He’s Learned About Losing the Huard Way

He sat on the bench, slump-shouldered and discouraged, with a red welt above his eyebrows where somebody had tried to take his head off. His Saturday was done, and the third quarter had just begun.

Brock Huard says you learn more from losing than winning, and he got a serious seminar in Washington’s 54-20 loss at Notre Dame.

“You always get more from hardships,” he says. “You enjoy victory, but you get spoiled by it.

“Our quarterback coach, Bill Diedrick, had told me it wasn’t always going to be like that, always successful, but I didn’t believe him. Now I know how tough it can be.”

There haven’t been many losses. He is a freshman quarterback, a 6-foot-6, 220-pound throwing machine who played for his father at Puyallup High, about 50 miles from Seattle. Brock Huard was 16-3 in his last two seasons, then took time out to average 18 points and 7.5 rebounds per game for his basketball team and carry a 4.0 grade-point average.

He is a legacy, whose arrival on the Washington campus was greeted as the second coming of his brother Damon, or maybe a better version, because Brock had been considered the second-ranked high school quarterback in the country, behind only Dan Kendra from Pennsylvania, who ended up at Florida State.

“He has a great touch on the ball, probably as good a touch on the ball in a tight spiral as I’ve seen around here since Sonny Sixkiller, with Sonny’s ability to throw all of the passes,” Coach Jim Lambright said.

Lambright has been at Washington almost since Lewis and Clark passed this way. Sixkiller played his last season with the Huskies in 1972.

Washington center Olin Kreutz is more succinct about Huard: “He’s the golden boy.”

UCLA had wanted him and went after him, hard.

“I liked Terry [then-coach Terry Donahue] and [now-Coach] Bob Toledo, and I loved the campus,” Huard says. “It was going to be ‘U-Dub’ or UCLA. If they could have found a way to get 75,000 Washingtonians and my family there for games, I might have gone there.”

It was going to be Huard or Cade McNown, one to Washington, the other to UCLA, and the Huskies got Huard, the Bruins McNown, and neither side is complaining. Huard spent last season as the redshirt backup to his brother. McNown led UCLA to the Aloha Bowl.

On Saturday, they can look across Husky Stadium at each other.

Junior Shayne Fortney began the season as the Huskies’ starting quarterback, but Huard came into the season opener at Arizona State briefly in the second quarter, and then in the second half after Fortney struggled. Huard passed for 143 yards and a touchdown and ran for another, helping the Huskies overcome a 21-point deficit before losing, 45-42, on a last-minute field goal.

The next week, Fortney started, leading a victory over Brigham Young, but suffered a strained knee ligament.

Then it was Huard, completing 20 of 31 passes for 311 yards in a 31-17 win over Arizona.

A bye week, and a win over Stanford, with Fortney starting, but both quarterbacks splitting time. And then Notre Dame.

The story was Fortney was injured. But Fortney had been injured four weeks before, and had started a game since.

A quarterback controversy? Lambright refuses to acknowledge one.

Fortney didn’t start at Notre Dame and won’t against UCLA on Saturday, “because of the knee and the knee has not recovered to its full health,” Lambright said. “It’s put him in a real pressure situation to come in and play as needed.”

He was needed Saturday at Notre Dame, but mostly because Huard, like most of the other Huskies, had come in wide-eyed, figuring they were playing Knute Rockne and George Gipp and finding that, no, these Irish were better.

And because Huard came out bleary-eyed, with a mild concussion.

“He didn’t know where he was at,” Lambright said.

He had found out quickly enough, when Notre Dame took a 26-0 lead.

“I didn’t feel that way, to be honest,” Huard said of the suggestion that he was awed by his surroundings. “I think we made [the game] more than it was. It was too built up. There was so much riding on that game--a chance for national attention for us. We put too much pressure on ourselves.”

Fortney and Huard are the antithesis of each other. Fortney runs better, Huard throws better. Fortney has been known to go to a party. Huard spends time with the Bible.

“We’re different people in many ways,” Fortney told the Seattle Times. “We get along on the field. . . . We know there’s some competition there and we’re fine with it. It’s almost unfortunate, because I think we could be better friends.”

Huard said to Fortney after the Arizona State game: “You’re still the man.”

Now, he isn’t.

Huard is still finding flecks of Notre Dame gold paint on his helmet, and he reported to practice on Monday eager to atone for his showing at South Bend.

“That makes the UCLA game more important for me,” he said.

It has been a busy week, with practice, a speech for a Christian group on Tuesday and study for a physics exam today. He is a pre-med major with a 3.6 grade-point average who is also taking courses called “Diseases in History” and “Introduction to the New Testament.” A year ago, he wanted to be a doctor. Now the ministry is a possibility.

But that can wait, because now he is a freshman quarterback, the second in his line, with a third perhaps on the way.

Brother Luke, a junior, is quarterback at Puyallup High for Coach Mike Huard.