A Former Bruin Tackles Game of Life and Death

John Fowler was a member of UCLA’s 1976 Rose Bowl championship team and was the Bruins’ fourth-leading tackler in 1977. He was a pretty fair rugby player too and liked that sport a little better because, he says, “I got to run with the ball.”

Fowler married Dianne Frierson, an excellent UCLA basketball player and the starting point guard on the teams that starred Ann Meyers and won a national championship. In other words, this was a typical jock union, right? Bet you wonder if either of them graduated. If they are, what, coaches or car salesmen or work in the UCLA athletic department?

Well, not quite.

On Thursday in Dallas, Dr. John Fowler will be inducted into the GTE Academic All-American Hall of Fame. Fowler has been chosen for this honor because he was a respectable college football player, yes, but he can hardly remember what it felt like to plant some offensive player face first onto the field.

Since 1990, Fowler has lived and worked and raised his family of six children with Dianne in Izmir, Turkey. Fowler is an assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine at Dokuz Eylul University. He founded the Turkey Emergency Medicine Assn. He is, basically, the inventor of the practice of emergency medicine in Turkey. Just about any emergency medicine physician in Turkey has been educated by Fowler or studied in one of his programs. He teaches all his courses in Turkish. His children attend Turkish schools. His home doesn’t even have cable TV. He can’t watch CNN International.

“I can’t really keep up with UCLA football anymore,” he says. “But it sure was a great part of my life.”

It is so easy to stereotype. Big-time college football players don’t graduate magna cum laude and don’t go to India as volunteer teachers before entering medical school, and they surely don’t give up the financially lucrative practice of U.S. medicine. Fowler and his family could have a lovely Southern California home, a big car or two, and spend football weekends at the Rose Bowl.

Yet this big-time college football player gave up all that.

Having been offered a football scholarship to UCLA after he graduated from Hawthorne High, Fowler postponed college a year to be an exchange student in Holland.

“When I came back from that year in Holland,” Fowler says, “I realized that I learned languages pretty easily, and when I came back to UCLA, I knew I would probably some day be going overseas to work. I guess that was always a desire.”

When asked why Turkey, Fowler answers quickly:

“Why not?”

It turns out that while he was doing a medical internship in Cincinnati, he met somebody who knew somebody who introduced him to somebody from Turkey. Fowler was specializing in emergency medicine and wanted to go to a country where he could have an impact on the emergency medical system. Pretty much, Turkey had none. So Fowler and his wife visited Turkey, met people at the hospital in Izmir, then came home, packed up their then five-child family and moved into a house in an olive grove in Izmir.

“We hadn’t planned on staying this long,” Fowler says. “But I’ve got a lot of things left to do.”

Dianne coaches basketball and raises the kids, the oldest of whom is 16. Fowler says Dianne is more famous than he is in Turkey because, and this must be universal, sports makes people famous and being the father of emergency medicine doesn’t. “Except in medical circles,” Fowler says. “I’m known in medical circles in Turkey.”

There have been adventures. When Dianne was pregnant with their sixth child, the family took a trip. “We drove a van all across Turkey,” Fowler says. “We drove to the Russian border. We drove down to practically the Iranian border. To Mount Ararat, all over. And we were on the top of a mountain, very isolated, when our van broke down. When we finally got help, they had to put the van, with us in the van, on a dump truck and drive about 24 hours to the nearest town where the van could be fixed.”

Fowler says he is proud that UCLA nominated him for this award and feels humbled to receive it.

And when he was asked about the perception that he, so academically accomplished, seemed ill-suited to football, Fowler laughed and then explained.

“The public might not realize it,” Fowler says, “but football is kind of a scientific sport. It’s very calculated, almost like chess. You’re trying to guess what the other team is going to do. If they’re lined up in this defense, you do this, that defense, you do that. It is surprisingly intellectual.”

This is what makes Fowler special. He finds the surprises in life. He embraces an experience fully. The game is more than a game. The world is there to be explored. To be made better.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com