RICH BROOKS : He’s Always Been Plucky : Oregon’s Coach Doesn’t Mind Underdog Role; He’s Used to It

In the late 1950s, when Oregon football coach Rich Brooks was the best high school athlete in the Northern California town of Grass Valley, his team was outclassed in the league championship game one year. But Brooks wasn’t.

In a steady rain, he kept battling his opponents, even when they ripped his jersey off. Brooks fought on in his T-shirt.

Then they ripped that off. And he played the second half in his pants and shoulder pads.

“Our school couldn’t afford replacement uniforms,” a classmate, Sacramento lawyer Russell Porter, recalls. “And Brooksie’s gear was so torn and mud-soaked that it was never used again. But that didn’t bother Brooksie.”

Apparently, very little ever does.

In his first nine seasons at Oregon, when his record was 36-60-4, Brooks fought back every year, refusing to consider quitting.

In the last nine seasons, he is 53-48, and counting, and still fighting.

And in the Rose Bowl Monday, with Penn State coming in, a fighter is just what all the doctors in Oregon ordered.

That day, Brooks, who is favored to lose by 17 points, will be the biggest underdog in a big game since possibly Joe Namath, who, in Super Bowl III, was expected to lose by 18.

“And you know what happened to Namath,” says Brooks, noting that Namath’s underdog New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts. “It doesn’t bother me to be the underdog. I’ve been there before.”

Like every week, some years.

Declining to guarantee victory this time--as Namath did in 1969--Brooks adds, “I’ll just predict this: If we play our game, it will be a heck of a game.”

If it is, if he makes things even for a while, Brooks will in one respect have an edge on the other coach, Joe Paterno of Penn State, who is used to running up a lead.

Brooks is used to running in adversity. In his Oregon State student days, he was a backup to a player nobody could have beaten out, Terry Baker--a Heisman Trophy winner. Downstate, as the leader of the Ducks--formerly the Webfoots--Brooks has known adversity almost every year, including this year, when a group of boosters tried to run him out of town after Oregon started 1-2.

And he was still playing in adversity just the other night, when 15 or 20 of his old Grass Valley pals--four of whom coach football on different levels--gathered for an annual party.

“With all that talent, we decided to name a Grass Valley coach of the year,” Brooks’ good friend Porter says. “And in the voting, Brooksie finished fourth.”

Brooks, who enjoyed the rib, was Oregon’s athletic director as well as football coach until this year, when he stepped down from administration to focus on the football program.

The job is getting tougher. Almost every star he recruits for Oregon chooses USC instead, or Washington, or Notre Dame.

Hoping Brooks will change his mind, one of his biggest campus boosters, Oregon Vice President Dan Williams, has assumed the position of athletic director temporarily, keeping the seat warm for Brooks.

Williams told John Conrad, sports editor of the Eugene, Ore., Register-Guard, “My strong support for Rich and his staff has to do with the kind of coaches they are, and what they represent.”

Brooks is gifted as a teacher, loyal and stable as an executive, charismatic in the company of good friends, “and a very private person,” Conrad says.

At 53, married and the father of two daughters and two sons, Brooks has the athletic build, the stern features, and the dark hair of a man who is used to having his way and never worries about it.

Reportedly, though, it’s his wife, Karen, who keeps him in Eugene, her favorite town. After living for years on a Eugene golf course, they are moving into a new house in the nearby Mohawk Valley on a 62-acre tree farm.

“We’re farmers now, on the side,” Brooks says. “We raise Ponderosa pines for harvest.”

The Mohawk Valley is a long way from Grass Valley, where, 50 years ago, Brooks’ late father was a gold miner who turned to law enforcement as a sheriff.

Rich’s brother was in junior high and Rich was in the sixth grade when their parents were divorced. Rich remained with his mother, who still sees some Oregon games.

In high school, Brooks’ friends remember, he was the biggest, fastest and toughest of the athletes.

“He was the same size as a high school freshman that he is now,” Porter says.

Each spring, Brooks, an all-around athlete, competed in the pole vault. One day in the sectional meet, he was barely holding second place when his pole broke. It was the only vaulting pole Grass Valley had, meaning Brooks was finished for the day, or so it seemed.

Instead, with the audacity he regularly shows under pressure, he walked up to the leader, asked to borrow his pole, and, ruining his rival’s afternoon, set a section record on his next attempt.

“It was a strange day,” Porter says. “He broke that guy’s pole too.”

That year, Tommy Prothro recruited Brooks for Oregon State, driving down to Grass Valley to make the first contact.

The next morning, Prothro invited Brooks to ride back with him, and, “showing his faith in me, asked me to drive his car,” Brooks says.

That sold the pride of Grass Valley on Oregon State.

Not for weeks did he learn that Prothro hated driving.

“The man never drove anywhere if he could help it,” Brooks says.

At Oregon State, the future Oregon coach graduated in four years, got his master’s degree immediately, and went into coaching with Prothro, following him to UCLA and then to the Rams.

Eighteen years ago, he settled down in Eugene--for good, apparently.

“Rich has a very young team this year,” Conrad says. “Nobody expected him to make the Rose Bowl this year--I didn’t--but I won’t be surprised if he comes back.”

In Pasadena this time, Brooks will be breaking, or at least bending, two personal precedents. He likes to take his own car to Oregon football games. It’s a 1948 Plymouth shined up, sporting big white sidewalls and painted Duck green, but he won’t have it at the Rose Bowl Monday.

Nor will he go fly-fishing the day before the game, as he likes to do in Eugene.

“It’s such a great life,” he says. “Only one thing beats watching a fish come up.”

And that, as everybody knows, is being chosen coach of the year in Grass Valley.