Win Tunnel

Deep in the Coliseum, beneath the end zone stands, a tunnel runs from the locker rooms to the field. It is shabby and dark, electrical conduit on the walls, piles of sand to one side, and there is no earthly reason to think of it as anyplace special.

Until you speak with generations of USC football players who have walked there.

They use words such as “thrilling” and “historic.” Even “sacred.”

Their reverence makes no sense, not when you consider the list of college football’s grand landmarks.

Touchdown Jesus sparkling in autumn sunlight at Notre Dame. The English privet hedges that line Georgia’s field. The supposedly mystical rock that Clemson players rub before kickoff.

Somehow, a dank, concrete corridor doesn’t seem to fit.

“You have to let yourself feel it,” said Sam Anno, sweeping his arms upward in quasi-religious fashion, eager to explain.

Anno played linebacker at USC in the mid-1980s and has returned as a graduate assistant on the coaching staff.

“The reason it’s sacred,” he said, “is because of all the ghosts in there.”

This Saturday, moments before USC’s home opener against Arkansas, the current generation of Trojan players will follow a long-honored tradition, walking down the tunnel’s gradual slope, pausing, gathering at the opening.

“There’s 90,000 people screaming and the band playing,” linebacker Dallas Sartz said. “It’s a tremendous feeling.”

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To much of the sporting world, the Coliseum is better known for its classic peristyle, the Olympic torch, even the nude statues outside the east end.

Yet this is the only stadium to have played host to two Olympic Games, two Super Bowls, a World Series and a baseball All-Star game. UCLA called the place home for a time, as did the Rams, Raiders and Dodgers. That means a who’s-who list of athletic greats have walked the tunnel.

During the 1984 Summer Games, Mary Decker and Zola Budd had a frosty encounter there after they tangled and Decker fell in the 3,000 meters. Joan Benoit Samuelson, winner of the first women’s marathon, talked about entering the stadium through the tunnel, knowing that when she emerged her life would never be the same.

“You can’t stand in there and not think about tons of things,” said author Chris Epting, who wrote a history of the Coliseum.

“It doesn’t need architectural grandeur,” Epting said, agreeing with Anno. “The tunnel is one of those places made special by those who have been there.”

No one quite recalls when it became such a big deal at USC, which began playing in the Coliseum in 1923 under Coach “Gloomy Gus” Henderson.

School folklore holds that, in the 1950s, a player slipped as the team charged onto the field and was trampled by teammates, breaking his leg. John Robinson fell and was overrun before his first UCLA game as head coach in 1976.

After a 24-14 victory that clinched a Rose Bowl berth, he got a call from old friend John Madden.

“The first thing Madden said was, ‘I saw you on TV. You fell down. Boy, did you go down hard,’ ” Robinson said in 1995.

The late Marv Goux, a longtime assistant and an icon within the program, always played to the tunnel’s lore, leading his players to the opening and holding them there until they were sufficiently frenzied.

“You’d better not be in front unless you were one of those guys ready to rip and scream onto the field,” said Hal Bedsole, an All-American receiver from the early 1960s. “I was never one of those guys, so my years at ‘SC, I was the last one out.”

The importance of this tradition struck home with Bedsole in 1963, when Ohio State came to the Coliseum. The Buckeye players walked casually out of the tunnel, and Coach John McKay became incensed.

“McKay was very soft-spoken, unemotional, didn’t speak to the players much,” Bedsole said. “But when [Ohio State Coach] Woody Hayes walked his guys onto the field, McKay was livid.

“He gave us an enormous pregame speech. He’d never done that. He said, ‘We’re not letting them walk onto our field like that.’ ”

Over the years, the tunnel became a recruiting tool, USC coaches escorting high school prospects along the dark stretch, using the sudden light for dramatic effect. It sold quarterback Todd Marinovich in 1988.

“When I walked down the tunnel at the Coliseum, I knew,” he said that year.

Even visiting players have acknowledged feeling something.

“When you walk through the tunnel ... you [realize] the Super Bowl’s been here and they’ve had the Olympics here,” former Penn State linebacker Keith Goganious said after his team played USC in 1990. “You just feel the magic that’s in that stadium.”

But not all of the folklore has been uplifting. Both teams must share the tunnel to reach their locker rooms and, though officials try to keep them separated, it doesn’t always work out.

Anno recalls a game against Notre Dame in the mid-’80s when the teams mixed before kickoff and got into “a full-on fight. Probably 40 or 50 guys pushing and hitting.” A few years later, the teams fought again at Notre Dame’s stadium.

The Coliseum field entrance has been an unkind place for opponents and even the Trojans during bad seasons. Fans gather along the rail to hurl invectives, or worse.

Former coach Paul Hackett endured jeers and nasty banners during his final days in 2000. At a 1998 soccer match, fans showered the U.S. team with debris and cups of undetermined liquid after a match against Mexico.

Bedsole, who played on a 4-5-1 USC team in 1961, prefers to think about better times and a part of the tunnel that most fans don’t see -- the upper end, where players emerge outside the Coliseum after games.

“The final glory of the tunnel is the girls who line up at the top,” he said. “Some of that goes on in football, you know.”

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The late Paul Cleary, an All-American in 1947, spoke of the tunnel in metaphysical terms.

Cleary suffered a major heart attack in 1978 and described a classic near-death experience, seeing a bright light in the darkness. Except his vision came with a twist.

“In my mind, I was coming out of the Los Angeles Coliseum dressing room, through the tunnel and onto the field,” said Cleary, who survived that episode but died in 1996.

The walk begins at the locker-room door, 50 or so yards from the field. Because of the tunnel’s long downward curve, players cannot see the field at the other end and the only illumination comes from dim fixtures along the wall.

“That walk feels like it takes 10 minutes,” said John Jackson, a broadcaster and former USC receiver. “It gives you time to think.”

The acoustics are such that surprisingly little noise seeps in from the stadium, the cavernous space filling instead with echoes of cleats on the concrete floor.

“It’s kind of like the tradition of a gladiator,” former quarterback Mike Rae said. “Everybody’s keyed up and you have this image of walking to war, more or less.”

Not until the final few yards does the team emerge into a blare of sound and brightness. That’s what current defensive tackle Sedrick Ellis is looking forward to Saturday before the kickoff against Arkansas.

“You hear the fans and see that light,” Ellis said. “You’re almost on the field and they hold you up.”

The players gather together, hopping, slapping hands, beside a banner that lists the program’s national championships and Rose Bowl appearances.

The mystique of this grimy passageway, this odd landmark that shouldn’t be, takes hold. Ellis said: “You can’t wait to get out on the field.”

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It’s in the hole

A look at some of the games and events that have been played in the Coliseum and teams that have used the tunnel:

OLYMPICS 1932 and 1984

WORLD SERIES 1959

MLB ALL-STAR GAME 1959

DODGERS 1958-1961

SUPER BOWLS I (1967) and VII (1973)

L.A. RAMS 1946-1979

L.A. RAIDERS 1982-1994

AFL L.A. CHARGERS 1960

USC 1923-PRESENT

UCLA 1929-1981

Source: Los Angeles Times