Nothing Like a Little Sleep to Cure Case of ‘Dallas Flu’

With no curfew when they got to Dallas, UCLA players have seen a lot of the area, including the Metroplex by night.

And by early morning.

Some players stayed out as late as 4 a.m. on Saturday night, after hearing from coaches that the Cotton Bowl is a reward for a 9-2 season. That mind-set ended, though, with a midnight curfew Monday, scaling down in half-hour increments to 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve.

The curfew, or lack of, might have had something to do with the spotty practices Saturday and Sunday, because workout effectiveness has picked up since.

“We have been fighting a bit of the flu bug,” Coach Bob Toledo said Tuesday. “I think some of it might have been the Dallas flu.”

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Chris Sailer has benefited mightily from the six weeks off between the USC game and the Cotton Bowl.

UCLA’s punter/kicker spent much of that time not swinging his kicking leg, which, he says, was tired toward the end of the regular season.

“You could probably tell it more on my kickoffs,” said Sailer, a junior who put them into the end zone regularly for the first two-thirds of the season, but was less effective in the season’s final games.

“I know I learned some things this season,” he said. “One thing is not to kick so much in two-a-days, and not so much in practice. After all, this is the first time I’ve done all three [punting, kicking field goals and kicking off] since high school, and college is a lot different from high school.”

Sailer said he wanted to continue to handle all three chores in his senior season, and UCLA coaches have said they are not recruiting a kicker.

They already have freshman kicker Zak Haselmo as a redshirt.

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Toledo on UCLA defensive coordinator Rocky Long: “When I hired Rocky Long, he had been with a 1-10 team and people asked me, ‘Why did you hire him?’ Then, after we lost our first two games, people asked me, ‘Why are you running that crazy defense?’ I believed in Rocky, and I didn’t make Rocky change a thing in the defense.”

That defense gets much of the credit for a nine-game winning streak, and it also helped Long land the coach’s job at New Mexico.

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UCLA running back Skip Hicks will turn down chances to play in the Hula Bowl and East-West Shrine game to concentrate on the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., because of the emphasis placed on the game by NFL scouts. . . . Texas A&M; running back Sirr Parker, from Locke High, has been fighting flu, but has practiced and is expected to play Thursday.