1979 Cougar kicks aside an old demon

A quarter century has now passed since Brent Johnson learned that life, besides not being fair, can use your earlier successes as a set-up to a really big fall.

It wasn't easy, the way he learned it. In the amount of time it took to kick a football crooked he experienced his crash course in public disappointment.

The occasion was the 1979 Holiday Bowl, played the Friday before Christmas in San Diego's Jack Murphy (now Qualcomm) Stadium. The BYU team Johnson played for trailed Indiana University by one point, 38-37, and lined up for a last-second 27-yard field goal that would have been the game-winner.

Although he had already kicked three field goals in the game, and although he was among the top scorers in college football that season, Johnson missed as badly as if he were Charlie Brown and Lucy yanked the ball away. An undefeated BYU team set to win the school's first bowl game was denied perfection as time expired. And Brent Johnson, a player who five years earlier had clawed his way onto the team as a walk-on and had sacrificed his all to get to this crowning moment — he was Rudy before Rudy — was left to wonder why.

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I only dredge up the past because Brent did.

I was working as a sports columnist at the 1979 Holiday Bowl game — the precursor, as it turned out, for BYU's legendary triumph in the same stadium a year later when it pulled victory from the jaws of defeat in the 1980 "Miracle Bowl."

But by then Johnson, a senior, was no longer playing football. Effects of "The Miss" meant that he was not taken in the NFL draft, and a free agent tryout with the New England Patriots did not pan out. Married with a young family, he packed up his misery and went to work selling sporting goods.

For 25 years, he lugged around the deadweight of his failure.

Until a recent trip back to the scene of his discontent.

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"My wife, Julie, and I went to San Diego for our 25th wedding anniversary," Brent explained as he told me the rest of the story. "One night we were out driving and I turned toward the stadium. Julie looked at me like, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'Sweetheart, I have to do this.'

"Everything was dark, but I went to a door marked security, and there was a man there, Art Sanchez. I asked if it would be possible to go in and walk around. I said I'd played in a Holiday Bowl here a long time ago. He asked me to print my name on a sign-in sheet. When he saw my name he kinda gasped. He said he knew who I was. He conducted tours for school groups and others. 'I tell them about some of the good things that have happened here,' he said, 'and some of the tough things.' "