The “Player Spotlight” series aims to provide mini-biographies for each player on the historic 1939 UCLA football team. Each spotlight will include on-the-field contributions to the 1939 campaign but also address the player’s life before and after their time in Westwood. Enjoy!
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Of all the 1939 UCLA Bruins, Mladin Zarubica may well have had the craziest life. If you’ve read the Woody Strode autobiography “Goal Dust,” you may be shaking your head right now and thinking, “Impossible!” Admittedly, I would have had that same reaction before beginning my research. I’ll save the goods for the last section of the article, but let’s just say revealing the top secret formula for Coca Cola doesn’t even top the list.
As senior right tackle for the Bruins in 1939, “Zubo” enjoyed a singular distinction. He was the only Bruin to start all ten games. Heading into spring practice, Zarubica already had a strong hold on first string status, having played 465 minutes of a possible 720 as a junior. Walking in to fall workouts he also had at least two summer movie credits under his belt, in one case playing a German soldier. Seven years later, one of the most remarkable events of his life would concern a certain “Abraham B” who also played a German solider. More on that later.
The 1939 Bruins made a statement in opening the season with their 6-2 victory over defending national champions Texas Christian. Writing for the Los Angeles Times following the game, Dick Hyland noted that “The Bruin line play was superb and too much cannot be said about the playing of Jack Sommers, Mladin Zarubica, Don MacPherson, and Jack Frawley.” Continuing, he specifically praised the play of Zarubica. “He made three tackles in a row with T.C.U. was hottest and one play, a wide sweep headed around end, was tagged touchdown had he not stopped it.”
Despite Zubo’s terrific play in the opener, the Los Angeles Daily News reported that Jack Cohen would replace him as starter in Seattle. No rationale was provided, but Coach Horrell’s early lineups tended to be full of surprises, strategic or otherwise. Regardless, it was Zarubica who got the start, and he made his impact known almost immediately, intercepting a pass to stymie an early Husky drive. Mladin suffered “a nasty cut over his right eye” but nothing that looked to slow him down the following week in Palo Alto.
There is little record of Zarubica’s play against Stanford beyond his getting the start. Collectively, the game was the worst of the season for the Bruin defense, which not only gave up 14 points to the Indians but only barely dodged much worse. (Goal line stops by Johnny Wynne and a Jackie Robinson interception kept Stanford from doubling their total.)
The team’s fourth opponent, Montana, looked to be their easiest contest of the season. In the real world, Bruins and Grizzlies may sound equal in size, but on the gridiron the UCLA lineman outweighed their Montana counterparts by an average of 15 pounds. As Al Wolf of the Times put it, “up front, those 200-pounders like Laddie Zarubica, Jack Sommers, John Frawley, and Dell Lyman should not be manhandled á la Stanford by a set of backs who can’t hit the 180 mark even with watermelons in their arms.” The prediction proved correct as the Bruins outgained the Grizzlies 325-185 in a 20-6 victory.
UCLA similarly romped Oregon 16-6 the following week. Despite the Ducks finding the end zone only once, line play by the Bruins was lackluster. In fact, Dick Hyland of the Times described their efforts as an embarrassment.
The Bruins next faced a tough matchup in Cal, which they won handily on the strength of a career game by Kenny Washington. Again, however, the Bruins line play was lackluster, so much so that Hyland’s preview of the team’s upcoming Santa Clara battle received the sub-headline, “The Tackles Are a Problem.” Hyland noticed a “harmful tendency to plant their No. 12 shoes and stand in one spot,” adding “They can’t do that in this game or they’ll wind up on their backs studying the clouds…”
In fact, the Bruin linemen played their best game of the year against Santa Clara, leading Broncos coach Buck Shaw to mutter, “That wasn’t the Bruin line I’ve been hearing about and saw in the Stanford game. Per Hyland, “every man on the Bruin line played his best game of the season.” Zubo leveled one of the game’s hardest hits, sending Santa Clara back Harry Sanders for a shoulder X-ray with his tackle following an interception. In contrast with his pregame write-up, Hyland now used the sub-headline “Bruin Line Good.”
Hyland again focused on the line once more in the lead up to the team’s next game, challenging the unit to turn the prior week’s excellence into their new normal. He had this to say about Zarubica.
Zarubica Improves
Zarubica, too, is on the upswing but cuts down his effectiveness a great deal by standing up and waiting to see where the play is going instead of taking an initial charge and then peeking. Last year, I understand, he was awarded a big black ceegar for playing the best defensive fullback of any of the linemen, even though he wasn’t supposed to play defensive fullback from tackle position. He has some failing this way yet, although the beeg black ceegar must be cut down to cigarette size if his percentage of fault last year and this determines the size of the smoke.
Following a 13-13 draw against the Oregon State College Beavers, the Bruins would rebound in a big way against Washington State. However, the Bruins first string linemen watched much of that rebound from the sideline. Trailing 7-6 after three quarters, most of the line was replaced with the second string. The gamble paid off as UCLA rattled off the game’s final 18 points for a 24-7 victory.
In the run-up to the USC showdown, Zarubica and teammate Dell Lyman were named Pacific Coast Conference all-star tackles by United Press, though neither made the first or second team. Despite the recent honor, Zarubica was regarded as “terribly underrated” by Bob Hebert of the Daily News.
It was Zubo (or “Socko,” after his middle name Sako) the Times chose to profile the day before the game, assigning him a unique sort of “triple threat” status.
However, it was sophomore Cecil Dye, Zubo’s backup, who earned acclaim following the game, having “piled up many a Trojan play” in the scoreless tie and being tabbed by Troy as one of the toughest Bruin linemen.
Though the Southern Cal matchup marked the end of the Bruin season and career for Zarubica, he would play one more game that year, joining teammates Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, Jim Mitchell, John Frawley, and John Zaby in a December 31 exhibition contest between the newly formed Kenny Washington All-Stars and a local pro team, the Los Angeles Bulldogs. The Bulldogs prevailed 22-6. It would be the only loss of the year for these six Bruins.
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LIFE BEFORE 1939
Mladin Sako Zarubica was born in Long Beach, California, on January 4, 1917, to Yugoslavian parents. His father, Sako, was a pipe layer born in Serbia, and his mother, Ljubica Rapovac, was born in Austria. Mladin had three older siblings: Bozidar, his eldest brother who died young; Anka, his sister; and Svotar, his other brother. Enough Serbo-Croatian was spoken in the home that Mladin remained conversant if not fluent three decades later.
Zarubica attended Hollywood High School where he starred at left tackle with future Bruin Louis Kyzivat. In Mladin’s senior season, Hollywood won their first two games but then found themselves on the losing end of three straight shutouts before eking out a slim 13-12 win in their sixth and final game. No Hollywood players received all-city honors.
Following his graduation from Hollywood High, Zubo enrolled at UCLA in the fall of 1936. As freshmen were not yet eligible for varsity, he played on a loaded frosh team that included Kenny Washington and Woody Strode. Surprisingly, the team managed only a .500 record, winning three games and losing three.
Zarubica made the varsity squad in 1937, though to call him a highly touted addition may be a stretch. On Zubo, Braven Dyer of the Times had this to say: “May make a great tackle and may not.” Still, as the season drew nearer, Mladin’s chances of displacing first string tackle Larry Murdock seemed to grow, at least in part due to Murdock’s having lost some weight between 1936 and 1937. A late September practice injury to Murdock solidified Zubo’s position on the first string when the Bruins opened against Oregon.
Mladin returned to a reserve role quickly enough, now behind Brewster Broadwell, but his strong play off the bench in a Bruin loss to Cal was cited as “nothing short of sensational” by Times writer Dyer. Zarubica must have impressed coach Bill Spaulding as well since it was only an eleventh hour decision that kept Zubo on the bench the following week in Seattle.
The Huskies beat the Bruins 26-0 with perhaps the biggest mismatches taking place on the line. However, Zarubica was the one bright spot among the UCLA guards and tackles. His strong play earned him the starting spot for the team’s final three matchups: Texas Christian, Missouri, and USC.
The Bruins finished last in the conference in 1937 and compiled the worst record of the Bill Spaulding era. Uncertainty plagued the team in so many areas that a joint committee of students and prominent alumni was convened to tackle to question, “What is wrong with football at U.C.L.A.?” However, one thing appeared certain: Mladin Zarubica was the team’s top right tackle and in the catbird’s season for first string status his junior year.
Mladin indeed earned the start in the team’s opener against Nile Kinnick and Iowa. However, it was backup right tackle Brewster Broadwell whose goal-line heroics kept Iowa out of the end zone, the result being Broadwell’s return to the starting lineup for the Bruins’ second game.
In what may start to feel like a recurring pattern, the newly second string Zarubica outplayed Broadwell at Oregon, and just like that found himself the starter, this time for a home matchup against Washington, which the Burins won 13-0. Coach Spaulding was effusive in his postgame comments. “I liked the way Jack Sommers and Johnny Ryland played of course, and that boy Zarubica was pretty hard to get out of there on those end runs when he floated out with the play, wasn’t he?”
Zubo even dispensed an early form of “trash talk” (known as twitting) on the Washington coach after the victory. “The trouble with your team, Mr. Phelan, is that you haven’t got enough Serbians on it.” Per Bill Henry of the Times, Zarubica “was gently twitting the visiting coach who is noted for the Nowagrowskis, Dubskis, Slivinskis and other lads of foreign extraction who have sparked Phelan teams to gridiron fame in the past. Phelan didn’t mind. He’s known Zarubica for quite a while and does quite a bit of kidding himself about his boys with foreign names and battling dispositions. He was feeling a bit too low to be insulted anyhow.”
A cold relegated Zarubica to the bench for the Idaho contest, but he still managed to enter the contest and play well in what was a 33-0 Bruin rout. The Bruins continued their winning ways the next week with a 6-0 victory over Stanford, and Zubo once again began the game on the sidelines. This time it was unclear if the reason was illness-related or simply some further experimentation with the lineup by Coach Spaulding. Either way, he was back in the starting lineup and “starred as usual” in the team’s 21-0 win over Washington State College.
Would you be surprised then to learn that Zubo was back on the bench for the Bruins next two games, showdowns against Wisconsin and Southern Cal? Mladin also found himself a “second teamer” days after the USC game, but this time it wasn’t Spaulding setting the lineup. Zarubica was named second team All-Coast tackle by the Associated Press. Days later, he began the Oregon State game on the sidelines.
On the strength of their 5-4-1 record the Bruins set themselves up for a postseason game, dubbed the Pineapple Bowl, against the University of Hawaii. While in Honolulu, they would also face a local all-star team.
Only 26 Bruins were selected to make the ocean voyage, but Zarubica was one of them. The Bruins won the two games handily by a combined score of 78-7, so it would be hard to point to any single play as pivotal. For Mladin, however, at least one play would have been memorable. In the game against the all-stars he scored his only career touchdown as a Bruin on a 41-yard interception return!
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LIFE AFTER 1939
When the Bruin All-Time Team was selected in 1950, Mladin Zarubica received an honorable mention at tackle. For the typical ex-gridder, such recognition would rank near the top of any listing of post-collegiate highlights. Zarubica, however, was no typical ex-gridder. On the contrary, his life after UCLA was so extraordinary that even the most honest narrative will no doubt be dismissed as fiction.
After graduating from UCLA in 1939 with a degree in Business Administration, Zarubica continued to play football up and down the West Coast with the Kenny Washington All-Stars.
Though the US had not yet entered the War, Zarubica displayed a keener interest than most in monitoring activity in Europe, perhaps due to his Eastern European heritage. In its April 30, 1940, war coverage, the Times included this blurb.
The entire Mediterranean and Balkan situation, however, remained fluid. Lack of further details made it impossible to tell the significance of a short wave broadcast picked up here by Mladin Zarubica, UCLA’s star football tackle, which represented Agram (Zagreb) in northwestern Jugoslavia as the scene of serious disorders…”
Zarubica’s draft registration card from late 1940 showed his employer as Mrs. Edward G. Robinson of Beverly Hills, presumably the wife of the Romanian-born and staunchly anti-Nazi actor of that name.
“The Year of the Rat,” Zarubica’s espionage thriller—you read that right, he wrote books!—includes this information about his military service.
[Zarubica] served in the United States Navy from 1941 through 1945 and was released from active duty at the end of World War II as a senior lieutenant. During the war he served on, and eventually commanded, motor torpedo boats, his principal duty being on PT 360 of Squadron 27 attached to the Third and Seventh Pacific Fleets. His tour with the PT’s covered a twenty-seven-month campaign in the southwest Pacific, ranging all the way from Guadalcanal to Manila Bay. Lieutenant Zarubica, in command of PT 360, spearheaded the American naval forces into Manila Bay.
There is some modesty in Zarubica’s account of the incursion into Manila Bay. Here is a later retelling with more detail.
In 1944, American troops were battling to retake Bataan. Their efforts to capture that Pacific Island, Zarubica explains, were being made difficult by the fact that each night the Japanese were shipping between 10,000 and 12,000 men from Manila to Bataan as reinforcements.
The U.S. Navy sent four PT boats to Manila Harbor on what amounted to a suicide mission. With Zarubica in charge of the lead boat and Raymond Shafer, now governor of Pennsylvania, aboard, the four PT boats—their mufflers placed deep into the water to silence them—slowly and quietly sneaked into Manila Bay…
“It was a real turkey shoot. We sank everything. It was one of the most horrible experiences I’ve ever had. Blood was flowing on the water. We must have sunk about 50 or 60 ships.”
To escape from Manila Bay, the four PT boats were forced to run a mine field. Amazingly, they eluded the mines. Not a single man aboard was wounded. The Japanese navy…was no longer able to carry reinforcements to Bataan.
—Richard S. Harmetz, Los Angeles Times, October 13, 1968
Zubo somehow found time away from battle in 1942 to return to Westwood as assistant line coach on a Bruins team that would finish first in the Pacific Coast Conference and earn its first Rose Bowl berth. Though he remained on the sideline, Mladin was even deemed eligible to play in the team’s September exhibition game against the Navy Airdevils.
Returning to the author information in “The Year of Rat—”
From 1945 through 1948 he was a regional manager for the Austria-Southern Germany division of the Coca-Cola Export Corporation, his main task being the construction of new plants and the commencement of their operations.
His job bringing Coke to Austria and Germany led to two improbable encounters, the first of which constitutes a secondary storyline in “The Year of the Rat.” (The primary storyline concerns an attempt by the Allies to misdirect Hitler’s defense of the D-Day invasion through the masquerading of a British agent, Abraham B, as trusted Nazi general.)
First chance encounter
While working for Coca Cola in 1946, Zarubica on occasion went on hunting expeditions in the Tyrolean Alps. His guide on these adventures was a captivating storyteller, Carlo, whose accounts seemed to require either a world class imagination or intimate knowledge of the Third Reich’s most carefully guarded secrets.
Thirteen years later, while flipping through the January 6 issue of Look magazine, Zarubica happened upon a photograph in the article, “The Insane World of Adolf Hitler.” He immediately recognized the man in the photo as his hunting guide Carlo. However, the caption told a different story:
Hitler called Martin Bormann, murderer, ‘my most faithful party comrade.’
This was the same Martin Bormann who after the Nuremberg Trials was the world’s most wanted fugitive from justice, the same Martin Bormann thought to have either died in an explosion or fled to China. Impossible! Or was it?
By now you’re probably wondering what Ernest Hemingway thought about all of this. Well, there’s no need to wonder. After listening to Zarubica tell the tale for 45 minutes, Hemingway had only one thing to say: “Just sit your butt on a chair and write that story.” Of course this is exactly what Zubo did, and “The Year of the Rat” sold more than a quarter million copies!
Second chance encounter
Remember though that Zarubica had not one but two consequential encounters while with Coke. Additionally, his role as supplier of “The Real Thing” to Austria and Germany put him face to face with Russian general Georgy Zhukov, who had a serious problem only Zubo could solve.
Zhukov loved Coke even more than vodka, but his anti-West cred required that he not be caught dead drinking it. The solution he fashioned with Zarubica was to create “White Coke,” a colorless version that might appear as vodka to bystanders.
Decades later, author Mark Pendergrast was researching the history of Coca Cola for a comprehensive book on the beverage. Among the information the company provided him from their archives, Pendergrast suspected Coca Cola had inadvertently handed off their most closely guarded secret: the formula for Coca Cola. Coke officials denied this vehemently, but Pendergrast was not one to take them at their word.
I photocopied the document, but I simply couldn’t believe that anyone in the company would hand over the original formula to me. Surely, it must only be a forerunner of the real thing. Then I received an unexpected confirmation that I had stumbled onto something far more valuable than I knew.
While interviewing Mladin Zarubica, the Technical Observer who made “white Coke” for Russian General Zhukov, I mentioned that I had a formula. “Oh, really?” he said. “So do I.” The Company gave me one when I had to take the color out for Zhukov. Want to see it?” I did indeed.
When the photocopy of his January 4, 1947, correspondence arrived, it contained exactly the same formula that I had found in the archives…
—Mark Pendergrast, “For God, Country, and Coca-Cola”
Continuing from Zarubica’s author bio—
In 1948 he returned briefly to the United States, then took a post on the overseas staff of the National City Bank of New York. He spent almost two years in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the banking business, surveying business firms and preparing the bank’s monthly economic report on Uruguay. He returned to New York to become an account executive with Bozell and Jacobs, Inc., working primarily on a public information program for the electric light and power industry. In 1954 he was assigned to an extension of this program in California, his home state. By the end of that year he had co-founded a heavy-construction firm.
Zarubica would remain in California for the next forty years, juggling his business enterprises (construction and race horses), his writing—”Scutari” (1968) would follow “The Year of the Rat” (1964), his community involvement (Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District board member, various UCLA committees) and his hobbies (model ship building, scrap metal sculpture, and painting).
At one point, Zarubica even bought the screen rights to a Charles Webb (of “The Graduate” fame) novel in hopes of producing a movie.
Mladin Zarubica passed away on July 25, 1995, at the age of 78, leaving behind five children (Karyn, Shawne, Tadd, Darryl, and Fionn) and three grandchildren. Pushing the Karadzik quandary aside for the moment, Zarubica’s words to an interviewer in 1968, which could just as easily have been spoken by his literary protagonist “Abraham B,” summed up his life as well as any:
“A man should make the most of the time he has.”
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Unfortunately, I don’t believe I can tell the story of Mladin Zarubica and ignore this final detail, at best puzzling and at worst troubling.
In August 1993, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzik was inducted into an Eastern Orthodox religious order. Presenting the honor to him personally was fellow knight Mladin Zarubica, then 76 years old, who lauded Karadzik as “carrying the anchor for bringing real peace to the world.” Karadzik, of course, would later face trial and be convicted for multiple crimes against humanity, including genocide.
As someone who detested Hitler and Nazism to their core, how is it possible that Zarubica could stomach, much less break bread with, Hitler’s spiritual successor? Had Zubo’s former revulsion for genocide taken a nosedive? Had his once sharp and inquisitive mind simply reached a point where propaganda now held the advantage? I have no answer, only an observation, informed by circumstances past and present. War—even at great distance—reduces a great many of us to tribalism, which by its very definition can’t help but steal from us some fraction of our humanity. We need look no further than the recent violence in Westwood as proof.
Author’s Note #1: I did my best to piece together this biography from newspapers, game programs, yearbooks, the subject’s published works, and other public sources. If you have information that can improve the piece, please leave a comment or contact me through this website.
Author’s Note #2: If you are a 1939 Bruins fan or just someone who enjoys helping others, Mladin’s daughter Karyn is going through some difficult times and could use your support.
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