You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
Another college football season is here.
As I watch USC take on the Rainbow Warriors, I think back to my first college football experience.
It was 1981 in the Los Angeles Coliseum.
It was late September, the 3rd game of the year. The Trojans were ranked number one in the country and number two Oklahoma was in town to duke it out.
The lights were on, the stadium was packed. The band was playing. Traveler was running around the track. Tommy Trojan was out on the field wielding his sword.
I remember being conflicted as I sat there. For some reason, growing up in California, I was a closet Oklahoma fan. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was Billy Simms. Maybe Barry Switzer. I’m not sure.
I was 18 years old, sitting in the USC section.
The game was close. The crowd was bonkers. It was late in the 4th period and Oklahoma was winning.
That’s when future Heisman Running back, Marcus Allen scored his 2nd td of the night. What a workhorse.
John Robinson could have tied the game with a field goal. Not Johnny R. He goes for it. I remember the crowd pulsing. I was swept away in the emotion. I remember the moment I became a life long Trojan. It was this moment. With 3 seconds to go, John Mazur scrambles and finds Fred Cornwell in the end zone. TD!
:02. :01. GAME OVER!
28 – 24 USC WINS A THRILLER
The crowd exploded. The parties raged. It was bedlam. I was introduced to big time college football on a national level.
I was carried away on a tidal wave of Trojan emotion.
Those Trojans led by Marcus Allen were a great football team. They ended up losing some conference games they should have won, but they beat UCLA in the Rose Bowl to end the season. I was there. It was a party.
While the 1981 season was electric, most of the 90’s were barren. These were the Ted Tollner years. The USC teams of the 1980’S mostly played like carp on a dock, flapping, sucking for oxygen, waiting to die.
These teams were lead by Sean “Wanna See My Junk on my cell phone” Salisbury. Google his name and ESPN and cell phone and see what pops up. You’ll be surprised.
Salisbury was a highly recruited QB out of H.S. but he never amounted to much more than a serviceable player, and an all around Trojan douche.
I was in a fraternity with Salisbury. He was pretty full of himself. He would walk around the frat house during parties and say, “I’m Sean Salisbury, you wanna sleep with me?”
Girls just looked at him like “did you really just say that?”
While Salisbury was a jerk off. There were plenty of other ball players I pledged with. Kennedy Pola, Joe Cormier, Rex Moore, Troy Richardson.
I remember throwing the ball with Jack Del Rio, now the coach of the Jacksonville Jags. Jack was a good guy, who periodically got into trouble for fighting.
Jack and I dated the same girl for a while. That was interesting.
The thing I remember about Jack was how damn strong he was. He was like Hercules. I was playing catch with him in the front of the frat house one night and he literally broke my ribs with every toss.
WHUMP. WHUMP. THUD.
I tried not to cry like a little girl but my nipples were ripped off my chest. It hurts when your nipples are obliterated by a speeding pig skin.
From 1982 till Pete Carroll came in, being a Trojan was a labor of love.
The coliseum holds over 90,000. I remember some games when you could hear crickets chirping. There were often more fans from the other team there. You know its empty when you can hear the coach yelling at his players at the top of the stadium.
It was so quiet during the Stanford game, I could actually hear John Elway’s passes whistle through the air. And I was 50 rows up. I could hear the ball hit his receiver in the chest and you could literally hear the man gasp as the air was knocked out of his lungs.
I turned to someone and said, “Damn this Elway guy throws the crap out of the ball.”
I remember being at the top of the coliseum in row 5 million armed with water balloons and a funnel-a-lator. That’s a funnel tied to surgical tubing.
It was September and the air was thick with smog and oppressive heat.
There were acres of open seats, so we stretched the tube an entire row and let it rip.
You know the games sucked when the fans stood with their backs to the field to watch us bombard people with water balloons.
I remember hitting one girl who pulled up her top to give us a better target.
Ah it’s good to be young and dumb and full of crazy!
I remember security rushing up the stairs and throwing us out of the stadium to wild cheers from our frat brothers and a group of well groomed sorority girls.
I remember buying a 2 dollar scalper ticket and getting right back into the game.
Within a few minutes we were right back at the top of the coliseum launching water balloons again, to the cheers of the crowd.
I remember the same security guy huffing and puffing walking up to row 5 million and saying, “Didn’t I just throw you out?”
“Yeah.”
The guy laughed and said, “Give me the funnel.”
He walked away, perhaps knowing I’d be back if he threw me out.
I remember college road trips. Well kind of. There was Berkley and Stanford and of course the Rose Bowl.
There’s nothing like screwin a Bruin they say, and beating UCLA was pretty much what the season boiled down to for me. Notre Dame is a big game, but it doesn’t compare to UCLA.
If you don’t live in L.A. you don’t get it. You have two nationally recognized football programs in the same city 15 miles from one another. It’s like two jungle cats trying to use the same litter box. It can get crowded and angry.
The differences between the two schools is remarkable.
USC is in the ghetto. Grafiti and homeless people are everywhere.
UCLA is in West Wood where it is clean and green and the bums where Polo Cologne.
USC’s mascot is a ferocious warrior. UCLA’s mascot is a female bear with an apron. Our Mascot is a regal horse that gallops proudly around the track. Their mascot is a bear in a dress. Are Bruin fans baking cookies before games? Are they trying on mascara during tailgate parties. Do they put lipstick on their ass and say climb aboard? WTF kind of mascot is this?
USC V UCLA is a city wide event. 3 million people choose a side. You’re either baby blue or Cardinal and Gold. TV stations gear up for the best coverage. The crips choose UCLA the bloods take the Trojans. It’s serious as a heart attack cuz!
On game day, people wore school shirts with slogans dreamed up by HUSTLER MAGAZINE.
Imagine an old woman with a walker wearing a shirt with a Bruin bent over and a Trojan mounting the Bruin.
The slogan: There’s nothing like screwin a bruin.
Can you imagine your grandma wearing this shirt? Well she’s someone’s grandma, and that is the shirt she wore.
Is nothing sacred?
That was the nature of the USC v UCLA rivalry week.
What I remember is the school wrapping Tommy Trojan, the statue in the middle of the campus, tighter than a 6 foot condom.
Why?
Crazy Graduation photo 1985
Because in years past, UCLA douche bags commandeered a helicopter and flew over Tommy Trojan with paint or animal feces or both, and dumped it on top of Tommy’s metallic head. It was disgusting. This was all pre-911 and air space over rival mascots was not tightly regulated.
I am not sure what we did to their stupid bear, but I’m sure it was something equally as noxious.
I haven’t even talked about the Notre Dame games. Probably because in the 80’s N.D. treated USC games like sailors in Tokyo treat liberty.
John Robinson’s USC teams beat Notre Dame my first two years. But then the Ted Tollner regime began and we rolled over and scratched our bellies. N.D. beat us in the 80’s like Eskimos beat baby seals.
But the memories I have are all wins. Tailgates full of beer bongs spiked with tequila at 10am. Ribs on the bar-b-que. I remember good friends and gaggles of sorority girls so hot, your eyes burned. I remember a coliseum where beer was sold to anyone. I saw a ten year old kid sporting a tray of big beers once. You would never see that in today’s NCAA world. How does a 10 year old kid buy beer? I went to the Big 12 championship game last year and the hardest thing you can buy is Mountain Dew.
I remember working for 2 years in the press box at the Coliseum. I ran the the video board, running replays. I was the guy who put up graphics like first and ten or DEFENSE. It was fun. On Saturdays we did Trojan games. On Sundays it was the Raiders.
What a difference in the crowd.
If USC was academia and BMW’s and Polo shirts, then the Raiders were prison tats, shivs, and foul language.
Raiders games were a filthy sea of Silver and Black. Fights broke out in every section of the stadium, and this was in the parking lot.
The L.A. Raiders fan base was more soiled than the inside of a toilet. It was as if the county jail bussed its most devious denizens to the coliseum. Raiders games were gang bangers and pimps and people who should have been wearing straight jackets all gathering in one steaming cauldron of stink.
While I don’t get to many games anymore, I can say that I have been to arguably, two of the greatest games ever played.
The first was in 2005:
USC at N.D.
USC came into the game with a 27-game winning streak. USC was defending national champions and was ranked first in the nation.
In the pre-game warm-ups, the Irish wore their regular blue jerseys. Then fat boy Charlie Weis brought out his leprechauns wearing green.
The crowd went wild, but it only lasted for a minute. You see the Trojans were on the other side of the ball wearing cardinal and gold and they had Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush.
The Trojans won the game 34 – 31 on a play where Reggie Bush pushed Matt Leinert over the goal line.
It was unbelievable. We were sitting on the fifty yard line, in the middle of the ND section. The crowd hated us, even though we cheered with quiet enthusiasm.
At the end of the game, as we hugged one another and high fived, an old ND man in the row behind us just started hollering:
“JEWS. JEWS. JEWS.”
I looked at him and wondered what the hell he was even talking about.
I guess that TD Jesus in the end zone is serious business.
We moved down to the end zone and celebrated with the band and the players as ND fans dragged their sorry asses out of their stupid stadium yet again.
I was also at the greatest game ever:
PASADENA, Calif.
ROSEBOWL 2006 NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME
Vince Young was a man among boys as he single handledly willed his Longhorns over the Trojans 41-38 in arguably the greatest game ever played.
I have watched this game many times since. There were so many Trojan mistakes. Reggie laterals to no one. Lendale’s 4th and 1 failure. Pete Carroll calling a time out on a 2 point conversion at the end of the game rather than save it for the final drive to set up for a field goal that would have tied it.
I relive this horror over and over. I remember my wife being so drunk she was like a foul mouthed sailor cursing at anything in burnt orange.
I remember the RoseBowl exits and stairs swelling with Texas fans singing “The Eyes of Texas are upon you”. We were trapped in this arena that felt like a moist arm pit of crazy. I remember just wanting to get out.
I remember feeling hollow for weeks. Even years. I hate that slow motion shot of Vince Young scampering into the end zone and the low angle shot of all that confetti falling on his raised hand. I hate it I hate it I hate it.
College Football is back.
It means the Earth has once again circled the sun safely in an orbit of celestial time keeping. It means fall is coming and white pants and shoes will soon be banished to closets across the land. It means that bar room arguments will commence with esoteric rhetoric like is the SEC better than the Pac 10 and should we have a playoff? OF COURSE WE SHOULD. And who is the Heisman Trophy winner?
USC is on probation for the next two years. I am not sure what we are playing for beside pride and a chance for Lane Kiffin to say something stupid only to apologize for it later and say he was taken out of context.
That’s ok. it’s college football. And it’s crazy good.