Former UCLA football coach Terry Donahue set standards that are tough to beat.
Coach’s underdog ferocity fueled UCLA football team’s success
J.D. Morgan, the UCLA athletic director, had just given Terry Donahue the head coaching job. Now he was explaining it.
“You don’t really mature as a coach until you’re 40,” Morgan said.
Donahue later said, “I didn’t know what to think about that. I was 32.”
The 1976 Bruins opened with a nationally televised Thursday night game against Arizona State, which was ranked No. 3 and tilted the field with NFL-bound thoroughbreds.
UCLA won, 28-10. Donahue would win 150 more games in the 20 years before he resigned, all with the same squinty insistence that a 195-pound nose tackle showed in a Rose Bowl against Michigan State.
He cultivated such underdog ferocity with such monstrously talented players that the Bruins finished in the top 10 five times between 1982 and 1988. The wider the shoulders, the bigger the chips.
He died Sunday night, two days after his enormous inner circle was told it was coming. Forever young, he becomes a nostalgic figure, harder for UCLA to replace than John Wooden.
Who remembers a UCLA football team that rolls a shutout at Ohio State, wins at Michigan, wins at Tennessee, wins three Rose Bowls and a Fiesta Bowl in a four-year period and wins eight consecutive bowls overall?
“In 1982 and 1985 and 1987 I felt we could have won a national championship if things had turned out just a little different,” said ex-quarterback David Norrie.
Who can expect assistant coaches like Bob Field, Tom Hayes, Homer Smith, Don Riley and Greg Robinson to stay for at least eight years apiece?
Troy Aikman, Kenny Easley and Jonathan Ogden went from that cramped practice field to the NFL and then to the Hall of Fame.
“If he hadn’t had the overdose, (safety) Don Rogers would easily have gone to Canton with them,” said Norrie.
Rogers was from Texarkana, Ark., Easley from Chesapeake, Va., Ogden from Washington, D.C. Donahue sold UCLA football from coast to coast.
Yet there was always room for ambitious walkons like Mike Sherrard, who came to Westwood looking up at receivers Cormac Carney, Jo-Jo Townsell and Dokie Williams. By the end, he was playing with Flipper Anderson, Michael Young and Karl Dorrell, until he broke his collarbone.
“I’m lying on the table at halftime and Coach comes over to see how
I’m doing with the news,” Sherrard said. “That was just how he was. He was training us to be men.”
“He believed in the proper balance, not getting too high or low,” said ex-quarterback Tom Ramsey. “I’ve worked in the outside world for 40 years and I’ve never had a boss like Coach. When you expect success and you’re coached for success and you achieve success, that’s the trifecta. The text messages I’ve gotten from people today would blow you away.”
Donahue went to Mass every morning, usually with Angelo Mazzone, a student manager when Donahue played. He inherited a fellow named Bow-Wow to whom he gave an office when the football staff moved upstairs in the Morgan Center. Bow-Wow was Donahue’s driver, from Westlake to campus.
“Then one day he asked me, ‘Did you know Bow-Wow doesn’t have a license?’ ” said Al Scates, the men’s volleyball coach and a forever friend.
No UCLA football coach is defined without USC, which Donahue usually called “Southern Cal” just for annoyance value. He lost his first four games against USC. He wound up 10-9-1.
In 1992, the Bruins were down to quarterback John Barnes, who had transferred from Western Oregon and UC Santa Barbara and, on the depth chart, was lower than the footnotes. Donahue tried to relax the Bruins by wearing an earring to practice, borrowed from office manager Jolie Oliver.
They trailed USC 31-17 in the fourth quarter and somehow won, 38-37, after Barnes and J.J. Stokes connected for a 90-yard touchdown.
Circumstances began to gnaw at Donahue. He wondered if the Bruins would ever modernize their fields or their offices. He resigned in 1995 to join the CBS broadcasters, later became the 49ers’ general manager and seriously discussed the Dallas Cowboys’ coaching job with Jerry Jones, who wanted to get Donahue cheap.
Later, Donahue organized a camp for passedover high school and junior college players and paid for college coaches to scout them. “It’s the Wal-Mart of college football,” Donahue said. Mostly it was an offering from the heart.
Through it all, Donahue regretted leaving UCLA almost as much as the beaten-up UCLA fan base does now.
But this isn’t the day to pile on successors who didn’t succeed. It is the day to realize that Donahue’s secret wasn’t just getting past 40 but taking all those Bruins with them, to all the places they went.