He Was Born to Take Field for the Trojans

He gets hit during games, but nothing like afterward, when Collin Ashton stops near the end zone and stares into the stands.

He sees tiny kids scrambling around in cardinal sweatshirts. He hears tinny voices begging for cardinal wristbands. He feels the hopeless, helpless swirl of cardinal dreams.

Collin Ashton may be the only USC football player who gets goose bumps running off the field.

“Because when I look up there,” he says, “I see myself.”

Only his seat has changed.

On Tuesday in the national championship Orange Bowl, Collin Ashton will be in the middle of the action for a team whose home games he has never missed.

In his entire life.

That’s 129 consecutive games over 21 years, first as a pacifier sucker and rattle shaker, now as a long snapper and backup linebacker.

Born into six generations of Trojans, he first showed up in the Coliseum in his mother’s arms, later in the lap of O.J. Simpson, then on the elbow of Rod Dedeaux, then on young feet that would roam the parking lot for pickup games and rush the field for autographs.

The Trojan baby became a Trojan toddler, then a Trojan teen, then an undersized Trojan walk-on, and finally, this summer, a Trojan full-scholarship player.

Is it any wonder his teammates greeted the locker-room announcement by giving him a standing ovation?

“The story is crazy, man,” tight end Alex Holmes says. “I mean, really crazy.”

The map of Ashton’s journey is found under his jersey and pads, in the form of a tattered gray USC T-shirt that he has been wearing since he was 10 years old.

It was oversized when his parents gave it to him. Now it’s falling apart. But he refuses to take it off.

“It reminds me of who I was,” he says.

And who he still is, a 215-pound symbol of something much larger and thicker.

A reminder that Oklahoma will be trying to knock over not just a football team, but a family tree.

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Collin Ashton’s first game was in 1983. His first seat was a bassinet. His first halftime snack was breast milk. He was 48 days old.

“I stuck him under the bleachers for shade,” says his mother, Denise.

He is a member of one of the oldest Trojan families, his great-great-great grandfather having graduated from the school, their season tickets among the first.

“It was something I was born into,” Ashton said. “It’s who I am.”

And so it is how he grew up, his diaper changed at the Coliseum, some of his first steps taken at the Coliseum, his first moves learned while dodging grills during tailgate football games, his vocal chords sharpened while cheering for Rodney Peete.

He was so dedicated to USC football, Ashton wouldn’t miss Trojan games even when he began playing his own Pop Warner games.

His mother would arrive at the youth field carrying milk cartons filled with warm water.

Ashton would stand between cars in the parking lot and pour the water over his head for an impromptu shower.

He would then climb in the back seat for the hurried drive to the Coliseum.

“Sometimes he would only make the last quarter of the game, but he always made it,” says his father, Mark, a USC graduate. “It was just part of our life.”

At his Mission Viejo home, Ashton would wear mostly cardinal and gold clothes, refusing to don anything in powder blue. He would pretend to be Trojans while playing in the streets. He vowed to become a Trojan when he began playing for Mission Viejo High.

He even played the Trojan fight song on the locker room stereo before his high school games.

“For a few seconds, before somebody ran in there and turned it off,” he says. “But just hearing a little bit of it was all I needed.”

Yet for all his resolve, he was nearly halted by reality. As a 6-foot-1 linebacker, he was small, and a tad slow and had no major-college future.

Until the afternoon he brought home a new toy.

“He came home one day and said, ‘Hey Dad, look what I can do,’ ” recalls his father. “He went into the street, bent over, and snapped the ball about 15 yards. I thought, where did he get that?”

He snapped for fun, but his long snaps became so hard his father could no longer catch them, and so accurate that a USC coach visited his high school field for a glimpse.

The Trojans couldn’t offer him a scholarship, but, if he wanted to be groomed to snap for their punter, they could give him a uniform.

“I took it in a minute,” Ashton says. “But I wasn’t thinking about long snapping. I was trying to figure out a way to get in there as a linebacker.”

He spent three seasons paying to play. He worked as hard or harder than anyone else for reasons that only he could understand.

“Sometimes I would think, ‘I cannot do this for five years, no way,’ ” he recalls. “But then I would realize, I can’t do anything else.”

He grew in the weight room, grew smarter on the field and, finally, as a redshirt sophomore, he became only the second walk-on to start for the Trojan football team in 20 years.

Watching from the same Coliseum seats that their son once shared, his parents wept.

Climbing into those stands in full uniform after games, Ashton would gather his two younger brothers and bring them on to a field that he once considered a shrine.

This summer, after learning that he had been awarded a scholarship for his final two years, Ashton screamed to his parents over the phone.

Nearby, Coach Pete Carroll smiled.

“That’s my favorite thing to do here, give out scholarships like that, and it shows you how special Collin is when his teammates gave him a standing ovation,” Carroll says. “He came here undersized and not prepared for football at this level, but he did not believe that.”

It’s as if his family still doesn’t believe it.

The four of them, two parents and two brothers, stood in the rain Friday at a local university field, watching USC practice.

Collin met them afterward, walked across the street to the locker room with them, smiling and jostling, as if he were in Pop Warner again, waiting for those milk cartons.

“Then I realize, I’m actually here, I’m actually doing this, I’m the guy I once cheered.... I get goose bumps just talking about it,” he says.

A couple of years ago he was calm enough to give his father a typical football-playing-son gift, a framed photograph of Collin in a USC helmet.

But in the photo was no typical Trojan.

Collin was about 6 years old. The helmet dropped over his eyes.

“Dreams do come true,” read the inscription, and, hey, Oklahoma, good luck finding a defense for that.

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