LONG BEACH >> Dick Hammer decided he would learn to ride a unicycle. The next day, he was riding around, no problem, with his niece Nancy perched on his shoulders.

Sam Darnold, although he lived in Capistrano Beach, had never played beach volleyball before. One day he and his sister Franki entered a tournament, against teams that had competed regionally. The Darnolds nearly won.

Dick Hammer was swimming in the USC pool one day. The varsity coach saw him churn and immediately asked him to join the team.

Sam Darnold was told he had to lose 10 pounds to play youth football. “I’m not going to ask my 11-year-old to do that,” his mother Chris said. Sam found another league. Besides, he had always been comfortable playing against his elders.

He still is.

Dick Hammer’s grandson is a 19-year-old quarterback who lost his first start, at Utah, and won his next eight.

On Monday, Darnold and USC play Penn State in the Rose Bowl.

As a redshirt freshman he has a blinding future, with talk of Heisman Trophies and NFL first-round drafts already circling. Who knows what awaits him?

But Chris Darnold, her husband Mike and her mother Betty are pretty sure that Sam is hermetically sealed against self-celebration.

For one thing, Dick Hammer’s example came right out of Gil Thorp comic strips. For another, he was far less impressed with his superpowers than everyone else was.

“He had too much talent for one person,” said Betty, his widow, as she sat in the den that Dick built, in the house near the bay in Long Beach.

“He’d change the subject if you started talking about him,” Mike Darnold said. “He’d start asking about your family, or about what you were interested in. He didn’t want any of that attention.”

Hammer played on USC’s Final Four basketball team in 1954. The Trojans haven’t been back since. Hammer averaged 7.1 points and four rebounds for a 19-14 squad that beat Santa Clara by one point in the regional but lost a late 7-point lead to Bradley in the NCAA semifinals.

He played on the U.S. Olympic volleyball team at the 1964 Olympics, along with a UCLA basketball player named Keith Erickson.

He held school javelin and decathlon records at Fullerton Junior College.

He became a firefighter and was the captain of the unit at Universal Studios. A commercial producer needed someone to put on a red hat and slide down a pole. Hammer was the man, and he made a commercial for Aunt Jemima pancakes, and that led to a career as the square-jawed, intense fellow in a cowboy hat, known as the Marlboro Man.

If you remember the TV series “Emergency!”, there was a fireman named Dick Hammer. Played by one and the same.

“They’d ring a bell for that Aunt Jemima commercial and the kids would rush into the room to see it,” Betty said. “When Dick was the Marlboro Man, he was on billboards and TV. I was driving on Sunset Boulevard one day, and that’s where they have the biggest billboard in the world, they say. Dick’s picture was on it and I looked up. I almost crashed.”

Later, as the lung cancer deaths mounted, Dick grew less proud of the Marlboro connection. He dealt with prostate cancer in the later years, and died in 1999, at age 69.

Sam was 2. It’s almost superfluous to ask how Dick’s chest would have swelled at the sight of Sam, running, passing, winning, leading.

“He and I were playing basketball one day, over at the junior high,” Mike said. “He must have been in his 60s. He hadn’t picked up a ball in years, but he stood out there and started draining 3s. He wound up beating me.”

But Chris Darnold makes sure you know that Dick wasn’t solely responsible for the athletic gene pool. Betty pitched and played second base, and she played on touring volleyball teams coached by the legendary Gene Selznick.

Betty has five grandchildren who played in college, all of them volleyballers except Sam. Franki wound up making all-conference at Rhode Island. Cousins Ali, Michelle and A.J. played at American University, Chapman and Concordia-Irvine, respectively.

Mike Darnold was a football guard at Redlands and Chris played volleyball at Long Beach City College.

But even if Hammer never had touched a volleyball, he would have touched lives.

He was a fireman during the Watts riots in 1965 and during several Malibu wildfires. He worked 24 on, 24 off, so he volunteered to be a substitute teacher. He particularly enjoyed working with special-needs children.

“He’d go to the schools in the rough areas,” Betty said. ‘He’d memorize the seating chart in the classroom beforehand. Then he would call somebody out by name. That would get their attention.”

“I remember when one of those Presidential Fitness Tests was coming up,” Chris said. “Dad made sure every girl in his class knew how to throw a softball properly.”

Al Scates, who coached 19 NCAA championship teams at UCLA, remembers playing against Hammer. Scates played for the Hollywood Y, Hammer for the West Side Jewish Club.

“He was the most honest volleyball player I ever met,” Scates said. “His team was playing in the finals of the U.S. National Volleyball Association tournament. We had an honor rule that said if you touched the ball as it was going out of bounds, and the officials said you got the point, you had to say that the call was wrong. That was the rule, anyway.

“There they are in the finals and Dick touches a ball, on game point, and it’s going out of bounds. The ref rules in his favor, and they win, and they’re jumping up and celebrating … and Dick’s standing there with his hand in the air. He’s saying the point shouldn’t count. They reverse it and his team loses. That’s just the type of guy he was.”

Hammer, Scates and Scates’ wife were sitting at a bar once, and Scates noticed that the fellow next to Hammer was wearing a shoulder holster and packing a .38. He mentioned that to Hammer.

Then the guy bellowed an obscenity.

“Dick got all over this guy because he cursed in front of my wife,” Scates said. “He got really mad. I’m thinking, you could have gotten shot because of that.”

The one thing Hammer did not do was play football. He didn’t like the danger and didn’t want his two sons to play. The grandson was a 20-point averager in basketball for San Clemente and also played baseball, but as a senior quarterback he threw 39 touchdowns and eight interceptions, and ran for 13 scores.

USC was not the first to sense what was happening. Darnold was pulled toward Utah. He liked the coaches, and San Clemente’s Travis Wilson had played there. Then, just as the family was narrowing the field, Clay Helton called.

“Steve Sarkisian was still the head coach,” Mike said. “But Coach Helton asked if we’d be interested. Well, Sam had been running around in Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush jerseys all his life.”

But first, Helton made a stop at Dick Hammer’s house. He sat with Betty, just those two, and talked for 45 minutes. Sold.

When Sarkisian was fired in October, Sam said he wasn’t going anywhere if Helton became the permanent man. That happened later, at the end of Darnold’s redshirt year, and by Game 4 of this year Darnold was starting.

“Now it’s two years later and our son is playing quarterback in the Rose Bowl,” Chris said, shaking her head.

Wait until he gets near a unicycle.