USC’s Ricky Ervins knew hardship, but also friendship, and football

After scoring the winning touchdown in USC’s victory over Michigan on Jan. 1, 1990, celebrating with teammates and packing up his hardware, Ricky Ervins did something that probably no other Rose Bowl player of the game has ever done.

He walked home.

Unique among Rose Bowl most valuable players, Ervins grew up less than a mile from the famous stadium, parked cars there on New Year’s Day and was a star at Pasadena Muir High.

He was, in short, a local boy made good, which is not to suggest that the journey to Rose Bowl immortality was anything close to a walk in Brookside Park for the former USC tailback.

Ervins’ fractured home life was not the type that is celebrated with floats and marching bands in fancy holiday parades.

Ervins says his late mother, Naomi, battled drug addiction, resulting in constant upheaval and evictions after his parents divorced when he was 4 years old and he, his mother and two sisters left his father behind in Fort Wayne, Ind.

“It was very nomadic,” Ervins says of his upbringing. “It was rough because my mother struggled, so I struggled.”

Ervins, 41, might still be struggling if not for the generosity of Tony and Sharon Crutchfield, a Pasadena couple and parents of his best friend, also named Tony Crutchfield.

The Crutchfields all but adopted Ervins when he was 14, taking him into their home and keeping him on the straight and narrow by providing a stable environment when he needed it most.

“They’re the best people, man,” Ervins says from his home in Ashburn, Va. “We are still tight to this day.”

Ervins, who played five seasons with the Washington Redskins and San Francisco 49ers and was the leading rusher in the 1992 Super Bowl, is the founder of Xtreme Xplosion, a business that trains high school athletes in Northern Virginia.

He and wife Shawnese, who met at USC on the day Ervins reported for fall camp as a freshman -- “Aug. 14, 1987,” he notes -- are the parents of two soccer-playing teenage girls.

“I feel blessed for everything I’ve been through,” Ervins says. “That’s why I’m always talking to kids about life lessons and experiences I’ve been through. It’s never as bad as you think it is. Somebody’s always got it worse.”

Ervins, though, had it pretty bad.

“You could tell he found comfort at our house just in terms of stability and . . . peace,” says the younger Tony Crutchfield, a former Muir linebacker and Brigham Young cornerback whom Ervins calls his brother. “He would stay long and didn’t want to leave. . . .

“We just knew he needed a safe haven, so to speak, to give him an opportunity to be the best that he could be.”

The Crutchfields provided it.

Says Sharon Crutchfield: “He had no place to stay, so we opened our doors to him. We felt it was the right thing to do.”

Ervins thrived at Muir, where last spring he was inducted into the school’s alumni Hall of Fame. Though only 5 feet 7, he led the Mustangs to consecutive Southern Section football championships before signing with USC.

During his senior year at Muir, Ervins parked cars for 11 hours at the 1987 Arizona State-Michigan Rose Bowl game, dreaming that he might one day play in the New Year’s Day showcase.

In ‘88, ’89 and ‘90, he did.

As a USC junior, Ervins rose from third string at the start of fall camp to become the leading rusher in the Pacific 10 Conference.

In the Rose Bowl, where the Trojans had lost the previous two years, Ervins rushed for 126 yards in 30 carries and scored the winning touchdown on a 14-yard run with 1:10 to play.

“It was called 86,” Ervins says of the decisive play. “When they called it, I knew we were going to score. Wasn’t no doubt in my mind. When they called 86, I said, ‘This is going in.’

“The rest is history.”

Later that night, Ervins says, he was greeted by well-wishers as he walked home with the Crutchfields.

His mother walked with them.

“Once I got into college, she stopped doing all that,” Ervins says of his mother’s misadventures. “I think my junior or senior year, we actually got a chance to talk about everything and cry with each other.”

His football success, Ervins believes, inspired his mother to straighten out her life, get back on her feet.

“I was the joy in her eyes,” he says. “For her to see people cheering for me, that made her feel good. That made her stop doing what she was doing. She knew it was hurting her body, she knew it was making me mad.”

While Ervins made a life for himself in Virginia -- “ ‘Skins fans love their former players, so my name carries weight here,” he says -- his mother continued to get better.

Ervins never held a grudge, despite their rocky past.

“Drugs are a very powerful force and a lot of people succumb,” he says. “There’s nothing they can do about it.”

Four years ago, Ervins brought his mother back East and moved her into his home. “To be here with her granddaughters, watch them grow and play soccer, and just to interact with the family,” he says. “That was probably the greatest joy of her life.”

Then, one day last January, she died unexpectedly.

Ervins was saddened, of course, but grateful that she’d overcome her demons and shared his happiness.

“Everything is great,” he says of his life. “I’m healthy. I get a chance to work with kids. I’ve got a family.”

And the Crutchfields are still in touch.

jerome.crowe@latimes.com