Rafer Johnson: Literally a champ, essentially a leader

By Art Spander

“Now the young world has grown old; gone are the silver and gold.” Lyrics from a song recorded by Frank Sinatra, among others. About the passing of time. About memories.

I thought of the words when I heard that Rafer Johnson had died at 86. Maybe because he was a man of both silver — if only once — and gold.

Also, because we were classmates at UCLA. He was a friend, as was his younger brother Jimmy, no less an athletic star, who became a Pro Football Hall of Famer as a defensive back with the 49ers.

Rafer, such a distinctive name. Such an unpretentious person.

A champion literally, with that narrow victory over C.K. Yang — another UCLA student — in the decathlon at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

A leader essentially, who would be elected student body president and in time be known for his global support of human rights.

The Johnsons were from Kingsburg, some 25 miles from Fresno. As was Monte Clark, who went to USC, played in the NFL and in 1976 was 49ers coach.

Sports were a way of life in the San Joaquin Valley, the sons of farmers and oil workers winning games and fame. Bob Mathias, a two-time Olympic decathlon champion, was from Tulare; Frank Gifford, the football great, was from Bakersfield.

No television, no internet. Kids played. And studied.

College campuses were quiet. As did others at UCLA, Rafer went to class. Unlike most others, he went on to sporting greatness.

Not as a forward on a middling Bruin basketball team in 1959 — Denny Crum, who would go on to coach Louisville to two NCAA championships, was a teammate — but as a sprinter and long jumper. 

Track and field was prominent in the days before the Giants and Dodgers moved to California. Johnson did have that silver from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and was involved in school activities.

Still, he never big-timed anyone, particularly a sports writer from the school newspaper, the Daily Bruin. You’d see him around campus in what was the unofficial attire of the era, a white shirt with a sweater draped over his shoulders. He was humble. He was purposeful.

The passing of others is a reminder of our own mortality. We exist in our own fantasies, cushioned against reality. When in 2016 the death of Arnold Palmer was announced, a well-known golfer who idolized Palmer told me, “I thought he would never die.”

It’s been a tragic few months for sports. We've lost Tom Seaver — another from the Central Valley — Joe Morgan, Paul Hornung, Bob Gibson, Diego Maradona. Now Rafer Johnson.

I last talked to him four or five years ago. It was at halftime of a UCLA basketball game at Pauley Pavilion, just a couple of alums discussing the state of the team and the state of the world.

NCAA championship banners, won after both of us had graduated, hung from the beams. Rafer didn’t have anything to do with those, although he played for John Wooden decades earlier.

Rafer’s contributions to the school and society are of a different type.

He was at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. in June 1968 when Robert Kennedy was shot, and he leaped in to help capture the assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.

He was chosen to carry the torch into the stadium and climb the steps to the rim of the Coliseum, lighting the permanent torch to start the 1984 L.A. Olympics.

UCLA would have sports heroes such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Troy Aikman and Evelyn Ashford.

But there has never been anyone like Rafer Johnson.

Nebraska plays a bruising game against Bruins

By Art Spander

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — This is the way to win a football game, the old-fashioned way, the effective way. You get the ball and run it through the other team’s defense. You gain yards, you score points and, perhaps most importantly, you never give the opponent the ball. Or a chance.

Stanford plays that style of football. USC plays that style. And as we — and UCLA — learned on a chilly night-after-Christmas, Nebraska plays that style. Crunch, smash, dash, flash. And now and then, throw a pass.

Nebraska had a 5-7 record but made it to the Foster Farms Bowl because of academic progress. UCLA was 8-4 and had a freshman sensation quarterback. But the Bruins couldn’t stop Stanford. Or USC. And on Saturday night, with a defensive line far too light and coaching decisions far too incorrect, they couldn’t stop Nebraska, which won the Foster Farms Bowl, 37-29.

You know the adage. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. But Saturday night at Levi’s Stadium, where the announced crowd was 33,527, these stats were all too truthful. The Cornhuskers rushed for 326 yards. The Cornhuskers had the ball just over 38 minutes out of the total 60.

“We’ve got to get bigger and stronger,” said UCLA coach Jim Mora, stating the obvious. “So we can be competitive against teams like this or Stanford or USC. But it’s a bit of a catch-22 in our (Pac-12) conference, because so many teams play spread.”

UCLA, ending the year with consecutive defeats, was merely spread out. They got bulled and trapped and, every now and then, tricked. “We knew the team we could be,” said Mike Riley, in his first year at Nebraska after a 12-year run as head coach at Oregon State. “This game gave us a chance to prove it.”

The Huskers proved it solidly and demonstratively, if somewhat slowly. After a fumble deep in UCLA territory and a couple of Josh Rosen touchdown passes, Nebraska trailed 21-7 roughly halfway through the second quarter. But then the domination began.

Nebraska, in order, got a touchdown, a touchdown — and it was 21-21 at halftime — a touchdown (with a blocked PAT), a field goal and a touchdown. The Huskers, down by 14, suddenly led by 16, 37-21. As they love to say on TV, 30 unanswered points. Wow. Or for UCLA, woe.

Rosen was harassed. He had gone a stretch of 245 passes without an interception in the middle of the season. He was picked off twice by USC in the Bruins’ one-sided loss to the Trojans and then twice more Saturday night.

“We didn’t do enough on offense,” said Rosen, “to keep our defense off the field. Nebraska ran 81 plays.” To UCLA’s 57.

Rosen is a drop-back quarterback. Nebraska’s Tommy Armstrong Jr. drops through you. He’ll hand off. He’ll carry (10 times for 97 yards) and, when needed, he’ll pass (12 of 19 for 174 yards and a touchdown). He’s mobile and agile. And getting blocks from a two-tight-end formation that flummoxed the Bruins when it didn’t overwhelm them, he became the offensive player of the game.

Rosen was 26 of 42 for 319 yards and three touchdowns.

A few days ago, Mora warned what Armstrong was capable of doing, and the UCLA head coach proved an all-too-accurate prophet.

UCLA, as it did in other games this season, made critical penalties, two unsportsmanlike calls that kept Nebraska drives alive. If you are unable to keep a team from pounding you, the worst thing to do is to respond by hitting someone out of bounds.

Yet, the Bruins did have ball and two chances to score late, but Ka’imi Fairbairn, who kicked a 60-yard field goal against Cal, missed a 46-yarder and at the end Rosen was intercepted in the end zone.

“It’s a disappointing loss,” said Mora. “We struggled against the run. We are light on defense, and they took advantage. They did a nice job.

“We fought our butts off, but (Nebraska is) a really good front out there to go up against. It starts with us as a staff, taking a hard look at ourselves, how we teach, the structure of our offense and defense, our drills, our strength and conditioning.

“I have a lot of respect for Nebraska. They beat Michigan State. They are a good football team.”

For sure, they are better than UCLA.

‘UCLA now runs L.A.’

By Art Spander 

LOS ANGELES — They were in separate rooms — well, a room for one, a tent for another, the coach unsure of his future, particularly the way his USC team played against UCLA, the quarterback unsure of his future, particularly the way UCLA played against USC.

The game didn’t mean much, not compared to Auburn-Alabama, not compared to Ohio State-Michigan, but then again it meant everything, this Bruin victory over the Trojans, 35-14.

“This win,” said the quarterback, UCLA sophomore Brett Hundley, “really validates what we did last year. You can wear your UCLA stuff proudly now. UCLA now runs L.A.”

An overstatement, an exaggeration, an emotional outburst. And well understood.

There at the other end of the Coliseum, the oversized replica jerseys of the six USC Heisman winners, spread out on the stairs below the glowing fire of the Olympic torch.

There on the walls of the tunnel that leads from the locker rooms to the field, the huge painted tributes to Trojan national championships and All-Americans.

It’s been a USC town, Los Angeles. Even with eight straight Bruin wins in the 1990s. Hadn’t the Trojans won 12 of the last 13 from UCLA before Saturday night? Hadn’t the Trojans won seven straight from the Bruins at the Coliseum?

Now the streak is severed. Now UCLA, 9-3 overall, with a quarterback who is going to consider entering the draft — even though he’s not ready — has won at USC’s home after in 2012 winning at its own home, the Rose Bowl.

A non-sellout crowd of 86,037 was there, the majority USC partisans who glumly began to file out with five minutes to play, cheers from the small UCLA group painful to their ears.

Not since 1997 had UCLA won at the Coliseum, and nobody in blue, players or spectators, was going to leave quietly. Some didn’t want to leave in any manner.

“This is a big win for us,” said Hundley.

How big a loss it was for USC (9-4) is yet to be determined. Under interim coach Ed Orgeron the Trojans had won five straight and six of seven. His players are so intent in having him named permanent coach that moments before kickoff they formed a circle, an “O” for Orgeron, to show their support. Had USC won, he would have had the job. He still might have the job, but the defeat was a negative.

“It’s our worst performance since we’ve been back together,” said Orgeron, a roundabout way of saying since he had been elevated to the position at the end of September, replacing Lane Kiffin.

“We weren’t able to run,” he conceded. “We couldn’t stop Hundley on the quarterback draws. We tried everything. We started blitzing; they started sprinting past the blitzes. Nobody played well enough tonight to beat a rival team, and that was my responsibility.”

His counterpart, Jim Mora, can take responsibility for bringing UCLA out of the sporting wilderness. Mora took control before the 2012 season, and while the Bruins are far from what he wants — they haven’t beat Stanford, they couldn’t slow Arizona State — UCLA Mora is 2-0 against USC.

“The stuff he brought to the team,” said Hundley, who in his own way brought plenty of stuff, “and the way he flipped around against USC, 2-0, the aura of the program has changed. Everything’s changed, and we’re seeing it.”

What Mora saw was a vision of the past.

“That was a heck of a game and a lot of fun,” said Mora. “It reminded me when I was a kid coming here when my dad was coaching at UCLA (as an assistant in 1974) and watching both teams in their home uniforms.”

That, certainly, was a great part of the game, allowed, finally, by the Pac-12 and NCAA.

“I had flashbacks,” said Mora. “What a great night. Both teams were so competitive . . . to come in here on a Saturday night and get this win tells you where this program is headed.

“We’ve had some good wins. The Nebraska wins have been big. We beat Southern Cal last year. But this one, on the road and coming off the ASU game (a 38-33 loss eight days earlier), to come in here where they’ve won and where Coach O has done a great job, I’d agree this is our biggest win ever.”

Hundley ran for 80 yards net and two touchdowns, and passed for 123 yards net. UCLA had 396 yards to USC’s 314, but USC also had a 15-yard punt, and UCLA's Ishmael Adams had 130 yards in kickoff returns.

“It’s been a while,” said Orgeron, asked when the last time an opposing quarterback had played as well as Hundley did. “Especially a quarterback running the ball. It seemed like everything we tried, they countered.”

Orgeron said he had no idea about his future at USC.

“We set out to go eight weeks in a row, one week at a time, one game at a time,” he explained. “Obviously we are disappointed, especially when you don’t beat UCLA and Notre Dame. That is what a head coach at USC is supposed to do.”

The day the music died

By Art Spander

The radio in my TR4, a British sports car, couldn’t always be heard clearly over the noisy four-cylinder engine, but I sensed from the gravity of the announcer’s voice that something was wrong. I pulled over to the curb and turned up the volume.

“ . . . The president has been taken to Parkland Hospital in Dallas,” was the somber message. “We are awaiting word on his condition . . . ”

Fifty years ago, Nov. 22, 1963. America’s age of innocence was at an end. Camelot had fallen.

It was the weekend of the college traditionals, and the next day I would be covering the USC-UCLA game for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, a publication no longer in existence. I was driving to the office, three blocks from the Pacific.

I stopped. So did America.

John F. Kennedy, the 35th president, had been assassinated. And nothing would ever be the same.

In the half century that followed, other leaders would fall, the World Trade Center would be brought down with a massive loss of life, one horror after another. This was the beginning.

They still argue about the killing of JFK, still posit conspiracy theories, still insist it was more than a single shooter, still point out that everything we’ve been told and seen has either been fabricated or whitewashed. The New York Times the other day had a story and photo of the blood-spattered pink suit worn by Jackie Kennedy as she sat with her dying husband.

Fifty years ago the scenes were of the Texas School Book Depository, of Dealey Plaza, of a country in mourning and sport in a muddle.

The nation didn’t want to play. It needed to weep.

The Outlook was a p.m., a pure afternoon paper. The advance story for a Saturday afternoon game was Friday. The first edition was on the streets. I changed a few words, and the revision made it for the late editions. Then we waited.

The Big Six, as the conference of Cal, Stanford, USC, UCLA, Washington and Washington State was known, announced postponements. As did the Big Ten. As did the American Football League, which was three years from a merger with the NFL.

But not Oklahoma or Nebraska. Or any games of the NFL.

At first, it seemed as if USC-UCLA would be held, if without card stunts — remember card stunts? — or bands or any type of normal celebration. Just football.

But John McKay, then the Trojans' coach, was opposed. “I can’t believe you’d play a football game," he said, “where there was only half the enthusiasm.”

We didn’t. For a week.

I composed a story that only a few hours earlier never could have been imagined, about a game that was so important now so unimportant. Then I went on the streets, a reporter, and interviewed people whose disbelief was no greater than mine.

Color television was only for the wealthy in the early 1960s. Most of us sat, numbed, watching the repetitive images in black and white, the widow helped on to Air Force One, the caisson rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, the world leaders from Charles de Gaulle to Haile Selassie in the procession, 3-year-old John Kennedy Jr. saluting as the coffin moved past.

Pete Rozelle was the NFL commissioner and was unsure of staying the course, allowing the usual Sunday grouping of games to be played 48 hours later, or deferring to reality.

Rozelle, who died in 1996, and Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, had been classmates at the University of San Francisco. They talked. Although it was more complex than that, Salinger persuaded Rozelle that to play games as scheduled would provide a sense of normalcy and perhaps relief to a country desperate for both.

The teams played. Rozelle rued his decision. “It’s the one thing I would change,” he later said of his 30 years as commissioner. “If I could do it again, we wouldn’t play.”

The games were not televised. They were reported. And criticized. Pete Rozelle, more for his suspensions of Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, would be selected Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year.

The following Friday, Nov. 29, in a repeat of sorts, I created another advance story for the game, rescheduled for the next day, Saturday, Nov. 30, suggesting a 40-6 USC victory — hey, those were the Trojans of “Student Body Right” — but the final score was 26-6.

What do I remember about the game? Virtually nothing. It was anticlimactic. We had been through a torturous few days that for our generation would stay forever. As Don McLean’s song of the early 1970s would remind us, it was the day the music died.

Pac-12 still belongs to Stanford

By Art Spander

STANFORD, Calif. — Nothing has changed. The Pac-12 still belongs to Stanford. They lost a week ago, certainly, but nobody wins them all in college football, other than Alabama.

And if Alabama played the schedule of Stanford or USC or most notably UCLA, which was outmuscled Saturday by the Cardinal, the Tide would lose one or two every year.

Stanford was defeated on the road, at Utah, and the dream of the unbeaten season, which these days is almost impossible in the Pac-12, collapsed.

So Stanford did what teams from successful programs virtually always do after a loss. It won.

More than that, in whipping previously undefeated UCLA, 24-10, on a glorious autumn afternoon at Stanford Stadium, the Cardinal dominated. It offered the mental and physical supremacy of a program that embellishes the school’s academic standing.

Stanford used its bevy of 300-pound offensive linemen to wear down UCLA. Stanford utilized its aggressive defenders to befuddle UCLA quarterback Brett Hundley, who when he wasn’t being sacked (four times) was being intercepted (twice). Yes, an exaggeration, but not by much.

“This is really a difficult loss for this football team,” said Bruins coach Jim Mora. As if any loss is easy. UCLA now is 5-1, 2-1 in conference, while Stanford is 5-1, 2-1.

“Stanford,” conceded Mora, “showed us the toughest defense we have seen all year.”

A defense that held UCLA to 266 yards total (Stanford had 419). A defense that Stanford coach David Shaw said was determined to make the mobile Hundley stay in the pocket. A defense that limited UCLA to 74 net yards rushing.

The Stanford offense was effective, efficient. It couldn’t get the ball across the goal line in the first half, which ended in a 3-3 tie, but it got a message across to UCLA: We’re going to pound away, and in the second and third quarters you’ll be unable to respond.

Often too much is made of possession time, but not this game. Stanford had the ball 37 minutes 11 seconds, UCLA 22:49. That’s almost an entire quarter differential.

“We were in the game until the last turnover,” said Mora, alluding to Hundley’s interception with around 2:45 to play, after which Stanford drove its way 32 yards for the ultimate touchdown. Psychologically, perhaps, but not in actuality.

A school once known for finesse football, Stanford obviously changed the pattern, athletes and culture. And the results.

“We recruit tough-minded people, people that bounce back,” insisted Shaw, the third-year head coach who played at Stanford.

Somebody then referred to “body blows,” the running game inflicted on a less-sizable UCLA.

“That’s been our staple for a long time,” Shaw reminded.

Along with having an excellent quarterback.

A huge mural on the stadium tunnel wall artistically calls attention to “Quarterback U.” You think of Frankie Albert, John Brodie, Jim Plunkett, John Elway, of course. But Kevin Hogan, the man who took over last year and is handling the situation, along with the ball, deserves mention.

“I thought it was really solid,” Shaw said of Hogan’s performance, 18 of 25 passing for 227 yards and no sacks, plus 5 runs for 33 yards.

“We did a nice little no-huddle, which he orchestrated outstanding. Kevin knows if the middle opens up, he’s got the ball and takes off and runs . . .  We wanted to run the ball on third down. It was our game plan.”

Not in the plan, but gratefully accepted, was a leaping one-handed catch in the end zone of a Hogan pass by Kodi Whitfield, whose father Bob was both an outstanding offensive lineman at Stanford and a first-round pick in the 1982 NFL draft.

When asked about the catch, Shaw joked, “I would say genetics, but Bob is 6-foot-7, 335 pounds, so I don’t think it came from dad. It was just a phenomenal play. God bless Kodi.”

UCLA fans had been saying the same about Hundley, the sophomore quarterback, but Stanford had him flummoxed.

“Just trying gap integrity,” said Shaw, meaning defenders did not slough off assigned areas. “He still broke containment twice. He stepped out of two sacks, but he’s big, physically strong.”

Said Hundley, “Stanford did a really good job of bringing pressure. Not even blitzing but just using their front four defensive, Stanford’s a great defense. I give them credit . . .  Games like this you want to win so bad. That’s really all I can say.”

UCLA next plays Oregon, which, ranked second in the nation, has been able to beat every team in the conference of late — except Stanford.

“I’m not into statement games,” Mora insisted. “I don’t think any one game defines you.”

Maybe not, but this one proved Stanford still is the class of the Pac-12.