Once A Duck

Back in the late “50″s, after a good season at Mount San Antonio College (J.C.), I was recruited to play football at the University of Oregon.  The campus was beautiful.  The sports facilities were “historic”.  The coaches were literally “great”.  Head Coach Len Casanova (Cas) was a former President of the National Football Coaches Association.  Bill Bowerman, once Coach of the U.S. Olympic Team, and later one of the founders of Nike, was Head Track Coach.  He already had a few National Championships to his credit.

Bowerman was known for being able to spot athletic talent.  One year, I had a friend on the basketball team who was spending most of his time on the bench.  He was a great leaper and obviously a fine athlete, but at his height (six-two or three), he didn’t have the size and skills to be a standout in basketball.

Bowerman asked him to come out to the track and try running a 440.  That’s a quarter-mile.  He must have looked pretty good because he transferred to the track team and took up running.  And man, did he run.  I don’t think he ever lost a race.  As a matter of fact, he won the gold medal in the 1960 Olympics.  His name is in the record books; Otis Davis.

Back to football.  Because of a minor injury, I red-shirted my first year as a Duck.  In the Spring, I was all healed up and fired up to look good in Spring Practice.  The Oregon backfield coach was John McKay.  John had been a star running back for the Ducks in 1946.  He was a very fine coach and was notoriously feisty.

One day when I was in the football offices, he pulled out a player profile sheet and asked me what I thought about my former teammate Paul Grover.  Paul had been an outstanding quarterback at Mount SAC.  Well, I was a little insecure about my own size and prowess.  At 5’11″, 185 lbs., without blazing speed, I was an underwhelming physical specimen for Division 1-A.  I wanted to be very careful with my answer.

I told him Paul was a clever ball-handler and completed a lot of passes for a guy who wasn’t real tall.  John snapped back at me, “It says here he’s 5’9″.  That’s what I am.”  I thought to myself, “Ooooh, no!”

Anyway, they brought Paul up and he became a Duck like me.

There was another time I said the wrong thing to John McKay.  I was walking through the Athletic Department and I saw John with a big bandage around his hand.  I asked him what happened.  John didn’t smoke cigarettes, but he liked to kick back with a cigar once in a while.

In answer to my question, John mumbled that a book of matches had blown up on him.  Without thinking, I said, “Didn’t you CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING?”.  He just stared at me. I thought to myself, “Oooooh, no, not again.”

John was quick-tempered and sometimes hard to deal with, but he had a great sense of humor.  Paul was from Anaheim.  I remember hearing John yell at practice, “Grover, if you can’t get that right, you’re going to run laps all the way back to dizzy-land.”

A few years later, John McKay was hired as head coach at U.S.C.  As football fans know, he built quite a dynasty there.  Traditionally, their last game of the season was against Notre Dame.  One year the Trojans got humiliated at home 51 to zip.

In the locker room after the game, the players dragged in with their heads hanging down.  Some were even sobbing.  John had invited Paul Grover to watch the game from the sidelines, so Paul was in the locker room.  He told me what happened.

John waited a while, then stood up on a bench and said, “Just remember, 800 million Chinese don’t even know we played today.”  After another (rare) lop-sided loss, his Trojans limped into the locker room dirty, sweaty, battered and beat.  John didn’t think they played hard enough.  He stood silently for a while, then said, “If any of you people need a shower, go ahead and take it.”

Another Duck, John Robinson, became head coach when McKay left U.S.C. “Robbie”, as Paul and I knew him, was a teammate on our Rose Bowl Team in 1958.  I always enjoyed the story he told about his experience in that game because it was also mine.

He said when the coaches finally sent him in on defense, the Ohio State quarterback looked across the line of scrimmage and was so terrified that he knelt down on one knee.  We lost that game 7 to 10.

Oregon Alumnus Dan Fouts (of San Diego Charger fame) was announcing a recent Pac-10 football game telecast when his colleague asked him, “Weren’t  you once a Duck?”  Dan answered, “I am a Duck.”