The Graduates

"The challenge was to see how long we could keep the ball up in the air without dropping it," said Wortman, "31, 32, 33...duhhhh."

College life, said Cox, was a series of these challenges.

Bob Terrio's mother came from Los Angeles for the graduation. His father, George, flew in from Las Vegas, where he is a shift boss in the Keno game at the Las Vegas Hilton. "This is what we've lived for," said George as they pulled two lounge tables together at the Misty the night before graduation. The Misty has a reputation for prime ribs that is Lincoln-wide and is known as a good place to sit around after hours. "I wouldn't have missed this for the world," said George Terrio, smiling happily. He is a tall man, deeply tanned, with a Don Ameche mustache, and he wore a flowered shirt with the tail out. The Terrios had been divorced when Bob was a child. Mrs. Terrio kept the name by marrying George's brother Bill, but they had all remained close over the years, sharing a common interest in Bob.

The mother was in a reminiscent mood. She, too, is tall and lean, with flesh-colored hair and horn-rimmed glasses. She recalled with delight the time she fell over the railing at a Pop Warner League football game cheering one of Bob's feats (a crucial run, as she recalled). She recited from "the greatest story ever done on him," in the hometown paper when he was a fullback at Fullerton J.C. "In the story they called him The Mudder," she said, because he was always at his best when playing conditions were worst. "The Mudder," she repeated, looking at Bob.

She told about the time she almost fell out of the Orange Bowl on New Year's night 1971 when Bob intercepted a last-ditch LSU pass to save Nebraska's victory and first national championship. She was jumping up and down, she said, and almost lost control.

Bob Terrio said he remembered the first day he arrived in Lincoln, on a flight from Los Angeles, three years ago.

"It was January," he said, "and the sun was shining like today. Bob Newton and I got off the plane in our shirtsleeves. It was 5°. We looked at each other. 'We ain't staying here,' I said."

Nevertheless he did, partly out of appreciation for Devaney's attractive program (bowl games; trips to Honolulu) and partly because the University of Southern California had not asked him. He remembered falling in among the redwoods Devaney had recruited that year. "I thought I was big," he said. (He is 6'2", 215 pounds.) At the first practice session he was matched one-on-one with a 6'8" 280-pounder. His compensation was a swollen eye that did not open for two days.

A scar on Bob's right cheekbone, from an encounter years ago with an opponent's front teeth, stood out in the blue glow of the lounge, contributing to a general swarthiness that made him look older than his 22 years. Terrio, he said, was not an Italian name; it was shortened from Therialt, and the bloodlines were French Canadian and Indian. One of his Nebraska coaches had said there was also a creditable strain of American Stubborn. The coaches had redshirted him his first year at Nebraska, risking the chance that he might run home to sunny California.

"It was a terrible letdown," Bob said. "I'd always been first string wherever I played, whatever I played. I thought, 'Do I have to put up with the weather and this, too? For an extra year? Why am I here?' I did think of going home. But I had never quit anything in my life, and I didn't want to start.