Beginner’s Pluck : USC’s Ervins Quickly Has Established Himself as a Top Running Back for the Redskins

WASHINGTON —  Ricky Ervins, the Washington Redskins’ rookie running back from USC, stood behind the scrimmage line last week, minding his own business in the Atlanta game, when quarterback Mark Rypien called a draw-play audible.

“It surprised me,” Ervins said after practice the other day. “We only had four (running) plays in the (game) plan--and none of them were draws.”

Nonetheless, he welcomed the opportunity.

“I’d rather run a draw than anything,” Ervins said. “There are always so many lanes to stroll through.”

He didn’t stroll this time. Taking a quick look at the Falcons, who had three players on the line and eight in pass coverage, Ervins took off.

And an instant later, he was in the end zone after a 17-yard run, breaking up a scoreless game during the second quarter.

It was a play that said a lot about both Ervins and the new Rypien, who might be ready to take a place alongside the Buffalo Bills’ Thurman Thomas and Jim Kelly, the best in the league.

Rypien, like Kelly, is a big, powerful quarterback who runs the Redskin no-huddle offense almost as efficiently as Kelly runs his--although Coach Joe Gibbs enjoys play-calling too much to allow the no-huddle as a prime formation.

Ervins, like Thomas, is a running and receiving threat--although Thomas clearly is the most valuable non-quarterback in the league.

Rypien, who is both more aggressive and more alert than last year, as well as more successful, didn’t hesitate to call the game-turning audible.

It didn’t worry him that the play wasn’t in the game plan. And most assuredly, it didn’t worry him that Ervins, a rookie, might have missed it.

“Ricky’s a student of football,” Rypien said. “I knew he’d remember it.”

Said Ervins: “I never forget a draw play.”

The run helped Ervins gain 103 yards in his first playoff game.

It also helped put him in position to be a winner in his first conference championship game today against the Detroit Lions and Ervins’ idol, running back Barry Sanders, “a guy I’d rather watch than any other athlete,” he said.

Ervins, who in his USC days played in the Rose Bowl three consecutive times, is ready.

“In the pros, every playoff game is a Rose Bowl game,” he said. “Win, and you’re a winner forever. Lose, and it’s all over.”

If his season ends today, it will have been a big one. Overcoming Gibbs’ aversion to rookies, Ervins, playing more and more as the season wore on, finished with an average of 4.7 yards a carry and last week was on the field longer than the starter, Earnest Byner.

“What Ricky does best is, he turns little gains into big gains,” Gibbs said. “Coaches love guys who score touchdowns. They make you look good.”

Said O.J. Simpson: “Don’t forget, (Washington’s) is just about the most conservative running game in the league. But on a play like the draw-play touchdown, Ricky’s instincts make the Redskins look wide open.”

Ervins was the second-biggest media attraction this week at Redskin Park, where, before and after practice, there were more reporters and microphones and TV cameras around Rypien--but not many more.

At first sight, viewed across a practice field, Ervins appears to be a little kid who has wandered in to watch the big kids work out. He is barely 5 feet 7, and his 200 pounds are so evenly distributed that it’s hard to believe he weighs that much--until you hit him. Or he hits you.

Even up close, he has the look of an adolescent who decided only a week or so ago to put some hair on his face. It is pretty scraggly, belying his manner, which is direct, friendly and considerate.

He is wearing a blue Kansas City Royals’ baseball cap. Why?

“I like the color,” he said.

Blue. A gang color in Los Angeles. Also a UCLA color. But Ervins has never had much time for gangs or Bruins, and these days he only has time for football. It gets about 12 of his hours a day.

“Everybody says our offense is the most complex in the league, and trying to learn it, I’m sure it is,” he said.

The blocking assignments are hardest for a running back who seldom blocked until he met Gibbs.

“I’ll do anything in my power to get a person down,” Ervins said.

Blockers, however, are anonymous. It’s his production as runner and receiver that is about to make Ervins a celebrity.

But it hasn’t happened yet. On a recent day off, when his fiancee--Shawnese Bracy, a USC graduate--sent him to the store, Ervins was in the checkout line when the cashier noticed that he was wearing a Redskin shirt.

Looking at him, she smiled and said, “So you are a Redskin fan--I am, too. They are going all the way this year, you know.”

“I know,” he agreed, a bit lamely--as he tells the story now.

Ervins was born in Indiana, about 10 years too late to be a Heisman Trophy winner at USC. There, Simpson, Marcus Allen and others of the John McKay-John Robinson era all rode to fame on student-body right.

Coming in with Larry Smith, Ervins, who grew up in Pasadena, continued to spend his winters at the Rose Bowl, but it was a different offense. He even played fullback one year.

He was on Trojan teams with great personnel--Todd Marinovich, Mark Carrier, Junior Seau and many other stars--and as a junior he averaged 5.2 yards while gaining 1,395. But somehow, the spotlight that had beamed so brightly on Simpson and Allen was more diffused at USC in Ervins’ day.

In his senior year, Ty Detmer’s year, Ervins could have been heading toward the Heisman, conceivably, when he was injured at Ohio State during USC’s fourth game. He had gained 199 yards that day when he suffered a severe ankle sprain during the third quarter.

A seriously sprained ankle, the trainers say, can be worse than a broken ankle. And Ervins’ was. So there went his shot at the Heisman as well as the NFL’s first round. Nobody would even take him during the second. He went to Washington during the third round, but he regards that, not as a knock on his talent, but as a big break, because it united him with Rypien.

Later, he will make up some of the lost salary, he knows. He is earning about $500,000 now.

There was a time in his Pasadena boyhood when, to Ervins, 50 cents looked like a fortune.

“It was a hard life--one parent supporting three kids,” he said of the years when his father stayed on in the Ft. Wayne tire plant and he lived in California with his mother and two sisters.

Without a trace of nostalgia, he said: “It was almost like living in poverty.”

Always fast on his feet, he kept running away from the drugs that darkened his neighborhood.

“My drug of choice was sports,” he said.

And it still is. A sprinter in his school days, he still has acceleration, and his speed makes him what he is. That and his stature, which is the root of his agility and quickness. The finest running backs in the NFL today are all well under 6 feet: Sanders, Thomas, Ervins and Emmitt Smith.

If Ervins is the shortest of them all, it is only barely, and as a Gibbs employee he could be the luckiest.

There isn’t a better way for a running back to come into pro football than to divide a one-back role with Byner, a 1,000-yard runner again this year.

One of the league’s most selfless athletes, Byner, 30, befriended him last summer and has spent the season training Ervins, 23, as his successor.

One day, Ervins asked him: “Why are you doing this?”

Said Byner: “I want to win.”

They are doing fine at that.