It’s iffy that Toni Pole even gets in a three-point stance Saturday night for Washington State in the Apple Cup, but if history holds, the big guy will spring some sort of surprise.

Surely, the Cougars would appreciate a key sack or a forced fumble, which would put Pole right on schedule in delivering big news around WSU’s season finale, as usual.

The play that WSU fans will associate with Pole (say PO-lay) for a long while came in overtime of the 2012 Apple Cup in Pullman. Logan Mayes forced an errant short pass by Keith Price and Pole plucked it out of the air and high-tailed it 65 yards to the opposite 5-yard line before he was overtaken by UW receiver Cody Bruns.

“The only thing I was thinking,” his teammate Jeremiah Allison said this week, “was, rumble, young man, rumble.”

WSU went on to win anyway in overtime, but had to do it with a field goal. Had Pole scored, it might not have elevated him to the Kenny Wheaton pick-for-the-ages echelon, but he would have earned a seat at the head table of Cougars historical highlights.

“I’m telling you man,” he said good-naturedly a while back, “it was that Thanksgiving dinner. I needed an oxygen tank, for sure.”

Further back, he admitted to real pangs of regret: “It also haunts me, because it was right there.”

The big fella was also a newsmaker for different reasons in the days before WSU’s 2013 New Mexico Bowl against Colorado State. Already in Albuquerque, Pole had to jump on a plane back to Pullman to sort out a snafu over a grade with a professor so he could be eligible to play. He did.

“It was hard,” he said. “Lotta flying. I was sick of the airport.”

Lately, he’s been battling a foot injury that scrubbed him from the Arizona State game last week. Surely senior night, the culmination of his five seasons at WSU, will be motivation for a try at one more showstopping moment.

Pole is a Tongan with big, soulful eyes and an easy, likable disposition. He admits that it took defensive-line coach Joe Salave’a to develop his work ethic.

“Just getting by was my motto,” Pole says. “I like to procrastinate.

“I can’t say enough about what he’s done for me as a player. If I look at myself now and two years ago, I was a lot lazier.”

Pole didn’t play football until high school — soccer was his first sport — partly because in eighth grade, he topped the 180-pound allowance.

“One-eighty,” said the 301-pound Pole playfully, “is pretty light.”

Utah offered him a scholarship when he went to their camp as a junior, and he was on the brink of taking it. WSU came in late, fortuitous because his father, Sione, favored the Cougars.

“I have so much family in Utah, I think he just wanted me to focus on school,” Pole said. “He saw the type of place this is. It’s a college town.”

Pole should graduate with a degree in criminal justice next spring, and says he’ll leave with a sense of having grown.

“I’ve learned a lot about myself,” he says. “Basically honesty — I was able to work on myself, become a better person, a better athlete, a better football player. I guess a better friend.”

It’s not uncommon on WSU’s trips to hear someone banging out a tune on the piano in a hotel lobby. That’s Pole, who also can play guitar and ukulele.

“My mother has video of me singing my first solo in church, when I was 3 years old,” he said. “Music is a big part of our culture. In high school, I was in three different choirs.”

Now his chorus is in the violence three or four feet from a football. Toni Pole hopes it spawns one more moment to remember.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com

Four weeks for 99 cents of unlimited digital access to The Seattle Times. Try it now!