Lonely USC Scout Battles Tourette’s : College football: Mosley has neurological disorder, but it doesn’t keep him on sidelines.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1990, in Pasadena’s Old Town, on Colorado Blvd.

Two students from Muir High School, Jonathan Mosley and Robin Turner, were there to meet some girls.

Mosley, now a USC scout team football player, was operating at a handicap for reasons beyond his own shyness. He has Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized in his case by involuntary tics and at times violent upper body spasms.

Suddenly, from down the boulevard, approached the most beautiful girl Mosley had ever seen. As usual at such moments, he was speechless.

“I introduced us,” Turner recalled.

“Then Jonathan had a tic or two, and this girl said: ‘What’s he doing?’ I told her, ‘Oh, Jonathan has Tourette’s syndrome. It’s a neurological disorder. It’s nothing to worry about.’

“Well, she kept looking at Jonathan, then she looked worried. Then she said: ‘Oh God, is it contagious?’ Then she ran away, down the sidewalk, and we never saw her again.’ ”

That’s pain.

You can experience pain on a football field by breaking a leg. Eventually the pain goes away. But this pain lingers.

Many of the first-string USC football players who pound on Mosley and his 15-or-so scout teammates every day in practice may think they know what pain is.

But the player they call “Shakes” has a PhD in pain.

Mosley, 20, recently recalled that New Year’s Eve:

“I never saw that girl again, but she’s still the most beautiful girl I ever saw,” he said. “If she walked by here right now, I’d recognize her.”

Mosley, an exercise science major who wants to be a strength coach, is in his second season with USC. He talked about other Tourette’s-related hurts, most having to do with women.

Probably the most prominent sports figure with Tourette’s syndrome is Jim Eisenreich of the Philadelphia Phillies. Another is Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf of the Denver Nuggets.

Eisenreich, in a video he did for the national Tourette’s Syndrome Assn., told of early dating problems, that he didn’t have a date until he was 27. Today, he and his wife, Leann, have two children.

Mosley has had one date.

“I knew a girl from Muir named Tammy,” he said. “She went to Cal, but now she’s in Scotland on an exchange program. We almost went out in high school, but I messed it up. I was too busy with football, worrying about getting a scholarship [he didn’t].”

For most of his life, unthinking and at times heartless people have done their best to take bites out of Jonathan Mosley. No one ever has.

His attitude, his self-esteem, in spite of it all, are unconquerable.

This is no doubt due in part to a solid, loving family. His father, Johnny, works at a Unocal refinery in San Pedro, and his mother, Toni, is an L.A. County Welfare Dept. administrator. He has a sister, Leah, 13.

According to the Bayside, N.Y.-based Tourette Syndrome Assn., the disorder is inherited. Yet Mosley said a search of both sides of his family for the last 100 years shows no evidence of it.

One time at Muir, in an English class, Mosley was having a stressful day and his upper body tics were more violent than usual. The teacher called him to her desk.

“Jonathan,” she said, “Take your books and go to the library. You’re disturbing the students here.”

He packed up his books and left quietly, and walked alone down a long, linoleum hallway.

“You have to shrug that stuff off,” he said recently.

“It used to bother me when people stared at me in restaurants, but not any more. People just don’t think things through sometimes. I have Tourette’s, and that’s just the way it is. To me, it isn’t a big deal.

“There’s a drug called Risperdol I’m supposed to take daily that alleviates the tics. But I only take it weekly because it makes me sleepy and I can’t be sleepy in class.”

Says another longtime friend of Mosley’s, Devin Henderson: “Jonathan’s attitude is that Tourette’s is more of a problem for other people than it is for him.”

Mosley is lucky in two respects.

--His tics have decreased in severity over the last two years.

--He has never had, as do 10% to 15% of those with the disorder, the most socially stigmatizing symptom of all--involuntary verbal outbursts of obscene or vulgar speech.

His hardest years, he says, were the early teen years in Pasadena parks, where he was sometimes set upon by gangs of kids.

“Thing was, Jonathan and I watched a lot of WWF [pro wrestling] in those days, so Jonathan knew some stuff,” Devin Henderson recalled.

“Plus, Jonathan was always big and strong for his age. He got beat up now and then, but it took more than a couple of guys. Most of the time he held his own.”

On the playgrounds, Mosley picked up nicknames. “Richter Scale” was one.

Recalled Mosley, with a grin: “If I’d have a big tic, someone would yell: ‘Wow, that’s a six-point-two!’ Or they’d call me ‘Fault line.’ Or ‘Earthquake.’ ”

Today, Mosley answers to “Shakes,” thanks to USC’s 1993 All-Pac-10 defensive end, Willie McGinest.

“I owe a lot to McGinest; he kind of took me under his wing when I came in as a freshman,” Mosley said. “He started calling me Shakes. Everyone does now. He thought I was too shy and nervous, so he started taking me to parties.

“He’d introduce me to girls. He’d yell at me: ‘Shakes! Stop being nervous!’ So I’d try to stop being nervous. Then he’d say, ‘Stop being shy!’ ”

Mosley is a popular member of John Robinson’s Rose Bowl team, although he has a tendency to sometimes annoy first-stringers.

One time in practice this season, simulating an opposing defensive end, he rushed quarterback Kyle Wachholtz and decked him, a shade after the whistle blew. Players and coaches screamed at him. Such is the lot of scout teamers.

On the next play, a still-steamed offensive tackle, 6-foot-7 John Michels, body-slammed Mosley. “If you want to be an All-American, then be an All-American!” Michels shouted.

It all mystifies Mosley.

“It happens all the time,” he said.

“They want us to simulate the opposition for the first team, but every time we knock down a first-stringer, everyone gets excited,” he said. “But no one gets excited when someone knocks me down. It’s a double standard. But that’s the way it is.”

When Mosley came to USC in 1993, he had a secret goal: to become a football star. All those Division I football coaches who wouldn’t offer him a scholarship simply didn’t know talent when they saw it, he figured.

So he walked on at USC, where the tab for his government student loans when he is graduated will be about $100,000. When he spent all of 1993 as a scout teamer, he transferred to Pasadena City College, still believing his skills were greater than USC coaches could see.

“It was arrogance on my part,” he says now. “I didn’t even start at PCC. It was hard to accept. I was a good high school player and I now had to realize I wasn’t as talented as I thought.”

Everyone Mosley meets asks the same question: Why didn’t he go to a small college football program, where he would have played? Occidental, for example.

“I went to some of those small college games,” said Mosley, who is 5-11 and 240. “My high school games drew more people. I could have gone to a small school, had a great career, and no one would ever know.

“At USC, I even like going into the locker room every day and putting on the equipment. I love the team meetings, learning all this stuff from the coaches. I like being a little part in a big-time program.”

Robinson sees a tenacity in Mosley similar to that of All-American-level players.

“This guy will make it,” he said. “He’s overcome more in his life than any of us will ever have to. He backs away from no one. This team has embraced him. . . . it’s a place where people care about him.”

Except when he knocks over a first-stringer.