player in Bruin blue and gold.

If the USC-UCLA game defines you, Jerel Jamal Stokes stands out in stark contrast. He is what the coaches like to call an “impact” player, and his impact on USC was total. He caught six passes, one for a touchdown. They were the critical receptions. Most of Stokes’ are.

J.J. Stokes doesn’t so much run a route, he choreographs it. He is not simply a guy with a football, he is Nijinsky in Swan Lake. He should play in a tutu. When he goes out for a long one, the Bruin band should strike up Tchaikovsky.

He doesn’t need the ball thrown to him. Anywhere in the same zip code is usually enough for J.J. Stokes. There is no such thing as a ball thrown “behind” him. Stokes can swivel. An admirer once said he could catch needle in the dark. To snare a football, he needs only one end and a finger.

He caught 82 passes last season. He caught 14 in the Rose Bowl game alone.

The Bruins tumbled through their six-game losing streak this year largely because J.J. Stokes had such a sore thigh, it hurt him just to go down for the mail, never mind trying to run a pattern.

When he came back, UCLA not only stopped losing, it started to win, beating Arizona State, 59-23.

“We just ran out of games,” UCLA Coach Terry Donahue moaned. If he could have put the season on hold until Stokes returned, it might have been a Rose bowl game Saturday after all.

Stokes won’t get the Heisman, and the Bruins (5-6) won’t get a Bowl. But, if you’re UCLA and you’re only going to win five games, a good idea is to make one of the five the USC game. It makes the off-season palatable.

They now have beaten the once lordly Trojans four consecutive times. It’s a trend. Once more and it becomes a habit.

Tad Jones would understand perfectly.

If some leader of industry woke up one night in the throes of a nightmare and was heard exclaiming, “We should have beaten Harvard!” maybe some Trojan will awake in the next century and be heard to moan, “We should have put two men on that Stokes!”