Preps / Scott Howard-Cooper : Shrine Game Is Something Special for North Lineman Willie Brewster

Willie Brewster, who is used to playing his football in front of 800 people at the local high school, has brought 50 family members and friends down from Northern California to watch him play in the Shrine all-star game Saturday night at the Rose Bowl.

Many others will be with him, if only in spirit.

In a game that will feature the state’s best college freshmen-to-be, he is extra special to some, not so much because of his talent, although he was an All-Northern California selection last season as a defensive lineman. He is special, because he will be the first former Shrine hospital patient to play in the game, helping to raise money for a cause he knows all too well.

His two stays at the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children in San Francisco to repair a damaged right elbow were brief, once in the sixth grade to take a tumor off the joint and most recently in May of 1985 to work on the cartilage. But in this case, length of time has nothing to do with the size of his feelings for the charity.

“This is a real good game for me to play in because I can give something back,” Brewster said last week from his home in Dos Palos a few days before coming to Southern California and the North training camp at Cal State Northridge. “They treated me real good there.”

Any mark on this game by a McGwire will be made by Dan, the South’s Iowa-bound quarterback from Claremont High, and Brewster will be staring across the line at him. John McGwire, Dan’s father, should have little trouble relating to both players for he, too, knows all too well that mentioning the word Shrine this week doesn’t have to mean a football game.

John McGwire was a 7-year-old with polio when he first went to the Shrine hospital in Spokane, Wash., in the early 1940s. The strength was being squeezed out of his muscles, but he still recalls his time there, about a year in all, with some fondness--the medical staff, the visits by Shriners to entertain and cheer up the patients, the high-ceilinged rooms with the windows overlooking the Spokane River.

Those emotions are strong, even today.

Harry Welch from Canyon of Canyon Country, one of the three coaches for the South, also has some distinct feelings about the game, but not because of anything that happened to him. It was his dad, and in many ways it took the passing of Harry Welch Sr. by cancer in early February to persuade him to coach this game.

“When (Publicity Director) Jerry Weiner called and said I was being considered as one of the coaches, I said that I wasn’t interested because of all the things that were happening in my personal life,” he recalled.

“Right at the very end of his life, my father and I established a rapport that had been missing in our relationship most of our lives. I just found out when he was dying that within the last few years he had become a Mason. Although I’m not involved in any Masonic lodges, and therefore am not a Shriner, I felt that this was a last link between my father and I.

“Putting those things all together, I felt that this (game) was something more meaningful than a little summer vacation.”

And what of Saturday’s game?

“It was a coincidence that we would all come together this year,” Welch said. “But it makes it more special.”

Brewster, 6-5 and 250 pounds, is only one example of the North’s considerable size advantage over the more talented South. Another is Dustin Quinton, a 6-6, 295-pound defensive lineman from Placer High in Auburn.

Quinton, bound for Nevada Las Vegas, already has two wins in Southern California, uh, under his belt in side trips arranged by game officials. He scored the first in a pie-eating contest and the second at a pasta bowl--a Shrine spinoff of the Pac-10 vs. Big Ten beef bowl--as the North consumed 63 pounds, one more than the South.

Gene Victor, like everyone else who saw New York prep star Lloyd Daniels play recently in a Las Vegas summer basketball tournament, came away impressed to the point of exclamation.

“The best high school player I’ve ever seen, and I’ll be coaching my 40th season next year,” said Victor, the Mt. San Antonio College coach.

But Daniels, it seems, has seen the last of his high school days, brief though they were in the classroom. The plan now, in place of his trying to earn a high school diploma, is to pass an equivalency exam, enroll at Mt. SAC for classes in September and then play at a four-year school--perhaps for Jerry Tarkanian at Nevada Las Vegas.

“I’m just trying to get my grades up,” he said. “UNLV is not a definite yet. Tark’s a good man and he runs a good program. He’s one of the best coaches I could ever play for. I wouldn’t mind going to Kansas or Kentucky.

“I’m definitely going to one of those three. Those are the only schools I’ve ever wanted to play for.”

Betting against Las Vegas on this count would not be wise. The Rebels have history--Jarvis Basnight made the same jump a couple of years back, and one of Tarkanian’s sons played at Mt. Sac--and Victor on their side.

“If they sent him here, I’ll make sure they get him back,” Victor said. “I’ll see to it that he gets his grades up and takes the right classes.”

Add migrations: Brian Williams, whose impressive play made him one of the most talked-about players at the Nike basketball camp in New Jersey earlier this summer, will soon be one of the most talked about players in California.

A 6-9, 210-pounder who averaged 18 points and 15 rebounds a game last season for Bishop Gorman of Las Vegas, which finished second in the Nevada state tournament, Williams has officially transferred to St. Monica.

That will bring the college recruiters, who tracked guard Earl Duncan last season, back to the 850-student private school in Santa Monica.

Williams attended Edison of Fresno as a sophomore before moving to Las Vegas for his junior season. His father, Gene, is a member of the Platters singing group.

Prep Notes Representatives from both sides met Tuesday at the Southern Section office in Cerritos to try to negotiate a settlement of the dispute involving football game officials. Referees in seven of the nine chapters in Southern California are threatening to boycott this season’s games. No progress was made, however, and no future meetings are planned, with the first games six weeks away. . . . Girls’ basketball star Terri Mann, a senior at Point Loma of San Diego, has at times dominated play at the U.S. Olympic Festival in Houston as if she were playing against high schoolers. Tuesday, she scored 16 points, 11 in the second half, in the West’s 74-67 win over the North.