Rich Brooks

"A shocker of a play" is how former Ducks coach Rich Brooks described what happened to Kenny Bryant as he raced toward the end zone against TCU in 1977.

(The Oregonian file photo)

EUGENE -- Perhaps the strangest play in Oregon Ducks football history started as one of the most predictable of Kenny Bryant's career.

It was Sept. 17, 1977, barely half a minute into the fourth quarter. Bryant crouched in his own end zone, three yards separating TCU from its first touchdown. Oregon held a 14-point lead in a showdown of also-rans that held little interest beyond Amon Carter Stadium in Fort Worth, Texas.

Assigned to man-to-man coverage, Bryant's job was blanketing the tight end. But first, he read the eyes of TCU junior quarterback Steve Bayuk. They told Bryant everything. Into the void between receiver and quarterback stepped Bryant, tipping the pass once to himself before securing the interception. Within two strides he was at full speed. He looked up to find 97 yards of open Astroturf ahead of him.

"I'd seen the play the whole way," Bryant said.

Instead, it was what he never saw coming next that keeps the play's witnesses retelling it, 38 years later. Nearly four decades can twist, fade and add dust to old memories. But as the Ducks and Horned Frogs -- each now an ascendant member of college football's upper crust -- prepare for their third all-time meeting in the Jan. 2 Alamo Bowl, it is their first meeting that has endured for reasons no one could have imagined at the time.

The Ducks and Horned Frogs remember the heat. They remember the brawl. They remember the ejections.

But mostly, they remember the inexplicable hit.

"A shocker of a play," former Ducks coach Rich Brooks said.

With Bryant streaking toward a touchdown, reserve linebacker Steve Barker burst off the TCU sideline for a crushing, illegal and jaw-dropping hit that flipped Bryant -- and almost the outcome of the game -- on its head.

"A stunned crowd, stunned referees, a stunned team," Bayuk said.

Nearly four decades later, Barker's reasoning remains unclear even as the memory has stayed indelible. It's the kind of story old Ducks teammates tell at reunions for a laugh.

"At that point," Bryant recalled last week, "I guess I was one of the few people that ever got a touchdown without ever seeing the end zone."

* * *

At best, Oregon's 1977 nonconference game against TCU in Fort Worth seemed destined to become a footnote in UO's modest football history: the first victory, in the second game, in the tenure of Brooks, the new coach. Few would have been blamed in wondering how long it would last.

In the decade before the Ducks hired Brooks, then 35, they produced one winning record and three head coaches. TCU had its own new coach, F.A. Dry, who also could go nowhere but up. His predecessor won two games and lost 31 -- along with his job -- after three seasons. It was a long way from Sammy Baugh.

"Two teams that were not really, really good," said Bayuk, TCU's starting quarterback that day and in 1978, when TCU ended the two-game series with a 14-10 victory in Eugene. His Texas twang is strong. So is his sense of self-deprecation. "We had a lot of inferiorities."

Each program had begun the season with a loss, with Oregon's coming on the road between the famed hedges of Georgia. In 2013-14, no athletic department brought in more revenue than Oregon, at $196 million. Purse strings were tighter in 1977. The Ducks spent the week in Dallas rather than Eugene to save on airfare and practiced at the Dallas Cowboys' stadium in Arlington.

"At Georgia, it wasn't very hospitable," said Willie Blasher, Oregon's starting outside linebacker. "And (Texas) was a big culture shock, I think for a lot of us. I hadn't spent much time there."

By kickoff neither team looked all that comfortable, combining for 14 first-half penalties and one brawl between TCU center Danny Kasper and UO nose guard Vince Goldsmith that the Register-Guard's Bud Withers termed a "fist-swinging melee." Goldsmith claimed Kasper landed several cheap shots at his back earlier in the game before he landed an uppercut. They were ejected, as was Oregon's Gary Beck.

"I think I'd do it again if it happened the same way," Goldsmith said after the game, "because they were a cheap, dirty football team."

TCU's fight before the whistle was more dubious, however, trailing 17-3 after three quarters. Any remaining suspense seemed to be reserved for what was more palpable: The burning heat of a 95-degree day radiating off the stadium's Astroturf surface, or the frustration boiling over on TCU's home sideline.

"They couldn't seem to do much right," Kim Nutting recalled last week.

As a player recruited by someone else's promises, only to see little success as a result, Nutting was typical of many on Oregon's roster. Coach Dick Enright persuaded the fullback from South Eugene High School to attend Oregon over Stanford, but soon he was fired and Nutting was playing linebacker as a sophomore and junior for new coach Don Read. Then Brooks, an Oregon State graduate with a "no-nonsense, stand-up guy" attitude, as Bryant recalled, arrived to inherit a team desperate for success.

"I don't remember him smiling a bunch," said Nutting, who returned to fullback in 1977 and led UO with 359 rushing yards.

Bryant's interception should have been a happy moment. Running with the TCU sideline to his left, he looked over his right shoulder to check for tacklers in his periphery.

At the TCU 43-yard line, Barker intervened, rushing off the sideline in an impromptu rage without even buckling his chin strap. His helmet met Bryant's left hand, which jarred the ball loose and sent Bryant tumbling, seeing spinning stadium lights he can still remember today.

"He was cruising," Brooks said. "All of a sudden, bam!"

The stadium fell silent. Those on the sideline with their back to the play stood rigid at attention.

"It goes from the high emotions of they're driving on us, to 'Yeah!' to 'Whoa, what was that?'" said Blasher, who was at linebacker on Bryant's side of the field on the play.

"I never saw the guy," Bryant said. Somehow, a second brawl did not ensue. "I was checking body parts to make sure everything was in place. It was more of a shock. Did that really happen?"

Furious, he spiked the ball, drawing a 15-yard penalty. The referees then awarded him a touchdown, and Oregon a 24-3 lead.

Bryant has never spoken with Barker to this day, nor does he believe he's owed a conversation. Barker's coach was contrite, but the freshman from Dallas offered no apology.

"I'm tired of seeing things happen out there and not be able to do anything about it," Barker told reporters after the game. "I didn't play at all, except on the kick team. (TCU coaches) said they wanted to make things happen. I did. We were standing there and I said, 'Somebody ought to tackle him.' So one guy says, 'Go ahead,' and another guy gives me a shove."

From his perspective, Bayuk saw a tackler less reluctant than he perhaps let on.

"He got a running start at this kid off the sideline," Bayuk said. "I mean, it was a massive hit."

And yet, Barker's tackle did what he intended. In the 147 seconds of game action that followed the hit, TCU scored three touchdowns on three consecutive possessions to tie the score at 24, aided by an Oregon fumble and an interception that led to TCU's own pick-six touchdown.

"My hand was really swollen up," Bryant said. "I came out of the game a few plays and then (Brooks) came over and said, 'Get your butt back in there. We still have a game to win, you don't get to rest on this thing."

But TCU was shut out in the final eight minutes of the fourth quarter. A safety and a field goal pushed Oregon ahead for a 29-24 victory to end a game Brooks described as simply, "chaos."

"It's hard to know what goes through somebody's mind, but when we asked him, he said, 'You shouldn't have thrown the interception in the first place!'" Bayuk said of his locker room interaction with Barker. "I said, 'Well I know that.'

"He said, 'I wanted to make an impact and do something that will be remembered forever.' I said, 'You did that.'"

* * *

Evidence of Barker's future after that 1977 season is incomplete. Brooks believed he transferred to Colorado. Bayuk recalls him losing his scholarship and being booted from school. Barker could not be reached for this story.

"At this point it's almost like it happened to somebody else," said Bryant, who has worked in real estate in Los Angeles for 30 years and has owned his own business the last 10. "It's like I was there, it happened but it's such a distant memory.

"There were no hard feelings. It's not a bad memory, it's just a bizarre memory. If you ever said that to somebody they'd be like, really? In a college game a guy came off the bench? Yep. That sounds like Pop Warner or something."

At the least, Barker is part of an infamous collection of college football's 12th men. In 1954, Tommy Lewis charged off the Alabama sideline, tackling Rice running back Dicky Moegle in the Cotton Bowl. In 1978, Ohio State coach Woody Hayes punched Clemson's Charlie Bauman out of bounds after the Tigers nose guard returned an interception. Ohio State fired Hayes the next day.

Amazingly, less than 100 miles away from Fort Worth on the same day Oregon faced TCU, Jessie Davis joined the club. Standing along visiting Western New Mexico's sideline, he stuck a leg out to trip an Abilene Christian running back bound for a long touchdown run, according to a Washington Post account written in the days afterward.

Yet for as unforgettable as Barker's bizarre tackle remains to witnesses, Ducks players and coaches find it can be almost wholly unknown to younger generations of fans who likely also couldn't fathom that Oregon took the field that season wearing Adidas. In November, Nutting recounted the story of Barker's tackle to his disbelieving, wide-eyed children.

Even Bryant's wife was unaware of her husband's role in TCU and Oregon's brief history until Dec. 6, when the Alamo Bowl revealed its matchup between the No. 11 Horned Frogs (10-2) and No. 15 Ducks (9-3).

"As soon as I saw the announcement, I told my wife," Bryant said, laughing, appreciative of the foresight he never had 38 years ago. "Because I knew this was going to come up."

-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif