Same Time Next Year for Smith

TUCSON —  Gene Fruge got a leg. Tim Ryan took the other. They went fast, like Thanksgiving drumsticks. And heave-ho, up went the USC football coach, jacked onto the broad shoulders of two 6-foot-5, 260-pound Trojan soldiers, who carried him away as cautiously and preciously as if bound back to Troy, bearing Helen.

On his way home Saturday, Larry Smith felt better than he looked. His shirt was soaking wet. His hair was plastered to his head. The coach’s own men had ambushed him, after USC’s 24-3 Rose Bowl-securing conquest of Arizona, with a bucket of liquid refreshment. They Gatoraded the guy. He felt icky and sticky.

“Remember when your kids are 2-years-old and they spill Kool-Aid all over you?” Smith asked, pinching the fabric of his soggy shirt with his fingers. “That’s how this feels.”

Of course, that’s not the only way it feels.

“Feels great,” he had to admit.

Smith was carried off this field before, on Arizona’s side of it, after very pleasant victories over Arizona State and occasional other opponents of years gone by. This might be the part of the profession that coaches value most, the sensation of being hoisted onto the shoulders of their players, placed on a human pedestal for all to see. It shows love. It shows admiration. It shows respect. Most coaches live for these things.

At 50 and at the top of his game, Larry Smith is liking this feeling more all the time.

He’s got it down pat by now, that’s for sure. He knows the drill. For three seasons, Smith has been USC’s head man, and for the third time he is headed for Pasadena’s swinging New Year’s Day party. You can’t do much better than that. Call up that Rose Queen and tell her she’s got another date. Larry Smith is fast becoming the Rose King.

“He’s a great football coach,” Ryan said. “He’s a champion.”

Yes, he is. Now, only one bonus could make him more of a champion. That would be if the Trojans could win one of these Rose Bowl things for him. Then, Larry Smith’s college coaching life would be complete. Not over, but complete. To ride off on the muscles of his players on the first day of 1990, now that would be a thrill. Maybe even he could outcoach Michigan’s Bo Schembechler, for whom he once served. Might as well dream big.

“I wouldn’t say it’s an obsession, winning the Rose Bowl,” Smith said. “It’s very important, but it’s not an obsession. It may seem like an obsession sometimes. You certainly work obsessed-wise when you’re preparing for the game. But playing in the Rose Bowl is an honor, it’s a privilege, it’s a right, and it’s a great opportunity for a bunch of deserving young guys. That’s enough.”

They want this one, the upperclassmen do. Since Smith is 0-2 in Rose Bowls, then obviously so are some of them. And seeing as how 21 of 22 Trojan starters Saturday are seniors or juniors--all but the quarterback--you could hardly expect these people to be satisfied with just another conference championship, impressive as that may be.

Yet the simple fact that USC keeps getting to Rose Bowls--well, hey, like the man says, that’s enough. A cheerleader was dancing Saturday with a rose clenched in his teeth, and the band was swinging and swaying long after the game, and a traveling assortment of fans kept chanting “Rose Bowl, Rose Bowl” betwixt more colorful comments that concerned UCLA. All in all, it was a USC football lover’s favorite way to spend an afternoon.

As for Larry Smith, he got up at sun-up and went for a jog in his old neighborhood. By 6:30 a.m., he was running around, seeing familiar sights. Four months into this decade, Smith accepted the coaching job at Arizona and moved his family to this cactus-lined town. His son Corby, now a quarterback at Loyola High in Los Angeles, was 6 or 7 then, only a few years removed from spitting up Kool-Aid on Dad.

The coach parted company with Arizona in 1987 when USC called, and the parting was not totally amicable. There was resentment on some fronts that he had not properly said goodby, and that of all the football teams he had to go coach, why did it have to be those conference enemies from USC? Smith was even hanged in effigy at one point, and was still the subject of an insult or two as Saturday’s game drew near.

“Three years seems like a long time,” Smith said afterward. “But there’s a part of me still here, and there always will be.”

He won’t soon forget this return engagement, the way Larry Wallace took the day’s first punt and ambled 29 yards with it, the way Cannonball Ervins took the quarterback’s first handoff and propelled himself 50 yards with it, the way John Jackson kept his tippy-toes inside the boundary stripe and latched his sticky fingers onto a 24-yard pass, the way Junior Seau spent more time in the Arizona backfield than the Arizona backs.

The players got everything right, right down to the soaking of the coach.

Smith sniffed his shirt.

“Hey, smells pretty good,” he said.

Like roses, Larry. Like roses.