Loss Taught Him Lesson in Real Life

Marcus Soward was thumbing the remote the other day, his baby girl playing at his feet, his Arizona State jersey tacked to the wall of an elementary school, when the screen lit up with a Rose Bowl interview.

There they were, players from Michigan and Washington State, framed by the palm trees that framed him last year, answering the same questions with the same rascal expressions, professing humility with smiles that said, can’t lose, won’t lose.

Soward laughed and thought, oh yes you can. You can lose. You can lose big.

You can be one minute 40 seconds shy of winning a national championship in the Rose Bowl, and then your heart can get caught in your tonsils.

You, a star defensive back, can start playing timid, laying back, trying not to get beat, your opponent advancing, the lump growing.

You can suddenly look up and discover your opponent is on your 19-yard line, and now you get rowdy again, but you are desperate, you grab the receiver, pass interference, the ball is placed five yards from a touchdown with 24 seconds left.

You can look up moments later and it’s over, your opponent has scored, you have lost, Ohio State 20, Arizona State 17.

And you will cry like the day you first came to this earth.

Cry on the field. Cry in the locker room. Cry until you get into your father’s arms, only he cannot make it better, nobody can.

You will return to your campus and discover that you cannot sleep, not until 1 or 2 each morning, finally soothed by the sounds of television terror.

You will wearily stop by your locker room mail slot one afternoon, open a strange-looking letter, and read these words: “You blew the national championship.”

Marcus Soward watched those bold Wolverine and Cougar players from his living room the other day and laughed. You aren’t careful, you can not only lose a game, you can lose yourself.

But you can find yourself too.

His gurgling daughter reminded him of this. So did a nearby ream of school papers.

And there are those consistently proud phone calls from his proud family--including USC receiver and brother R. Jay--in San Bernardino.

“The Rose Bowl changed my life,” Soward said, brightly. “It taught me, you fall down, you get back up and you keep walking. You keep walking.”

Determined never to lay back again, he hustled to finish his degree in elementary education while signing a free-agent contract to play with the Chicago Bears.

Determined never to be forced into desperation again, he quit the Bears before summer conditioning because--as a longshot--he couldn’t bear the possibility of being cut and leaving his wife and daughter without proper support.

So he took a job making $27,000 as a schoolteacher, sixth graders, classroom 15, Adams Elementary in Mesa, Ariz.

A couple of weeks ago, one of Soward’s students walked up to him and began crying about his mother entering a drug rehabilitation center.

Soward found another teacher to watch his class, took the boy outside, and together they took a long stroll around the campus.

“You fall down, you keep walking,” he told him, passing along a lesson learned at the knee of the granddaddy of them all.

Rose Bowl warnings to Michigan and Washington State, from one who has been there:

“You will walk on the field and it will be like you are walking onto another planet.”

“You are going to feel things you have never felt before.”

“You think you have been in big games before? You have never been in anything like this.”

Through the words of 23-year-old Marcus Soward, we now know what unbeaten Arizona State felt last season during its Rose Bowl classic with Ohio State.

We know now that the breathtaking emotion shown during the best college football game of many seasons was neither planned nor intentionally prolonged.

“I’m telling you, I got goose bumps the minute I ran into the bowl, and they stayed with me the whole game,” Soward said. “We were fueled by that emotion.”

We also now know they were ultimately destroyed by it.

Soward still remembers the attitude of the Sun Devil defense while it vainly struggled to end Ohio State’s eventual game-winning, 65-yard touchdown drive in the final minutes.

“We were wide-eyed, we didn’t think it would come down to that,” he said. “We were looking at each other like, ‘Damn, it’s up to us to win the national championship!’ ”

Soward still can’t believe they didn’t.

He recently watched a replay of the game on Classic Sports Network and found himself cheering.

“Even now, I thought we were going to win,” he said. “The minute it finally hit me that we lost that game, I turned the TV off.”

Michigan will have that same chance Thursday, to go unbeaten and claim a national title.

Soward can’t tell the Wolverines how to do it, but he can tell them one thing the Sun Devils should have done differently.

During that final Ohio State drive, he said, they should not have done anything differently.

“We had been bumping the Ohio State receivers all day, right up in their faces, and suddenly we are told to give them room, to not give up the big play,” he said. “I wish we had been more aggressive. I wish I had said, ‘The hell with it’ and gotten in my man’s face.”

He sighed. “I’ve done that before. I wish I had done it then.”

What he does not regret, he said, is the pass-interference call for which he became so famous. Receiver David Boston jumped past him, he had no choice but to grab him before he got open in the end zone and hope the pass would be ruled uncatchable.

It was not. The penalty stood. The Buckeyes scored on the next play, with 19 seconds remaining.

“I would do the same thing again,” he said. “By then, it was the only thing we could do. It shouldn’t have gotten to that point.”

It was only afterward, while enduring a couple of months of long nights and endless questions, that Soward got the point.

This is something else he would like to pass on to Michigan and Washington State.

“The Rose Bowl puts you out there with the world watching, but it’s not about what happens in the game,” he said. “It’s about, what do you do with what happens? How do you handle it? Do you grow?”

Last summer Soward realized how much he had grown when he turned down the Bears to support his family. He had done well in their spring mini-camp, but he still knew that undrafted free agents rarely make the team.

With an infant daughter and a wife whose job could not support them both, he decided to stay in the Phoenix area and look for work.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “Other guys can just leave everything for the game, but I had responsibilities. I was done taking chances.”

A couple of days later, he was hired by the Mesa school district. Several months later, he signed a contract with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League.

He will report for work this summer only after the school year has ended, and only because he has saved money for his family, and because his teaching job will be there if he is cut before the next school year begins.

“Everybody said my son was stupid to walk away from the NFL,” said Rodney Soward, his father, who once walked away from the World Football League to support his family. “I told him, son, I’m proud of you.”

Today, Marcus Soward hangs his Sun Devil jersey and newspaper clippings in his classroom. He leaves his Rose Bowl watch and ring on his teacher’s desk.

His new students are constantly examining, touching, wanting to know what the great game was like.

When he tells them, Marcus Soward finds himself going on and on without once mentioning football.