COLLEGE FOOTBALL ’87 : COACHES, PLAYERS, TEAMS AND TRENDS TO WATCH THIS SEASON : DOUBLE TROUBLE : Having Your Cake and Eating It, Too . . . or, The Gordie Lockbaum Story

WORCESTER, Mass. â€”  Here’s a sociological snapshot: A year ago, the most visible college football player in the land was Oklahoma’s Brian Bosworth, a kind of Mad Max with an attitude.

He wore an earring, went out in the noon sun, and promised, by word and deed, to subvert everything you believed in. His Doberman pinscher ran to a far corner when he stooped to pet him. His hair was purple.

Today? Everybody’s darling is Gordie Lockbaum, of the Holy Cross powerhouse.

Lockbaum’s stolid mug might well have been lifted from a Norman Rockwell print, his story from a John R. Tunis book. He is the guy you’d vote least likely to wear jewelry about his head or otherwise tamper with a crew cut. His school puts his academic transcript--GPA 3.167--in the football guide. Favorite food? Book says mom’s meat loaf.

Perhaps, we stretch a point. But how else to acknowledge the overwhelming popularity of a Division I-AA player, somebody who may or may not have the gifts to even make an Oklahoma football team?

Here come ABC and “Good Morning, America,� People magazine, altogether 36 interviews in his first 10 days back on campus. These are different times. We need another hero, evidently. Another kind of game, certainly. Maybe the one Lockbaum plays.

Look at it this way. In the year since we first celebrated Brian Bosworth and all that was outrageous and, we thought, fun about football, the game has been characterized by cheating at SMU, greed in the premature signing with agents, drugs--steroids at the very least--astonishing arrogance as characterized by any Miami-related police action, and academic inadequacies just about everywhere.

Perhaps the backlash was being signaled on Jan. 2 when gloriously old-fashioned Penn State, a team whose players do not even wear names on their jerseys, overcame the bigger, better, brasher Miami Sound Machine for the national championship, in a game that took on all the important aspects of a morality play.

In that time even the Tide has turned (see: Bill Curry, Alabama).

And now comes Gordie Lockbaum, two-way throwback, from the Department of Too Good to be True. So good even his publicist blushes.

“Now, Gordie’s kind of a straight arrow,� he warns, just as Lockbaum is loping into view, stepping out of 1956, apparently. Licking an ice cream cone. Vanilla.

“Aw, geez,� the publicist sighs, stopped in his own tracks. It is a daunting thing for publicists when they cannot anticipate the pleasing innocence of even their own candidates.

Lockbaum, besides being a swell guy, of course had a hook going into all of this, in its way no less outrageous than Bosworth’s haircut. The team’s best defensive player his first two seasons, Lockbaum was pressed into emergency duty as a tailback his junior year. Of course, he didn’t give up defense; he simply played both ways.

The result was not simply effective from a football point of view, but from a publicity angle. When this was being done, Holy Cross was still thought of, when thought of at all, as the school whose football coach had hanged himself. Yet, from under this shadow emerged one of the season’s brightest stars.

What Lockbaum was doing was challenging everything about the game as played. The game had become complicated, too demanding. It was an age of specialization, players hand-tooled for specific roles.

And here was Lockbaum, in his team’s upset of Army, rushing 11 times for 40 yards, catching 4 passes for 73 yards, making 19 unassisted tackles. Of Holy Cross’s 1,599 plays last season, Lockbaum was on the field for 1,005.

Mighty good hook. Reporters came to town to eyeball this little novelty--he’s 5 feet 11 inches and 195 pounds--and then craft their own gags. Should get two scholarships. Probably a double major. He was posed in 1930s togs, even, holding a leather helmet.

But in eyeballing Lockbaum, they discovered that the metaphor was not just skin deep. He really was a throwback.

Here’s a guy talking about his off-season conditioning program: “Well, my girlfriend lives two miles away and I don’t have a car, so I run back and forth to her house.�

Reporters have heard a lot of things. They heard this and slapped their pencils down and just looked at each other. It’s the dawning of an old age.

“The timing is right,� said Holy Cross Coach Mark Duffner, explaining Lockbaum’s appeal. “The atmosphere is right for a guy like Gordie, who attends class, will graduate on time and in addition is a very efficient football player. With all the problems in athletics, here comes Gordie representing the traditional things, even things that go as far back as two-way football.�

Holy Cross never set out to break ground. Nobody said, hey, it’s been 20 years since Leroy Keyes played both ways at Purdue, we could get some attention here. Duffner didn’t want a two-way player any more than any coach does. It’s just that the Crusaders were a little thin at tailback going into spring practice before last season.

“I talked to him about learning a few running plays, just as a buffer for us,� Duffner said. “He was all for it, but we had no real intention of giving him up on defense.�

The defensive coaches didn’t think that much of the little experiment, one way or another. Except, said defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle, “the first day he goes over there, he’s the best on the field.�

The offensive coordinator, Tom Rossley, got this glint in his eye. More like a laser beam. “We had to have him,� he said. “No two ways about it. You could say, that’s when the fight began.�

The idea of there being two ways about it, figuratively or literally, didn’t occur at first. At first it was simply an un-civil war between offense and defense.

“It got ugly,� Rossley admitted. But he had to have Lockbaum, the way he could move the ball.

Yet there was no way Coyle, whose own backfield was young and inexperienced, was going to surrender his top player.

“He’s a natural to run,� whined Rossley to his boss. “I don’t even know why he fools around with defense.�

Rossley began making bold statements, that he’d fix it so Lockbaum wouldn’t be missed on defense. “If we have Gordie, he’ll give us 28 points a game. You won’t need anybody on defense.�

Coyle, meanwhile, was becoming anxious about the way Lockbaum was being flipped from unit to unit. He was worried that the player’s abilities on defense would become diluted.

“It got to the point where he was doing more than buffing, seemed to me,� Coyle said.

The coaches’ meetings were stormy. Rossley recalled that the defense stooped to a certain pettiness. “We’d be driving the ball downfield in scrimmage and then the defense would take him back,� he said, the hurt still in his voice. “We’d never score. We didn’t know if it was because we had Gordie stopping us, or because he wasn’t carrying the ball.�

Duffner remembered “the offense ripping his jersey toward offense, the defense tugging their way. Finally I said, ‘Enough. We need him both places.’ �

The coaches campaigned vigorously as to why this was impossible.

“Quit telling me what we can’t do,� Duffner told them. “Let’s try it.�

Just 10 days before the opener, the staff reluctantly concluded that Lockbaum would play both ways.

“We felt it was a gamble,� admits Duffner. “But it was a necessity. It came down to us having to do it. ‘Let’s put Lockbaum on offense, ease the freshman in, take it from there.’ So first game, he’s in 90 plays.�

Lockbaum was in for 97 plays, actually, making 5 tackles, recovering a couple of fumbles--one for a touchdown--returning an interception 34 yards, rushing 6 times for 29 yards and catching a 20-yard pass.

“By God, we won,� Duffner said. “So we thought, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.�

Here’s how the gamble worked out: Lockbaum made 46 tackles, caused 2 fumbles, recovered 2 and intercepted a pass; returned 21 kickoffs for 452 yards; caught 57 passes for 860 yards and 8 touchdowns; gained 827 yards and scored 14 touchdowns rushing. He was voted Division I-AA All-American on both offense and defense. He was fifth in the Heisman Trophy balloting.

And so history, if not made, was revisited. The position coaches haven’t stopped grumbling ever since.

“I think we were more receptive than the offense,� said Coyle, self-approvingly.

Not so Rossley. “I hated it, I hated it, I hated it,� he said, and he still hates it.

Rossley got a look at Duffner’s practice schedule and cracked anew when the coach entered the room the other day. “Coach,� he moaned, “you’ve got him on defense for the heart of our practice, the very heart. “

Duffner smiled lamely and got out of the room fast.

The struggle is natural, given the evolution of football. It hasn’t been a simple game for a long time. Practices are specialized. The competition is at such a level that no coach can afford to lose the edge of intensive practice, where a player does “reps,� repeating skill or plays until they are robotic in their efficiency. Then there are meetings, of course. Films for offense and defense.

“It’s become such a technical game,� Rossley said. “So much technique to teach. You just can’t get enough (teaching) time. Individual time, group time, team time--and if he misses any party of it, he just can’t get it done.�

Rossley, like most of today’s coaches, is too young to remember that all-around Lockbaum would have been commonplace in the 1950s, when unlimited substitution was outlawed. In those days, it could get done. Had to be done.

It might shock him to know that Johnny Unitas also played defensive back, that Frank Ryan played linebacker, that Howard (Hopalong) Cassady, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1955, played both ways.

But that was a simpler time. It has been a long time since Lockbaum could have been classified as commonplace.

In the nurturing of any legend, it is important to go back as far as possible to the source material. When William (The Refrigerator) Perry was becoming a folk hero, reporters interviewed all the fast-food franchisers in his hometown. Lockbaum’s parents do the job here.

So far, the anecdotes look like this:

--During church communion, young Gordie would ran past people in line so he could be first up, first back in the pew.

--He came home from first grade and announced to his mom that he’d be going to summer school because there was a girl in his class further along in reading skills than he.

Kind of a driven kid, seems to be the point. Three-sport star--wrestling, football, baseball--at Glassboro High in New Jersey. National Honor Society. Ranked second in a class of 147. Getting the picture? Narrowed colleges down to those in a six-hour driving radius so he could get home to family easily. He was recruited as a free safety by Syracuse and a running back by Navy, and heard from Rutgers and West Point, among other Division I schools. But being a student at Holy Cross, a small Jesuit school which has turned out the likes of Bob Cousy and Joseph Califano, held an appeal for him. He wasn’t thinking Heisman Trophy at the time.

Now that everybody else is, well, Lockbaum is still not swept off his feet. He’s been playing along and he obviously enjoys the attention. But he hasn’t lost perspective or that annoying team-oriented humility that coaches foster among their players.

“We laugh about it,� said Lockbaum of the attention he’s been getting. “I mean, when I came here, I expected to play good ball but I never expected I’d go to a newsstand and see my face on a cover. Seems silly the way it’s happened. If we’d had a good tailback, I’d have been on defense last year.�

That is as outrageous as he gets. Although he admits to being goal-oriented, he couches all talk of his personal achievement in the inevitable team talk. “If I do well, the team does well,� he typically says, noting semi-correctly that his team’s 10-1 record has helped his stature as much as his own statistics.

For all the attention, though, he understands the fragility of his fame, how lucky he’s been. Not to be good, but to get the opportunity he has had.

“It’s been a combination of things, another of which is I’ve never really been injured,� he said, ticking off another circumstance leading to celebrity. He shrugged.

His modesty is appropriate in at least one respect. He’d be having as much fun doing this even if nobody noticed. Individual stars do well to remember how much fun being part of a bunch is. In fact, Lockbaum is smart enough to regret anything that takes him from the team.

“That’s the one part I miss, since I began playing tailback, when I don’t feel part of the defensive back group,� he said. “You know, when you have your little friendships, your own jokes, your own busts on people. Sometimes, I feel a little left out.�

If he no longer belongs to one group, he still belongs to the team, and the others good-naturedly tolerate his national profile. They kid him openly when he rushes onto the field with a towel for a muddied teammate, as he did in one game last season.

When a reporter entered the locker room last year, inquiring after Lockbaum, the players explained that he was unavailable as he was lunching with the Reagans at the White House. And so on. Before the spring game, the alumni team chained Lockbaum to the fence to keep him out.

But all these are side dishes to Lockbaum’s entree, playing football. He understands he’s doing “something uncommon and that I had a chance to make a name for myself.� But he understands, too, that he’s getting to play twice the amount of football he expected to.

“It’s a lot more fun than I imagined,� he said. “It’s great to be on the field, to have an effect on the outcome of the game, not just standing on the sideline hoping the defense will hold them off. Isn’t that where a football player would want to be, on the field?�

The amount of time Lockbaum wants, and now expects, to be on the field is almost irritating.

“I’ve created a monster,� said Duffner, who in the past thought he was doing the responsible thing by resting Lockbaum on defense. “I’d be watching the play and I’d feel this tap-tapping on my shoulder.�

Argues Lockbaum: “I have to keep reminding them I want to play defense.�

The demands off the field are sometimes extreme, with both the defensive and offensive coaches offering special tutoring to make up missed meeting time. And they do not forget at Holy Cross that Lockbaum, besides carrying two playbooks, may well be carrying 19th-Century Russian Plays (Up the middle, through Poland, on One!).

But Lockbaum is obviously up to it. He makes few-to-no on-field mistakes and his grades actually improved when he became a two-way player.

“I’m just one of a bunch here,� he explained. “Everybody studies at night. It’s just what you do.�

These demands are clearly worth it, as well. He enjoys the hustle and bustle of the practice field, no standing around for a two-way player.

“I just switch jerseys and go to the other end of the field when they start giving the second team their reps,� he said.

What player doesn’t want to be in on every play? Maybe that’s what’s so old-fashioned about him.

Rossley was musing about his little throwback. “He was probably one of the great all-time backyard players,� he said of the irrepressible Lockbaum.

Backyard player? What kind is that?

The kind that plays for the fun of it, he explained.

See what we mean by throwback?