USC

Did you see the USC-Notre Dame game yesterday? I only watched the last 5 minutes or so, but, damn, that was a hell of a game. That was the game where Matt Leinart went from being a great college quarterback to being a GREAT college quarterback, like Doug Flutie, like Dan Marino, like Joe Montana, like Bernie Kosar. A guy whose reputation will be secure even if he doesn't do jack in the NFL. Man, being Matt Leinart in LA right now would be something.

I mean, USC had 4-and-9 with like a minute left on about their own 30 with 70,000 screaming Notre Dame fans in their ears and Leinart calls an audible at the line and then throws a pass to the receiver he audibled to find, gets it to the guy even though he's covered like a blanket and they get 61 yards! Then Leinart gets popped trying to vault in for a touchdown with 7 seconds left and then calls his own number without telling the line and gets stuffed and then spins his way in with 3, count 'em, 3 seconds left to win. Great game!

And, once again, the game exposed my personal hypocrisy. I should hate the USC football team. I should want them to lose in painful ways. I'm a public school guy, born and bred. I attended exactly four schools during my scholastic career: (1) Island Union Elementary School K-8; (2) Lemoore Union High School; (3) UC Davis; and (4) Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley. The idea of public schools means a lot to me. Everyone can go, whether they're rich or poor, and they are supposed to get the same education. You get all segments of a community in public schools. They should expose kids to kids of other backgrounds and broaden their minds. If a public school system has special programs or magnet schools or a great band or a great football team or an Academic Decathlon team or a good theater department or whatever, it is open to everyone in the school, at least to try out. I think that all of that is really important. I can understand that, in the real world, where a lot of public schools stink and where people want their kids to go to religious schools and that kind of thing, private schools work better for some people. Overall, though, to me at least, public schools are a big deal. Those old pictures of African-American kids integrating Little Rock High School and other Southern schools are so powerful partly because these were kids just wanting to go to their school, like the other kids.

The Muse's cousin was in town last week and we got started talking about private schools in the context of football. We are from the same area, having graduated from high schools about 10 miles from each other in the same year. She is a UC Berkeley grad and I mentioned that UC Davis, a Division I-AA school, had beaten Stanford, a Division I and Pac-10 school, and she was quite pleased to have Stanford be so embarrassed. She said, "I just love to see those snooty private schools lose to public schools."

Generally, I feel exactly the same way. For example, I always enjoy the day that Duke gets knocked out of the NCAA basketball tournament. I always root for U. of North Carolina when they play Duke in basketball. (An aside: can people please shut up about Coach K? This is a guy who, during the one year he had a bad team, decided that he was too stressed out to continue coaching them, took a leave of absence in the middle of the season and then, during the NCAA tournament, showed up as a guest analyst on TV. Wow, what commitment to his players.) I like to see UC Berkeley (sorry, as a UC Davis guy, I'm not calling Berkeley "Cal" -- all of the UC's are "California") beat Stanford as frequently as possible. (The fact that Stanford didn't let me in has nothing to do with this at all, of course.)

But I can't shake the attachment to USC football that I developed as a kid. When I was about 9 to 12, USC was in one of the stretches when they were really good. Charles White won the Heisman in 1979 and Marcus Allen won it in 1982 (after becoming the first college player to run for over 2,000 yards in a season). My family used to go to the coast for New Years and I used to watch USC in the Rose Bowl on January 1 while gazing on the surf and eating what were basically Malomars. That was sweet. (The Rose Bowl is one of the great setting for sports, up there with Dodger Stadium, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, the old Boston Garden, ARCO Arena, Augusta National, Pebble Beach, those kinds of places.) USC, like almost all of the Pac-10 teams in those days, would play a much more interesting kind of football than the smash-mouth teams that the Big-10 would send and the Pac-10 teams would win and all would be right with the world. Plus USC had those cool red shirts and gold pants, colors that were the same as my elementary school's colors. Man, I was going to be a USC tailback. I even had USC pajamas.

But, now, I'm a committed public school guy. The hypocrisy of rooting for USC always gets me when I watch the USC-UCLA game. I really want to root for UCLA. They're a UC, for God's sake! They have those cool powder blue and gold uniforms. (There may be no better of combinations of sports team colors than when USC and UCLA play and USC is in its red-and-gold and UCLA is in its powder-blue-and-gold. It looks like a moving painting.) They generally throw the ball a lot, which I like. But I still feel emotionally tugged to root for USC. I'll probably root for USC this year on the theory that I want them to win so that they can go play and beat Texas for the national championship. ("Texas" in the previous sentence should be said with the inflection with which Jerry used to welcome Newman on Seinfeld.) Next year, I'll make up some other theory.

So, there it is, I'm a public school guy, but I root for USC. As the Muse "loves" to hear, it's the exception that proves the rule.