Patton Stands Out in Name, Numbers : UCLA: Unwanted out of high school and still underrated, he has gotten better as Bruins have gotten worse this season.

UCLA’s most visible and most vibrant player and probably its most valuable, too--wasn’t even recruited by the Bruins.

In fact, hardly anybody recruited Marvcus Patton out of Leuzinger High School in Hawthorne.

A senior outside linebacker, Patton doesn’t hold a grudge for the seemingly glaring oversight, but the realization that he was virtually unwanted has never left him.

Patton won’t let it leave.

“When you have that feeling that everyone’s against you and they don’t think you can get it done, it gives you a little extra drive,” he said. “Being a walk-on, in a way, has been a little bit of an advantage because I’ve always felt that I had to prove myself.”

Patton, 22, long ago proved that he belongs in the Bruin lineup.

His play this season, however, has exceeded expectations.

UCLA publicists might be right when they describe him as “perhaps the most underrated outside linebacker in the nation.”

His consistency has been one of the few bright spots for the Bruins in a disappointing season that is 3-7 and counting.

With 22 tackles for losses, Patton is tied for the Pacific 10 Conference lead with USC’s more celebrated linebacker, Junior Seau, and his 11 sacks place him third in the conference behind Seau and Trojan tackle Tim Ryan.

Since such records were first kept in 1975, no UCLA player has made more tackles for losses than Patton, who also has been credited with hurrying 16 passes, causing four fumbles and making 95 tackles in all, which ties him for fourth among the Bruins.

He also has an interception.

“Under different circumstances,” Coach Terry Donahue said last month, “he’d really receive a tremendous amount of recognition and notoriety for his play.”

But with the Bruins enduring the worst of their 14 seasons under Donahue as they prepare to play USC Saturday at the Coliseum, Patton’s brilliant play has attracted scant notice.

Asked this week about Patton, a personnel director for an NFL team asked: “Who is he?”

It was much the same at Leuzinger, where Patton was the Pioneer League’s defensive player of the year and an All-Southern Section selection as a senior but was virtually ignored by college scouts.

Cal State Fullerton showed interest, but only San Diego State offered a scholarship.

Patton, who is 6 feet 1 1/2 inches, weighed only 133 pounds as a high school junior and only 165 pounds as a senior.

“It was difficult to project where he would play in college,” said Bill Rees, UCLA’s recruiting coordinator. “Would he be good enough to play in the secondary or ever get big enough to play linebacker? He was an in-between player.”

As a student, though, Patton was exemplary. “Even before he was in school, he was involved with books,” said his mother, Barbara. “He loved to read.”

Placed in an advanced academic program in grade school, Patton completed upper-division classes during his freshman and sophomore years in high school and met virtually every graduation requirement before he was a senior.

A longtime Bruin fan, he applied to UCLA and was accepted.

His educational expenses have been paid by the Los Angeles Police Memorial Foundation, which provides aid to the families of officers slain or disabled in the line of duty.

Patton’s father, the late Raymond Hicks, was a narcotics officer who was shot and killed during a raid in Inglewood 13 years ago.

Patton was only 9 when Hicks was slain and doesn’t remember much about him, but it was Hicks who gave him his unusual name.

It’s pronounced MARV-cuss and has caused him immeasurable grief . Almost everybody mispronounces it, believing that the extra letter is silent, and most believe that he has misspelled it.

“They take it upon themselves to think it’s a mistake,” Patton said of the banks that have eliminated the extra letter from his credit cards.

Even UCLA’s sports publicity office got it wrong until last December, when Patton was given a bolo tie by Cotton Bowl officials and mentioned in passing to the Bruins’ sports information director, Marc Dellins, that his name on the front of it was misspelled.

Dellins, he said, thought he was joking. Why had Patton waited until then to tell him?

“It’s no big deal,” he said.

Patton’s father named him after Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and warrior, but added the extra letter because he wanted him to be different.

It wasn’t until after his senior season at Leuzinger, though, that Patton, who is known as General to his teammates, first took on the look of a football warrior.

After the Olympians were eliminated from the Southern Section playoffs, he joined a gym around the corner from campus and began lifting weights in earnest, honing the V-shaped torso that he has today as a 222-pound senior.

“Everybody commented about his size and that just gave him more incentive to go after it,” his mother said. “They used to tell him how good he looked, and he just ate that up.”

Liking what he heard, Patton said he grew addicted to the iron.

He kept on lifting through the spring and summer and, only a few weeks before reporting to UCLA, he stood out during a South Bay all-star game.

Rees, who was there, knew the Bruins had a nugget.

“He played with great intensity,” Rees said of Patton, who added about 30 pounds after the previous football season. “He really showed a lot of athletic ability. He was all over the field.”

Patton continued to grow and improve at UCLA, but he was used mainly as a reserve last season behind starters Carnell Lake and Eric Smith, both NFL draft choices.

In his first three seasons at Westwood, Patton made 91 tackles, including one-half of a sack and five other tackles for losses.

Nevertheless, his goals for this season were 100 tackles and 15 sacks.

“Knowing that they were gone made me more aggressive,” Patton said of his former teammates. “I knew I’d be on the field all the time and finally get a chance to do what I really wanted to do.”

What he has done through 10 games is wreak havoc.

To almost everybody’s surprise, Patton may reach his goals.

“I think we all anticipated that he’d have a good senior year,” Rees said. “But, quite honestly, he’s had a great year. I’m surprised that he’s been so dominant.”

Patton is not.

“I’ve always felt that if I was on the field enough, I could do a lot.”