By Bob Markus

The Heisman Trophy Statue is about as highly regarded in the world of art as Madonna is in the world of opera. But in the world of artifact it ranks supreme. Challenged only, perhaps, by the fictional Maltese Falcon, like Dashiell Hammett's famous black bird it is "the stuff dreams are made of." Nightmares, too. I know, because for a few years back in the late '80s and early 90s, I had a Heisman vote. Each time, I took it seriously and agonized over my choice. More times than not, my choice did not win. Sometimes that was O.K. But I'm still incensed over the way some of the elections turned out.

If I still had a Heisman ballot this year, I would have voted for Colt McCoy. But I wouldn't have been upset if either Sam Bradford, who won it, or Tim Tebow, who didn't, came out on top. All three had outstanding years and who you voted for depended a lot on your own vision of what the Heisman is all about. But for at least some of the voters, it depended a lot on regional bias. I live in Florida now, in the only region out of six that gave Tebow the plurality of first place votes. In fact, the voting throughout the south was so skewed in favor of the Florida quarterback that he ended up with more first place votes than either Bradford or McCoy.

The main reason that Tebow, who won the trophy last year and was hoping to become only the second player to win it twice, did not win again was that voters in the Southwest were equally as biased. Many of them were among the 154 who left Tebow completely off their ballots. Tebow was the first player to fail to win the Heisman despite garnering the most first place votes since Tommy McDonald, star running back for 1956 national champion Oklahoma, finished third behind Notre Dame's Paul Hornung and Tennessee's Johnny Majors. Perhaps more outrageous than the fact that Hornung, who quarterbacked the Irish to a 2-8 record, won the trophy was the fact that Jim Brown of Syracuse finished fifth.

Hornung became a friend of mine and I like to think that my campaigning for his election to the pro football Hall of Fame had at least a little to do with his belated election. Keeping him out, I argued, when his Packer backfield mate, Jim Taylor, was already in, made no more sense than it would to vote Dodger pitcher Don Drysdale into the Baseball Hall of Fame while excluding Sandy Koufax. One of Hornung's biggest critics was a Baltimore writer who consistently not only voted against Hornung but campaigned against him, saying he never saw Hornung have a good game against the Colts. I pointed out to him that, on the same day Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears scored six touchdowns against the San Francisco 49ers in Wrigley Field, Hornung was romping for five against the Colts in Memorial Stadium. Nevertheless, no quarterback with a 2-8 record deserves the Heisman Trophy.

Notre Dame has had seven Heisman winners, which ties it with Southern Cal for the most of any school. I'd argue that more of them than not were due more to the aura of the Golden Dome than the aptitude of the player. The last Notre Dame Heisman winner was Tim Brown in 1987. That was the first year I can remember voting and I thought, and still think, the honor should have gone to Syracuse quarterback Don McPherson. McPherson was the nation's leading passer that year while leading the Orangemen to a perfect 11-0 regular season. I had covered the 48-21 victory over Penn State, a team which had whipped Syracuse 16 years in a row and only the previous season had laid a 42-3 whipping on the boys from Syracuse. To me, McPherson was the obvious choice.

But I wasn't as upset with his second place finish to Brown as I was at Jeff Blake's seventh place finish in 1991. I was one of only seven voters who picked Blake to win, despite the fact that the dynamic quarterback ran and passed East Carolina to an 11-1 record, winning the last 11 in a row after an opening game 38-31 loss at Illinois. Along the way Blake was an almost weekly highlight show on Saturday night sportscasts as he engineered improbable last second comebacks. The Pirates won five games after trailing in the fourth quarter, including a Peach bowl win over North Carolina State, when Blake's 22-yard scoring pass with 1:32 left capped a comeback from a 34-17 fourth quarter deficit. East Carolina finished ninth in the final AP poll that year, its highest ranking ever. If Blake wasn't everything a Heisman trophy winner should be, I don't know who is.

Unless its Gordie Lockbaum. I didn't vote for Lockbaum to win the Heisman trophy, but I did give him a third place vote in 1986. Lockbaum, a two-way player for Holy Cross, finished fifth in the 1986 voting and third behind Brown and McPherson the next year when he actually got 108 first place votes. He probably had a better year in '86 when his 32 first place votes were second only to runaway Heisman winner Vinny Testaverde's 678. The remarkable thing about Lockbaum is that he did not even play for a Division 1A team, yet was a viable Heisman candidate after leading Holy Cross to a 10-1 record in 1986.

College sports was my fulltime beat at the time and I went to Worcester, Mass. before the 1987 season to do a story on him. Here, in part, is what I wrote: "In Arthurian legend, only the pure of heart could hope to find the Holy Grail. Not so with the Heisman Trophy, college football's most precious bauble. The pursuit of the Heisman is open to all, rogues and rascals, saints and sinners. But now comes a Galahad of the gridiron whose leading virtue is virtue. Heisman electors are being asked to consider Gordie Lockbaum not only because he is a great player, but because he is a great person. In a nation weary of stories about athletes who do drugs and other unsavory things, it is a campaign that has a chance to succeed."

It might have had an even better chance if Lockbaum had managed to duplicate his performance of his breakout season in 1986. That would have been close to impossible to do. Lockbaum had been recruited by a few Division 1A including Syracuse, Rutgers and Navy. "I'd be a free safety at Syracuse if I'd gone there," he told me. "I think my situation here is unique. You can't just recruit somebody and say he's going to play both ways. The circumstances aren't always there."

The circumstances that made Lockbaum a two-way player and Heisman trophy contender were these. Lockbaum had played only defense his first two years, but in spring practice in 1986 then head coach Mark Duffner suggested Lockbaum play tailback as "a buffer against disaster." That fostered an internal tug of war within the coaching ranks that came near to breaking out in to open hostility.

On one side was defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle, who would have to start a freshman in his place if Lockbaum went to offense. On the other side was a new offensive coordinator, Tom Rossley, who had never heard of Lockbaum, but knew all he needed to know after watching him play tailback just one day in spring practice. "We have to have him," said Rossly. "As soon as he went in there we started moving the ball. We didn't even know why we were moving it. Was it because they diddn't have him on defense. We'd move the ball right down to the goal line, then they'd flip him over to defense and we'd never get it in.

"We started making bold statements. Give us Gordie and we'll score 28 points a game. If we don't have him maybe we can kick a field goal and win 3-0. The defense was saying they had to have him, at least early on in the year. It got very close to being ugly in some meetings." Duffner agonized over the decision all summer and finally came up with the Solomon-like decision to cut the baby in half, a decision that horrified both sides.

As that season progressed Lockbaum became a situational player on defense, while dominating more and more on offense. He gained 827 yards rushing and another 860 on 57 pass receptions. But in a 17-14 upset oveer Army he played the entire game on defense and made 22 tackles, 19 of them unassisted. That was probably the game that propelled him into the limelight. "I certainly didn't expect all this," he told me. "My friends and I almost laugh about it." B ut he didn't consider himself a joke as a Heisman candidate. "It depends on how the voters look at the award," he said. "A lot of them won't consider me because they don't believe the level of football is up to par." But enough did consider him enough to name him No.1 on their ballots. I couldn't find it in my heart to argue against that.