Meet Mr. Motivation

Practice has been loose enough for occasional trash talk, focused enough that from the stands you can hear the lacy spin of a fingertip catch. A big game is two days ahead. (It’s an 11-game season. They’re all big games.) Now the head coach stands at midfield, sermonizing in the early-evening Westwood haze. As he speaks, the UCLA Bruins kneel in unison, forearms staked into empty helmets, heads bowed.

Afterward, a reporter asks for the gist of the prayer.

‘Prayer?” Bob Toledo answers, surprised. He laughs, smiles his cartoon smile. “They’re just paying attention.”

The evangelical imperative of big-time coaching--to motivate players, fans and boosters alike--has undone every Los Angeles coach in the last 20 years except Pat Riley and Tom Lasorda, both legends. Bob Toledo is another natural.

Here he is, weeks earlier, in the lion’s den of the athletic department’s most prominent donors--20 or 30 couples balancing cocktails and plates of caramel brie in a gated colony of Newport Beach. On Balboa Island, nearly in earshot, resides Toledo’s enigmatic predecessor, Terry Donahue. Forehead knotted with low-grade doubt, Donahue turned to broadcasting in ‘96, not long after losing the love of rooms like this. “His last couple of appearances, he was a deer in the headlamps,” says one attendee. As the darling replacement--happy to be anywhere, in some up-from-the-playground respect--Toledo fears no such evil. He shakes peanuts in his fist, working the crowd.

“It got down to us and Nebraska,” he is saying, describing a recruiting war for lineman Michael Saffer. “We were battlin’ pretty hard and makin’ a lot of calls. Well, Mike’s dad, Donny Saffer, played on a national championship basketball team at UCLA, so . . . .” A wicked grin. “We had John Wooden make a little call at the end there--kinda like the Mafia’d do it!”

The voice is a lusty sermon. The stance is wide, short below the waist; the eyes all but collide at the bridge of the nose, Yogi Bear-like. Every associative leap, in fact, lands on images of popular beardom, from Bear Bryant of Alabama to the new, bulked-up UCLA mascot: Gone is the “gutty little” Bruin image of old. But while this robust new symbol was stitched together in the sweat shops of market research, Toledo arrived full-blown, the hardy, gregarious, backyard dad of bears, a leader so natural you could plain overlook him. And UCLA did at first. Toledo, then offensive coordinator, got the promotion only after better-known candidates Rick Neuheisel and Gary Barnett turned down the job. “I probably wasn’t my wife’s first choice either,” Toledo quipped to reporters.

“I’m proud,” he tells his Newport audience, “of what we’ve accomplished the last two years.” The most encouraging trends of Toledo’s 1996 debut--better conditioning, resilience, killer instinct--mushroomed in 1997 to magical heights. Nine points shy of an undefeated season, last year’s Bruins closed with 10 straight wins, a feat the university hadn’t witnessed since 1946. If that weren’t enough, he has recruited a class of freshman athletes ranked best in the nation by many analysts. With the Bruins’ starting offense in full flight--senior quarterback Cade McNown is a leading contender for the Heisman Trophy--local fans have cause to wonder, week by week, just how many notches upward their dreams may rise. In late September, national polls had the team at No. 4.

Heady math, to be sure, for an L.A. culture conditioned to leave the perfectibility of football to a few factories in the Midwest and the South. But in Toledo’s presence, Bruin fans have shed negativity. Not that he’ll promise a national championship outright, though he does establish the goal of “competing” for one. It’s enough to hear him talk the talk of unremorseful exertion--of “sparring enough to keep us calloused and tough,” of “playing each play like it’s the last we’ll ever play . . . and I’m not worried about the scoreboard!” Those two words alone, “not worried,” have worked magic on his listeners.

The applause is long and genuine. “Imagine this guy recruiting you at home,” one supporter whispers to another. Yet Toledo is no harder to imagine in your living room than the next guy, which may be the point. Football experts admire him as various things--a risk-taker, a master of surprise, a motivator. Just as important around UCLA’s family of boosters, however, is that Bob Toledo is a sunny guy, gambling on destiny, reaching for the prize--a “half-full kind of guy,” as athletic director Peter Dalis has put it, in a time of half-empties. He may just stand to lift a family curse.

*

It was not the worst family curse in sports. It was the curse of fielding “quality teams,” teams that sent players to the NFL, teams that went to bowl games.

Yet the same Bruin teams had lost nearly every Rose Bowl-qualifying showdown in school history, had their helmets ground deep into the grass by ball-control schools like Nebraska. Even in salad years, the school’s victims seemed to feel less than beaten, unconvinced sometimes to the verge of disappointment. “A No. 1 team should have an offensive line that is relentless and devastating,” complained a Cal nose guard back in ‘88, the last year UCLA briefly occupied top rank.

“I’d gotten sick of bend-don’t-break,” Toledo says, singling out a philosophy by which UCLA’s defensive teams historically sought to contain, rather than attack, opponents. “I’ve seen people bend all the way to the end zone.” Some players resented the team’s laid-back image. “If an opponent comes up after the game and really wants to converse with you,” says fullback Craig Walendy, in a voice full of brotherly regret, “you did something wrong.”

There had been an emotional residue to clear away. A good share of Toledo’s squad and coaching staff were Terry Donahue recruits, and the name evokes complex loyalties. “You wanted him to win games,” one former assistant says. Once a boxer with a gristly handshake, once the quintessentially undersized Bruin lineman, Donahue by the late ‘80s had become unmanned by luck and loss. Under fire during a losing streak to USC, he reportedly drove to St. Jude’s in Westlake four times daily to pray. Pregame speeches became menopausal pearls spilling through the grasp of baffled teenagers.

Toledo remembers a different man: a wry, lethally smooth competitor. As rival coaches in the ‘70s--Toledo as defensive-backs coach at USC, Donahue newly ascendant at UCLA--the two had occasion to court the same high school players. Once Donahue brought an assistant and the obligatory pair of Bruins; Toledo brought Trojan stars Ricky Bell, Gary Jeter, Marvin Powell and Chris Foote.

“You could’ve brought the white horse and the band, too,” Donahue said.

The coaches remain close friends. Their wives sat together at games where Toledo says the Donahue family was heckled. “That hurts you,” Toledo says, putting himself in his friend’s place. “I mean, you’re thick-skinned, you’re tough, but when your family’s in the stands and your kids are crying, there’s no question it hurts you. People are cruel.”

Toledo won’t condemn the Donahue legacy, yet he’s been unmistakably busy burying it. On a walking tour of the athletic department, he moves fast, a near trot, calling to players in street clothes (“How YOU dooin?”), showing off this and that new visual detail. The script on UCLA’s gold helmets has been repainted: larger, bolder. A locker-room Wall of Fame lists Bruin All-Americans, Heisman winners and Outland Trophy winners. Toledo had the retired jerseys hung. “So the kids’ll say ‘wow.’ ”

What used to be there?

Toledo hesitates. “A white wall.”

Former players describe a new internal glasnost. NFL stars are not only welcomed at practices but invited to speak. For Toledo’s first homecoming game, he resurrected the drill of linemen uncoiling from the huddle in serpentine--a sight that endeared Toledo to everyone who fastened a chin strap in the ‘50s and ‘60s. “It’s hard to get across how important the little things are,” says George Farmer, 1960s receiver and father of current wide receiver Danny Farmer. “He reminds you a little of George Allen, who used to walk around the field picking up litter to get across that ‘this is a place of honor.’ ”

An atmospheric detail: The locker room “didn’t used to have music,” Toledo says, gesturing around him. “I let the seniors pick it, and there’s a new pick daily. Sometimes rock, sometimes rap, sometimes country.”

Though he says he’s sure he’ll have his own tough times to navigate, it’s unclear whether, even at 52, Toledo has ever really envisioned decline, or just can’t, recoiling at the whole idea of malaise.

For example: “There’s no excuse for saying, ‘our heads weren’t in the game,’ or ‘we were flat.’ I will never buy that! How could you be flat when you’ve got only 11 opportunities to play in a year?”

Nor would he accept historically high levels of nagging injuries. In the din of the weight room, where barbells crash like locomotives, Toledo introduces assistant coach Kevin Yoxall, credited with revamping the weight-training program. Yoxall teaches by face-to-face challenge and absurd repetition. “You can see it on the field,” says fullback Walendy. “There’s no hanging fat.”

Insofar as a single statistic may reflect improved stamina, last year’s Bruins outscored opponents 111-52 in the fourth quarters of games and 112-34 in the third--allowing fewer second-half points altogether than the 1994 Bruins allowed in the fourth quarters alone. Not that Toledo is drawn so much to numbers. What he is really after, it becomes clear, is a picture in his mind. Tired of seeing practice fields cluttered with the red jerseys of players excused from hitting, Toledo banished the walking wounded to rehab rooms--deglamorizing the injured, purging the scene of symbolic weakness. Across the press box now hangs a bunting of conference championship banners and the lone national championship banner from 1954--a collection to which Toledo has exhorted players to “visualize” adding another.

In mid-stride, he asks if he’s mentioned the rush the team gets from parading through tailgaters before games--”The players just go crazy,” he says, and suddenly you remember that these are kids, that the scene to them is football mecca: Knoxville in autumn, or Texas A&M;, where students kiss their dates after every touchdown. “I wish I had a video camera,” Toledo says.

*

So much of coaching may not translate. Postings from the Bruin locker room--”Make The Catch” . . . “Finish Blocks”--could be deep truths or dumbbell English. Northwestern Head Coach Gary Barnett galvanized his team with the story of a high school coach who muscled his starting quarterback under a lake, letting him up within an instant of his life: When you want to win as much as you wanted that next breath, then that’s when you’ll win. Without the peculiar heightened reality that can sometimes connect player and coach, that is just a story about madness: men thrashing and gulping in rural Illinois, coughing lake water back to the truck.

Stories of Toledo as motivator might strike the uninitiated as similarly insane. Calculating that physical intensity would be decisive in last year’s game against Arizona, Toledo decided to open each practice that week with a quietly violent theme. “I said, ‘Look. This game’s gonna be decided one-on-one. Big man on big man, best on best.’ Then I called up a defensive lineman and an offensive lineman, and I put them on the white stripe on the field. And they hit each other and tried to knock each other back until I said stop. Next a running back and a linebacker. Then a defensive back and a receiver. I did that Monday, I did it Tuesday, I did it Wednesday, I did it Thursday.”

Game day arrived, and players waiting for Toledo to make his pregame remarks were surprised when he spread a roll of white tape straight down the center of the locker-room floor.

“Oh, that was big time,” says Walendy. “Everyone was riled. It was almost like sumo wrestling, four inches away from the other guy in the locker room with the game about to start.”

Toledo says the players “ran right over me and took the field, and we proceeded to win 40-27. And after the game, the opposing coach said it was the most physical UCLA team he’d seen in seven years.”

Preparing for the Washington Huskies, Toledo’s inspiration was to acquire 30 pairs of Husky-purple pants and 30 purple helmets, then have his reserve unit descend upon the scrimmage field wearing them, part comic relief, part electroshock. Some starters actually believed the enemy had landed. “Talk about visualization--when we took the field against the Huskies, they looked the same, and our kids said, ‘Coach, we’re gonna knock the hell out of them, too.’ ” The clincher came during the locker-room huddle before the game, with a speech of one sentence: “You guys are ready.” (The Bruins won, 52-28.)

“It’s such a delicate touch you’ve got to have,” says Assistant Coach Gary Bernardi--that ability to keep players at just the right balance between uptight and too loose. “The real hallmark, I think, is his demeanor in the last 48 hours before a game. Look at the last USC game. It’s a rivalry game. If we win there’s a shot at the Rose Bowl. You know what Toledo’s demeanor was?” Bernardi laughs. “No different from any other week.”

A conscious embargo on controversy and doubt surrounds Toledo’s orchestrations of the pregame mood. Defensive Line Coach Terry Tumey says concerns about this year’s inexperienced defense have been conscientiously soft-pedaled. “If we don’t harp on it, it doesn’t exist.”

Toledo claims he won’t even listen to sports opinion shows himself--an assertion his wife, Elaine, contradicts. “First thing in the car after games, he’s flicking onto XTRA to hear what’s being said.” Assuming she is right--maybe Toledo tries to stay innocent of public opinion but can’t help himself--the double standard seems almost chivalrous, paternal. (“I’ve got three daughters and 110 sons,” he likes to joke). Perhaps he arms himself with facts to maintain control, meanwhile sparing those around him from demon fear. Locker-room worry is inevitable. To coach well is to make it sporting. Facing a player with a difficult blocking assignment, Toledo ribs: “I just dunno if you can handle this guy. You’ll have to show me.”

That instinct--a near-musical sense for the emotional ripeness of a moment--also informs Toledo’s penchant for trick plays. One memorable “gadget” touchdown from last year: Toledo placed two quarterbacks, McNown and Drew Bennett, in the Bruin backfield. Bennett pitched to McNown, who pitched to tailback Skip Hicks. “Toledo’s sense of timing comes from being through the wars,” says Tumey, “and knowing the opponent, how tired he is, where the ball is.” He’d called the play at the opponent’s eight-yard line, where an instant of defensive paralysis opens the end zone like a plain.

Yet even Toledo’s reputation as a trickster may deceive. “People lose sight of the fact,” says assistant Bernardi, “that first and foremost, he’s gonna field a strong running team.” Radio host Joe McDonnell says that before last year’s USC game, Bruin players were privately abuzz about a rather surprising Toledo decree: No trick plays. “I personally think he just wanted to beat their ass straight-out,” McDonnell says. Or perhaps it was the ultimate gadget, leaving the opponent in terror of the surprise that never comes.

Understandably, Toledo hates nothing more than being caught off guard himself. What temper he shows (face-to-face and seething, insiders say) is provoked by unexpected administrative shocks: a coaching defection, a player in trouble. Asked, half-facetiously, whether something in his past soured him--an earthquake, a jack-in-the-box--Toledo thinks for a minute and mentions the time that Elaine threw him a surprise party on his 40th birthday.

“I got really upset with it. Really upset.”

He is absolutely serious.

“Because I wasn’t ready for it. I walked into this room and all these people were there--I wasn’t ready for it!” He seems to sense that the phobia isn’t shared. “I like to be organized, to know what’s going on, and for things to just pop up . . . “ Toledo shudders slightly. “It hurts. And she got mad at me, and I got mad at her, and I shouldn’t have done that. She said, ‘I’ll never throw a party for you again!’ ”

*

A near-spoof of the former jock, Toledo once secretly cut his wife’s fishing barb with a pliers to make sure he out-fished her.

She is blond and fit with country-club looks and a sweetly uncynical nature. She was Elaine Barras at San Francisco State, and they were so right for each other that they almost overlooked it. She was best friend to his too-busy girlfriend, forwarding regrets (“Sandy says to say hi”) until the young quarterback asked her out.

Every Thursday they still date each other, dinner and sometimes a show, meeting halfway on issues of taste. “I like real-deal stuff, Mario Puzo,” Toledo says. “She likes, you know, fiction?” He pronounces the word as though it were a foreign dish. Toledo understands that home life balances. He won’t let coaching assistants overwork at the expense of family, and even after a heartbreaking game, according to Elaine, he typically takes visiting friends out to dinner and makes himself remember to have a good time.

Toledo doesn’t examine his San Jose childhood much except as the scene of his daydreaming. There he visualized becoming a coach and even golfing at Pebble Beach, beating the seventh hole, a tricky one: If you overshoot, the ball plunks in the Pacific.

Sports were everything to him, but no one steered him that way at home. Asked what he’s overcome that would help him understand the struggles of today’s players, he says, “Well, not having a lot.” His mom was a cannery worker, his father a truck driver who became the school custodian. He shot rabbits with a .22 in the backyard. He never followed sports the way a child would, never rooted for a team. It was strategy that hooked him. He played football board games with friends, brainstormed with a Pop Warner coach.

His dramatic foil was his own height, a stubby 5-foot-9. “He had to be gregarious,” recalls longtime San Francisco State Coach Vic Rowen, “because people would look at him and say, ‘You’re not the guy who threw 45 touchdown passes in a season.’ ” (“Everything I did,” Toledo says, “was on account of spite.”) Rowen had pioneered a passing attack that presaged the modern pro offense and designed it to the idiosyncrasies of his protege--a vote of confidence that Toledo, a second-chance transfer from San Jose City College, repaid with an All-American performance. Rowen remembers about him a resilience verging on farce: Against San Diego State’s then-famed pass rush, “he’d get hit by four guys every time he dropped back to pass.”

Dead center in nearly every chapter of Toledo’s coaching career has been a reenactment of this formative drama: The young man redeemed by an understanding mentor, the quarterback deputized by a coach. The first famous Toledo protege was Oregon’s Chris Miller, for whom, according to Elaine Toledo, “Bob had to learn to communicate with a shy player.” But his lasting legacy may be McNown, whom Toledo recognized three years ago as a trigger-puller and a winner in the rough.

Now regarded by many as the most valuable collegiate player in the nation, McNown personally lobbied for Toledo’s hiring, and it is fitting that each embraced the other as a middle-of-the-pack candidate--though in Toledo’s case the obscurity seems vastly undeserved. For a starting salary far below that of basketball counterpart Steve Lavin (Toledo, who first signed for $285,000 over four years, now receives $453,000 annually through 2003), the university was able to hire the architect of some of the nation’s most productive offenses at Texas A&M.; Add to that the box-office value of razzle-dazzle offense and attacking defense. Other symbolic roles a collegiate coach must fulfill have either come naturally to Toledo or, he says, taken care of themselves. On academics, he declares that UCLA’s entrance requirements prevent him from recruiting ill-equipped students (“They better be students first”), and that he wouldn’t change this if he could. “UCLA,” runs his convenient one-liner, “recruits character, not characters.” History is inconclusive on that, but Toledo’s admittedly short track record is unmarked by scandal. “I’ve told guys, you’re wasting your time if you’re not concentrating on school--I try to be honest about their chances of making it in the pros.” He offers that last year’s practices were reorganized to agree with kicker Chris Sailer’s 4 o’clock class. What would Bear Bryant have done?

Toledo guffaws: “Fire the professor?”

Coaches and former players sometimes argue a back route to academic legitimacy, insisting that the game’s discipline follows players, Marine-like, through life.

“If you got through this,” Kevin Yoxall told former wide receiver Rodney Lee, “you’ll get through law school.” Others see, at lucid instants, something monstrous. “The game of football at its highest level,” wrote former player Rick Telander, “has become too bizarre and dangerous to serve any educational function.”

Toledo, just in from a round of golf, hears this quote by phone; it must sound like Venusian to him. “For some kids,” he says soberly, “Being in an airport. Staying in a hotel. That’s an education.”

*

The season progresses. New milestones are achieved. With a victory over Texas in the season opener, Toledo has extended his winning streak over two seasons to 11, the longest in UCLA history. For 30 minutes, the Bruins are all but perfect, but after halftime they struggle, possibly an omen. In the Rose Bowl press room, Toledo looks drained, for him, though ever-antsy. Sweat coating his upper lip, tan slacks drooping over spotless white Reeboks, he hugs friends, snapping good wishes, gulping a Diet Coke . . . inching for the door. But a gaunt, white-haired figure in a blazer leans in to press upon him a bauble of wisdom. “Just thank God,” he rasps, “that the other team gave you competition in the second half. Because if your kids get cocky . . . .”

“Yeah,” Toledo cuts in, half-patronizing. “You might have a point there.”

He takes a few steps, then stops. You can practically see the thought fold its way into next week’s emotional narrative.

“You know what?” he calls back. His eyes are wide and devout. “You’re right! It’s a good thing! “

Eleven weeks of maintaining a jump on the opponent . . . on the mood of a game . . . on the morale of your team: Anything can happen in a season. A team can go unbeaten. A short guy with an unnatural fear of surprise can be an All-American quarterback. A third-choice candidate for head coach can win the heart of a city. And knowing this, we may forgive Toledo if he returns to the theme of visualization. Going, in the idiom of sports cliche, with what brought him here. Gamble on destiny. Reach for the prize.

What is Toledo visualizing nowadays?

No hesitation. “Being carried off the field with a national championship,” he says. “One finger in the air.”