It’s Better to Give Than Receive It

Glenn Davis sits curled up in a family room chair, swallowed in sweat pants and thick jacket and, rather amazingly, a smile.

The man known as Mr. Outside has spent most of the last seven months inside, battling cancer, alone with his family and his 1946 Heisman Trophy.

Um, where is his Heisman Trophy?

“Don’t have it,” he says.

Don’t have it?

“Gave it to my high school,” he says.

Gave it to your high school?

“Drove it over one day and dropped it off,” he says.

Dropped it off?

“When I got there and they saw what I had, they wanted to arrange some ceremony, but I just handed it to the principal and left,” he says.

The most recognizable trophy in American sports and you just gave it away?

He looks over at his shrugging son, down at a coffee table containing two lit candles and a cocoa tin, around a La Quinta duplex lined with books and knickknacks, a man who has lost 60 pounds still enveloped in warmth.

Davis smiles at me, as if any columnist foolish enough to drive across a desert in search of the Heisman would never understand.

“It’s just a trophy,” he says. “It’s not a life.”

*

It’s just a trophy. It’s not a life.

Try telling that to Matt Leinart today as he understandably celebrates his Heisman as if it were life itself.

While Leinart parades through the palaces of New York, the second-oldest living Heisman winner will awaken quietly in a modest duplex he has owned for three decades, not once imagining he were anywhere else.

“I’m better off not saying what I think about most athletes today,” says Glenn Davis, 79. “Let’s just say I was around before all that stuff.”

Leinart will make thousands of dollars in endorsements.

Aside from appearing in a silly football movie after graduation, Davis never made a penny from the Heisman. He never sold anything, never trademarked his “Mr. Outside” nickname, never did a television or radio commercial.

“The Heisman didn’t change much of anything,” he says.

Leinart eventually will get a fair chance at a pro career.

Davis, an Army running back, couldn’t play professionally for three years because of his West Point service requirements, and then lasted only two injury-plagued seasons with the Los Angeles Rams.

“Missing those three years, whatever I had, I could never get it back,” he says.

Leinart probably will be able to retire from benefits offered by the Heisman.

Davis went to work for the Los Angeles Times in its special events department in 1954 and remained there for 35 years.

“That’s really who I was,” he says. “Just a guy out there making a living.”

And now that he is a guy bravely fighting to live, the curse that has plagued so many Heisman winners has also passed him by.

A guy who has never had a cellphone and never learned to use a computer also has never found reason to regret.

“I could pass away tomorrow, I don’t know,” he says, running his hands through chemotherapy-thinned hair. “If it happens, it happens. I’ve been very, very fortunate all my life. God has been really, really good to me.”

Good enough to watch Saturday’s ceremony, where the only thing certain was that Davis would not be gloating over picking the winner.

He voted for Aaron Rodgers, the California quarterback who wasn’t even invited to New York.

It is no coincidence that Rodgers was the only quarterback who outplayed USC, the only quarterback whose team lost only to the No. 1-ranked team, a guy who did little else but lead.

Davis won the Heisman during a season in which he rushed for only 712 yards and seven touchdowns. He won because he also passed for 396 yards and four touchdowns. He won because he played tough safety on an unbeaten team.

Davis still holds the national career record of 8.26 yards per rushing attempt, but that’s as important to him as the bronze stiff.

Nothing, he says, equals playing three years of college football and never losing a game.

“None of it was as important to me as winning, ever,” Davis says. “You could have the rest of it, the awards, all that stuff. Why else do you play but to win?”

*

One afternoon several years ago, Davis was thinking about the winning.

Where did it start? How did he learn?

His answer was Bonita High in La Verne, where he played four sports and still remembers winning CIF championships in football and baseball.

So he picked up the phone, called the school office and engaged in a conversation that he said went like this:

“Anybody going to be down there today?”

“Yes, why?”

“I’m going to bring something over.”

School officials, who had already named their football stadium after Davis, could not imagine what it was.

Davis’ future wife Yvonne -- he lost his previous wife Harriett to a heart attack after 43 years -- saw exactly what it was.

Yvonne was the widow of another former Heisman winner, Alan Ameche, so she understood the impact.

“I was sitting there and he’s bringing out the Heisman Trophy and we’re going to the school and ... I was overwhelmed,” she remembers.

The school officials apparently felt the same way when Glenn Davis pulled up, dropped it off, and left.

“I don’t think there’s too many high schools in the country with a Heisman Trophy in their possession,” says Principal Bob Ketterling, who arrived a couple of years after the handoff. “People walk by and do a double-take.”

Especially recently, when the trophy was moved from the main display case to make room for the Smudge Pot award, annually given to the winner of the Bonita-San Dimas football game.

“We still have it right here on the counter,” Ketterling says.

Not that Davis cares. After dropping it off, he hasn’t been back to visit it since.

“He is such a sweet, such a humble man,” Yvonne says. “He never wanted to be on TV. He never wanted to make a ton of money, he just wanted to be home.”

During his battle with prostate cancer, his only big trip was a drive from his Pennsylvania home to West Point this fall for induction into the newly created Hall of Fame there.

“He didn’t look good, it looked very hard for him,” recalls Joe Steffy, a former Army teammate. “But he walked out there on that field all by himself.”

Davis says, like the Heisman donation, a return to West Point only made sense, back to the place that gave him a chance.

“It was not that important to him to be there,” Steffy says. “But you could tell, he knew it was important to them. So he went.”

Felix “Doc” Blanchard, the oldest living Heisman winner and Davis’ running mate known as Mr. Inside, did not show up at the ceremony. He lives a secluded life in his sister’s home in a small Texas town.

But you say you are calling about Glenn Davis, and he comes to the phone.

“Glenn’s a great guy, still a great friend, and, yeah, I’m thinking about him,” Blanchard says, then chuckles. “That thing about him giving his Heisman to a high school? He learned that from me. I did the same thing.”

Glenn Davis doesn’t know when, or if, he’ll be able to be Mr. Outside again. His life is now one endless parade of treatments and recoveries, punctuated by hugs from Yvonne and visits from son Ralph and phone calls from old friends.

“Any time I’d play him in anything, he would try to beat me, pingpong or tiddlywinks or whatever,” Ralph says. “That’s his state of mind right now. He will not give up the fight.”

At one point during the two-hour interview earlier this week, Davis climbs up and strolls nimbly down the hall without his walker. At another point, he throws up his legs on a nearby chair as if a teenager again.

They say he once had the best first step in college football history, and you can still see it. You can still feel it.

You don’t need a bronze statue to know that you are in the presence of greatness, of a life well lived in an era long since disappeared.

“What do I miss?” Glenn Davis asks. “I miss the winning.”

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. For more Plaschke columns, go to latimes.com/plaschke.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Glenn Davis File

* Born: December 26, 1924 in Claremont, Calif.

* High School: While attending Bonita High in La Verne, Davis played football, baseball and basketball, ran track and won 13 letters.

* College: Army, 1943-1947. From 1944 through 1946 season, Army went 27-0-1, won two national championships and finished a close second in ’46. Davis finished his career with 2,957 yards rushing, 855 yards passing and 59 touchdowns (43 rushing, 14 receiving, and two punt returns). Still holds the NCAA career record for yards per carry at 8.26 while averaging a touchdown almost every nine plays.

* College honors: He was voted first team All-American in 1944, 1945, 1946. He was the Heisman Trophy runner-up to teammate Doc Blanchard in 1945 and won it in 1946. He was voted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961

* Military: Spent three years in the Army.

* The NFL: After his Army tour, Davis joined the Los Angeles Rams in 1950. He teamed with quarterback Bob Waterfield on an 82-yard touchdown pass, a championship game record, when the Rams lost the title game to the Cleveland Browns, 30-28. Davis never suffered a serious injury while playing football but tore a knee ligament while filming a 1946 movie, “The Spirit of West Point.” The injury recurred in 1951 and he played little that season, sat out all of the next then retired after trying to come back in 1953.