Pupils Turn Tables on Athletes, Tape Drug Warning for <i> Them</i>

There was a time when Principal Jaime Mercado would jump at the chance to bring a major-league ballplayer to National City Junior High School, secure in the knowledge that he could expect a sports hero to exert the right kind of influence on impressionable youngsters.

Times have changed.

In an era when superstars can be found in drug rehabilitation centers and courtrooms as well as on playing fields, Mercado thinks the athletes need a few words from the kids.

Turning the tables on tradition, 100 seventh-graders at National City are videotaping original skits for the Padres, Chargers, Sockers and other professional sports clubs in an effort to keep their idols off drugs.

Known as Project HERO (Help Every Athlete Resist Offers of Drugs), the videotapes offer ballplayers a mixture of hero worship and the disappointment youngsters feel when the stars let them down.

“We’re their fans,” James Rickels said. “We’re trying to show them that we care about them. Just because they have money, they shouldn’t be using drugs. We’ve got money. We don’t use drugs.”

Juan Lopez, speaking to his football heroes, said, “We love you guys. Every time we see one of you guys, we say, ‘There goes my favorite athlete.’ ”

Using the drab yellow walls and steel-gray lockers of the girls’ locker room as a backdrop, some of the students rehearsed their brief dialogues Thursday, practicing their techniques before the camera.

The simple skits demonstrate a detailed knowledge of sport’s more-celebrated drug cases. Included are takeoffs on drug sales in the Pittsburgh Pirate locker room that became public during trials last summer, and former Padre Alan Wiggins’ two bouts with cocaine abuse.

In one performance, Padre first baseman Steve Garvey turns down an offer of angel dust from two locker-room pushers.

“Hey man, let’s go get Steve to buy some angel,” 13-year-old Tania Rodriguez says, grinning.

“Yeah,” Jodi Cole says, laughing. “He’ll sure need it for this game.”

Steve doesn’t need it.

“I want to win bad, but not with the help of angel or any other drug,” a stern Cynthia Ruiz, who plays Garvey, says.

In another skit, Filemon Alcaraz, 14, as former Padre second baseman Alan Wiggins, tells NBC broadcaster Bob Costas, played by Rickels, what he learned from a 1982 drug bust.

“I feel pretty good not to be in it anymore,” says Wiggins, who voluntarily entered drug treatment again in 1985, “because most of the children like to watch me. They like to be like Alan Wiggins. I can’t let the children down.”

That idealism is tempered with the cynicism of kids who feel they have been burned already.

“They’re cheating us,” Rodriguez said. “They’re using our money. When we buy the tickets and everything, they use that to buy the drugs. . . . If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t be playing baseball.”

Rickels said, “It’s as if they don’t care that we’re out there. They get the money, they go and get drugs and have fun.”

Project HERO’s lessons cut two ways, Mercado said. Athletes need to be reminded that their behavior will be mimicked by students.

“They need to be in touch with the reality that these are impressionable young people out here and they’re looking for heroes,” Mercado said.

By taking on the role of mentors, students get another chance to internalize the anti-drug message, he said.

Project HERO grew out of Project Feeling Fine--a three-week course on the dangers of drugs and alcohol for the school’s seventh-graders--after students told Mercado that the athletes they follow on television and in the newspapers could use the same kind of warnings.

Mercado has no guarantees that the unsolicited videotapes, which he will mail to sports clubs in June, will be seen by pro athletes. But his students plan to write letters to the same ballplayers, and Mercado wants to invite them to the school in the future.

“I want one who has had experience with drugs,” he said. “I want the students to see that they suffered socially or financially, that there is a price to be paid for using drugs.”