UCLA’s first win over USC was a battle, but don’t dare call it war

UCLA’s first football victory over USC saved Milt Smith’s life.

Smith was a receiver for the 1942 Bruins, who defeated the Trojans, 14-7, to advance to the Rose Bowl. Two years later, he was among thousands of soldiers who were critically wounded during the Battle of the Bulge.

Medics declared him a hopeless case and were about to move on, Smith told people, when someone spotted his engraved Rose Bowl watch and shouted, “This is one guy we’ve got to save!”

Smith spent 18 months recovering but saw a lifetime of UCLA-USC games before his death in 2010.

UCLA halfback Ed Tyler, one of the few living players from the 1942 team, recalls the Bruins’ celebrating that inaugural win into the night. “It wasn’t very athletic,” he says of the party. “That was the greatest year of my life.”

Which came during some of the darkest days the world had known.

Over the next few years, players from both teams were spread around the world, engaging in bloody struggles with hallowed names like Normandy, Okinawa and the Battle of the Bulge.

The Bruins lost to Georgia in the Rose Bowl, then left to save the world from tyrants.

“Mickey Rooney knew one of the guys and was really attached to the team,” Tyler says. “He and Ava Gardner rented the Coconut Grove ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel and threw us a big party after the [Rose Bowl]. I got to light Ava Gardner’s cigarette.

“That was the end. By spring, everyone was off to war.”

The game

There was never a doubt about beating USC, at least among those playing for UCLA.

“We felt all along we were going to nail them,” Tyler says.

The Bruins were 0-5-3 against the Trojans heading into the 1942 season. The series started in 1929, and USC so thoroughly dominated the first two games that UCLA took a five-year hiatus from the rivalry.

When it resumed, UCLA teams still couldn’t get it done, even with stars such as Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington.

But 1942 was different.

“We had Bob Waterfield,” says Mike Marienthal, a UCLA guard that season.

Waterfield was a budding star — as was his girlfriend, actress Jane Russell. The two eloped to Las Vegas in 1943 and were married for 25 years. Waterfield was the NFL’s most valuable player as a rookie in 1945 and, by then, Russell was a sensation at the box office and as a pin-up.

But as the 1942 season approached, Waterfield and Russell were just a couple of kids from Van Nuys High.

“The three of us would go down to Muscle Beach, and he and Jane would get in some fight and I would end up giving her a ride home,” says Tyler, who also attended Van Nuys. “We were just country folk from Van Nuys.”

It didn’t take long for Waterfield to grow up in 1942.

“Against California, Waterfield took the ball on a naked reverse,” says Marienthal, 89. “It wasn’t the play that was called. He just did it. He stood in the end zone and held up the ball to show us.”

But Waterfield wasn’t a solo act. The Bruins had talent: Jack Lescoulie was an All-American guard, Al Solari was an honorable mention All-American at running back, and receiver Burr Baldwin was a future All-American.

And USC was on their minds.

A group of Bruins went to Newport Beach for a party that year and ran into some USC players. Smith and a USC player got into a fight, and both were arrested.

“My mom went down to bail them out and he refused to let her unless she bailed out the USC player too,” says Barbara White, Smith’s daughter. “There was respect.”

That was no doubt true on some level, but Tyler, 92, says, “It was no different than it is today. We hated ‘SC.”

The Bruins were 6-3 and ranked 13th going into the game. USC was having a poor season at 4-4-1.

“We had a lot of confidence,” Tyler says. “We had Waterfield. He could do it all — run, pass, kick, play defense. He was the No. 1 quarterback on the West Coast.”

Waterfield completed only two of six passes in the game, but one went for a 42-yard touchdown to Baldwin. That and a touchdown run by Ken Snelling built a 14-0 UCLA lead.

The defense did the rest.

“We didn’t score a lot, but we controlled that game throughout,” Tyler says.

Afterward, the team followed Waterfield and Russell to the Glen.

“That was a place where we went to drink beer,” Marienthal says. “It was quite a night. A highbrow place for a bunch of lowbrow guys.”

The Rose Bowl lay ahead, but Marienthal says, “We all knew we were going to war and, boy, did we go.”

The war

During halftime of the ’42 UCLA-USC game, a Japanese midget submarine, captured after the Pearl Harbor attack, was paraded around the Coliseum.

Reporter Nadine Mason wrote in The Times: “Rooting sections, football teams and the roaring crowd that filled the Coliseum were all fighting on the same side of a big war.”

There was a war bond drive the week before the game. Singer Rudy Vallee and comedian Joe E. Brown did a show on the UCLA campus. The competition between the two schools raised more than $2 million.

“You could never forget there was a war,” Tyler says.

That spring, Tyler recalls, Army trucks rolled onto the UCLA campus.

“They stopped in front of the gym, loaded up with Bruin students and hauled them off,” Tyler said. “By June, most of the team was in the Navy or Army.”

Tyler was assigned to the Marshall Islands, where he was a captain of a “crash boat” used to rescue downed pilots.

It sounded dangerous, but . . .

“I was out there three years and never once had to rescue a pilot,” Tyler says. “I’d pull into the dock, get gas and go fishing. One time, the island commander asked me to take a dozen USO girls to another island. I said, ‘Yes, sir!’”

Others had it much worse.

Marienthal was with the Marines on Okinawa at the height of a brutal battle that cost thousands of lives. On May 22, 1945, a Japanese mortar landed in his foxhole, severely wounding him. A sergeant provided a belt for a tourniquet that Marienthal applied to both legs.

“We lost 29 men that night,” says Marienthal, who spent 11 months in the hospital and whose left leg was amputated. “I was lucky. I can’t believe I went through all that.”

Solari was a B-29 pilot who flew bombing missions over Japan. Baldwin fought in the Battle of the Bulge and rose to the rank of captain. Al Sparlis, a UCLA guard, flew 70 missions over the “Hump” from India to China, crashing twice and earning seven campaign ribbons. Buck Compton, also a guard, parachuted into France with the 101st Airborne on the eve of D-day. He won a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart after he was wounded in Holland.

When Compton woke in the field hospital, in the bed next to him was Mickey Panovich, a UCLA basketball player.

“I rubbed my eyes in disbelief,” Compton wrote in his autobiography.

Panovich, Compton wrote, said, “Buck? Of all the people to meet.”

Peace

Of the 27 UCLA players who went to war, one failed to return, Tyler says.

John Obidine was a tackle for the Bruins in 1942. He was in the first wave on D-day. In August 1944, he wrote to his wife about getting two hours’ sleep in a haystack, his first sleep in three days. He was killed in France three weeks later.

“Only one guy,” Tyler says. “We were really lucky.”

All tried to pick up their lives. Most were successful.

Baldwin returned to UCLA and was the Bruins’ first consensus All-American in 1946, helping them reach the Rose Bowl for the second time. Marienthal returned to UCLA as a football coach and spent 50 years as the official scorer at Bruins basketball games.

Tyler ran an engraving company and is still an avid tennis player. Sparlis was an All-American at UCLA in 1945 and later fought in Korea and Vietnam, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Compton was an LAPD detective, and later the deputy district attorney who prosecuted Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Compton became a judge and gained fame for his World War II exploits after an HBO miniseries about the 101st Airborne’s Easy Company.

And Smith was in a Washington, D.C., hospital when a letter arrived that had been chasing him around.

“It was a contract from the Philadelphia Eagles,” says his daughter, White. “They must have sent it to his last address. Dad needed a job, so he signed it while still in the hospital. He hadn’t been out of bed in a year.”

Smith, a 20th-round pick by the Eagles in 1944, eventually played five games in 1945. Then he returned to Westwood and opened Smith’s Sporting Goods with Vic Smith (no relation), a teammate in 1942.

The Rose Bowl watch was lost when Smith’s family home burned down in the 1960s. But he was still able to mark time in the UCLA-USC rivalry.

“In his later years, Dad would watch the game alone,” White says. “He would shut himself in the den. He didn’t want anybody yelling. He didn’t want any distractions. He wanted to focus on the game.”

It had, after all, saved his life.

chris.foster@latimes.com

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