The Crosstown Rivalry: Comparing UCLA and USC’s Most Famous Athletes

For over 80 years, UCLA and the University of Southern California have enjoyed a rivalry that’s one of the greatest in college sports.

It’s certainly the greatest rivalry in which the schools involved are located in the same city.

Many outstanding athletes have been involved in Los Angeles’ crosstown war and have left their mark on sports in general, so many that it would take an entire book to discuss them all.

In light of the upcoming showdown this Saturday night, I thought I would do a comparison on who I consider the single best athletes that the Bruins and Trojans, respectively, ever produced.

These two men I’m about to mention are true sports legends whose fame should never be disputed.

Let’s start with USC…

In 1967 their football program brought in a junior college transfer from San Francisco, who was just what they needed at running back after Mike Garrett won the school’s first Heisman Trophy two years earlier.

With his 1,451 yards and 11 touchdowns, including an epic 64 yard scoring jaunt against UCLA that earned a Rose Bowl berth and an eventual national championship for the Trojans, he became the toast of Troy.

He outdid himself the next year as he ran for 1,709 yards and doubled his touchdown output with 22, becoming USC’s second Heisman winner in the process.

His two-time consensus All-American status on the gridiron would have been enough to confirm him as one of the greats, but his world record in the 4×100 relay for ‘SC’s track team puts him over the top; no other Trojan did so well in two sports.

His pro numbers were even greater than his college numbers, as it was with the Buffalo Bills that he truly became famous.

He had 2,003 rushing yards in 1973, the first man to reach that mark – and unlike those 2,000 yard rushers who came after him, he did it in 14 games.

He finished with the second highest rushing yards total in NFL history to Jim Brown when he retired in 1979, and…

He was a five-time All-Pro on his way to being elected to the Hall of Fame in 1985.

What made this man famous was his charisma, which is what led him to a career in film and TV; no athlete was better known in the 1970s and 80s, and no black athlete was revered more in mainstream America.

The flaws he had, which proved to be fatal, were his pronounced arrogance and sense of entitlement, in addition to the way he treated his spouses.

In what’s widely known as “The Trial of the Century” in 1995, this icon was acquitted of murdering his second wife and another guy, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and the widely known fact that he brutally beat the wife he allegedly ended up killing.

His credibility and stock dropped to less than zero after that, and karma prevailed in 2008 when this former Trojan was convicted of armed robbery, kidnapping, conspiracy and coercion.

As of this writing, O.J. Simpson is serving 33 years in a Nevada prison.

So goes the most famous, and arguably the greatest, USC athlete ever.

As for crosstown rival UCLA, their most famous Bruin athlete is also, indisputably, their greatest of all time.

In fact, this legend is considered as UCLA’s greatest Bruin, athlete or otherwise, for what he did after his days in Westwood and the impact he made both in sports and in society.

Like his Trojan counterpart, this icon transferred from a junior college in Pasadena and had an immediate impact not only in football, but in basketball and track and field as well.

He was one of the leaders of UCLA’s first undefeated team in 1939, leading the nation in punt return average, and 1940 saw him lead the gridiron Bruins in everything as he was pretty much the whole team.

While on the Bruin basketball squad, he led the Pacific Coast Conference’s Southern Division in scoring two years running.

Although he was playing baseball for UCLA in the spring of 1940, he participated in the broad jump for the Bruin track team during his downtime where he merely won the NCAA title with a leap of 24 ‘, 10 1/4 “.

And speaking of baseball, that was his least successful sport in Westwood as he went 4-for-4 in his first game and did nothing thereafter, finishing at .097 for the season.

Considering what he would eventually accomplish in that sport, that is incredibly surprising-  but we’ll get to that later.

Being the first – and still the only – four sport letterman in UCLA history, his exploits in Westwood paled greatly to what he did at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York, on April 15, 1947.

When he took the field for the Dodgers that day, he did something that had not been done in sixty years and what a lot of people didn’t want to see happen: Break the color barrier in Major League Baseball.

This ex-Bruin went through major league hell that year as he faced an incredibly intense level of racist bigotry by those who very much wanted to keep baseball white, of which there were many. And he took that abuse without fighting back, which wasn’t in his nature; the stress of that burden would eventually kill him at the too-soon age of 53.

Winning the first Rookie of the Year Award in 1947 and being named the National League MVP in 1949, he more than succeeded in integrating the game. His .311 lifetime average and six pennants in his ten-year career (with one World Series title in 1955) solidified his legacy as he was the first black player inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962.

All of those accolades would have been enough if he did nothing else, but during his post athletic life he became a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, going South for marches and relentlessly lobbying for African American equality while serving on the board of the NAACP.

He also did much to raise the economic lot of the black community, doing things like starting banks and building businesses in inner city neighborhoods.

When one gives it some thought, Jackie Robinson essentially started the Civil Rights Movement in ’47, breaking the color line in America’s sacred sport.

And when it comes down to it, no one comes close to Robinson as the greatest UCLA Bruin that ever lived, as well as the greatest all around man in the history of U.S. sports.

Comparing USC’s Simpson and UCLA’s Robinson, it’s absolutely no contest when one is asked who was greater – one broke a racist color barrier and sparked a movement for the ages, changing history for the better, and the other’s an accused murderer and a convicted felon who’s currently behind bars.

If nothing else, Bruin fans can use Jackie Robinson as good fodder when arguing with Trojans about their schools…

“Yeah? Well, we have Jackie Robinson. We win! Case closed! End of discussion!”

With all due respect, no USC athlete can or will ever match the impact that Robinson, a former UCLA Bruin, had on America, let alone in sports.

And that’s just being honest.