These Bruins still savor 1954 as the benchmark

The old wrestler grapples with his conflicting emotions.

As a UCLA alumnus and three-time football letterman, Jack Ellena laments the Bruins’ failure to duplicate the success that he and his teammates enjoyed in 1954, when UCLA stormed through a nine-game schedule unbeaten and topped the United Press International coaches’ poll at season’s end.

But a part of him, he admits, can’t help but privately delight in the knowledge that, 52 years later, he can still say he played on the only UCLA football team that won a national championship.

“It’s an ego thing,” he says. “You take pride in that.”

Ellena was the best player on the best team in Bruins history, a hellacious heavyweight who was an All-American two-way tackle, seventh-place finisher in the Heisman Trophy balloting and a two-time conference wrestling champion.

Teammate Primo Villanueva was an All-American back, leader in total offense and a clutch defender. His deflection of a late pass saved a 21-20 midseason victory over Washington, the Bruins’ only close call in that 9-0 run.

Later, Ellena and Villanueva enjoyed great business success. Ellena, 75, made his mark in real estate after a knee injury ended his NFL career after 2 1/2 seasons with the Los Angeles Rams.

He was barely out of college when he and his late wife, a former beauty queen, opened a summer camp for kids near his Northern California hometown of Susanville, about 85 miles northwest of Reno. Now run by son Chip, Mountain Meadow Ranch has been host of the children of Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan, among many others, and this summer celebrated its 51st year of operation.

Villanueva, who will turn 75 on Dec. 2, played 4 1/2 seasons in the Canadian Football League before opening Primo’s Mexican Grill, one of Canada’s first Mexican restaurants. Villanueva, whose younger brother Danny was a kicker and punter for the L.A. Rams and Dallas Cowboys, later started a food manufacturing business that sold salsa, chips and tortillas. The restaurant is now run by son Mark, the youngest of his four children, and still thriving in Vancouver after 46 years.

Ellena splits his time between homes in Palm Desert and Lake Almanor, about 35 miles west of Susanville.

Villanueva lives with his second wife, Phyllis, in Surrey, Canada. A Mexican American whose father, Primitivo, was granted amnesty into the U.S. after fighting against Pancho Villa in 1916, Villanueva long ago settled in Canada.

“It’s such a peaceful place to live,” he says.

Ellena and Villanueva hope to attend Friday when the Sanders Single Wingers, a group of former Bruins who were coached by the legendary Henry R. “Red” Sanders, gather for a reunion at UCLA’s J.D. Morgan Center.

At some point, undoubtedly, talk will turn to the fall of ’54.

You thought USC was dominant the last few seasons?

UCLA in 1954 led the nation in scoring, averaging 40.8 points a game, and scoring defense, yielding 4.4. That Bruins team still holds school records for rushing defense, total defense and scoring defense. It outscored its last five opponents, 235-6, after the squeaker at Washington, in which the Pacific Coast Conference champions squandered all but the last point of a 21-0 lead.

“We didn’t screw around after that,” Ellena says.

The season-ending blitz started with a 72-0 victory over Stanford that set a still-standing school record for margin of victory, after which the Bruins and their coaches attended Ellena’s wedding in Westwood.

“Instead of orange blossoms,” Ellena says of the nuptials, repeating a line from the late UCLA trainer Ducky Drake, “all you could smell was analgesic balm.”

They would have preferred roses.

But after a 34-0 victory over USC in front of 102,548 in the Coliseum, the Bruins reluctantly called it a season. The PCC’s “no repeat” rule denied them a second consecutive trip to the Rose Bowl and a shot at unbeaten Ohio State, the Associated Press national champion.

USC went instead and lost to the Buckeyes, 20-7.

“Sure there was frustration,” Ellena says. “We were a hell of a football team. What I remember so well is that we went into the games with so much confidence that we came up to the line of scrimmage with smiles on our faces. We just knew that we were in complete control.”

Maryland coach Jim Tatum, whose defending national champions were 12-7 losers to UCLA in an early season game at the Coliseum, called those Bruins “the best college team I’ve ever played or coached against,” adding, “it took my boys two weeks to get over the beating they got in that game out there.”

Sanders, whose teams were 66-19-2 during his nine seasons in Westwood, including a 6-3 mark against USC, said at the time: “This Bruin team has provided me and our other coaches with the highest point in our lives.”

Two years ago at a 50-year reunion, the ’54 Bruins were awarded long-overdue championship rings by the school, 46 years after Sanders, then 53, died of a heart attack a month before the start of the 1958 season.

The champions still marvel that their title was UCLA’s last.

“We thought it was going to be a forever thing,” Villanueva said of the Bruins’ one-season mastery. “You just don’t think it’s ever going to be anything less.”

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jerome.crowe@latimes.com