Former UCLA football player Ira Pauly reminisces on game

Ira Pauly still remembers the final touchdown he witnessed as a UCLA football player.

The 1952 and 1953 Bruins’ primary long snapper, Pauly sprinted down the field during the fourth quarter of the 1954 Rose Bowl Game to make a play against the Michigan State punt return. Three-quarters of his way down the field, Pauly noticed that the ball was traveling toward his right.

By the time the returner secured the ball, Pauly found himself parallel to a Michigan State Spartan and could only watch as the player raced down the sideline and into the end zone, finalizing a 28-20 defeat for UCLA.

With the Bruins losing in three games by a combined total of 11 points through the 1952 and 1953 seasons, Pauly’s memory holds on to the losses better than the wins. The retired psychiatrist remembers little detail about the many blowouts UCLA collected during his final two years on the varsity team.

Yet, he knows by heart the exact scores of the three defeats that UCLA suffered with Pauly as a starting center. His memories of defeat remain strong, despite Pauly playing during a bygone era that defined winning as the essence of football, a notion to be challenged by his sons’ generation.

 

Hardened Bruins

The many triumphs Pauly and the Bruins enjoyed on the field did not seem to come naturally.

Pauly refers to himself and his teammates as “undersized overachievers,” a nod to the team’s collectively small stature and shortage of athletic ability compared to contemporaries from schools with athletic scholarships. He pointed out that scholarships allowed archrival USC to consistently assemble teams consisting of larger, stronger athletes than those who attended UCLA.

Weighing in at just over 180 pounds, Pauly was more than 100 pounds lighter than UCLA’s current starting center, redshirt sophomore Jake Brendel. He was a small offensive lineman even by his era’s standards, an era which Pauly claims was devoid of players anywhere near the 300-pound mark commonly seen today.

To Pauly, a coaching staff that was headed by Henry Russell Sanders and included future NFL coaches Tommy Prothro and Jim Myers compensated for UCLA’s lack of scholarship players. Pauly lauded the team’s conditioning regimen, which he thought put the Bruins on a level playing field with the competition.

Sanders, a man whose legacy includes coining the phrase “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” helped the Bruins establish something of a winning formula during and right after Pauly’s time.

The team went 22-5 during Pauly’s full-time varsity years, and it did not lose a game en route to a shared national championship the season after he graduated. But UCLA could not compete in the 1955 Rose Bowl Game– consecutive appearances were not allowed at the time. Finishing No. 1 in the coaches’ poll, the Bruins were considered co-national champions with Rose Bowl winner Ohio State.

Despite his program’s immense success, Sanders’ ways were not for everyone. Pauly knew many good athletes who left the sport because they could not withstand the mental and physical abuse that coaches used to get the most out of their players.

“Most of us kind of saw what was going on and thought it was pretty funny and amusing, but some guys suffer (from) the belittling approach … It was designed to have you become a better player,” Pauly said.

Sanders’ style of leadership was not surprising for players who roamed the field in days when facial scabs and bruises were part of the uniforms and facemasks were not.

Pauly even recalled an offensive line coach pulling out a player’s mouthguard, throwing it on the ground and saying that he never wanted to see such gear again. Pauly added that UCLA’s single-wing offense seemed to him even more violent for certain players. Blocking backs collided with defensive ends after 10 to 20 steps worth of building momentum.

Lack of regard for players’ comfort also colored the language of Pauly’s time with the Bruins. “Have your bell hung,” a still-commonly used saying, is a phrase that Pauly heard during his playing days, and one he considers a trivialization of the sport’s inherent dangers to the head.

Pauly could also clearly remember when Sanders would yell through a microphone from above the field to criticize bad snaps or missed tackles. He said that Sanders’ manner and tone made the coach come off as “playing God.”

 

Changing the game?

From practicing long snaps in the backyard to huddling around the TV for NFL games on Sundays, Ira Pauly’s son Brett Pauly did not need to look far to see how his father imparted a love of football upon his children.

Experiences of the sport’s violence, which characterized Ira Pauly’s era, carried over as well. Now, the game that Ira and Brett Pauly played has seen and continues to face changes that address growing safety concerns in the sport.

The brutal side of football hit close to home for the Paulys in the mid-1970s, when Brett Pauly saw his football career end as a high school freshman.

Brett Pauly said he recalls suffering the second of two concussions while participating in a “bull in the ring” drill, a controversial exercise in which he, one of the two smallest players on the team, repeatedly rammed helmet-to-helmet into the team’s biggest player at the highest speed possible.

“I’m not sure I lost consciousness, but when I opened my eyes, the grass was green out of one peeper and blue out of the other. And suffice to say, that was my last play in football,” said Brett Pauly, a senior editor for ESPN.

In recent years, football governing bodies across all levels of competition have taken measures that attempt to prioritize player safety. A new targeting rule, to be implemented this year, ejects players striking the opposition’s head and neck region, and represents one of the NCAA’s latest attempts to create a safer football environment at the collegiate level.

Some, like current UCLA coach Jim Mora, doubt the targeting rule’s fairness and see its effectiveness as limited. During this year’s fall football camp in San Bernardino, Mora called the new rule the “worst” rule he has seen in his 29 years of coaching. He reasoned that a potential violator’s intent cannot be accurately determined live or on replays.

As public concern over head trauma in sports mounts, parents like Quinn Pauly, another of Ira Pauly’s sons, have taken pre-emptive action in protecting their young athletes. Quinn Pauly, a family doctor who often deals with sports-related injuries, once barred one of his children from football for two years. Only after pleading and begging from his now-11-year-old did Quinn allow his child back onto the field.

“It’s been a bit of a struggle to go through that, but (those are) the decisions we all make. I wish sports were safer, but life isn’t safe,” said Quinn Pauly, a graduate of the University of Nevada School of Medicine.

Ira Pauly said that the mentality and technique behind blocking and tackling have not changed much, if at all, since he last lined up on the gridiron. Ira Pauly’s assessment suggests that preventative measures like Quinn’s may be the only way to significantly impact player safety in the football environment.

“I don’t think there will be less than hard hits, no matter how the game changes,” he said. “That’s just the nature of football. You’ve got to be aggressive, and aggression means hitting hard.”

 

 

A win-win situation

Pauly will walk away from the Rose Bowl for the first time in more than a decade this Saturday. No matter the result, Pauly will leave Pasadena with a win.

Saturday’s football season opener, which Ira Pauly will attend with Brett Pauly, against the University of Nevada, Reno pits against each other two schools that have shaped the Pauly family.

Pauly, a first-team Academic All-American, earned his doctorate at what is now UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and went on to chair the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno, a school that all four of his sons have attended.

Pauly is looking to get excited over rousing plays between two teams that he loves. He intends to enjoy the game as a spectator, on a level far removed from the scrutiny of tough-love coaches and an increasingly safety-conscious general public.

“I don’t have the same passion for the football games that I had when I was playing or a lot younger. As you get older, it’s entertainment. But it’s not life and death.”