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Show by Jim Murray Munipray (Dim SpoDirits The most famous Trojan of them all He knew more about picture making than anyone who ever lived." John Wayne was a right tackle who made good. "I never made an art film in my life," he used to growl at me. "The best advice I ever got was from Will Rogers. He told me not to sit around waiting for artistic parts.. 'Keep working, kid,' he told me. 'They ain't never gonna make Hamlet on horseback.' He figured I wasn't going to get to many parts Ronald Colman turned down." ' Wayne used to say: "I guess I'm the only guy in Hollywood who never had a part where he wasn't on a horse or a ship or a tank. I just didn't look natural with clean clothes on. I was in more uniforms than Georgie Jessel and more wars than Germany." Football, Wayne used to say, was ideal training for movies. "You learn to take direction, follow a script, play hurt, and learn to live with bad reviews. The kind of movies I make, we did our own stunts, rode real horses, said our own lines and even fought our own fights. No dubbing or retakes, $5,000 a picture and don't be late or they'd get somebody else. It was like playing Notre Dame every week. At South Bend." ' Quick now! For an autographed photograph of Antelope Al Krueger or a mint copy of the witty sayings of Howard Jones, who was the most famous football player, nay, athlete, to come out of USC, the noblest Trojan of them all? Cotton Warburton? Hardly. O.J. Simpson? Not even close, Orv Mohler? Who's he? Mike Garrett? Marcus Allen? Charlie White? Forget it. I'm talking famous here. The most famous football player ever to wear the cardinal and gold never won the Heisman, played in the Rose Bowl, beat Notre Dame or caught a Doyle Nave pass. Of course, he never played on a losing team. But, then he never played on a winning one, either. The most famous football player ever to come out of Troy was M.M. Morrison, a tackle from Glendale. He was big, quick and he had these kind of snake eyes and a slow way of talking. He looked like a Marine poster just sitting still. He had wrists like wagon axles. Put a cowboy hat and a pair of boots on him and you had everybody's idea of what Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickok must have looked like. This was the face of a guy that won the West. Wayne brought the philosophy of the football field to the sound stage. If it moves, hit it. If it stands still, go around it. Hit the ground running. "We made two movies at a , . time. We didn't make B movies, they were a lot farther down in the alphabet than that. But I'll tell you one thing: They weren't as far down as R or X. I think anyone who makes an X picture should be made to take his granddaughter to see it with him . " The good guys always won in Wayne pictures. "We learned that in football, too. You don't condition a guy to lose. We never had any courses at SC in How to Lose Gracefully. And we didn't make pictures .. , that way. Look at your heroes today. Losers. You can always tell the bad buy in a movie. He's the one who works for a living. The one who gets the girl is the loafer who throws bottles of ketchup at waitresses." He never got a Heisman but he got an Oscar. And, if you go by Heritage Hall, the pantheon of athletic achievement on USC's ' campus, you'll find among the busts and plaques of long-gone football heroes the bust of an old tackle who didn't make the team in 1927. No one asks, "Who's that cowboy with all the All-Americans?" They ask instead, "Who are all those guys with John Wayne?'! There are places in the world where they don't know what a touchdown is, but they dp know John Wayne is the ultimate AllL American. What brings this into focus this month is that the spirit of John Wayne is returning to the campus. The Wayne Family Enterprises, through son Michael Wayne, is donating $50,000 for the John Wayne Memorial Scholarship, a fund to pay tuition and books for any football player seeking a post-graduate degree. "It's no secret dad was very proud of his association with SC and the team," Michael said. Which is all very well. Except the university should also seek to find and honor the memory of the man who made it all possible. The anonymous guy who broke Marion Morrison's shoulder and made him the most famous football player of all time at USC. (c) 1983, Los Angeles Times Dist. by Los Angeles Times Syndicate Give up? Can't place the name? Well, would it help you to know that Marion Michael Morrison took a stage name after he left Bovard Field? That girl's handle didn't quite make it on a marquee. Today, an athlete might opt for "Sun Yat So," or something more exotic, but our hero settled on a nice, short Anglo-Saxon derivative, easily remembered, as short and direct as a Dempsey punch, as American as pumpkin pie. John Wayne is America's most famous ex-football ex-football player. What about Red Grange? Well, what about him? You think anybody in New Delhi ever heard of Red Grange? They've heard of John Wayne, all right. In places where they never heard of a right tackle, they can do imitations of John Wayne winning the war in the Pacific. Duke Wayne owed everything he became to college football, although he never played a down of varsity ball. He got injured in his sophomore season breaking his shoulder either on (1) the practice field or (2) the big game against Notre Dame depending on whether you believe Modern Screen magazine maga-zine or the hospital report at the time. "I was the only guy who ever made the 1930 All-American team in 1960. "Duke used to say. "I was the unanimous choice of the Hollywood Publicists' Guild." He used to add: "But I did play for Howard Jones' Trojans. Coach Jones always spoke highly of me. What he did was scream at me." His football career, such as it was, did put Wayne in a movie studio. It was a Hollywood practice at the time to throw as much work the football team's way as the sports-struck directors and producers could manage. USC used this as a powerful recruiting tool. Still does. "I went to work as a grip (stagehand)," Wayne used to recall. "Around the rest of the country they used to spell that j-a-n-i-t-o-r. a My first co-starring role was opposite a j broom." b The great director, John Ford, took a liking f to young Wayne. "He wasn't like those other jock stars, just looking for a buck or a date L with a chorus girl. You could see he wanted to learn." For his part, Wayne always said: "I took orders from Jack Ford all my life. |