Local Sports Gives Norwalk TV Star a Lot to Kick Around

Local coaches like Richard Estrella.

He interviews them, broadcasts scores of high school and junior college games only a few thousand people attend and publicizes the triumphs of athletes who grew up in Norwalk wanting to play professional sports--and made it.

Estrella takes teams that rarely make big news and puts them in the limelight.

Estrella, who played football for Santa Fe High School until a knee injury cut his career short, is a broadcaster for Norwalk Community Cable. When his alma mater held the record for the longest losing streak of 500 schools in the CIF Southern Division this year (19 games in a row), Estrella broadcast that, too.

Estrella produces, writes and hosts Norwalk Community Cable’s “Sports Wrap,” a monthly interview and call-in show, and does the play-by-play commentary for the “Game of the Week,” which features local teams. Until Community Cable’s local news program was canceled, Estrella was sports anchor on that, too.

The show is seen only in Norwalk, which has 9,000 cable subscribers. Nobody knows how many of them watch “Sports Wrap,” but once, when Estrella opened the lines to callers, he got 30 questions in an hour.

Show Costs Him Money

Estrella is unpaid. In fact, “Sports Wrap” costs him money. He buys Raider tickets and gives them away as prizes in his sports quiz. After work, he pays the seven-member crew in pizza.

In four years, Estrella figures he has logged 500 hours of air time, and put in another 2,000 preparing for shows. He persists because he, too, wants media attention.

Like hundreds of other cable television volunteers, Estrella wants into the “big time.” If his big break were to come next week, Estrella figures 100 applicants would line up to take his job at Norwalk Community Cable. The field is that competitive.

At 26, Estrella isn’t serious about much. He once went on the air in a Santa Claus hat to celebrate Christmas, and he tossed a pumpkin around the set for Halloween. But his antics make his intensity about broadcasting all the more striking. He goes on the air live “because that’s the way the big boys do it.” He wears a blue blazer and a tie to high school football games because, he says, “you’ve got to look the part.” Even the Santa hat had a serious side.

“Sports guys are the clowns of broadcast,” he said. “A little levity is expected.”

“Sports Wrap,” originally “Sports Talk,” has gone through three incarnations and one programming hiatus in two years, due mostly to the vagaries of community-access cable television. The show started as “Sports Talk” on Falcon Cable Television. Norwalk Community Cable took over Falcon’s community programming in July, 1985, and the show went on, first as “Sports Talk,” and then, after an intermission of several months, under the name “Sports Wrap,” said Julie Ragozzino, programming supervisor for Norwalk Community Cable.

Only Show of Its Kind

It is the longest-running live community-access show in Norwalk. To the best of Ragozzino’s knowledge, it is also the only community sports interview program currently airing in the Los Angeles area.

Estrella and his mostly volunteer crew have have never missed a show for lack of preparation. “They call in sick if they can’t make it,” said director Larry Jones. “They’re there on time, they’re there to the end. They all want in to the big time.”

One of the few members of the crew who actually earns a living in television, Jones produces commercials for Falcon Cable Television in Alhambra.

For four years that ended last month, Estrella also worked in TV--he dispatched repair trucks for Falcon Cable Television. (He is now training to be a real estate appraiser.)

“My absolute only reason for taking the (dispatching) job,” he said, “was because I thought it might somehow get me into doing a show.” Two months after he started as a dispatcher, Estrella got a break. Somebody called in sick two hours before Robert Vega, a local Olympic boxing hopeful, was scheduled to fight. Estrella was asked to do ringside commentary.

His first time on television, he went on live, without a script.

“Sure it was scary,” he said. “But now I am totally relaxed. My set is my office.”

Recent programs have featured interviews with Frank Mazzotta and Larry Anderson, head football coaches at Cerritos College and Lynwood High School, respectively. Both live outside Norwalk, and neither had seen the show before going on the air.

Last June, Estrella interviewed Anderson, a coach in the 605 All-Star Football Game, about the upcoming contest.

Being on the air with Estrella was just plain fun, Anderson said. It was also “a good way to get publicity for the game,” Anderson said. The game attracted 4,000, one of largest crowds in years. Anderson credits Estrella, who promoted the game aggressively on the air, with increasing the turnout.

Tuesday, three days after the Cerritos Falcons won the South Coast Conference Championship for the first time since 1978, and less than two weeks before the team travels to Bakersfield to play against Taft College in the Potato Bowl, it was Mazzotta’s turn to talk sports with Estrella.

Calls came in faster than Mazzotta could answer them. Replying to one, Mazzotta said Taft may have a psychological edge in the upcoming bowl game because Cerritos beat Taft earlier this season. “If you play a team you beat, then they always think they could have beaten you last time,” he said.

Could Have Talked for Hours

For Mazzotta and Estrella, the show’s end seemed to be an unwelcome interruption to a pleasant chat about sports. “I could have gone on for another two hours,” Mazzotta said afterward. “It was great, just great.”

“We’re in a funny area here,” he said. “We get shined on a little about sports coverage. Our people are always complaining that there is not enough, so it will be nice to have it.”

Estrella, a Cerritos College graduate, agreed. “Here’s a team that’s headed for a bowl game, and I bet most of the people in this area didn’t even know it,” he said.

Jeff Brinkley, former head coach at Norwalk and Excelsior high schools, has been on “Sports Wrap” three times. Brinkley left Norwalk High in June to become head coach at Newport Harbor High School in Costa Mesa. Brinkley called his last appearance “a retrospective.”

“Richard asked questions that really gave me a chance to express my feelings about leaving Norwalk, and to explain that this was a step up and I had to take advantage of the opportunity,” he said.

Another time, Brinkley and John Glenn High Coach Andy Andersen were Estrella’s guests the week before the cross-town rivals were scheduled to play. Gloria Mayo of Norwalk called in to tell Estrella and Brinkley that half the Norwalk High Football team was at her house, eating pizza and watching the show. (The rest of the team was doing the same thing at another home.)

Shawn Jones, then a Lancer fullback and defensive end, was in the audience. “We wanted to find out what the other team thought about us,” he said. “The other coach said he thought we were ‘a good strong team, but little.’ Our coach said, ‘We may be little, but we’re mighty.’ ”

The Lancers won, 20-17.

Estrella still never uses a script, partly because Norwalk Community Cable does not have a TelePrompTer. Prior to his monthly half-hour shows, he writes a few stories, which he delivers--smoothly--from memory.

Follows 35 Teams

He writes an outline of the show, which he distributes to the crew, and consults with his guest about probable areas of questioning. He keeps abreast of local sports by reading three sports sections a day, attending local games and chatting with players and coaches. On his monthly half-hour show, he broadcasts scores of 35 local teams. Coaches who have been on the show call Estrella “well prepared.”

These days, the shows are more professional than much community access fare, but it wasn’t always like that. “In the beginning,” Estrella said, “I’d look at the tapes and say, ‘This thing has got to get better.’ ”

Tom Lopez, 28, once helped Estrella do play-by-play commentary at a local rugby match. “You look at the tape right after the show and you say, ‘That was terrible,’ ” Lopez said. “But if you wait a week, and go back and look again, it starts looking a little better.”

A live call-in show is subject to equipment failures and audience pranks. Estrella once fielded an obscene call by deliberately mistaking the caller’s epithet for a comment about Montreal Expos Coach Buck Rodgers.

A couple of times, crew members mistakenly shut Estrella’s microphone off in mid-sentence, until someone pasted a label on the control panel. Another time, Estrella went on the air expecting to take viewer calls, but the telephones weren’t working that night.

Estrella spent the next hour ad-libbing. Lopez, who served as assistant producer that night, credits Estrella with delivering familiar news stories deftly. Unfamiliar stories came out rougher, Lopez said.

“It wasn’t too bad,” Estrella insisted. “With sports, there’s always something to talk about.”