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The man the Rams hired to run their offense, the football genius who swirls X's and O's in his head and logs more meeting-room time than there is available chalk, once needed what amounted to a National Guard escort to get him into a classroom.
Funny, but now they can't drag Ernie Zampese out of one, which still has former USC fraternity brothers rolling in the aisles.
Ernie Zampese? With a notebook? Zamp? The same party animal from (How 'Bout A Night) Kappa Alpha, the take-two-aspirin-and-don't-wake-me-in-the-morning-fraternity in the mid-1950s?
"Of course, what was wild then is nothing now," Sam Tsagalakis, former USC kicker and fraternity brother, said in defense.
The same Zampese who danced on table tops and ceilings, the one who never met a Singapore Sling he didn't like?
And wasn't that Zampese a regular riot during rush week, when he'd grab goldfish from a bowl and stick the squirmy things into the nostrils of quivering pledges, just to make sure they were Kappa Alpha material?
Columnist Joe Jares of the L.A. Daily News, another of Zampese's fraternity brothers, remembers.
"He used to say, `See how these goldfish have been mistreated?' " Jares said. "`Well, now you're going to have to take care of them.' "
If Zampese wasn't doing striptease dances to Louis Prima records on the hoods of cars, he was making famous midnight taquitos raids on Olvera Street.
Zampese's idea of sleeping was an occasional plop-down on a pile of rumpled sheets and blankets. On a good night, he'd wrap the garments around him. Not exactly bouncy television commercial stuff.
His room, insiders say, had fire marshals biting their fingernails and reworking building codes.
Zampese was a work of art, or so the legend goes, a guy who could paint the town Trojan Red at night and be seen whistling at sunrise the next morning, a Daily Racing Form folded under his arm, a soda in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Let's just say he wasn't headed for biology class.
"He used to pass us going the other way on our way to class," Jares said.
Yes, there was this little nuisance known as school. Zampese actually was on scholarship as a gifted athlete. He had been...