Macaluso: He’s a Grade-A Titan : Football: Tackle gave his all on the field and in class. Bound for medical school, he hopes physical duress will help with the long hours that await.

FULLERTON —  Cal State Fullerton football Coach Gene Murphy knew he had an unusual student-athlete on his hands when Damien Macaluso signed with the Titans in 1986. But he didn’t realize how unusual until a player-coach conference in the spring of Macaluso’s freshman year.

“He had gotten straight A’s his first semester and it was a week before finals that spring, but he was legitimately depressed,” Murphy recalled. “I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said he was going to get a B in a course that I couldn’t even pronounce. I talked to 25 other players and they were all happy to get Cs.”

For the record, the class was zoology and Macaluso did get a B, one of the few subpar marks--for him--in five years at Fullerton.

Macaluso, an All-Big West Conference honorable mention selection at offensive tackle last season, will graduate magna cum laude Sunday with a degree in biology. Barring any surprises from this week’s final exams, he’ll finish with a 3.8 grade-point average.

“I’d like to chop his GPA up and give it to some other players,” Murphy said.

Macaluso was one of the school’s two 1991 outstanding student award winners and will receive the President’s Associates Award, which recognizes scholarship and contributions to an Associated Students-sponsored activity (such as athletics), at a banquet tonight.

He also won the Miles D. McCarthy Health Professions Award, which is based on scholastic achievement and community service and is given to a student who has been accepted in a health profession school.

Macaluso, who skipped sixth grade and is now 22, will start medical school at UC Davis in the fall with his sights set on a career as an orthopedic surgeon. After four years of medical school, he hopes to do a five-year internship and a one- or two-year fellowship in sports medicine.

“I’m looking at 10 years of schooling, so I’ll be 32 before I get a job,” Macaluso said.

He got some serious on-the-job training last fall, though. The Titans (1-11) were besieged by injuries and Macaluso didn’t escape. He strained both rotator cuffs, sprained a ligament in his right knee and bruised his left knee but played every offensive down from the seventh game on.

With so many other injured players--more than a dozen Titan starters missed at least a game--Macaluso did what he could to help out in the training room.

“By the end of the season I was treating myself,” said Macaluso, who graduated from San Pasqual High in Escondido with a 4.12 GPA on a 4.0 scale. “I’d put myself on the electroshock machine and I knew all the settings. The trainers didn’t have to do anything for me.”

When he wasn’t treating himself, he was checking on teammates or asking Dr. Joseph Cummings, the team physician, how he was handling certain injuries.

“When someone got hurt in practice, we’d call for Dr. Macaluso,” Murphy said.

If it was spring, the call often went unanswered. Macaluso, Fullerton’s male scholar-athlete of the year, missed many a spring practice--with the blessing of Titan coaches--to attend biology and chemistry labs, and his attendance in the fall wasn’t perfect, either.

“It was just a shock to see him sometimes,” Murphy said. “When he’d come, we’d ask him if he’d been lost. But we knew that going in. Some guys try to get out of practice using school as an excuse, but he was a legitimate case.”

Macaluso’s grades never suffered because of football, but school may have stunted his football progress. He played very little his first three seasons, his only highlight coming during the last game of his freshman season when he caught a one-yard touchdown pass against Montana.

“It was for one yard, but it felt like a 100,” Macaluso said.

Macaluso was used sparingly as an offensive tackle in 1988 and ’89. But when tackles Shannon Illingworth and John Cotti went down with injuries in 1990, Murphy turned to Macaluso midway through the season. Macaluso didn’t disappoint.

Despite being undersized at 6 feet3 and 230 pounds, Macaluso, by his own count, allowed only one sack in six games.

“He always graded the highest on technique and assignments, and if he was defeated, it was because of something physical,” Murphy said. “He wasn’t big, strong or fast enough, but that didn’t concern him. He did it with a big heart and a big brain, not a big body.”

Murphy said Macaluso shouldn’t have played with some of his injuries.

“But there were times when I said, ‘Hey, you can’t come out because there is nobody else,’ ” Murphy said.

The season won’t go down as one of Macaluso’s most pleasant college memories, but he believes he’ll benefit from the pain and suffering.

“I’m sure there will be many times when I’ll go 40 hours with no sleep, I’ll be exhausted and in the operating room,” Macaluso said. “Undoubtedly, this kind of physical duress and having to keep my mental concentration through it will help in my field.

“Many doctors have the training to handle mental stress but they don’t know how to deal with the physical stress. Football will help with that.”