Cardiac Kids played with heart

If the hangover from Washington State University’s latest from-the-jaws-of-victory calamity lingers, here’s a foolproof, time-tested cure:

Nostalgia.

And not just a couple of aspirins worth. A big ol’ B-12 shot.

Come to think of it, perhaps some of the more infamous unfulfilled wishes in WSU football history – the sure things that went south – can be laid off on the fact that 40 years ago, the Cougs somehow managed to extract 50 pounds of mojo from a 5-pound bag and have been running on empty ever since.

So maybe Saturday’s game in Pullman against Stanford is the perfect time for a subtext. It’s a must-win game, and back on campus is the team that found a hundred new ways to do just that – the Cardiac Kids of 1965.

The party starts off-campus – a 7 p.m. shindig on Friday at the Ridpath Hotel in Spokane that’s open to the public. Upward of 40 players and coaches are expected back, a number that may or may not include a certain scrubeenie quarterback from the ‘65 team who would later coach the Cougs to a couple of Rose Bowls. Mike Price’s UTEP Miners coincidentally have this weekend off, though he hasn’t RSVP’d for the festivities.

Regarding the Rose Bowl, the Cougs that year finished a victory short of that grail, which certainly stung – but less so given the big picture of, well, ridiculous improbability.

“What we did,” said All-America defensive tackle Wayne Foster, “blew everyone away.”

A quick primer for the post-boomers:

•Opening at Iowa, the Cougars win 7-0 on Tom Roth’s 20-yard touchdown pass to tight end Rich Sheron with 36 seconds to play.

•A week later at Minnesota, WSU erases a 13-0 deficit with two fourth-quarter touchdowns – the last a Roth plunge followed by Bill Gaskins’ second PAT kick with 2:12 left.

•Down 14-10 to Villanova in Pullman, Roth and Bob Simpson hook up on a 78-yard scoring pass with 2:15 to go, and Gaskins nails it down with an interception for a touchdown a minute later.

•Back in Big Ten country and trailing 7-0 at Indiana, Roth and Doug Flansburg hook up for a touchdown as the clock strikes :00. A two-point conversion pass to Ammon McWashington wins it.

•At Oregon State, another Gaskins interception seals a 10-8 victory – the only Cougars touchdown coming just 7 seconds before halftime.

•Trailing 7-0 at Arizona State, the Cougs score with 2:38 left and make another two-point conversion – only to get flagged for taking too much time getting the play off, a circumstance that still has them steamed, and only in part because the referee’s watch had a sweep second hand. “The night watchman,” former Spokesman-Review sports editor Harry Missildine dubbed him, dubiously.

“There were four or five other calls he really blew,” insisted Steve Boots, a sophomore linebacker back then. “We got home-towned.”

Or maybe it was the law of averages. Really, can a football team expect to live so close to the bone every week?

But the improbability wasn’t just Wazzu’s deadline Jones.

When the Cougs reported for coach Bert Clark’s torture chamber in August, 41 of the 68 players were sophomores. Only Foster, Gaskins, Roth, bruising fullback Larry Eilmes and halfback T.C. McClellan were seniors who saw significant playing time.

“I think Sports Illustrated predicted us to go 1-9,” Boots recalled, “and they had Iowa going to the Rose Bowl. We went into that game like a deer in the headlights. It’s 80 degrees and raining and there’s 50,000 people in the stands and they had 120 guys suited up – and we had something like 11 sophomores starting who had never been in a stadium that big.

“That was my first start and I was scared to death.”

The fear ebbed after a few hits, of course, as it inevitably does. But just as quickly, all those sophomores started playing like seniors, which is no inevitability at all.

It was, in fact, a rare alchemy – young talent, great leadership and a fierce strain of toughness, embodied in particular by Foster (“We were afraid to make a mistake and have to answer to him,” Boots said) and Eilmes.

“Pound for pound, he was the hardest hitter I’ve ever seen,” Boots said. “He would kill us in practice. The famous play was in the Minnesota game, the opening kickoff, where he lifted Aaron Brown, their great end, just completely off the ground with a block, put him flat on his back and broke his jaw in two places.

“Of course, Brown’s an All-American and he gets up on his hands and knees and crawls over and gets in on the tackle. I was on the sidelines and watched the whole thing. The rest of that season, Bert used that clip to recruit players – ‘Look at this guy.’ “

There was an uneasy undercurrent running through it all, too: the ramping up of the Vietnam War.

“It didn’t exactly hang over guys,” said Roth, “because if you stayed in school, you were OK. But the protests were starting and National Guard units were filling up like mad and if you even thought about quitting football and getting out of school, you had to have an alternative. The sophomores and juniors who stayed were usually two kinds of people – either they didn’t have any options or they were fairly stubborn and they weren’t going to give in.

“I think we had a lot of those stubborn guys.”

The three road wins in Big Ten stadiums weren’t quite a record – Notre Dame had once done it in a season, but Wazzu’s pedigree was nothing like that of Notre Dame. The flipside, of course, is that the Cougs came home and lost to Idaho – an upset, sure, but not a shameful one, considering the Vandals were running the likes of Ray McDonald and Jerry Campbell at people.

Tougher to explain was why that magical year didn’t turn into a magical run, especially with all those sophomores. Clark’s hardball style (“We had Thursday hitting sessions, and Mondays and a couple of Sundays that I recall,” said Boots) probably had something to do with it, but that now matters a good deal less than the memories of an incredible season.

“Some good teams would come out and look at our roster and maybe might recruit one or two guys off it,” Roth said. “The rest of us would have been left at home. And that’s the kind of thing that makes it special, as much as the way those games were won.”