COLLEGE FOOTBALL BOWL GAMES : There Was Trouble Brewing : But Senior Nose Guard Stu Gage Scored a Significant Victory at USC by Overcoming Alcoholism

Reflecting on his USC years, the Trojans’ biggest football player, Stu Gage, said, “I’m one of the lucky ones--I didn’t kill anyone.”

Gage, a senior nose guard who closes out his collegiate career in the Rose Bowl on Monday, wasn’t talking about football. He was talking about his battle with alcoholism, a battle he says he believes he has won.

Gage, 6 feet 4, weighs from 330 to 350 pounds. He looks like a guy who might occasionally enjoy a cold beer.

And at one time, he did. But not one. “Going out for a few beers” with Stu Gage once might have meant 20 beers, or more.

That was the old Stu Gage. The new one hasn’t had alcohol in 18 months.

Growing up in Sand Springs, Okla., a suburb of Tulsa, Gage had his first problem with alcohol his junior year in high school.

“My friends and I used to hang out at a club in Tulsa,” he said. “It was just something you did when you grew up there; we’d drink a lot of beer before we even got there.

“One night I was really drunk there, there were plainclothes cops and they busted me. They called my mom and dad, who came to get me. I was under 18, and I had to write a paper for a juvenile counselor, and that was it.

“My parents started keeping a tighter rein on me, but all that did was make me get better at hiding it.”

For a number of years, Gage said, he and his parents, Paul and Sharon Gage, were in denial over his growing dependence on alcohol. Paul Gage is a minister for the Restoration of Jesus Christ Church, now in Independence, Mo.

The years of denial came to an abrupt end early one Sunday morning in April, 1993.

Mike Barry, USC’s offensive line coach, got a 6 a.m. call from Xavier Suazo, USC’s football security chief.

He told Barry to meet him at USC’s security headquarters, where Gage was locked up.

There they found Gage, passed out on a cot, his clothing soiled with vomit and urine. He was barefoot.

“The cop didn’t want to let me in with him; he told me he was out of control,” Barry said.

“He was in kind of a sleepy stupor. I asked the cop to get me two big cups of ice water. Xavier and I got Stu up against the wall and I threw ice water in his face. He came to, but didn’t know who I was. He got mad and I thought he might turn on me.

“But we got him settled down, got him talking. Turned out he’d gone to some frat party the night before, started drinking, then got into a street fight. It took a whole bunch of cops to subdue him and bring him in.”

Gage had arrived at a crossroads in his life.

For the first time, he was made to realize he had an alcohol problem. And so were his parents.

“I called his mom and dad,” Barry said. “I’d had a kid at Colorado [where Barry was a line coach from 1987-1992] with the same problem. I told them flat-out their son had a drinking problem.

“They said: ‘Well, Stu sometimes has a little too much to drink. . .’ and I told them, ‘No, you don’t understand. . . . He’s a drunk. He can’t drink, ever. And you need to deal with this right now.’ ”

Barry got Gage enrolled in an outpatient program at Centinela Hospital Medical Center.

“I owe a lot to Coach Barry,” Gage said.

“He made me realize what was happening to me. He got me in a very good program at Centinela, where I got a lot of good one-on-one counseling.”

But Gage wasn’t quite finished with drinking.

“I did drink a little bit on five or six occasions after that, but I never got in trouble,” he said.

“Then I had a minor incident in Wisconsin [when he was kicked out of a friend’s house after drinking] because of beer, and that was it. That was 18 months ago, and that’s the last drink I ever had.

“I know now I can’t touch it, ever. I don’t even like being around it; I quit going to parties. Just thinking about drinking, the way I used to be, it almost makes me ill. It’s a blessing from the Lord, really.

“I see young people at SC starting off in that lifestyle like I did, and I try to talk to them about my experience. But it’s hard. I wouldn’t listen to anyone then, either. Being out of control and not realizing it . . . I hate to see that in anyone now.”

A university campus can be a dangerous place for an alcoholic, experts say.

Estimates are that as many as 15% of U.S. university students are problem drinkers.

“Fifteen percent wouldn’t surprise me, it is a serious problem,” said Dr. Ronald L. Alkana, a USC neuroscientist with a specialty in alcohol and drug abuse.

“When you define an alcoholic as someone whose daily physical, mental or social functions are negatively impacted by alcohol, or whose drinking brings them into contact with law enforcement, you’re talking about a lot of students.

“A university environment isn’t a great place to be for a problem drinker.”

In 1991, to 18-year-old Stu Gage, USC was a beer drinker’s wonderland.

On his recruiting visit, he got drunk.

“I thought SC was the greatest place I’d ever seen,” he said. “I went home and canceled all my other recruiting trips.

“After I was enrolled, the weekends were incredible. There were parties everywhere, and every refrigerator I saw was full of beer. I made sure I didn’t have any Friday classes so I could drink Thursday nights and spend Friday getting over the hangovers.”

Gage was drinking his way through his first couple of years at USC, then had a fateful 1992 weekend in San Francisco.

“I wasn’t on the travel squad that year, and I paid my own way to the Stanford game,” Gage said.

“The night before the game, I went to an area of San Francisco with a lot of bars and got in trouble. I don’t remember much about it, but I guess I got belligerent when the cops came. I never made it to the game.”

The next Monday, Gage was summoned to the office of Larry Smith, head coach at the time.

Smith suspended Gage for the final four games of the season. “He told me, ‘If this ever happens again, you’re out of here.’ And that was it.”

Smith had resigned by the time of Gage’s episode the next April.

Summing up his troubled early years at USC, Gage counts himself as a lucky guy.

“I owe a lot to a lot of people,” he said.

“Coach Barry and this coaching staff who reached out to help me, my family, all my friends who helped me, my hometown of Sand Springs. . . .

“I can see now, looking back, how alcohol even affected me academically. I was a marginal student when I got here. I do much better now. So many times, I’ve wanted to go back and start all over here, I’d have been a better player and a better student.”

Gage, who is on schedule to graduate in communications in the spring, began as an offensive lineman at USC, but John Robinson switched him to defense two years ago. He has played his best football as a nose guard in USC’s goal-line defense.

He would like a chance to play in the NFL, but doesn’t have high expectations.

More important, he takes a major step soon in his new life.

On Jan. 6, he marries Carmen Willey. He met his fiancee 18 months ago, at his father’s church.