Lesser Sports Fans Must Concede Title to This Long-Ball Hitter : SPORTS: Teacher Is Super Fan

Mickey Mandell, at 53 years of age, points to the advent of cable television and the videocassette recorder as a turning point in his life.

WOR-TV in New York carries all the games from Madison Square Garden, Atlanta’s Turner Broadcasting System shows basketball and baseball on weeknights and, of course, there is ESPN, the 24-hour sports network. What Mandell can’t get home to watch, he tapes.

“It’s opened up a whole new world for me,” he said. “I’ve been known to watch three games on TV and listen to two more on the radio, all at the same time.”

Fan From Way Back

But tell us about the old days, Mickey. The days before you could get 36 channels on the television set in your living room in Woodland Hills. Tell us about the time you dressed up as an usher to get up close to the ring when Archie Moore fought Willie Pastrano in the Sports Arena. Or the time you pretended to be a reporter so you could get into the Forum to see the Lakers in the playoffs.

What about before that? Tell us about when you were a kid back East and you used to sneak into Yankee Stadium. You caught the sports bug early and it took hold, didn’t it? You gave up a marriage of 20 years for sports.

“Being married,” Mandell said, “you cannot have the freedom to devote your leisure time to being a sports fanatic. You’d either have to have a wife who’s a saint or who doesn’t care about you.”

Memorable Bout

And the single greatest moment of your life? You say it was when Sugar Ray Robinson stopped Jake La Motta in the 13th round in Chicago. February, 1951. La Motta knew he was getting killed, but he wouldn’t go down. The ref had to step in.

“That was the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen,” Mandell said. “I am the inveterate sports fan.”

In Mandell’s living room there is a couch, at one end of which is propped a television set equipped with one of those screen-size magnifying glasses that enlarge the picture. The couch is just long enough that Mandell can sit at the other end and stretch his feet out right up to the screen. On a recent afternoon, home from work, he switched on two baseball games on two different radios and watched the first half of the Boston Celtics-Atlanta Hawks playoff game. He watches at least 10 games of some sort or another each week, and listens to more.

All-Around Sports Buff

There isn’t a sport he won’t watch, although he acknowledges that he doesn’t know much about hockey. During the second quarter of the basketball game, his 23-year-old daughter telephones.

“Every time she calls me up she says, ‘Can I talk to you, dad, or are you watching something?’ ” he said. “Well, I was watching the Celtics.”

By 7 p.m., Mandell is ringside at the Country Club in Reseda where he will watch a night of professional boxing. He attends two or three live sporting events a week. This, he says, is way down from the old days, the days before cable television, the days when he was married. Back then, he’d be at the arena or stadium almost every night.

This night, as is usual, he has gotten into the fights without paying. He knows the promoter and has wangled a free pass. Home by midnight, Mandell watches the second half of the Celtics game on tape.

The next morning, second-period health class comes to order in Room 39 at Francis Parkman Junior High School in Woodland Hills. Thirty teen-agers turn away from talking with friends and look toward the teacher’s desk. In the sudden quiet there is only a soft, bubbling sound from a row of aquariums at one end of the room.

There are firm rules in Mr. Mandell’s classroom. Here, he is no spectator. He is the teacher, the center of attention. He controls the action. Students may speak only when called upon. They must ask permission to approach his desk. No chewing gum.

Yet Mr. Mandell’s reputation among the students is as a wisecracker, a joker. Just the other day, during textbook exercises, he suddenly ordered the entire classroom to stand up and sing “The Hokey Pokey.” He is known for his deadpan one-liners, gently teasing his students. One boy in his class said that sometimes Mr. Mandell teases a bit too much, “but you get used to it.”

“He tries to be funny,” said Vann Miller, another student.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” the teacher said. You have to have fun, he said. “If you don’t, you’ll go crazy.”

The students are surprised to hear that Mandell is so inclined toward sports. They say he never talks about it in class. Most of them aren’t much interested anyway. These are well-dressed, carefully groomed children whose concerns run more toward movie theaters and record stores. They live in a far different world from that of Mandell’s youth, a time when Joe DiMaggio was king and there was no rock ‘n’ roll.

Friends and acquaintances of Mickey Mandell simply smile and shake their heads when asked about his consuming passion. Mandell himself looks upon his life in simple, behavioral terms that date back to his childhood in Bridgeport, Conn.

“I was a Depression baby brought up in a home where there wasn’t much money, so I had to fend for myself as far as recreation,” Mandell said. “I had an aunt who lived one stop before Yankee Stadium on the elevated. I used to sneak into Yankee Stadium. I was weaned on Joe DiMaggio.”

As a youth, Mandell would do anything he could to get into sporting events. He’d spot a group of Police Athletic League kids being ushered into a football game and fall in step, sliding quickly past the ticket taker. He sold peanuts at small-time boxing arenas like Ridgewood Grove in New Jersey or Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway.

“I also used to stand outside, where the fighters and trainers came in,” he said. “I’d pick up their bags and walk in with them. It worked every time.”

Mandell played sports, too, back then. He says he had a tryout with a Hartford, Conn., Class A professional baseball team. It didn’t work out, he says. Neither did his attempt to play football at Arnold College in Milford, Conn. On the second play of practice, Mandell was knocked unconscious.

It was only logical, Mandell says, that he embarked on the life of a sports fanatic.

Would-Be Athlete

“Men live vicariously through watching sports,” he said. “If they’ve ever played sports--I don’t care at what level--they can identify with the athletes, their successes and their failures. They can only wish that they, themselves, were out there.”

Mandell says that, for him, a college baseball game can be as exciting as the World Series. Local club fights are as urgent as Ali-Frazier.

“I feel sorry for the people who can only feel like that for the big events, you know, like the Super Bowl,” he said. “How would you like to feel like that all the time? That’s how I feel. I go crazy. And I never boo at a sporting event because, even if you see players and they’re not very good, they’re out there trying their best.”

As for that other matter, the sneaking and cajoling to get into games for free, well, Mandell dismisses that as merely habit.

“It’s not that I can’t afford to pay my way in. It’s just that I’ve been doing it for so many years that I enjoy it,” he said. “I’ve talked my way into baseball parks, football parks. There isn’t a stadium I can’t get into.”

Usher Disguise

His favorite story is of the Moore-Pastrano fight. He actually purchased a $3 general admission ticket to that event, but he found the seat to be so high up that the ring looked like a postage stamp. Walking down to the higher-priced seats, he noticed an open door to the ushers’ dressing rooms. Mandell stepped inside and quickly changed.

“If you look like you know what you’re doing, people will accept that,” he said. “I walked right down to ringside. I was showing people to their seats. I worked long enough to see the fight.”

Journalist Impersonation

Then there is the sportswriter charade. Mandell has used that one lots of times. Just carry a notebook and look like you’re late for an interview, he says. In one instance, he says he sat on the opposing team’s bench at a Laker game in the Sports Arena. Years later, Mandell faked his way into a Laker practice at the Forum. In the locker room, a group of reporters crowded around Laker coach Pat Riley. Suddenly, someone at the back began asking particularly tough questions.

“Riley was looking at him as if to say, ‘Who is this guy?’ ” recalled one of the reporters there that day.

The guy Riley was wondering about was Mandell.

“I’m a knowledgeable basketball fan. So, I said to myself, I might as well interview these guys.”

At boxing matches, Mandell is often seen standing by a fighter’s corner between rounds, offering advice. Few of the out-of-town boxers or trainers know who he is. They will look at him bewildered. But Mandell delivers instructions in such an authoritative tone that they often listen attentively.

“You know what? Most of the time he makes a good and valid point,” said Joe Goossen, a local trainer who knows Mandell. “I don’t like it when he talks to me during the fight. But, after the fight, I listen to Mickey when he’s got some advice for me.”

Fighter Heeds Advice

“Everybody has something to tell you, especially when you’re going good,” said undefeated middleweight boxer Michael Nunn, one of Goossen’s fighters and a frequent recipient of Mandell’s wisdom. “But Mickey’s a true boxing fan, so I take it for what it’s worth.”

For months, Mandell had been telling Nunn to plant his feet more firmly when throwing punches. Goossen and Nunn, accustomed to hearing this from Mandell, would nod patiently and walk away. Last month, former champion Sugar Ray Leonard visited Nunn’s dressing room after a fight in Las Vegas and offered similar advice. Nunn is now in the gym working on planting his feet.

Mandell smiles and claps his hands when he thinks about that.

“I don’t blame them for not listening to me. They don’t know who I am,” Mandell said. “But I know something about sports. I can pick things out when I’m watching. So I impart some of my knowledge.”

Disturbing Experience

Looking back over the years, Mandell says, he is content with having lived the life of a sports fanatic. As with anything else, there are painful memories to go with the good. Mandell recalls only too clearly watching Emile Griffith punch Benny (Kid) Paret to death in the ring in 1962.

“I was standing in the aisle to watch that fight. . . . I snuck in,” Mandell said. “I knew Paret was hurt badly. And then he was dead. I really got a sick feeling in my stomach.”

Mandell stares off to a point somewhere far away.

“It took me a month or so to go back to watching boxing,” he mused. “But our baser instincts persevere. You forget.”

And the world of sports, like life, goes on.

Now, as May brings blue skies and warmer days, Mandell looks forward to summer. School will be out and he’ll be free to go to Dodger games or spend the afternoon watching the Dallas Cowboys practice at their summer training camp in Thousand Oaks.

“When they talk about putting people on a life-support machine . . . well, I wouldn’t let them pull the plug on me if I could sit there with my remote control and still watch sports.”