A Peek at the Big Time : Instead of a Major Event, USFL Game at Pierce 10 Years Ago Was Minor League

Steve Young, pro football’s best quarterback, cheerfully recalls the site of what must rank as the lowest--if not the most bizarre--moment of his professional career.

Pierce College. June 15. Ten years ago, when the Los Angeles area had three more professional football teams than it has today.

In 1985, a decade before Young led the San Francisco 49ers to a record fifth Super Bowl victory, he stood on a dirt hill near the Pierce football field, conducting a postgame interview while breathing exhaust fumes from the team bus.

Young was the $40-million quarterback of a club that had trouble scraping together 40 cents. The Los Angeles Express, the ill-fated franchise of the doomed United States Football League, was so desperate as it lurched toward extinction in 1985, the team actually scheduled a home game--as it turned out, its final home game--at Pierce College.

Shepard Stadium on the Woodland Hills campus suddenly became a professional site. The Arizona Outlaws and Express squared off for what is believed to be the first and last game waged between professional teams in a major sport in the San Fernando Valley.

The stadium was better suited for high school games. When the league expanded the stadium’s capacity from 5,500 to 15,000, the new seats seemed more like props to a bad football movie.

Still, Young gives his Pierce experience a thumbs-up.

“Sure, I remember the game,” he said. “After the game, we had the press conference next to the buses and I yelled out, ‘Whose mom has the carpool next week?’

“The field was all screwed up so they took big potholes and filled them with sand and painted them green. And the scoreboard, you couldn’t see it in the sunshine so they had to tell you about the clock. The referee had to keep yelling out the time to us.”

And those aren’t even Young’s weirdest recollections from that day. That honor is reserved for the team’s bus trip to the Valley from its Manhattan Beach offices.

The Express had been bankrupt from the start of the season after the real estate empire of owner J. William Oldenburg went belly-up. The league took control of the franchise and agreed to pay players’ and coaches’ salaries but nothing else. The team parking lot was stocked with expensive cars, but the Express couldn’t pay utility bills or provide trainers with adhesive tape.

When the team boarded the bus for the trip to the Valley, the driver, obviously aware of the team’s financial predicament, said he wouldn’t start the engine until he was paid.

Coach John Hadl, former star quarterback of the San Diego Chargers and L.A. Rams, promptly wrote a check. No way, said the driver.

“He said they told him at headquarters that he had to have cash,” Young said. “Everyone was trying to get up a collection but some of us didn’t want to play. So we were like, ‘We don’t have any money, man.’ Finally, the trainer, who just got paid, went down to the bank and got the 600 or whatever dollars and we finally got up there.”

Perhaps because Young has twice been most valuable player in the NFL’s since then, he takes a sort of macabre pleasure in remembering the Express. Asked whether the high school environment at Pierce depressed him, Young laughed.

“By then, it was all a joke anyway,” he said.

*

It seemed like such a promising marriage. The cash-strapped Express sought fans and new investors; Pierce officials hoped to a lure a professional franchise to the campus.

The Express was fleeing the Coliseum, where crowds had dwindled to a precious few. Two weeks earlier, in its last appearance in the Coliseum, the Express drew 3,059.

And that was probably a generous count.

The Coliseum seemed so empty and quiet, sportswriters covering the team swore they could hear the players talking on the field.

Desperate for more customers, the Express headed north, fueling hopes among some that the Valley would go big league. At the head of that list was Valley College Coach Jim Fenwick, who was Pierce’s coach. He helped attract the Express to Pierce and worked hand-in-hand with the USFL team to prepare the facility for the game.

Four months earlier, Fenwick was among a crowd of nearly 6,000 who showed up on short notice to see the Express scrimmage the Portland Breakers.

But that was little more than a glorified workout. The Express-Outlaw game was an official pro football event, and a potential big moneymaker for the Pierce athletic program. Fenwick couldn’t help feeling like a kid on Christmas morning.

“As the head coach, I was hoping that some pro team would come in and build a facility and we could play in it and they could play in it,” Fenwick said. “You let yourself dream.”

Turns out, that’s all it was. The 5 p.m. game on Saturday drew an estimated crowd of 8,200--gigantic by Express standards but hardly an overwhelming mandate.

It probably didn’t matter anyway. By June, 1985, the USFL, a spring football league that lasted only three seasons, was on the critical list.

USFL Commissioner Harry Usher, the former L.A. Olympic Committee general manager who now serves as a sports consultant in Los Angeles, knew the league faced problems when owners of the Houston and Los Angeles franchises told him minutes after a gala media day to kick off the season that their teams were broke.

“And those were the teams with [quarterbacks] Jim Kelly and Steve Young,” Usher said. “It was that way every day of that season. The owner of the Tampa Bay team died and then his partner shot himself. The owner of the Birmingham Stallions went to jail because of [savings and loan] fraud. San Antonio wasn’t paying players. We had no labor agreement and the players were threatening to go on strike. It was absolutely wild.”

Express general manager Don Klosterman, the architect of the exceptional Rams teams of the 1970s, put together a budding juggernaut. In 1984, Klosterman netted what the Sporting News called “arguably the finest haul of talent in one draft in pro football history.”

Young was obviously the crown jewel but Klosterman landed other gems. In fact, more than a dozen Express players forged exemplary NFL careers after the USFL folded following the ’85 season. Making the Pro Bowl along with Young were running back Kevin Mack, kick returner Mel Gray, defensive end Lee Williams and offensive lineman Gary Zimmerman.

Three other offensive linemen--Mark Adickes, Derek Kennard and Mike Ruether--became NFL starters, and receiver Jojo Townsell, quarterback Tom Ramsey, linebacker David Howard, cornerbacks Dwight Drane and Wymon Henderson also had NFL careers. Tony Zendejas set an NFL record in 1991 when he kicked 17 consecutive field goals.

And months before the 49ers drafted Jerry Rice in the first round of the 1985 NFL draft, Klosterman invited Rice’s coaching staff from Mississippi Valley State to the team’s Manhattan Beach offices.

Imagine that. Steve Young throwing touchdown passes to Jerry Rice.

Instead of touchdowns and championships, though, the Express’ lasting legacy is bounced checks and death threats from irate creditors. Oldenburg, who once claimed he was richer than Donald Trump, disappeared shortly after the season started, leaving behind a stack of unpaid bills.

While front office employees dodged bill collectors, things deteriorated on the field. A team that reached the Western Conference championship game in 1984 staggered to a 3-15 record, including a midseason 51-0 loss.

When players were injured, the league refused to pay for replacements. At one point, a 39-year-old truck driver was playing tackle for $100 a game. No wonder Young told his center during one game to snap the ball over his head and “Let’s see what happens.”

Young took the same what-the-heck approach in the season’s final game. When the team’s only healthy running back was hurt, the ever-willing Young, who has the highest quarterback rating in NFL history, carried the ball.

Hadl, now an athletic administrator at the University of Kansas, laughs when recalling Young’s brief career as a professional running back but quickly points out, “It wasn’t funny at the time.”

“We had some big boys in football,” Hadl said. “Guys like Don Klosterman and [assistant coach] Sid Gillman, and this was not what we had in mind for our last roundup.”

Klosterman figured the sun had already set on the franchise when he trudged out to the Valley for the team’s final home game.

“It was real sad for me,” he said. “At that point the curtain was coming down. We had the ingredients for a championship team. We had built the foundation and now somebody was blowing it up.”

Klosterman, who manages a casino company in Los Angeles, knew that nothing, not even a massive turnout by Valley football fans, would save the Express.

“We didn’t have much support from around the league and there was no way the people in the Valley were about to let a stadium be built,” he said.

*

Perhaps the only legacy the game provided was fodder for football trivia buffs. Name the starting quarterbacks. Hint: Both became Super Bowl MVPs.

Young is the easy half of the answer to that question. After starring at Brigham Young, he helped give the new league cachet and national headlines. As a rookie, he passed for 2,361 yards and still is the only professional player to pass for more than 300 yards and rush for more than 100 in one game.

The other quarterback? Doug Williams, a journeyman from Grambling State. For the record, Williams led Arizona to a 21-10 victory. But perhaps because his playing future was as dubious as the USFL’s, Williams seemed deflated by the Pierce experience.

“Playing here was a little letdown, to tell the truth,” he said at the time.

Who would have guessed that little more than two years later he would be leading the Washington Redskins to a 42-10 Super Bowl blowout of the Denver Broncos?

That victory and time have softened his memory of the game at Pierce.

“The field was a little bumpy, but I wasn’t disappointed or bitter,” said Williams, who retired from the NFL in 1990. “We knew what we were up against. We had a league we were trying to sell. The bottom line is we were all getting paid to play. We were still professionals.”

That was the lure for Fenwick and his assistant coaches. While Fenwick worked as the unofficial stadium manager, attending to such needs as locker-room amenities and phone lines on the sidelines, his assistants and players manned concession stands, installed at field level for the game.

Rich Lawson, Fenwick’s offensive line coach and now Chaminade High coach, relished his up-close look at a professional team. In fact, he still has a copy of the game-day program.

“The only bummer is I didn’t get Steve Young’s autograph,” Lawson said. “It was neat to see how a professional team approached a game, seeing all the strategy sessions beforehand.”

However, Lawson also recalls an Express player running off the field and directly over to his concession booth and asking for a cold drink.

“He said he needed to get a Coke from us real quick,” Lawson said. “I guess they ran out of Gatorade on the sidelines. He was dressed for battle, so I said, ‘Sure, take what you want.’ ”

Fenwick, who said Pierce netted $5,000 in concession sales from the game, remembers feeling sorry for the players, hoping they didn’t blame his staff for the minor-league conditions.

“I was hoping they understood that this was just a trial,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t a first-class situation. But the fans didn’t seem to mind. I felt like people were really hungry to bring football to the Valley.”

Fenwick still has the hunger. When the Raiders and the NFL were looking at Southern California sites earlier this year before Al Davis moved his team to Oakland, Fenwick was pained that the Valley was never considered.

“I was hoping they would build a stadium at Devonshire Downs,” he said about the old fairgrounds near the Cal State Northridge campus. “Why not there as opposed to Anaheim or Hollywood Park?”

But Fenwick answers his own question, citing the strength of homeowner groups that undoubtedly would oppose construction.

So he is left with the memory of the June 15 game, a career highlight and lowlight all at the same time.

“It was a nice game with a nice atmosphere,” he said. “I remember that [Raider owner] Al Davis was there. I’m sure he was there to see [Steve Young], but it was an exciting night.

“It was a dream come true, but after all was said and done, it was just a dream.”