FOOTBALL ’92 : Last Muster for Farmer : Recalcitrant Back Brings Sizable Talent to Northridge

Some of the football coaches who have tried and failed horribly over the past seven years to rein in a wild horse named Jamal Farmer say that Farmer is self-centered, arrogant and just plain full of himself.

Other coaches say Farmer is just plain full of himself, arrogant and self-centered.

And they see trouble in the near future for Cal State Northridge coaches, who suddenly find themselves as caretakers of this wild horse.

But Bob Burt, the head coach at Northridge, sees something else in the near future. He sees Farmer taking a handoff and erupting to full speed with several strides of his massive legs. He hears a collision and sees a defender, some wide-eyed, would-be linebacker from Southern Utah or San Francisco State launched into the air, his helmet now turned backward, shoulder pads jerked down around his waist and his feet somehow jammed into just one shoe, soaring over the rusted chain-link fence that surrounds the pasture-like North Campus Stadium, high over the dirt parking lots and halfway across campus, landing heavily near the science building just as Farmer struts into the end zone.

Or something like that.

“Let’s just say I’m excited,” Burt said. “Real excited.”

With good reason. Farmer (5-foot-11, 225 pounds) has blasted defenders into next week at all levels of football, from youth leagues to college. For the past three years, he did it to solid Division I college teams such as Brigham Young and San Diego State as one of the most prolific running backs in the history of the University of Hawaii.

Pro scouting combines seldom write reports on underclassmen, but both the National Football League Scouting Combine in New York and the National Football Scouting Service in Tulsa, Okla., said a running back with Farmer’s credentials undoubtedly will be scouted during the 1992 season.

And this season Farmer will be pounding a football into far lesser opponents than he is used to facing, football players who tried lifting weights once but found them too heavy.

*

Farmer sits in the CSUN locker room, unthinkingly rubbing a hand over a biceps muscle that is roughly the circumference of a tuna, a muscle that helps him snap 450 pounds off the bench-press rack and jolt it easily off his chest.

This body has caused some concern too. Three times at Hawaii he was tested for steroid use. Negative. Plain, old-fashioned weightlifting, he said.

“At Hawaii, they kept calling them random drug tests, and every time they picked me,” he said. “When they said, ‘Random,’ I knew that meant me.”

He is asked about his final college football season.

And he smiles.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I just don’t know what I might do. Maybe 2,000 yards. Maybe 20 touchdowns. I think that might be realistic. Maybe more than that.”

CSUN will play 10 games. Farmer knew that, of course, when he settled on those numbers. Two hundred yards and two touchdowns per game. And perhaps a linebacker stumbling around groggily after each contest with a frightening headache.

“Some runners hit you,” Burt said. “Jamal rattles your jawbone. Geez, can he hit!”

Farmer also is able, it must be noted, to run around people. He rushed for more than a mile in only 27 games for Hawaii, and you don’t do that by plowing into every defender. At Granada Hills High, Farmer started for three years and helped the team to the 1987 City 4-A Division championship with a victory over Carson. In Granada Hills’ pass-oriented attack that year, he rushed for a team-high 788 yards and caught 26 passes for 260 yards.

Recruited by UCLA, Arizona, Oregon State and others, Farmer used one of his NCAA-approved recruiting visits to check out Hawaii. He had, he said, no intention of going to school there. But a free weekend in Hawaii is a free weekend in Hawaii.

He liked it. He stayed.

Moved from slotback to tailback by Coach Bob Wagner during his redshirt freshman year, Farmer exploded in his first season in 1989, setting an NCAA freshman record for rushing touchdowns with 18. His efforts, which included a freshman school-record 986 yards rushing, a team-leading 116 points, the No. 7 ranking in the nation with a 10.55-points-per-game scoring average and a stunning 242-yard rushing performance against Air Force, boosted Hawaii to a 9-3 record. He was named the Western Athletic Conference freshman of the year, naturally.

As a sophomore, Farmer’s output fell to 664 yards and nine touchdowns as he played less than he had as a freshman, down to half a game. Along the way, he was suspended for a couple of games. Last year, as a junior, the playing time continued to drop. He rushed for four touchdowns and 474 yards in Hawaii’s first five games.

And then he quit. Eighteen points short of the school’s all-time scoring record.

The parting, as they say, was amiable. Everyone was happy. The Hawaii coaches were happy to be rid of Farmer. And Farmer was happy to be rid of them.

*

What happened? Why would Wagner be so eager to see his meal ticket punched out early? It was, according to the Hawaii coaches, simply a matter of size: They were unable to find a helmet big enough to squeeze over Farmer’s swollen head.

“He’s a young kid with a lot of talent and, yes, he’s gotten some special treatment, he expects that sort of thing,” Wagner said late in the 1990 season.

After one game that season, Farmer invited a reporter into the team’s training room for an interview, which was against team rules. An assistant coach walked by and said tongue-in-cheek, “It’s OK because you’re Jamal Farmer and Jamal Farmer is special.”

During his stay in Hawaii, Farmer had been suspended for missing practices, for blasting teammates after losses and once was arrested for riding a stolen moped, although charges were not filed after it was learned that Farmer was negotiating to buy the vehicle and was test-riding it, courtesy of the man who had stolen it.

Wagner did not return phone calls for this story. Said an aide in the Hawaii athletic department, “Wagner doesn’t talk about Jamal much. It’s over and done with.”

Farmer blames the mess on a cultural difference. He pauses during an interview, choosing words carefully. He does not, he points out, want to say anything disparaging about the Hawaiian people, who make up about 80% of the school’s football team.

He fails miserably.

“They talk about people from L.A. being laid back. Well, you haven’t seen laid-back until you’ve seen a Hawaiian,” Farmer said. “They’ve got the beaches and the surf and the sun and they’ve got it made. The guys on the team, that was the zenith for them. They have no intentions of going on in football. Playing for the university is the NFL for them. They’ve already made it.

“All they talked about was getting a little house on the beach somewhere, grabbing a pair of shorts and surfing and swimming for the rest of their lives. That’s all they wanted. That’s how they were raised.”

*

Into this picture of, well, tranquillity , roared Farmer, who never met a weight he didn’t want to repeatedly lift over his head, never met a hill he didn’t want to run up to strengthen his already-bulging calves and thighs.

It was a match made in hell.

“There was resentment right from the start,” Farmer said. “From some of the players and from the coaches, who thought I was doing all that just to show them up, to make myself stand out, almost to make fun of them. But it was never anything like that. It was just me, trying to get better.

“I believe God gave me a great football talent, and I will not waste it. So I worked 10 times harder than anyone else on that team. They’d head for the beach, I’d head for the weight room. And that was the source of all of the problems.”

Today, Farmer practices harder than ever with his new team. His parents still live in Lake View Terrace and he said he just wanted to come home for his final year of college football. A transfer to another Division I school was not possible, because he would have been forced to sit out a year, which, because of his redshirt season, would have exhausted his eligibility.

And against a backdrop of mini-malls on the Northridge practice field, his talents stand out like a reasonable price at Saks Fifth Avenue. He leaves defenders lunging at the area where he has just been and, fortunately, pulls up short on what will soon be full-speed collisions against other teams.

And, if you believe his former coaches at Granada Hills and Hawaii, it shouldn’t be long now before he insists on changing CSUN’s team name from the Matadors to the JamalFarmers, replacing the logo on their helmets of the Spaniard in knee-pants waving the cape with an oil painting of himself, perhaps a pose near a glowing fireplace, or seated in the Oval Office of the White House. Well, it hasn’t happened yet.

“When I first heard that Jamal might be interested in coming here, I was cautiously optimistic,” Burt said. “I didn’t want to get too excited. Now, I’m excited. It’s not just his talents, but his work ethic that impresses me. He’s out here early, he stays late, he works hard on everything we show him and then he’s the first guy into the weight room and the last one out. I’ve made him one of the captains.

“If I had 44 Jamal Farmers, we wouldn’t lose a game.”

However, Burt might need 44 buses for every trip. At least that’s what they say.

*

But others in addition to Burt have seen no sign of an egomaniac. What they have seen is one of the finest runners the school has ever had, working harder than anyone else on the team.

“I’ve been on this team for five years and seen Albert Fann and some other great runners, but Jamal is the best I’ve ever seen,” said Eric Treibatch, a fifth-year senior and strong safety. “His quickness and speed are unbelievable, especially for a guy his size. But what really impresses you is his work ethic. Every time he carries the ball in practice, you know he’s here to play. He’s the most intense, focused, driven person I’ve ever seen.”

And if a trace of cockiness should surface, and past coaches guarantee that it will, Treibatch said it’s justified.

“If he has an ego, no one here has seen it,” he said. “You might think a Division I guy with his background would be stuck up, but it’s just not the case. We all respect the guy. But if he has an ego, it’s understandable. I don’t think you can get to a big show like Hawaii without having a little attitude. Sure he has a lot of confidence. He should.”

Farmer has heard all the comments. He has learned to live with his critics.

“I know what they say about me,” Farmer acknowledged. “But you’ll see a difference here. This is the first time I’ve felt wanted on a football team. The coaches have gone out of their way to make me feel comfortable. After all I’ve been through, I needed that. You start thinking that if one coach doesn’t like you, like in Hawaii, then all coaches won’t like you. It feels nice to have a coach accept me.”

And then, sitting on a rickety wooden bench in a cement-block building on the dusty end of a campus full of students who tend to treat football like malaria--the further away from it you stay, the better--Farmer smiles.

“I can’t tell you how excited I am,” he said. “Excited about what might happen this year, right out there on that football field. I think my day to shine is here.”