Confidence Man : Nick Giovinazzo Coached Self-Esteem as Much as Track and Field to High School and Valley College Students Over the Past 34 Years

In the early 1970s, a tall, scrawny kid who called himself “a mediocre athlete and a troublemaker” in high school was given a choice by his father: Go to college or get a job.

The kid picked Valley College, then went out for the track team. He approached Coach Nick Giovinazzo, expecting to get turned down. But he didn’t know Giovinazzo. As track coach at Monroe High, Giovinazzo once had 300 boys on the team--a third of all the boys in school. If you wanted to play for him, enthusiasm was the only requirement.

“Nick welcomed me in, and that was the turning point for me,” said Fred Dixon, the skinny kid, who went on to become a decathlete on the 1976 and ’80 U. S. Olympic teams. “He believed you could do a lot more than you thought you could do. It became contagious until you were convinced. I was an insecure kid with no confidence. Nick provided that confidence.”

Giovinazzo (pronounced jo-vin- ot -so) is one of Los Angeles’ great unsung sports figures. He’s a contradiction to the popular belief that this is a city without a soul, a place where everybody is from somewhere else, where neighbors don’t know one another’s name, where close friends go back all the way to lunch--total strangers until bonding over an arugula salad and a round of Hollywood Hugs.

It’s hard to imagine Giovinazzo taking a lunch or making a deal. Earthy, unpretentious and warm, he’s that Southern California rarity--an Angeleno for all his 57 years. When 200 of his friends, family and former athletes recently threw a party to mark his retirement after 34 years as a teacher and coach, he wore his best polo shirt, his ever-present ear-to-ear smile and an aura of sincerity even while doing more hugging than Leo Buscaglia at a love-in.

Giovinazzo is an educator who fought for physical education and took an interest in athletes that went beyond their worth to him on the field. During his tenure at Valley College, from the fall of 1962 to the spring of ‘85, he was a coach and teacher, chairman of the physical education department for six years, chairman of evening health education for seven, iconoclast, innovator, motivator.

“Years ago, Nick did a lot of things coaching track that you see now,” said Dan Means, acting president of Mission College. “And he helped Valley build a great physical education program in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But what distinguished him was that he was great with kids. He liked to work with kids who had academic difficulties. He took great pride in helping them get over these difficulties and go on to four-year colleges. He spent hours and hours helping them with their studies. He’s that kind of person.”

Giovinazzo is also the kind of person who would take the time to organize and run a semipro football team, as he said he did with the Valley All-Stars in 1960, “just to give older guys who can’t get football out of their blood another chance to go out and knock heads.” And he’s the kind of person who will befriend and room with a 3-foot-10 little person, as he did with Billy Barty in the 1940s, and become a close friend with someone without even bothering to ask what he does for a living, as he did with motion picture director Martin Ritt.

“Nick doesn’t care about those things,” said Means, who chaired the Valley College PE department when Giovinazzo was hired. “That’s why everybody loves him.”

Means was the only college administrator to attend Giovinazzo’s party. In his quest to maintain the quality of physical education at the junior college level, Giovinazzo has crossed swords with more than one administrator. To say he has contempt for them “is the understatement of the year,” he said. But in the end, the administrators won. Giovinazzo grew weary of the battles, saying that coaching in junior colleges was “a major effort in futility.” So he quit.

“I am a thousand times the teacher I was 10 years ago,” he said. “I am at the peak of my productivity as an instructor. I could have lasted another 10 years, but my heart was torn out by what I saw happening in education today: the cutbacks and the layoffs and the polls that showed that 75 out of 100 teachers wouldn’t recommend teaching as a profession. I was always the guy trying to get the other teachers ‘up,’ but I can’t do it any more. I’m so down. It’s hard to believe it’s me.”

And it’s harder to believe that Giovinazzo will stay down. The son of Italian immigrants, he has overcome a lot more than mere disillusionment. When Los Angeles was young and still “like a small town,” Giovinazzo said, he was born in a house that is now an off-ramp near Dodger Stadium, and as a child he played war among the Indian burial sites in Elysian Hills. His father, Joseph, was a gravedigger, bootlegger, restaurant owner and, finally, a wine maker with his own label, Sunland Vintage.

“When I didn’t go into the business with him, my father sold out,” Giovinazzo said, laughing, “and then he predicted that the wine business in California would never amount to anything.”

Giovinazzo’s passion for sports was forged during the Depression. In the 1930s, all the usual part-time jobs were taken by adults, not kids, and playgrounds became a hotbed of after-school activity. As a youngster, Giovinazzo said he followed the exploits of the “playground bums” and knew by the fifth grade that he wanted to be a coach. “I loved competition and athletics,” he said.

Later in life, when he moved his young family to Granada Hills, he said it was his boyhood memories that compelled him to bug the school board for 2 1/2 years to open the playgrounds after school.

At Marshall High from 1943-46, Giovinazzo captained the football and track teams and also took part in choir and drama. In his junior year, he said, he set a school record that lasted 35 years, long-jumping 21-3 1/2, “which was a helluva jump for anyone, let alone a white boy.” As a single-wing tailback, he carried the ball about 30 times a game his senior year and made all-league.

After high school, Giovinazzo enrolled at L. A. City College and said he was named a Helms All-American as captain of a track team that won back-to-back national junior college championships. It was at LACC that he met Billy Barty. At the time, Barty had done “The Wizard of Oz,” but was going to college to study journalism. Giovinazzo was a hot-shot athlete, and Barty interviewed him for the school paper. They became fast friends.

“People don’t realize this, but Billy was a great athlete,” Giovinazzo said, “and he even played football at City College. I’ll never forget this. Barry Brown was our quarterback. He was All-City at Hollywood High and could really throw the football. One day in practice, Billy was playing flanker and ran a post pattern into the end zone. Barry rifled a shot to him but hit him on the helmet, and I swear Billy did a double flip in the air.”

When Giovinazzo enrolled in summer courses at UCLA after graduating from LACC, he got Barty to join him. In the fall, Barty ran off with the Spike Jones Orchestra to do a novelty act and Giovinazzo stayed at UCLA to major in education. He made the varsity in football but played sparingly. The next season he broke his ankle during the first practice and gave up football, although he did eventually continue on the track team as a sprinter and long jumper.

Giovinazzo said he got his first job as a PE teacher at Monterey High, then returned to L. A. two years later to teach at Santa Fe Special, “this city’s Blackboard Jungle”--a school for incorrigibles located behind the city dump. Teachers had problems with students. Giovinazzo said he was challenged to a boxing match by the biggest, baddest kid in school. Giovinazzo called his bluff and accepted. As a crowd formed, Giovinazzo said, the kid raised the teacher’s hand and announced, “This is my man!” End of problems.

Santa Fe Special closed down in 1954 and Giovinazzo took a job at Van Nuys High, the biggest school in the city with 5,200 students, including Natalie Wood, Robert Redford and Stacy Keach. Giovinazzo coached cross-country, winning three league titles in three years; swimming, winning the league title his first year even though he didn’t know how to swim, and was co-coach in track and field.

After four years, Giovinazzo transferred to brand-new Monroe High; at the time, he said, Nordhoff Street was still a dirt road. For a coach, it must have been the golden age of sports. Extracurricular activities, he said, “were the hub around which the school revolved.” Even teachers, he said, were swept up in school spirit, and he talked wistfully about the time 6,000 fans showed up for a night track meet against Poly.

Aside from coaching track at Monroe, Giovinazzo assisted his longtime friend, Howard Taft, in football. Taft and Giovinazzo went to UCLA together, but the similarities ended there. Gruff and strict, Taft was called Run It Again Howard by his players for long, repetitive practice sessions.

“He and Nick together were the perfect pairing,” said Steve Dem, who captained Monroe’s first league championship team in 1961. “Nick was a happy-go-lucky guy who got the most out of his players. Taft chewed us up and spit us out. Here’s how different they were: We were practicing for Manual Arts. It was raining and cold. Nick was wearing a slicker. We were all freezing. But what’s Taft wearing? Only a T-shirt.”

John Schlicher also played on the ’61 team and took part in track, too. He remembers Giovinazzo for his compassion. “I was learning how to pole vault,” he said, “and the day came to finally go up on the pole. But Nick put it off and put it off. It took him a week to tell me, ‘Schlicher, you’re too big to be a pole vaulter. The school can’t afford the high cost of poles.’ He let me down easy.”

About the same time, Giovinazzo introduced all-comers track meets and summer wrestling meets to L. A. He also founded the Valley All-Stars to give the established Eagle Rock Athletic Club some competition. He placed an ad in the old Valley News and Green Sheet and “150 guys showed up on a Saturday morning at Van Nuys High,” he said. With local high schools and the Los Angeles Rams donating used equipment--and Giovinazzo raising money by selling program ads--the All-Stars managed to survive for about seven years, although Giovinazzo’s association ended when he was hired at Valley College in 1962.

“It was great,” said Gordy Hjelmstrom, a former All-Star. “We played teams like the Marine Bulldogs and we even did quite well in a scrimmage against the Dallas Cowboys. I played against Bob Lilly and I think we only lost by a touchdown. But Nick was the guy who made it all possible. He was great. He turned a lot of bad boys into good boys. I should know. I was one of them.”

At Valley, Giovinazzo coached track with George Ker for 12 years, their teams never finishing worse than third in the Metropolitan Conference. Giovinazzo also started the wrestling team at the college, coached volleyball (Tom Selleck was on the team) and introduced PE classes in jogging and women’s weight training before they became fashionable.

But ultimately, he said, he couldn’t tolerate “roadblock after roadblock” from the administration and quit last May.

Other obstacles also contributed to his decision to retire.

In 1980, when he was PE chairman at Valley, he and athletic director George Goff were asked to resign their administrative titles after irregularities were discovered in the transcripts of athletes who had transferred to other colleges. Giovinazzo said they resigned to placate school officials and “take the pressure off two young guys” in the department. Goff was later rehired as Valley’s athletic director under a new administration, Giovinazzo said.

In 1983, Giovinazzo made headlines when a 2 1/2-year investigation by the L. A. district attorney’s office turned up improprieties in an in-service teacher training program he founded in the late ‘60s. When Giovinazzo became too busy to run the project--which enabled teachers to earn units that increased their salary--he turned it over to his wife, Lois.

In 11 1/2 years, more than 11,000 teachers went through the program and, according to Giovinazzo, a small percentage didn’t attend the clinics, choosing instead to do independent study to earn the units and the raises. During the investigation, Giovinazzo said, 48 teachers were not able to prove that they had actually done the independent work, and had to pay back their raises. Giovinazzo said his wife had not been able to monitor everyone and did not keep complete records. The Giovinazzos were fined $12,800 by the city.

“It was devastating for us,” said Giovinazzo, who maintains that he and Lois were guilty of nothing more than sloppy bookkeeping.

After he retired, Giovinazzo sold his Granada Hills home to one of his five children and he and Lois moved to a condominium in Solana Beach, just a mile from the Del Mar race track. Giovinazzo has been a horse racing fan almost as long as he’s been involved in sports. His father took him to the track at an early age, he said, adding that he “learned to read a racing chart at 12.” Steve Dem remembers riding “an old jalopy Ford back from track meets, pole vaults sticking out the windows, race results on the radio.”

Giovinazzo, in partnership with people like Ritt, has owned thoroughbreds for about 20 years. In retirement, Giovinazzo plans to train young horses, applying the same principles of integral training--which involves mixing sprints with long-distance runs--that he pioneered at Valley College in the ‘60s. His horses will probably benefit from his approach as much as his athletes.

“I’m an exercise physiologist,” he said. “I never thought training should be painful. When it hurts, stop. You build step by step, asking for a little bit more each day. You don’t have to punish yourself to do it.”

Vicki Woehrle, Giovinazzo’s daughter, doesn’t think her father will change in retirement. “He’ll still be the coach,” she said. “He coached us in everything. Cleaning the bathrooms, pulling the weeds. It’ll still be the same. When he was coaching, he dedicated so much of his time to his students, we’re hoping he’ll spend some time with us now, and I’m sure he will. Until Del Mar opens.”