BILLY+WITZ

BILLY WITZ. “A Strong Arm and a Strong Mind.” New York Times. September 13, 2008 = http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/sports/ncaafootball/13usc.html = LOS ANGELES — Long before he became a quarterback at Southern California, Mark Sanchez endured countless tests dreamed up by his father. When Sanchez took batting practice as a teenager, his father quizzed him on the periodic table as each pitch was about to arrive. While gauging the speed and location of a fastball, his brain was also attempting to recall the atomic weight of magnesium. When he was younger, he dribbled a basketball while wearing glasses that blocked his view of the ball — all the while facing rapid-fire questions on multiplication tables. And when he dropped back to pass a football, working on his touch by lobbing the ball over a goal post, he had to know who the 13th president was. Answer: Millard Fillmore. This work was often done after practice, once others had gone home. “It was this time,” Sanchez said as dusk closed in after a recent U.S.C. football practice. “Practice had just ended, and we wouldn’t leave until it was dark. My mom would be in the car, screaming from the parking lot that dinner is getting cold. I’d say: ‘Nobody else is here. Let’s go home. This is crazy.’ ” If Sanchez did not understand the reason for those drills, or for the demands his father placed on him, he does now. He is the starting quarterback for the top-ranked Trojans, who play host to fifth-ranked [|Ohio State] on Saturday in one of the season’s most anticipated games. Nick Sanchez taught those lessons to help his son learn to think quickly and to develop a self-confidence that would rub off on others. Those may be the qualities of the quintessential quarterback, but Nick Sanchez said that was not the point. “Football is a wonderful thing, but as that expression goes, football ain’t all that,” he said. As proof, he could offer himself, a former junior-college quarterback, and his two older sons. Nick Jr., played quarterback at Yale and is now a lawyer. Brandon was an offensive lineman at DePauw and is now a mortgage broker. “There was no foresight to athletics,” the father said. “I wanted them to deal with difficult situations. My hope is that they would be stronger.” As if to emphasize that point, he ends each conversation with Mark with a reminder: be a leader. This focus on leadership comes easily for Nick Sanchez. A former Army sergeant, he is a captain in the Orange County Fire Authority and a member of the national urban search and rescue team. The search-and-rescue duty took him to New Orleans after Katrina, to New York after the Sept. 11 attacks and to Oklahoma City after the bombing of the federal building. “In a sense, it is like football,” the elder Sanchez, who is a regular at U.S.C. practices, said of his rescue efforts. “The group I’ve been with has been very successful. We live together, we work together. You can call the same play 50 times, and there’s always a different result. It might be a traffic accident, a residential fire — you have to function, react and deal.” For most of the previous three seasons, Mark Sanchez has had to function, react and deal while sitting on the bench. It was not easy for the former all-American at Mission Viejo High, where he played for Bob Johnson, the father of the former U.S.C. and [|Buffalo Bills] quarterback Rob Johnson. But Sanchez, a junior who started three games last season when John David Booty was injured, won the starting job in the spring in a competition with the sophomore Mitch Mustain, a transfer who had won all eight of his starts at Arkansas in 2006. Sanchez follows in a recent line of quarterback royalty at U.S.C., but he is cut from a different cloth. [|Carson Palmer], for whom Sanchez served as a ball boy when Palmer was a high school star in Orange County, was blessed with a rocket arm but he was quiet and introspective. Matt Leinart lived the life of a rock star. Booty, who grew up in a football family, was the accurate automaton. Sanchez, it seems, is the life of the party. His arm may be strong — he threw a ball 60 yards to Ronald Johnson in a season-opening win over Virginia — but it is matched by his personality. Sanchez plays with a let-it-all-hang-out vibe, always eager to look for a big play. During the week, he bounds around the practice field, pumping up teammates or peppering coaches with questions. His teammates have dubbed him the Mexican Jumping Bean. “Leinart and John David were very methodical, in-control guys,” said Jeff Byers, a fifth-year senior guard. “Mark knows what’s going on, but he’s got a much higher energy. He’s very charismatic. The O-line, we love him.” If there is a question about Sanchez — one that Ohio State may pose with its pass rush — it is whether he is too excitable. Last year, Sanchez appeared poised to rally the Trojans from a 14-point fourth-quarter deficit at Oregon, but he threw an interception that sealed a 24-17 loss. Afterward, he blamed himself for the defeat, which knocked the Trojans from the national championship picture. But U.S.C. Coach Pete Carroll warned not to confuse an abundance of passion with a lack of poise. “I like a guy who plays the game with his heart,” Carroll said. “Mark is that kind of player, someone who can feel the game and adapt. The best example we’ve ever seen is a guy like [|John McEnroe] — the more crazy he’d get, the better he’d play. A great example is [|Brett Favre]. All the emotion, all the fire — that is an engaging manner that affects everybody. I’m not saying there won’t be times when he’s too pumped, but I like his way. Even last year, people loved it when they saw him play. It’s interesting that for some guys, that translates to the crowd.” During his three-game stint as a starter last season, Sanchez made a decision that did not translate so well. The Trojans’ team dentist created a mouthpiece for him with a Mexican flag, a nod to Sanchez’s heritage. Instead, Sanchez received a torrent of criticism — both on the Internet and on op-ed pages. “It was supposed to be fun, to say thank you to the Hispanic following,” Sanchez said. “I never intended it to be a radical statement, or about political power or anything like that.” Sanchez is well aware that prominent Mexican-American quarterbacks are rare. He knows Jeff Garcia, Tony Romo and Jim Plunkett have Mexican heritage, but he also knows he is a third-generation American who grew up in a largely white suburb of southern Orange County. He listened to Spanish mostly at family functions, where his grandparents, aunts and uncles spoke it. After a practice this week, Sanchez was approached by a TV reporter from a Spanish-language station, who asked questions in Spanish. He answered them in English, blushing that he did not want to embarrass himself on camera with his Spanish. “I can speak commendable kitchen Spanish,” he said later. Sanchez said the controversy over the mouthpiece taught him a lesson about the position he is in as the U.S.C. quarterback. He was taught a similar lesson — albeit much more seriously — in the spring of 2006, when he was a 19-year-old redshirt freshman. He was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault but was ultimately cleared in the case. Around the same time, he was cited for using a fake ID to enter a bar. “It was tough, because my side didn’t come out for a while,” he said. “We just had to put our trust in law enforcement. It was one of those things — on the field, people will cheap-shot you, and in a social light, someone might toss their drink at you and see how you respond. You learn, you grow, you mature.” Off the field, Sanchez said he had come a long way from those days. On it, his progress will be measured Saturday against the Buckeyes. Sanchez will walk into the Coliseum with many of the 92,000 fans expecting him to lead the Trojans to victory. When the Ohio State defense begins throwing more than quadratic equations at him, it will be asking a lot of a quarterback making his fifth career start. But this one has spent a lifetime preparing for it.