Boller Finally Finds Field of Dreams

The trip to the Rose Bowl comes from the Bay Area by plane, not Westwood by bus, as he originally had hoped. Kyle Boller, who once wanted to be one of the Bruins, now wants to beat them.

He doesn’t come alone. His father bought about 170 tickets for Saturday’s game to distribute among family and friends, some of whom are also longtime UCLA supporters. His California teammates can also offer daunting numbers, with the No. 1 sack unit in the Pacific 10 Conference and a come-from-behind victory over Arizona State, as opposed to UCLA’s recent come-from-ahead loss to Arizona State.

Boller is Cal’s starting quarterback as a freshman . . . and UCLA’s reminder. That’s the other thing about Saturday. Boller wanted to be a Bruin, but the Bruins wanted J.P. Losman. Losman took the scholarship but didn’t even stick around until fall practice. He ultimately transferred to Tulane because of the quarterback congestion as UCLA coaches shook their heads and passed around quotes from Losman about how he looked forward to battling for a job.

So Losman won’t be at the Rose Bowl. And Boller will be.

It’s not as if Boller was a lifetime Bruin fan or anything. He liked Notre Dame growing up. But by the time he was at Hart High in Newhall, and especially as a senior when he became the latest in a long line of star Indian quarterbacks, UCLA was his top choice. If the scholarship offer had come, he would have become a Bruin.

But it never came. The Bruins went with Losman, and Boller, who would have liked to have stayed close to family in Santa Clarita and Burbank and a sister playing volleyball at Loyola Marymount, gave other schools stronger consideration. Once he settled on Berkeley, hardly a cross-country trip, it seemed like a great fit, he said.

But now he gets to achieve a longtime desire. Not to play in Pasadena as the home team, but to play in UCLA’s home.

“I’ll be pretty juiced,” he said. “I can’t wait to get out there and play at the Rose Bowl. It’s been kind of a dream to play there.

“I’m not going to think about the UCLA coaches and how they didn’t offer me [a scholarship]. I’ll just be playing hard to win the game for Cal.”

Said friend Jerry Owens, a Bruin freshman receiver and All-Southern Section choice last season at Hart: “He’s a competitive guy, so he wants to win. But I’m not sure if he wants to beat UCLA extra bad. I think he wants to come down and show people how good he is in the Rose Bowl.”

UCLA Coach Bob Toledo offers no regrets about his recruiting decision, even now that Losman is gone. The same goes with the timing--backing off from other quarterbacks after getting an oral commitment from Losman the summer before his senior year, before Boller led Hart to the Southern Section Division III title and set a state record with 4,838 yards passing.

“Kyle Boller did not play quarterback as a junior,” Toledo said. “He was a safety. He didn’t really flourish until his senior year, and when you’re at Hart and you play quarterback you’re going to be pretty good because they run a run-and-shoot, throw-it type system. So the system provides an opportunity to be really good if you’ve got some physical ability. And he did. He just didn’t do it as a junior.

“So we had [summer] camp, to make a long story short, and there was question at that point that J.P. was a better quarterback. We were only going to take one. J.P. wanted to come. We did not offer a scholarship at that point to Boller. We would have recruited him, but we had to see what he was going to do. We liked what we saw in J.P. We had watched him as a junior. He had been in our camp and we knew he was going to be a good one, so we went with him.

“A lot of people say, ‘Why do you take a commitment so soon from a player?’ You think you’re going to be right. It’s like when you get married. You don’t think you’re going to be divorced. He divorced us, unfortunately, because he could have been a good quarterback.

“Everyone in this room, if you sat down and watched that camp of ours and you couldn’t have predicted the future and you said, ‘Right now, you can have J.P. or you can wait and see what happens later,’ you’d say, ‘Hey, I got the one I want. That’s the one I want to marry. I’m getting married.’ And that’s why we did what we did. I don’t look back. I’m sure Kyle Boller is going to be an outstanding quarterback. Right now, he’s playing like a true freshman. And if he was here or J.P. was here, they’d be backing up Cory Paus.”

Losman didn’t make the Bruins look bad with his play, not when he completed 59.5% of his passes as a senior at Venice or when he enrolled at UCLA early to compete in spring drills and flashed a powerful arm. They just didn’t expect him to bolt, before so much as a day of fall practice at the start of a season in which he might have become the backup quarterback.

Boller, meanwhile, became a starter in Cal’s third game, a victory over Arizona State on Sept. 25. He has completed only 41.5% of his passes for 122.4 yards a game, part of the reason Cal is last in the conference in passing. But he is only part of the growing pains--the Bears start a freshman and two sophomores on the offensive line, a freshman and a sophomore at receiver and a freshman at tailback. They are also 10th in the Pac-10 in rushing and scoring.

The chance to improve comes against a UCLA secondary that showed some improvement last week against Oregon but still has a long way to go. It also comes at UCLA.

Just not with UCLA.