What Makes Robert Run?

Some call him a gambler who would try anything to run up a score. Others call him a mercenary who ran out on the University of Washington to peddle his talents in Minnesota. But last week, as he led the Gophers against his old school, Minnesota's curly-haired quarterback, Bobby Cox, 23, found winning so simple that he seldom had to gamble. His ball handling seemed more magical than mercenary. He called signals so swiftly, his team peeled off as many as four plays a minute, had its first touchdown in only six plays. When Bobby & Co. stopped running, Minnesota had the game won, 46-7.

Successful Failure. Robert LaFayette Cox has been on the run for the better part of his life. A couple of his slower-footed friends in the grade-school gang he ran with in Los Angeles wound up in reform school. When he was 14, he ran away from home, worked at odd jobs along the West Coast for a few months before he took a crack at education again in Washington's Walla Walla High School.

In between classes, busy Bobby found time to get married at only 16, a hasty marriage that still managed to survive for a year and a half. He was only a bit more successful at his studies. But he was a three-letter man (football, basketball and track), the finest all-round athlete in Walla Walla's history, and a cinch for any number of athletic scholarships.

A Minnesota alumnus sent Bobby to Minneapolis to sample the pleasures of life in a Big Ten football factory, but instead, Bobby moved to Seattle to play football for the University of Washington. By the end of his sophomore season, he was first-string quarterback, already building a reputation as a triple-threat gambler. He could run like a bulldozer and pass like a pro. He specialized in exasperating his coaches and exciting his fans by calling for such outrageous maneuvers as a third-down pass with only 1 yd. to go for a touchdown.

Hunch Player. Just as he hit his stride, Cox decided to quit. He got caught between the lines in a pitched battle between "downtown" alumni and Coach "Cowboy" Johnny Cherberg, and when his own eligibility proved to be at stake, he packed his gear and moved to Minnesota. National Collegiate Athletic Association rules kept Transfer Student Cox on the sidelines for a long, tough season. Then he busied himself by getting married once more. But his new wife has been forced to share him with his first love: football. Bobby still mixes his plays with fine disdain for classic strategy, and his most outrageous hunches still have a habit of paying off. Last year he fired the touchdown pass that put Minnesota in front of his former alma mater; he scored twice against Illinois, twice more against Michigan to win back the five gallon Little Brown Jug. Last week against Washington he completed four passes and carried the ball himself for only 38 yds., but before the second team took over, his deft ball-handling had engineered four of the six Gopher touchdowns.

"Football in the Big Ten," says Minnesota's husky (6 ft., 190 Ibs.), dark Quarterback Cox, "is rougher than on the Pacific Coast. There you get a breather once in a while. Here you never do." But a breather is the last thing Bobby is looking for. He likes nothing better than running his team out of a tough spot with his dangerous calls, and he is one of the few players in big-time football who can get away with fooling even his coach. It is a tactic that may unhinge Coach Murray Warmath. But before it does, it may run the Gophers all the way to the Rose Bowl.

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