Author: fartheroffthewall

This is the latest post for an ongoing media project — SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage.  Pick a number and highlight an athlete — person, place or thing — most obviously connected to it by fame and fortune, someone who isn’t so obvious, and then take a deeper dive into the most interesting story tied to it. It’s a combination of star power, achievement, longevity, notoriety, and, above all, what makes that athlete so Southern California. Quirkiness and notoriety factor in. And it should open itself to more discussion and debate — which is what sports is best at doing.

The most obvious choices for No. 62:

= Bill Bain: USC football; Los Angeles Rams
= Al Krueger: USC football, Los Angels Dons

The most interesting story for No. 62:
Brent Boyd, UCLA football offensive lineman (1975 to 1979) via La Habra
Southern California map pinpoints:
Downey, La Habra, Whittier, Westwood, Pasadena

Brent Boyd’s brain, bruised and battered, had finally betrayed him.

Headaches and memory loss. Dizziness and fatigue. MRIs and other medical tests couldn’t pinpoint what would be the early onset of dementia. That all came after a six-year run as an NFL offensive lineman — which, to the 6-foot-3, 286-pounder out of UCLA — felt like a lifetime ago.

Born in Downey and reared in La Habra, Boyd doesn’t think anything serious happened to him under the helmet as he learned the game at Lowell High in Whittier. He couldn’t recall any traumatic experiences during the four years he put in at UCLA, a career that started as a member of the 1976 Rose Bowl championship team and ended with him second-team All-Pac-10. He caught the attention of the Minnesota Vikings to make him a third-round NFL pick.

Wearing No. 62 as a 23-year-old rookie offensive lineman, trying to make a living as in pro football after forgoing a chance to go to graduate school at UCLA, Boyd got an on-the-job education about what a concussion felt like. Over and over.

Especially in how it was addressed and treated. Or wasn’t.

Boyd once explained his first experience during in the Vikings’ final exhibition game against Miami at the Orange Bowl:

“In the second quarter I got hit, knocked out. My teammates carried me to the sidelines and when I woke up, I was blind in my right eye. I started to panic.

“My coach came over and said, ‘Boyd, what’s the matter?’ I was still panicking and I said, ‘Coach I can’t see out of my right eye.’ And he said, ‘Well, can you see out of your left eye?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And he said, ‘Get back in the game right now’.

“I had to finish the game unable to see out of my right eye. That situation was common.”

Boyd told that story, and many more personal experiences, during three appearances before U.S. Congressional committing hearings in Washington D.C. The televised events tried to get some answers about the NFL and brain injuries.

Boyd became Exhibit A for chronic traumatic encephalopathy — better known as CTE. His platform was as the founder of the NFL retired players advocacy group, Dignity After Football. It has become his LinkedIn professional title.

“Going into the NFL,” Boyd would say, “we knew we were going to play through pain, wind up as old men with bad knees, shoulders, other body parts. It was a risk, but we made an educated calculation and decided to play professional football. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have played.”

This is the latest post for an ongoing media project — SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage.  Pick a number and highlight an athlete — person, place or thing — most obviously connected to it by fame and fortune, someone who isn’t so obvious, and then take a deeper dive into the most interes story tied to it. It’s a combination of star power, achievement, longevity, notoriety, and, above all, what makes that athlete so Southern California. Quirkiness and notoriety factor in. And it should open itself to more discussion and debate — which is what sports is best at doing.

The most obvious choices for No. 64:
= Jack “Hacksaw” Reynolds, Los Angeles Rams
= Roy Foster, USC football

The not-so-obvious choices for No. 64:
= Damon Bame, USC football

The most interesting story for No. 64:
Terry Donahue, UCLA football defensive lineman (1965 to 1966), UCLA assistant football coach (1971 to 1973), UCLA football head coach (1976 to 1995)
Southern California map pinpoints:
North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, Valley Glenn, Westwood, Pasadena (Rose Bowl), Los Angeles Coliseum, Westlake Village, Newport Beach

Terry Donahue seized the day when it came to Jan. 1 in the college football world.

The Pasadena stadium that helped create the bigness of national sports holiday has reciprocated its appreciation.

Since 2023, a statue of Donahue has been right inside Gate A of the Rose Bowl, near the ramp that leads down to the home team locker room. With his left arm, he points to the players’ entrance. At the base, 151 bronze roses purposefully are at his feet — one for each of the regular-season school-record victories he collected as UCLA’s head football coach in a 20-year span.

This, on top of the fact that the Rose Bowl Press Box was renamed the Terry Donahue Pavilion some 10 years earlier, and The Rose Bowl Hall of Fame inducted him in 1997, two years after he was done coaching the Bruins.

The Rose Bowl Legacy Foundation noted when that statue was propped up that Donahue is the only person associated with the Pasadena landmark and its game itself as a player, an assistant coach and a head coach at his alma mater. And it happened six times.

The first may be the most inspiring and set the foundation for the future.

Jan. 1, 1966: UCLA toppled undefeated and No. 1 ranked Michigan State. Perhaps no one more than Donahue, wearing No. 64 on the defensive line, best represented the prevailing attitude that no one was going to intimate the so-called “Gutty Little Bruins.”

This is the latest post for an ongoing media project — SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage.  Pick a number and highlight an athlete — person, place or thing — most obviously connected to it by fame and fortune, someone who isn’t so obvious, and then take a deeper dive into the most interesting story tied to it. It’s a combination of star power, achievement, longevity, notoriety, and, above all, what makes that athlete so Southern California. Quirkiness and notoriety factor in. And it should open itself to more discussion and debate — which is what sports is best at doing.

The most obvious choices for No. 38:

= Eric Gagne, Los Angeles Dodgers
= Clyde Wright, Los Angeles Angels
= Burr Baldwin, UCLA football

The not-so-obvious choices for No. 38:

= Dave Goltz, Los Angeles Dodgers
= Todd Worrell, Los Angeles Dodgers
= Roger Craig, Los Angeles Dodgers

The most interesting story for No. 38:
Leon Burns, Long Beach State football running back (1969 to 1970)

Southern California map pinpoints:
Long Beach, South Los Angeles

Long Beach State retired its football program in 1991. Not long before that, the school retired the one and only jersey number from its 37-year run. That was the No. 38 that Leon Burns wore for just two seasons.

“To 49er fans, Burns was Superman,” it reads on that bio that the school posted to honor the 6-foot-2 bruiser, 225-pound tailback. “He could bench press 450 pounds and run the 40 in 4.5 seconds. He could also play football, earning first team, collegiate division All-America recognition … (and the) only player ever to represent LBSU in the now defunct College All-Star game.”

The Superman reference was specific to one of the 49ers’ biggest program wins ever — a 27-11 victory over San Diego State in 1970 to clinch the conference title before some 39,000 at Anaheim Stadium.

After the game, Burns took off his jersey and showed everyone he had a Superman T-shirt on underneath.

“I guess it was my idea,” he admitted to the Long Beach Press Independent Telegram afterward. “Somebody put an article in the paper: ‘Does he really have an ‘S’ underneath?'”

Burns would set the NCAA Division-II record for carries in a game (35) and for all-purpose plays (360) in a season. Having once rushed for 300 yards in a single game, he also set school records for career carries (655), rushing yards (2,809), points (304) and touchdowns (50).

When the San Diego Chargers did their due diligence and made Burns the 13th overall pick of the 1971 NFL Draft, and the fifth running back, one glaring fact stood out — Burns was 28 years old. By two years, older than any other draftee.

The gap in Burns’ resume between high school and college — a four-year prison sentence in Oakland he started serving as a 19-year-old. Missing from today’s “Whatever happened do?” search for Burns — he was shot to death in an unsolved murder in South Los Angeles just before Christmas 1984 and died at the age of 42.

It happened two years before he could see his school retire his number.