Jess Holguin was there Saturday, among the 75,000-plus people at the Coliseum who witnessed a feat accomplished only once before, 31 years earlier – by Holguin.
He’s a lifelong fan and former USC football player, an associate professor of clinical occupational therapy at USC with expertise in neurocognitive dysfunction, and a dad with two sons whom he wouldn’t let play football.
You might have read Holguin’s name this week – “approaching relevancy,” he joked, for the first time in his sons’ lives – if you’ve been keeping up with all the accolades and honors being heaped on King Miller.
Miller is the Trojans’ latest breakout star, a non-scholarship (for now) running back from Calabasas with if-you-didn’t-know-now-you-know vision and acceleration.
He found paydirt in USC’s 31-13 victory over Michigan, all but icing the win with his 15-yard scoring scamper in the third quarter – which goes down as the second touchdown by a walk-on in program history.
It came just days after the now-52-year-old Holguin – who was the first Trojans walk-on to score a touchdown, back on Oct. 22, 1994 – finished paying off his student loans.
Holguin’s score was in the waning seconds of a 61-0 homecoming victory over Cal, when, as best he can remember it, he took a handoff 7 yards from the goal line, ran right and, well, let’s let him tell it:
“The linemen were doing their jobs and blocking spectacularly,” said Holguin, then a 5-foot-8, 175-pound junior running back. “But there wasn’t a clear lane, so I bounced it outside, which is always a tricky option … everyone is so blazing cheetah fast. But I could see the corner of the end zone, and I knew it would be tough to power through at the angle I was running, so I dove and stretched out with one hand and I was able to get the ball across the goal line.”
After that, his teammates, all of them “12 feet tall,” lifted him skyward in celebration, Traveler did his traditional touchdown trot, and his girlfriend – now wife – Yvette was in the stands, near the end zone, making it a cherished memory for them both.
And, yes, the Coliseum let him hear it.
“The roar of the Coliseum, it’s always neat, anywhere you sit,” Holguin said. “But the reverberation of sound is different when you are at the epicenter of all those converging voices and cheering, you can feel the excitement.”
Call it a “Rudy” moment – but for Notre Dame’s rivals across the country. And it was hard-won for the former Bishop Amat High standout, who was accepted into West Point and offered opportunities at other colleges but who had grown up dreaming of playing for USC.
So the Walnut native followed his heart and walked on, starstruck initially by his own teammates. And definitely by his position coach, Charles White, a former Trojans star and physical phenom – “his muscle striations had muscle striations” – whom Holguin had grown up admiring and continued to at USC, because the man was just so nice. Also, it was so illuminating, the way he taught running the football. “All inarguably cool, fun stuff,” Holguin said.
As a walk-on, Holguin didn’t travel to away games, wasn’t invited to partake in the training table meal plans his teammates on scholarships did and, of course, didn’t have his tuition covered.
But he was part of the team. He felt it as a freshman, when people criticized the Trojans who went 6-5-1 that season. He carries with him lessons learned from Coach John Robinson, one of the game’s great motivators. “I loved my teammates,” Holguin said, “and they loved me.”
And like any other student-athlete who takes school seriously, he had to balance books and ball. Determined to get his money’s worth, he never took fewer than 18 credits at a time, intensely focused as he was on a career in occupational therapy.
Then, in the afternoons, he was determined to earn his coach’s attention and trust, so he took all the punishment asked of him on the practice field. As a freshman under head coach Larry Smith, he recalls playing the jackrabbit in a drill called “jackrabbit punt return,” the undersized scatback tasked with returning punts without blockers. Yes, he said, he’d get blown up every time by a unit of assassins. And, yes, he’d wake up the next day with bruises from head to toe and would go to classes, “genuinely wounded in multiple places.”
He remembers when his mom saw layers of bruises on his body one summer while he was washing his car, shirtless, that she cried. “I told her, it doesn’t hurt as bad as it looks.”
Now, the occupational therapist who previously worked as a senior clinician for neurorehabilitation at St. Jude’s regional brain injury rehabilitation center, acknowledges: “I wake up every morning and I still feel it in so many areas that you shouldn’t.”
He’s cognizant these days of the long-term risks of playing such a dangerous game, of the very real effect CTE – chronic traumatic encephalopathy – is having on so many football players.
“I’m very conflicted about it,” Holguin said. “I love my life and everything that happened as it did; I met my wife and have my boys. But football is an ultra-violent sport. I am concerned that my aging course won’t be ideal … for as much as I love football, and as huge a part of my identity is being a Trojan, and every aspect of what it means to be a Trojan, was it worth sacrificing brain cells and checking out early to play?
“No.”
So Holguin – whose grandfather was a boxer and whose dad was a football layer – barred his boys from playing football. Instead, Garvey, 14, is an accomplished soccer player and Quinn, 11, a multiple-sport-playing pianist.
But, you bet, they both root for USC. Of course they do, the whole tailgating, Trojan-loving family does, on both Jess and Yvette’s side.
And, yes, Garvey was also there Saturday to see Miller come in and carry the ball 18 times for 158 yards. To see the Trojans’ walk-on electrify the big crowd and to score the touchdown, that rare feat only his father had managed before.