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THE PRESIDENT-ELECT

You get knocked down day after day and you keep coming back, and you learn that you can't win all the time, but if you keep coming back, you might win at last.

That locker-room homily on football was delivered not by Knute Rockne or Alonzo Stagg, but by the next President of the U.S. Perhaps because it applies equally well to his political career, Richard Nixon has never lost interest in the sport that inspired it. He often garnishes his speeches with stories of his football days at Whittier College--he was not very good--and turns to the newspaper sports page right after skimming the political columnists. After one campaign appearance in Miami, he relaxed by tossing a football around on the airport apron at 3 a.m. Last week--even though he was vacationing in Key Biscayne, just a few miles from the Orange Bowl--Nixon picked up stakes for a trip back to California and the Rose Bowl. He calls it "the prize game of all bowl games."

Tournament of Noses. The President-elect became an impassioned, if studiedly neutral fan inside Pasadena's huge stadium, despite the fact that Pat Nixon is a graduate of the Pacific Eight champion, Southern Cal. He leaped to his feet when Heisman Trophy Winner O. J. Simpson took off on his 80-yard touchdown run and summoned with rapid gestures his own version of instant replay for the benefit of former Oklahoma Football Coach Bud Wilkinson, who sat on Nixon's right. A reporter inquired if Nixon was attending his first Rose Bowl game. "Oh no, I've seen several," he replied, recalling that the first was in 1930, when Southern Cal beat Pittsburgh 35-0. "Pittsburgh just didn't have the horses."*

At half time, to demonstrate his impartiality, Nixon walked from Ohio State's side of the field to a seat in the Southern Cal stands, pausing to have his picture snapped with Comedian Bob Hope. The result, as New York's Daily News observed the next morning, was a "tournament of noses."

Next day Nixon helicoptered from his hotel to the clinic of Dr. John Lungren, a Long Beach internist who has traveled with his campaign party in every national race since 1952, to get his annual physical checkup. He was pronounced in "excellent condition," agreed to use the White House pool for occasional exercise, then toured a community-built hospital near by. He found a lesson there too. Many Americans, he said, think that they can escape rising medical costs by the "knee-jerk reaction" of asking the Federal Government to provide "some kind of a system of free medical care." Declared Nixon: "I don't want to see the Government become so overwhelming that it will suppress this sort of institution."

Desire to Compete.The finale in California was a "Welcome Home, Pat and Dick" party in half a dozen towns in the area where Nixon grew up. It was staged--inevitably--as a "This Is Your Life" show. The 9,000 rooters who packed Anaheim's convention center were treated to recollections of Nixon's youth by everyone from Speech Teacher H. Lynn Sheller, who told of the future President's "tremendous desire to succeed and to compete," to 92-year-old Ella Furnas, who was introduced as the first person to hold Nixon when he was born in Yorba Linda 56 years ago this week. Did he cry? Recalled Mrs. Furnas: "He just quarreled."

It was a night, as Nixon later put it, for a man to reflect on "his neighbors, his friends, the people from whom he came." No one had much to say about his political career, though Toastmaster Art Linkletter, an old friend, observed: "I've known him since he was a young Congressman, and now look at him today. He's General Eisenhower's grandson's father-in-law."

The Actual Bench. However, Nixon's friends were not about to let him forget the lumps in his football record. First came Wallace J. "Chief" Newman, a full-blooded Shoshonean Indian who coached 155-lb. Tackle Nixon in 1933. Presenting Nixon with his first varsity letter, Newman explained: "The reason we waited so long was that we wanted him to get over his bruises." Then, to provide the proper setting for photographers, some 30 of Nixon's teammates carried out the "actual bench" on which the most successful second-stringer in Whittier's history sat out most games.

*Actually, the game to which Nixon referred was played in 1933. When Pitt and Southern Cal met at the Rose Bowl in 1930, the score was 47-14 in favor of U.S.C.

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