Game Left His Spirits Flagging

Well, nobody ran the wrong way. But it did have its moments.

Nobody came off the bench in the closing minutes a la Doyle Nave to score the first points scored all year against an opponent and beat them, 7-3.

It wasn’t the Vow Boys of Stanford, who swore never to lose to USC again and they didn’t--if you consider losing the Rose Bowl game to Columbia an improvement. Those weren’t the Four Horsemen out there, as it was in ’25 when they paid their lone visit to Pasadena on New Year’s.

But if you came into the 83rd Rose Bowl game in the last three minutes Wednesday, you would have thought you had made it to the football version of World War III, as exciting a 180 seconds as you will find in any bowl.

The rest of the game was somewhat less titillating. In fact, it had all the thrills of an arm-wrestle in International Falls. It was what the fight mob would call an “agony” fight, a match full of clinching, dancing out of reach, minimal damage inflicted. Or it might be said to resemble a 2 a.m. barroom fight--not much offense. What you had was your basic Ohio State football--three yards and a cloud of dust. Woody Hayes football. Woody is gone but his legacy lingers, and Woody’s message was that three things happen when you put the ball in the air and two of them are bad. Not this day.

Ohio State had one quarterback who couldn’t pass and one quarterback who couldn’t run. Together they made a whole quarterback, but you can’t play two quarterbacks. Eventually, Ohio State won on the despised stratagem of the pass.

Here is how they finally put some show biz into the game: It was puttering along with Ohio State leading the Arizona States, 14-10, in the final quarter.

The game, really, was like your average airline flight--hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of wild excitement, not to say terror. Both teams had struck quickly for their scores, but most of the time the game was trench warfare--b-o-o-o-r-r-ing!

That’s when the game got out of its coffin like Dracula and wrought havoc.

Ohio State was--lethargically--driving toward what would have been a clinching score when, predictably, it decided to settle on a field goal.

Arizona State blocked the kick--and anarchy ensued for the rest of the game.

ASU marched then to what appeared to be the winning score when its quarterback pulled down a projected pass and flew into the end zone. He put his team ahead, 17-14, with only 1:40 on the clock.

Some day, someone is going to have to explain to me why a team that has all it can handle to put seven or 10 or even 13 points on the board in 57 minutes of play suddenly is able to score almost at will in the last minutes. One minute and 14 seconds was all Ohio State’s quarterback needed to put the winner on the scoreboard.

The game actually turned on an unfortunate or gallingly inconclusive note--a most infelicitous way of deciding any important contest.

A pass-interference call is the most ambivalent of judges’ calls. The rules of football only inadequately lay down what the infractions are. You do not have to stand back and give a receiver all the leeway he requires to catch a ball. Neither can you mug him. I mean, choking him is out. So is pulling a knife on him, threatening to kill his family if he catches the ball. You should not trip him unless you can make it look like 1) an accident; or 2) his fault.

It’s the most unprovable of infractions. Even if they came up with DNA, Johnnie Cochran would have no trouble proving the official wrong and his client innocent of any wrongdoing. The penal code is too inexact.

In the sandlots where I played as a youngster, there was, of course, no such animal. You either caught the ball or you didn’t. Pass interference? Ha! Catch the ball, chump! The defender could undress you, if necessary. If you still had your head on, the play was legal. Catch the ball or shut up.

In the Rose Bowl on Wednesday, knowing they have tried to bring a little civility, not to say civilization to the feat of pass-catching, Ohio State’s quarterback, Joe Germaine, put ball after ball in the air with only seconds left to play. He knew two things: An incomplete pass takes no time to speak of from the clock--and an overzealous defender can be expected, with the game on the line, to resort to the tactics of a guy hiding in the bushes of Central Park.

Germaine got not one but two pass-interference penalty calls inside the Arizonans’ 34-yard line. The first put the ball on the 19-yard line, the second put the ball on the five.

Arizona State was thoroughly demoralized by these calls, however meritorious, and it was easy prey to the final touchdown pass, which the receiver caught untouched.

The officials had a vintage Rose Bowl. They called 19 penalties. The two they leveled in the final seconds were decisive.

“I can only hope they were sure when they made the call,” losing Coach Bruce Snyder said, shaking his head after the game. “Maybe they were.”

So, in sum, it might be a game not decided by the Four Horsemen or Doyle Nave coming off the bench or the Vow Boys. In a way, in the ballot for the top star of the game, I was threatened to write in a guy in a striped shirt. Along with Snyder, you just hope they didn’t run the wrong way, either.

* SWEET DREAMS

Arizona State’s loss almost guarantees that the winner of tonight’s Florida-Florida State rematch in the Sugar Bowl will win the national title. C4