Grounded passer

Sporting News, The, Dec 23, 1996 by Michael C. Lewis

Steve Sarkisian lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building that looks as if it were built three decades ago with budget-stricken college students greedily in mind.

The walls are thin, the doors hollow. The kitchen is colored in mustard from refrigerator to stove. The small, wooden deck that overlooks the parking lot is home not only to a tiny barbecue grill, but also to a curious band of pigeons that apparently can find no better rest stop in all of Utah County.

"I have to clean it every week," Sarkisian says.

So there you have it. Every week this season, Sarkisian put on the blue-and-white uniform of Brigham Young University and got himself on every highlight reel by passing for hundreds of yards as the latest in a long line of standout BYU quarterbacks, and every week he had to step outside his apartment to clean pigeon droppings off his deck.

Some superstar.

"That's exactly the way he is," receiver K.O. Kealaluhi says.

Many people might not figure that, because all the attention Sarkisian generates endows him with great potential to become a Narcissus in shoulder pads. He is, after all, the quarterback of the 13-1 Cougars, ranked 11th by The Sporting News as they enter their Cotton bowl matchup with Kansas State.

Indeed, a simple walk down the street during the season would bring congratulatory handshakes from strangers and joyous shouts of recognition. Once, while standing shoeless in a clothing store to have a suit altered, he attracted a gaggle of squeakyvoiced boys scrambling to find pens and paper suitable for an autograph.

Sarkisian politely indulges all his fans. But the player who has stood so tall on Saturdays in Cougar Stadium is nothing but a ridiculously regular college student, fixated on sports and maybe music and frighteningly little else.

"He is exactly what you see," says Stephanie Yamamoto, his fiancee.

She certainly would know. A student at Long Beach State, Yamamoto has been dating Sarkisian since their high school days in Torrance, Calif. When they first met through mutual friends--Yamamoto attended Torrance High, the archrival to Sarkisian's West Torrance High--she says Sarkisian was "skinny, he had no hair and he had braces." Yamamoto didn't like him at first.

But the second time she saw him, he didn't look as goofy as she remembered, and he grew on her quickly. "He was the only guy on the football team who would walk around with a smile on his face," she says. "Everybody couldn't believe I was dating the quarterback of the rival high school."

This year Yamamoto flew to Provo for BYU home games, wearing miniature Cougar helmets as earrings and armed with a camera The couple will be married June 21.

"His whole life is football," she says.

That might be a bit of a stretch. After all, that would be forgetting baseball--"I'm huge Boston," says Sarkisian, meaning he digs those Red Sox--basketball, soccer and golf. Well, maybe not so much golf as the movies that it inspires. Caddyshack. Tin Cup. You know, the classics. The game itself is too demanding. "I don't like doing something I'm not good at," he says.

That is Sarkisian's way of saying he cannot shoot par.

The only native Californian in a family of Irish-Catholic Bostonians, Sarkisian also is widely known on the team as an authority on Sega computer football. This season, he would spend hours matching the computerized Cougars against their upcoming real-life opponents. Kealaluhi said during the season Sarkisian, on screen, had won the Heisman about seven times already.

Although he leads the nation in passing efficiency, having thrown for 4,027 yards and 33 touchdowns, and has the highest career rating in NCAA history (152.21), he is practically resigned to a future without football.

"I'm definitely not planning on it, I can say that," he says. "There's so much that goes into it. If I can just go to a camp. ..."

The problem is his size. Although he is listed at 6-2 Sarkisian actually stands only a fraction-of an inch over 6 feet and does not fit the mold of an NFL quarterback. And he knows that the NFL's perception is the NFL's reality.

Of course, there's always the Canadian Football League, though Arena Football is probably out.

"That looks a little physical for what they get paid," he says.

That dream-fulfilling Sega machine sits near the middle of Sarkisian's living-room floor, at the end of a sprig of coaxial cables and at the foot of an easy chair whose built-in ottoman too often springs up unprovoked.

The entire apartment is decorated aptly in Modern Collegiate, with one room sitting entirely empty but for a pair of folding chairs and some scraps of clothing on the floor. Another room is furnished with two sofas, two coffee tables and an easy chair.

Only a few football posters and the spiritual "Footprints" poem enliven the walls, though Sarkisian keeps part of his baseball cap collection hanging from tacks near the ceiling in his bedroom.

Of course, the TVs are there, one in the living room and one in the bedroom. How else would he watch SportsCenter or GameDay or the videotape of his junior college games at El Camino College in Torrance?