Miami Against the World

By Tom Callahan

Offering more opportunities for trouble than smaller and chillier college- football towns, Miami has assembled the best and most troublesome team in the country. "It's the University of Miami football players against the world," declares All-America Tackle Jerome Brown, who has been evicted from the dormitory for having a firearm. A chunk of the team is in the process of making restitution for phone calls charged with an illegal access number. Individual scandals have ranged from car-leasing improprieties to steroid possession to shoplifting. In other news, they beat Oklahoma last week, 28-16.

"It makes us want to go out on that field and destroy," says Halfback Melvin Bratton. As it happens, the Hurricanes' cleanest liver is their finest player and main destroyer. In Vinny Testaverde, they have produced a third quarterback for the ages in just the '80s, their sixth decade in the business but the first to speak of. The Hurricanes had a tradition in the '40s, but not of winning. They canceled a game with UCLA rather than play against Jackie Robinson.

At times during the '60s, a player or so was worth cheering, such as Passer George Mira or Pass Rusher Ted Hendricks. But the highlight of the '70s, a bowl-less interlude for the Hurricanes, was the time that the University of Florida literally lay down to let them score. A peripatetic coach named Lou Saban came along then, and before moving on in two years, recruited a monstrous class headed by Quarterback Jim Kelly. He is the current matinee idol of the Buffalo Bills. Saban's successor, Howard Schnellenberger, backed Kelly up with Ohioan Bernie Kosar and Long Islander Testaverde. On the day after New Year's in 1984, Kosar passed a storied Nebraska team silly in the Orange Bowl, and Miami won its first national championship.

Arguments are being waged over which of the triumvirate is the greatest, but none over who is the smartest. Polishing off a double major in three years, Kosar had two seasons of eligibility remaining when he contrived his own N.F.L. draft and installed himself last year as the boy genius of the Cleveland Browns. Considerately, he signaled the game plan to Testaverde, who otherwise might have transferred. Because of all the talented players lately streaming to Miami in search of a professional halfway house, the pro longest in the making has been Testaverde. (He even lingered an extra year in high school to improve his scholarship offers.)

The son of a construction worker and confessed fanatic, Vinny was presented his first football in a bassinet. It was the day he came home from the hospital. "When I think of it now I have to laugh," his father says, "but I also have to believe in God." To free himself for football trips, Al Testaverde has given up his 17-year foreman's job to go back to the cruel toil of grading and finishing cement. "It's worth it," he says. "I want Vinny to * win the Heisman more than he wants to win it; I admit that. If he wins it today, and I drop dead tomorrow, I'm happy."

He may have won it last week as No. 2 Miami went head to head with No. 1 Oklahoma while Testaverde at least seemed to be similarly engaged with Brian Bosworth. Events in college football have seldom been so clear cut. Bosworth is an unruly linebacker who prunes his head like a boxwood bush and streaks it with rainbows to spell out individuality. Even as its children have taken to emulating him, the Oklahoma Bible Belt has somehow been able to rationalize Bosworth, to forgive the occasional "loogie" he talks of spitting into opponents' faces, and to disregard some other troubling things he says, like "I used to beat my sisters with whips."

So powerful is the religion of Sooner football, even a barbarian like this can be championed for the Heisman Trophy. With the country's attention so clearly focused, Michigan State's Lorenzo White, Penn State's D.J. Dozier and Florida's Kerwin Bell suddenly seemed minor candidates, especially after Testaverde completed 21 of 28 passes for 261 yds. and the first four touchdowns scored this season against the defending champions. Bosworth was relatively subdued and was not detected goobering on anyone. Testaverde riddled Oklahoma almost as emphatically last year in Norman, 27-14, but any title claim was lost in the Sugar Bowl to Tennessee, 35-7. "I've put that out of my head," the quarterback said before last Saturday's game, "but not permanently."

As the long-suffering understudy, Testaverde had become a figure of team sympathy. "When you see someone that good working that hard," Melvin Bratton says, "it's depressing. We kept telling him, 'Your time's coming, it's coming.' " Now that third-year Coach Jimmy Johnson describes him flatly as the "best college quarterback I've ever had," some of them marvel that he is unchanged. "He's just old Vinny," says Gregg Rakoczy, the center. "He wants to show how good we are, not how good he is." Despite himself, Testaverde showed how good he was at eluding the Sooner pass rush, and how strong he is at 6 ft. 5 in. and 218 lbs. "Every quarterback strives for the perfect game," he says, "but he'll never get it." This was close enough.

At the same time that several teammates were explaining to the National Collegiate Athletic Association how they came to lease rather luxurious cars, Testaverde was getting along on a bicycle. Someone stole it. "I don't know whether it's always been this bad," says the Miami Herald's longtime sports editor, Edwin Pope, "or whether we're just paying more attention to the players' conduct since they've been winning. The easy atmosphere that attracts them here is the very thing that gets them into trouble. Trouble's not as easy to find in frozen little places in the Midwest, although they got some guys on this team who could manage it."