With Elway Out in 1978, Short-Timer Passed Test : High school football: Substitute Walter Seymour delivered four consecutive victories for Granada Hills.

By RICH TOSCHES

Jan. 26, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

“Starting at quarterback in place of John Elway will be Walter Seymour.”

Those words were spewed forth over the public-address system at the Granada Hills High football field moments before a game in 1978.

The 900 or so fans in attendance that night had to be excused for having a stunned, deer-in-the-headlights look on their faces when they heard the announcement.

Elway, the premier prep quarterback in the nation, was being replaced by a guy named Walter?

And when Seymour trotted onto the field for the first time, the eyes of the spectators grew even wider and their jaws dropped a bit more. For not only had the 6-foot-2, cannon-armed Elway been replaced by a guy named Walter, he had been replaced by a guy who stood just 5-foot-9. In cleats. And weighed about 150 pounds. With his helmet on.

“It was pretty quiet out there that night,” Seymour recalled. “Very quiet, now that I think of it.”

Elway, who will lead the Denver Broncos into Sunday’s Super Bowl against the San Francisco 49ers, had sustained a knee injury a week earlier in a game against San Fernando. Jack Neumeier, then the Granada Hills coach, learned on that fateful Monday that Elway’s high school career--and, he figured, his own--was over.

But he instructed his players to keep it a secret, not wishing to give any advantage to the next week’s opponent, Monroe.

This helped to account for the silence that greeted the news that night that Seymour, who had not played football in his life until just a year earlier and whose varsity career at that moment consisted of about five minutes of garbage time, was replacing the best high school quarterback in the country.

In the face of this pressure, Seymour, one would assume, fell flat on his face. Threw perhaps a half-dozen interceptions. Maybe lofted a few passes into the school bus parking lot before Neumeier could find another body with an arm attached to it and yank Seymour back into the shadows.

That, however, isn’t quite what transpired. What did happen was that Seymour played brilliantly, leading Granada Hills to three consecutive regular-season victories and earning the team a berth in the City Section playoffs, in which he came within one completion of sending the Highlanders into the championship game.

Which wasn’t bad at all for a kid who was pulled aside in a 10th-grade gym class by an assistant football coach and asked whether he might be interested in learning the game.

“I found him in one of my P. E. classes and noticed what a terrific arm he had for such a little, skinny kid,” said then-assistant and now co-head Coach Darryl Stroh.

“He played for the junior varsity in 11th grade and then became Elway’s backup. He never got any snaps in practice and played real briefly at the end of two games. But then John got hurt.”

The injury, torn cartilage in Elway’s left knee, required surgery. The coaches and players could not have been more shocked had they learned their starting center for the past three years was actually a woman on a steroid rampage.

“When John went out, it let a lot of air out of our balloon,” Stroh said. “He was our everything. He was on his way to setting all the national high school records. And the only guy behind him was Walter Seymour. I recall the general feeling at that point was something like, ‘Oh, gee. Our season is over.’ ”

Seymour said the first day of practice after Elway’s injury didn’t exactly reset the mood on the team.

“I threw five interceptions that first day,” he said. “I could hear the coaches moaning.”

Then the games began.

And Seymour was dazzling.

In his first game, he threw for 254 yards and one touchdown and ran for another in a 34-7 stomping of Monroe. In his second game, he passed for 288 yards and threw four touchdown passes in a 55-0 win over Van Nuys.

Then, against Mid-Valley League rival Kennedy, in a game that would lock up a playoff berth for the winner, Seymour threw one touchdown pass and ran for two more touchdowns in a 21-14 win.

The remarkable story continued the next week as Granada Hills defeated Palisades, 31-12, in the first round of the 4-A playoffs. Seymour passed for 243 yards and ran for one touchdown, moving Granada Hills into the semifinals against top-seeded and undefeated Carson. Granada Hills came back from a 12-6 deficit to take a 19-12 lead late in the game, but Carson tied the score and won in overtime, 20-19, on a tiebreaker system.

The story had ended for Granada Hills and Seymour. But it was one they still talk about on the Highlanders’ campus.

“What we found out that season,” Stroh said, “was that we had the two best quarterbacks in the area on our team. John Elway and Walter Seymour.”

Today, that kind of talk makes Seymour, 29, a bit uncomfortable. He knew he could throw a football, but it took only a few seconds in 1978 for him to understand that he didn’t throw a football like Elway.

“The first time I saw him throw, my eyes got real wide,” he said. “The first time I met John we started playing catch on the sideline with him.”

Seymour’s reaction?

“My first reaction was, ‘Ow, ‘ “ he said. “He threw footballs that whistled. He was unbelievable.”

Seymour, who played one season at Moorpark College before his football career ended, is an X-ray technician. Coincidentally, he works for Dr. Robert Rosenfeld, the Los Angeles Raiders’ team orthopedic physician. And once a year, Elway comes home to battle the Raiders at the Coliseum and the two friends meet.

“I see him before the game and we talk for a while,” Seymour said. “The last time, he saw me first and called me over. We were friends, on the field and off the field, but I try not to be a pain when we meet before a game. I figure he’s got thousands of guys like me coming up to him all the time yelling, ‘Hey, John. Remember me?’ I don’t want to be like that. That’s just not me.”

And while the meetings have been brief, they bring Seymour and Elway back a decade. They talk of their high school days. And sometimes, the meetings make Seymour wonder.

“When I look back, I have mixed feelings,” he said. “Most of the time I think it was fun, just being on the same team with John. But other times, I think about what might have happened if I was at a different school and didn’t have a John Elway playing ahead of me. Because of the situation, no one ever noticed me and I never got a chance to play football at a Division I school or get a scholarship. And I know that I threw the ball as well as a lot of guys who did get Division I scholarships.

“But I don’t dwell on it. John Elway came to Granada Hills, and that was that.”

And on Sunday, as Seymour settles onto a couch like tens of millions of other people to watch Elway and the 49ers’ Joe Montana fling footballs into the artificial light of the New Orleans Superdome, he will have at least one thought that no one else will have:

The night of the exploding beans.

“We were at the beach with some beer and a big fire going,” Seymour recalled. “John tossed a can of beans into the fire to heat them up, but then, well, we were drinking some beer, and we just forgot. About an hour later, boom , the can just explodes in our faces and John and I are jumping around, covered with beans and glowing embers from the fire. It was hysterical.

“I can still remember how hard we laughed that night.”