You Can Leave College, but College Never Leaves You

What is it about a school that makes a boy or girl true to it forever?

You walk around a campus in your youth. Years later, the ties still bind. You remain a child of an alma mater, apron-strung to her traditions. You get goose bumps when your school’s team is on TV in a big game, your senses attuned to the smell of the face paint, the roar of the crowd.

Because that’s YOUR team out there.

Your (insert school color here) blood begins to pump.

It doesn’t matter if a school is no more than a landscape of brick, ivy and knife-whittled desks. It is also the hallowed place of your dance fads, your frats, your letterman jacket, your messiest roommates and nuttiest professors.

Any time I see an athletic contest that involves a school--not a town or country--I see a grown-up who can’t help acting like a kid.

It might be inside a locker room, where a Richard Nixon once made the rounds, saying hello to 22-year-old basketball players from Duke, telling them of his days there in law school. Or it might be outside the Playboy Mansion, where some Illinois lads about to play football in a Rose Bowl were welcomed by alumnus Hugh Hefner to the home of a different sort of sport.

Thomas Wolfe said we can’t go home again. He didn’t say anything about school.

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I am not sure James Caan has been this motivated since the Godfather got shot. I don’t mean since he and his fellow actors shot the movie--I mean since the Godfather himself got shot.

Saturday afternoon, Caan’s school, Michigan State, is playing basketball in the NCAA national tournament. It is playing Duke. It is a game that Michigan State is being given little or no chance to win.

Do not disturb Caan between 5 and 7 p.m.

He will be on the white sofa in his Bel-Air living room, by his 5 1/2-month-old baby boy’s toys, then up off it, to pace in front of the TV.

“I get so UPSET when I watch,” he says.

There are telegrams ready to be sent to the Michigan State team--you know, just in case--and caps and jackets galore in Caan’s house.

He went to Michigan State for one year. That’s all. But once a Spartan, always a Spartan. (Don’t forget, Magic Johnson only stayed for two.)

Son of a kosher meat cutter, Caan grew up in New York, in the Sunnyside area of Queens, a far cry from the farmland of Michigan where he would eventually go to college.

He graduated high school at 16, because: “They couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”

Caan had no athletic scholarship. He played a little football, though he jokes that Coach Duffy Daugherty’s players mainly used him for a tackling dummy. He tried out for the swim team and anything else with a clock or a stopwatch.

And in his year there, something good happened. Michigan State made it to the 1957 NCAA Final Four.

“We didn’t think we had much of a basketball team. There wasn’t much about Michigan State in the papers, even in Michigan state,” Caan recalls. “And then suddenly we had this guy, Jumpin’ Johnny Green. I never saw a human being jump like that in my life. ‘He jumped over the backboard!’ the radio guy kept saying.”

With the entire student body jumpy, the Spartans met undefeated North Carolina in a game it was thought to have little chance to win. A 50-foot basket would have won the game, but was judged to have come a fraction of a second too late.

Michigan State lost . . . in triple overtime.

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A couple of years ago, Caan acted as grand marshal for an East Lansing football weekend--”I think I was homecoming queen”--and led the team’s traditional mile march to the stadium, accompanied by son Scott, 21, an actor whose current film is “Varsity Blues.”

Caan, 59, enjoys his collegiate connection. (Although he once did urge an L.A. prep to attend Michigan State, then got cold-shouldered by the MSU coach. “He told me, ‘This kid’s the laziest football player I’ve ever had,” Caan recalls. “You know, like it’s MY fault.”)

In his own life, Caan has been a rodeo cowboy, fought bulls, learned karate and, after nine shoulder operations, still works with trainer T.R. Goodman alongside pro athletes. But his hardest task is to sit back and watch his school’s first Final Four appearance in 20 years.

“I wish I had some Michigan State guys here to watch this thing with me,” Caan says, already anxious, already singing the words to the school’s fight song. Today is his birthday. He knows what he wants.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com