Love Will Find A Way

This is a Love story.

Actually, this is Love’s story. But then, Love isn’t so much a story as an anthology.

Or, if you prefer, this is a Love song. But, again, there isn’t just a Love song so much as there is an album, or a boxed set.

So maybe you should consider this Love’s greatest hits.

Love Takes Time

Love Jefferson the fourth of five children of Silei and Fred Jefferson - was born shortly after midnight Feb. 15, 1976.

“I was expected on Valentine’s Day - that’s why they were going to name me Love,” he explained. “My mother went into labor on the 14th, but I wasn’t born until after midnight. Once I thought she didn’t go into labor until around 11 or 11:30, but she later told me she’d been in labor since 7 a.m. So they decided to name me Love anyway.”

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

They took offense when a national magazine called them a team of renegades, but the Washington State Cougars can live with it if you call them a collection of spare parts. Because that could include Rolls Royce parts, no?

So what would that make Love Jefferson? Maybe a rear-view mirror off an abandoned Love Bug. He is at Washington State because the University of the Pacific, where he first enrolled in 1994, dropped its football program the next year, making him a free agent.

He is the Cougars’ starting tight end because David Knuff graduated, because Jon Kincaid gruesomely broke an ankle last year and because Ivan Mercer was dismissed from the team for a frat-party fight. He is playing in the Rose Bowl on Thursday because his accelerated development helped solidify a once-suspect offensive line, giving Ryan Leaf and Michael Black and the Fab Five the time and space to carry the Cougars to a 10-1 season and the Pac-10 championship.

What I Did for Love

“I guess my father wanted to give me his middle name,” said Jefferson.

Don’t tell us.

“Yeah,” he said, “his middle name is Lee. But my mother said that’d be a little too much, so they left it blank.”

You’re My Love Interest

Jefferson’s football ambitions were modest: his sights were set on junior college. But at Bolsa Grande High School in Garden Grove, Calif., coach Gary Stevens had other ideas.

“He said, ‘Look, I’m going to sign you up for this (language) class and you’re taking it,”’ Jefferson remembered. “I said, ‘OK, I’ll take French.’ And he said, ‘No, you’re taking Latin because it’s going to help you on the SAT, with vocabulary and all that.’ And he had me take Algebra I and geometry at the same time, because I was behind in math.

“He was really looking out for me. I guess I’d better go back and thank him.”

Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

“When I was in elementary school, I got in so many little school-yard fights,” he said. “The kids used to make so much fun of me because of my name.

“Finally, I told my mom that I was going to change my name when I turned 12. She told me I had to be 15. So when I was 15, I said, ‘Mom, I’m going to change my name,’ and she said I had to be 18. By the time I was 18, it seemed like a cool name. I love it now. People tell me it’s so pretty, and it is. But when I was little, they tore me apart.”

Love Is a Many Splendored Thing

“They had me playing everything in high school,” he said. “I played fullback. I played receiver and center in the same game. Our center forgot to bring his knee pads, so they threw a No. 50 on me and I had to snap the ball because nobody else could do it. I long snapped. I kicked field goals. Maybe that caught the eye of a few coaches.”

Love Shack

The Jeffersons - mom and dad, brothers Fred, Tafa, Love and Sylvester and sister Toeaso - have always been close emotionally, spiritually, chronologically. And sometimes physically.

“We lived near the (Los Angeles) Coliseum,” Jefferson recalled, “but when the neighborhood got too bad, we moved to Westminster with my uncle. There was no room, so we stayed in the garage. A one-car garage.

“My dad built bunkbeds on the walls for us. All we had in there was a queen bed for my parents, a dresser, those bunkbeds and a refrigerator. We stayed there for three years. But it was no big deal. We were so young, it seemed like there was plenty of room.”

Are You Ready for the Thing Called Love?

Jefferson has just 14 receptions this season - barely one per game - and two touchdowns, meaning that realistically, he’s Leaf’s seventh option.

“That doesn’t bother me,” he said. “Maybe the tight end is forgotten sometimes, but we have five great wide receivers and a great running back. The way I look at it, I’m there to bail Leaf out. If he’s in trouble, he can count on me being open.”

Love Is a Battlefield

“When we were really young, we had family night at our house,” Jefferson said. “We had a piano and my father would put 75 cents on the piano and tell us whoever wanted to sing gets the 75 cents. My brother would jump up and sing and sing and sing and I’d be hiding behind the piano all mad because he didn’t ask me.

“The funny thing was, we’d sing so long, we’d conk out and fall asleep and my dad would take the 75 cents and use it for the next family night. We’d never remember it.”

Who Do You Love?

When colleges came to recruit Jefferson out of high school, they discovered it was a package deal. Love and Tafa, then a junior college lineman, wanted to play at the same school. All but Pacific and Nevada balked.

“We chose Pacific,” Love said, “because I wasn’t ready to be out of state yet.”

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

The coaches at Pacific redshirted Jefferson as a freshman. The next fall, Jefferson redshirted himself.

He and four high school choir buddies - Justin Brock, Mike Perez, Jonas O’Campo and James Wahlehwa - had formed an R&B group named 714 after their area code. A friend in music management hooked them up on a tour through Texas, Arizona and Louisiana with some name acts - Blackstreet and Usher among them.

“Suddenly, we’re sitting backstage with guys whose CDs we’d buy or who we’d watch on MTV,” he said.

The tour cut into the 1995 football season, but Pacific coach Chuck Shelton signed off on the arrangement reluctantly. But Jefferson’s father wasn’t at all pleased.

“All hell broke loose,” Jefferson said. “It tore him up because my brother and I were the first ones in the family to go to college. I got kicked out of the house. It wasn’t until later on, close to Christmas, that I went home to visit my brothers and wound up falling asleep there. The next morning my father came in and said, ‘Boy, you need to get up and clean this house if you’re going to stay here.’ That was his way of saying, ‘OK, you can come back now.”’

Love for Sale

When Pacific pulled the plug on its program, Jefferson was suddenly in demand even though he hadn’t played a college down. He arranged recruiting trips to Hawaii, San Diego State, San Jose State, Hawaii and Boise State.

Love Letters in the Sand

“I was all set to go to Hawaii,” Jefferson confessed, “but my dad told me, ‘You just want to go do-wop with your buddies on the beach.”’

Love at First Sight

“I had a friend who was playing in the East-West Shrine Game,” Jefferson said, “and (WSU coach Mike) Price was on the staff, so my friend introduced me. I was a little hesitant, but coach Price said, ‘Love! Wow, you look better than I thought. I’ll tell you what - I’ll give you a scholarship right now.”’

Love Will Find a Way

“I have so much family, I needed 50 or 60 tickets to the Rose Bowl,” Jefferson said. “I’ve got family coming out of the woodwork. I got tickets for my mom and dad, my brothers, my aunts and two cousins. So the rest of them are going to rent two mobile homes, get two big-screen TVs and a generator and they’re going to barbecue in the parking lot.”

Bringing us up to kickoff, which must mean it’s time to …

Stop, in the Name of Love

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review