Snake Eyes on Roll of Dice

Richard Dice did not see the referee signal a touchdown. He did not hear the roar of the visiting team’s fans who were packed into the closed end of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

It should have been a shining moment for Arizona’s all-conference receiver. Halfway through his senior year, Dice had finally recovered from off-season surgery to his left knee. He had returned to his hometown to play against USC. Family and friends were sitting only a few rows up from where he had just caught the ball.

But there was something else. As Dice lay in the end zone, pain shot through his right knee, the good one.

“My foot planted and it felt like the defender clipped my heel and the knee just popped,” he says. “I had put in all that hard work and then to have it all thrown away on one play.”

Just another tough catch by a receiver known for his toughness. Dice realized that his college career had come to an end.

“I didn’t even know it was a touchdown,” he says. “I had to ask the trainers.”

Today, as Arizona plays UCLA in Tucson, Dice will be rooting from the sidelines with a fresh surgical scar on his right knee to match the one on his left. A month has passed since the USC game and he still cannot fathom that his body let him down a second time.

Back at Alemany High, not so long ago, his pure athleticism was the stuff of legend. There was the time that Dice, captain of the basketball team, came flying downcourt to block a shot and ended up hurdling the opposing team’s 6-foot-6 center.

On the football field, the 6-2, 216-pound receiver earned a reputation for muscling his way to the ball.

“Speed isn’t everything,” he says. “It helps to be a little bit taller, a little bit heavier than the defensive backs.”

USC recruited him to play defense but he chose Arizona for the chance to get his hands on the football more often. The Wildcats took advantage of his rugged style, what their media guide calls his “willingness to take hits and capacity to make the clutch catch.”

In 1993, as a redshirt freshman, Dice scored the go-ahead touchdown against rival Arizona State. The following season, he caught 56 passes for 969 yards and received honorable mention on the All-Pacific 10 Conference team.

Arizona played in the Freedom Bowl that year and Dice was being mentioned along with J.J. Stokes and Keyshawn Johnson as one of the conference’s top receivers. Great things were expected of his final two years.

But his physical brand of football had already begun to take its toll. Dice was a regular in the X-ray room on Monday mornings, playing with deep bruises to his back, hip, calf and knee.

His mother, Linda, recalls his sophomore season as “kind of a hold-your-breath year.” Dice shrugged it off.

“Just a part of football,” he now says. “You’re going to get banged around.”

Then, halfway through his junior season, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee. It was the first serious injury of his career. He missed five games but postponed surgery to come back against Arizona State, catching four passes for 68 yards.

Again, he made all-conference honorable mention.

“That was the most inspiring thing I have ever seen since I’ve been coaching,” Arizona Coach Dick Tomey told the Arizona Daily Star. “I have as much or more respect for Richard Dice than any player I’ve ever been involved with.”

According to Gray’s Anatomy, the knee “would at first sight appear to be one of the least secure of any of the joints in the body. It is formed between the two longest bones, and therefore the amount of leverage which can be brought to bear upon it is very considerable; the articular surfaces are but ill adapted to each other, and the range and variety of motion which it enjoys is great.”

The anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments, forming an “X” that ties the tibia to the femur, must withstand tremendous forces. Once damaged, they are slow to heal.

Following surgery last December for his first knee injury, Dice faced months of rehabilitation, a minimum of five days a week, three hours a day. He had to regain flexibility, regain strength, then retrain the joint to function normally.

“It takes a tremendous amount of effort,” says Magie Lacambra, the Wildcats’ head football trainer. “Pain is part of the process.”

As Dice explains: “It’s hell.”

Still, the senior recovered enough to be considered the Pac-10’s premier receiver coming into this season. By the fourth game, against Washington, he showed flashes of his previous form, out-jumping Husky cornerback Mel Miller for a 14-yard touchdown pass.

The USC game was to be an even greater test. Late in the third quarter, with the Wildcats trailing by two touchdowns, he caught a 34-yard pass against the Trojans’ heralded cornerback Daylon McCutcheon. It was classic Dice, leaping and using his body to shield the defender from the ball.

That catch made him No. 3 on Arizona’s all-time list with 1,955 yards receiving. Two plays later, quarterback Brady Batten called for a slant pattern into the end zone.

In the moments after the injury, Arizona trainers hoped that it was only a torn meniscus, but feared worse. Once again, it was the anterior cruciate ligament.

Dice spoke to his family for a few minutes after the game, a 14-7 Arizona loss, then climbed onto the team bus. A moment later, he stepped back off.

“He said, ‘Mom, I want to go home,’ ” Linda Dice recalls. “We came back [to the family home in North Hills] and just talked and I had made a big thing of lasagna. He was with the people that he needed to be around.”

There were a few days of sitting around, wondering why. Dice says he was forced to consider life beyond football. But in the next breath, the 22-year-old admits he does not know what that life might be and, for now, is not willing to give up the game.

So today he will haunt the sidelines, cheering, contributing however he can to a Wildcat team that is struggling through a 4-5 season. He has thrown himself back into rehabilitation, returning to those torturous hours in the trainer’s room with Lacambra.

If all goes well, Dice will be healthy enough to try out as a free agent at an NFL mini-camp this summer.

If not, he will continue to strengthen his two reconstructed knees for the league’s scouting combine in early 1998.

Just another tough situation for a receiver known for his toughness.

“If I had it to do over again, I’d like to have these last two years back,” he says. “But I’m optimistic. Things are going to come out good in the end.”