Marshall Duffield, Millennium Hall of Fame

Richard Dunn

Before television and the Internet, before the Lakers and Rams,

Dodgers and Angels, USC football was king in Southern California.

Fans who didn’t go to the games would sit by their radio and listen as

players like Marshall Duffield became household names and legendary

figures.

USC gridiron standouts were so exalted back then, their company was

sought by Hollywood celebrities -- themselves making a transition from

silent to talking movies.

On the golf course, the late Duffield, a USC teammate and fraternity

brother of John Wayne (formerly Marion Morrison) and later a Newport

Beach neighbor of the silver screen icon, teed it up with folks like Bob

Hope, W.C. Fields and Bing Crosby.

For years, Duffield urged Crosby during 19th-hole discussions to bring

a satellite event to Newport Beach for the pros who didn’t make the cut

at the old Crosby National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach (now the AT&T;).

One toasty day, Crosby said yes and Newport Beach changed forever with

the Crosby Southern Pro-Am and Clambake, presented by Hoag Hospital’s 552

Club, which Duffield helped start. The golf tournament would last for 23

years and eventually merge with the Toshiba Senior Classic to become the

most philanthropic stop on the Senior PGA Tour.

Duffield and his close friend, Charley Hester, also a Hoag supporter,

had only one month to put the inaugural pro-am together, held in January

1975 at Irvine Coast Country Club (now Newport Beach). The first

tournament was a success with 72 amateurs and Fred MacMurray as a

celebrity player.

While Duffield’s legacy in Newport Beach includes enormous economic

elements, his status as a Roaring ‘20s football hero at Santa Monica High

and USC was nothing short of Ruthian, provoking some sportswriters to

christen him the next Red Grange.

A three-year letterman and two-time All-Pacific Coast Conference

quarterback (1929 and ‘30) for the Trojans, the fair-haired All-American

boy was the USC captain in 1930, when he led the Trojans to a 47-14

victory over unbeaten Pittsburgh in the Rose Bowl.

Duffield’s Trojans were coming off a 27-0 loss to Notre Dame in Knute

Rockne’s last game and were heavy underdogs against Pittsburgh. But

Duffield scored two touchdowns and passed for a third in the Rose Bowl

for fabled USC Coach Howard Jones.

He graduated with honors from USC and was nominated for a Rhodes

scholarship, but testing came on the same day as the Notre Dame game,

Dec. 6, 1930. “I couldn’t have deserted the team, even if I’d wanted to,”

he said, years later in the Los Angeles Times, of abandoning his plum

academic chance to study at Oxford University.

Duffield achieved 12 varsity letters in four major sports in high

school and once was given a parade to promote his candidacy as the

“Southland’s most popular athlete,” according to the Santa Monica Evening

Outlook, dated Nov. 9, 1925.

“My dad was very modest,” said his son, Duffy. “He’d turn over in his

grave if he knew I’d sold him out to the Daily Pilot.”

Duffield, who originally planned to attend Stanford, was often called

the “tow-headed flash” in newspapers during his celebrated prep career, a

reference often used to describe someone with blond hair.

At USC in 1928, sports columnist Sid Ziff once wrote: “Jones may find

(Duffield) to be a very marvelous quarterback. He is a strapping, big

youngster, powerful and steady. He of all men should make a great

ballcarrier and only a sophomore, too.”

Duffield (5-foot-9, 175 pounds) earned the Trojan Diamond Medal, USC’s

highest athletic honor, on June 6, 1931.

After USC, he dabbled in politics and briefly attended law school. He

worked as an assistant movie director and in 1933 married a starlet,

Dorothy Lee. They divorced two years later.

Before World War II, Duffield founded a distributing company, and

during the war he served as commander of the Navy minesweeper Starling,

shipping out four weeks after his marriage to Donna Maguire.

Duffield’s business became a huge success after WWII, then he sold it

and moved his family in 1959 to Newport Beach, where he expanded his

entrepreneurial portfolio and remained an avid sportsman, primarily as a

golfer and fisherman.

Duffield, a scratch golfer who played with five U.S. presidents,

developed Bayside Village and Rancho San Joaquin Golf Course in Irvine.

He was on the original founding board of Big Canyon Country Club, and was

also a member of Santa Ana Country Club, Irvine Coast and Newport Harbor

Yacht Club.

Also known as “Duff” and “Marsh,” he died of Alzheimer’s disease on a

golf course in Palm Desert on July 6, 1990.

The latest honoree in the Daily Pilot Sports Hall of Fame was survived

by his wife, Betty, and three children: son Marshall Jr. (or Duffy), and

daughters Susan and Francy.