Next up — the Bruins
UCLA drew the zingers from The Boz in 1986
The first time UCLA visited Norman for football, Brian Bosworth was there to dish out the zingers.
Brian Bosworth stayed relatively tame in the days leading up to UCLA’s first football visit to Norman. But then the Sooners spanked UCLA 38-3, and the Bruins became Bosworth’s bull’s-eye.
In the postgame interviews of Sept. 6, 1986, Bosworth came ready with a variety of zingers.
“Last year, we opened with a semi-doormat (Minnesota). And this year, we opened with a legitimate doormat.”
“That’s girls football,” he said about a play on which a Bruin complimented him on a tackle.
“I know I wouldn’t wear pastel blue. I’d transfer.”
No one will wear pastel blue Saturday on Owen Field, where UCLA plays the Sooners. The Bruins will be in their road whites. And no one will be talking like The Boz. No one anymore ever does.
Times indeed have changed. A star player with no regard for diplomacy or common decency or sportsmanship is a modern coach’s nightmare. Brian Bosworth would routinely send any 21st-century coach to the coronary care unit.
But Bosworth at Oklahoma, playing for Barry Switzer, in the mid1980s, was an unbridled linebacker who could and would say most
anything, all the while backing it up.
“I don’t know that he would have been able to do that at other schools, even then,” said Tim Lashar, a senior kicker on the 1986 Sooner squad. “Barry Switzer gave him an awful lot of latitude, and of course, he continued to try to push the envelope. I don’t think he could have done that at Penn State, or if Grant Teaff was his head coach at Baylor. Oklahoma was one of the few venues that would have allowed a personality to take over the way he did.”
Take over, Bosworth did, in the form of his alter-ego, The Boz, who became a national sensation as OU won the 1985 national championship. Bosworth won the Butkus Award as the nation’s top linebacker and was back in 1986, more brash and brave than ever before.
But even on a team of huge personalities, Bosworth wore on his teammates.
“Brian and I have talked about this,” said Spencer Tillman, a senior halfback in 1986 and not only a team leader during his OU days but a campus leader. “He was a great teammate in some ways, but he was also the worst of teammates. Probably the only people who appreciated that was guys who were in a leadership role.”
Tillman talked about his fellow fifth-year seniors, guys who arrived in 1982, when the Sooners were coming off a 7-4-1 season, OU’s worst in a dozen years. Veterans who had made a commitment to restore the Sooners’ glory and helped do so by 1984, when OU was Big Eight champion, and 1985, when OU was national champion.
Younger players, “you’re self-absorbed,” Tillman said. “You’re less concerned about it. Maybe drawn to his bravado.” But veterans committed to building something could grow weary of The Boz’s antics. Tony Casillas, an All-American as a senior nose guard in 1985, was particularly critical of Bosworth over the years.
Of course, no one ever disputed Bosworth’s ability to play linebacker or his effort on game days.
“It was a duplicitous kind of deal,” Tillman said. “You respected his playing ability, but you
understood not everybody was a superstar athlete. You needed to show up every day. Dependability is a great ability. Brian could miss some things. We needed everyone on board.”
Even apart from Bosworth, those Sooners were not some innocuous team. They were big personalities, led by their coach, who didn’t talk smack so much as he talked honest. Switzer didn’t try make the Kansas State game out to be as big as the Texas game. He let his players blossom.
Quarterback Jamelle Holieway was a California-cool quarterback with a fashion sense right off MTV. Tillman was a statesman; Tillman has been a network broadcaster in the 25 years since his NFL career ended, and Lashar says Tillman could have been a television personality as a college freshman. Tight end Keith Jackson was a big-hearted, big-talking man-child who, then as now, commanded every room he entered.
But all were in Bosworth’s shadow as the 1986 season began. All the talk was about The Boz, not the 35-point rout of the Bruins.
“With Coach Switzer’s personality, and a lot of people looked at us as a renegade team, it kind of fit into the same persona,” Lashar said of Bosworth. “But there probably became a point where he became bigger than we were.”
Bosworth’s showmanship — the smack-talk, the wild hair, the outrageous interviews, the invitations from Johnny Carson and David Letterman — never cost the Sooners on the field. His final two seasons, 1985 and 1986, the Sooners were 22-2, with both losses to the University of Miami, not exactly a team of straight-laced freckled faces itself. In fact, programs like Nebraska migrated toward renegade itself, trying to keep up with Oklahoma.
And for the record, Bosworth did not reserve his arrows solely for the Bruins. Texas, in particular, was ripped by The Boz. Heck, by 2005, Bosworth’s twin nephews were playing for UCLA, wearing pastel blue, and he had come around to the notion that the Bruins actually don’t look half bad on the gridiron.
The Boz still springs up from time to time. He has apologized for his antics
to Sooner football players from multiple generations and fell on his sword in the ESPN film about those wild days. But a few years ago, Bosworth also called for a coaching change, saying it was time for Bob Stoops to move on. Nobody listened, of course, but Bosworth broke his plate over such nonsense.
That’s part of the duplicity. A linebacker for the ages. A character that made life fun for Oklahomans of many generations. A pain in the butt for those who had to deal with the fallout when Bosworth would become The Boz.
Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at (405) 760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. You can also view his personality page at newsok.com/berrytramel.