Quips Only Part of Story

John McKay is gone, another pillar fallen.

How better to measure a man's legacy than to say, a quarter-century after he left USC, the school has yet to replace him.

Oh, how the Trojans have tried. John Robinson gave it a good run, winning one-half share of a national football championship, USC's only since McKay.

USC trotted in Larry Smith, Ted Tollner, Robinson II, Paul Hackett and now Pete Carroll.

None are/were/or will ever be John McKay.

McKay, who died Sunday at 77, was part of Los Angeles sporting Camelot in the 1960s, arguably the most romantic time in our city's history.

It was an era of Koufax, Wooden, West, Baylor, Gabriel and McKay. We had Vin Scully and Chick Hearn on mike and Jim Murray behind the typewriter.

McKay held a seat in this high court.

The kids won't remember. They don't remember last week.

But McKay dominated in the most competitive situation imaginable.

In 16 years, he won four national championships at USC in a town where the Koufax and Drysdale Dodgers hogged the headlines and Coach John Wooden's UCLA Bruins turned the NCAA basketball tournament into a farce.

McKay won four titles in an era when his contemporaries were Bear Bryant, Ara Parseghian, Darrell Royal, Woody Hayes, Tommy Prothro and Joe Paterno.

Not bad, huh?

McKay redefined USC football, raised the bar so high not even Trojan great Bob Seagren couldn't vault it.

McKay was so good, like Wooden at UCLA, he left the program in a perpetual state of unattainable expectations.

There was USC football tradition before McKay, but you'd have to remember how to do the Charleston to recall it.

Howard Jones had his "Thundering Herd," but USC football went 30 years between national titles from the time Jones won his last in 1932 to McKay's first in 1962.

McKay was 36 when he got the job in 1960, and brought more self-confidence to the program than a man his age probably had a right to have.

McKay didn't invent the "I" formation, but boy did he expand on it.

He learned how the "I" worked from a young junior college coach in Washington by the name of Don Coryell.

Yet, McKay transformed the "I," setting his tailback deep, with eyes up and hands on his knees, far enough behind center to get a running start into the line of scrimmage.

"If we're going to run the daylight out of the football, the tailback should see the defense as the QB sees it," McKay once said.