Don’t Get Too Close

Cordial is the best word for it. When Paul Hackett and Bob Toledo run into each other at coaching conventions and the like, they shake hands and exchange a few words.

“We’re cordial,” Hackett says.

Toledo agrees. “We’re civil to each other,” he says.

It is pleasant and professional and perhaps a bit chillier than one might expect from two men whose lives have intersected at more than a few crucial junctures over the years.

Hackett and Toledo have faced each other as young quarterbacks on the field and as young assistant coaches interviewing for the same job. There was a time when they lived around the corner from each other, their wives becoming friends.

This shared history has not engendered warmth. Especially not now, with Hackett at USC and Toledo at UCLA, recruiting against each other, occasionally trading barbs the week of the game between their teams. The best they can manage is a working relationship.

“There is respect,” Hackett says.

Toledo concurs. “We’re acquaintances, I guess you could say,” he says.

But not friends, not in any real sense of the word. Too much has passed between them.

*

It was the fall of 1967 when San Francisco State played UC Davis for the Far Western Conference championship. Toledo, the quarterback for San Francisco State, was on his way to setting eight Division II records for passing yardage and touchdowns.

“He was a great quarterback,” Hackett says, adding: “We were not a very good team.”

Yet with San Francisco State leading 21-17, Hackett guided Davis on a fourth-quarter drive. Not that he mentions any of this, speaking briefly of that game, letting the subject drop.

Toledo fills in the details.

“They drove to the one-yard line,” he says. “Paul was about 137 pounds at the time.”

Actually, the program listed Hackett at 165 pounds. But the rest of Toledo’s recollection is accurate.

“He tried a quarterback sneak and got stuffed to end the game,” Toledo says. “We won the championship.”

By 1975, only eight years later, both men had moved up the ranks as coaches, Hackett working with quarterbacks at California and Toledo running the show at tiny UC Riverside. Both attracted the interest of John Robinson, who was taking over at USC.

Toledo recalls that when he interviewed with Robinson, they talked about coaching either quarterbacks or defensive backs. It seemed odd because Toledo was known for his offensive prowess.

Days later, Robinson called him at home.

“He offered me a job,” Toledo told his wife. “I took it.”

“What are you going to coach?” she asked.

“God, I didn’t even ask.”

The next day, when Toledo got a call about an opening on the Cal staff, he knew.

“I put two and two together,” he says. “I realized Robinson had just hired Hackett to coach the quarterbacks.”

Their fates were linked. Toledo had been recommended by Arizona State Coach Bruce Snyder, who, at the time, was a USC assistant and was leaving for another job. Hackett, moving to Southern California, bought Snyder’s house in Diamond Bar.

And Toledo moved nearby.

“Right around the corner,” Toledo says. “Our wives were good friends.”

Toledo recalls car-pooling occasionally, though Hackett is not certain.

“Maybe once in a while,” he says.

In those days, as a USC administrator recalls, Toledo was thinner and Hackett had more hair. They joined a 1976 staff that included a young Norv Turner and veteran assistants Marv Goux and Don Lindsey.

Hackett was 29, an intense man who waved his arms and hopped from foot to foot as he explained plays. His quarterback, Paul McDonald, recalls him as “a live wire.”

Toledo was 30 and calmer, more likely to laugh.

“Almost at opposite extremes,” says Dennis Thurman, a safety on that team who now serves as Hackett’s secondary coach. “Not to say Toledo wasn’t intense on the inside, but he had a demeanor about him, always on an even keel.”

A curious dynamic took hold of the USC staff. Though close-knit and devoted to winning, the assistants and their various squads developed rivalries on the practice field.

“We were pretty intense people,” says Robinson, now head coach at Nevada Las Vegas. “We all had egos.”

When it came to passing drills, Hackett’s quarterbacks competed against Toledo’s defensive backs and the action occasionally accelerated to game speed.

“The offensive coaches were for their guys and the defensive coaches were for their guys,” Thurman says. “Toledo, in his own way, was like, ‘Don’t let those SOBs catch the ball.’ ”

Not that it was divisive. To the contrary, the coaches recall it as a kind of Camelot. The players used their competitive fire to win two Rose Bowls and a national championship in three seasons.

Says Hackett: “I mean, it was good chemistry.”

It did not last. In 1979, Toledo left to coach Pacific. Two seasons later, Hackett became an assistant for the Cleveland Browns, the first of several NFL jobs.

“We took different paths and I didn’t think I’d ever come back to the college game,” Hackett says. “We kind of lost contact.”

Almost two decades passed before they found themselves together again in Los Angeles. Toledo was named as UCLA’s head coach in 1996; Hackett arrived at USC two years later.

The gamesmanship began immediately. Hackett--as intense as ever--said Oregon was the best team in the conference though UCLA had just defeated the Ducks. The week of the 1998 USC-UCLA game, he did an about-face and suggested his team had a “slim” chance against the third-ranked Bruins.

He chuckles about it now, saying, “Of course, you’re playing mind games back and forth.”

But in the game’s final seconds, with UCLA leading 34-17, Bruin quarterback Cade McNown ran a 23-yard bootleg instead of taking a knee. Hackett confronted Toledo at midfield.

“I felt a little animosity,” Hackett says. “I came out of that game a little angry.”

Toledo still seems surprised.

“Why would you worry about one play?” he asks. “There are a lot of plays that happen during the course of a game.”

This was the easygoing guy that Thurman recalled from the 1970s, the one who liked to keep things light. Could Hackett’s comments get under his skin? Not a chance.

“That’s silly stuff,” he says.

Yet, before last season’s game, Toledo returned fire. With his team holding an eight-game winning streak in the series, he told reporters that all the pressure was on USC.

“Did I say that?” he asks now, smiling. “I don’t recall saying that.”

Hackett called it “a bunch of BS” and, when USC ended the streak, he put a picture of the victory bell--awarded to the winner--on his Christmas cards. Again, Toledo laughed it off.

But recently, when a reporter mentioned that both teams enter the game with disappointing records, he interjected: “I hope ours isn’t as disappointing as theirs.”

*

The last few days have been relatively calm, little sniping, big on cordial. Toledo spent a few moments of his weekly news conference sympathizing with Hackett, who is on the hot seat because of a losing record. He wants to make this clear: “I don’t dislike Paul.”

It’s simply that, in a metropolis of 9 million people, in a population center that stretches for thousands of square miles, there is barely enough room for the two of them.

All the years, all the shared experiences, only make it tougher.

“The fact that Bob and I have known each other for so long . . . makes for a much more intense rivalry,” Hackett says. A rivalry he describes as “a monster with great emotion on both sides.”

Furthermore, both men insist that in the big-money, ultra-competitive world of college coaching, it would look wrong for them to have a beer together or otherwise socialize.

“It’s hard to compete against each other, to recruit against each other and our alums, if they saw us together, I don’t think it would be kosher,” Toledo says.

This might sound extreme--even, to use Toledo’s word, silly--but Robinson understands. He recalls that his relationship with former UCLA coach Terry Donahue warmed only after they left their respective schools. Former players understand too.

“Both of these guys have egos,” McDonald says. “Both of them want to succeed.”

That is the key. They want to win. On Saturday, only one of them will.

*

ON THE WEB--For more on the USC-UCLA rivalry, including complete advance coverage, a unique four-part video history of the rivalry, recaps of each game in the ‘90s and classic columns from Jim Murray, Mike Downey, Bill Dwyre, Bill Plaschke and J.A. Adande, log on to the Times’ Web site:

https://www.latimes.com/rivalry

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