A Blurred Vision : O’Connor Fails to See a Way to Do Justice to His Dreams at Pierce

Bob O’Connor’s literary career began 26 years ago at the University of Southern California when he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the concept of justice. Since then he has published seven health textbooks and is currently collaborating with Raiders Coach Tom Flores on a scholarly probe into football’s cerebral dark side entitled “The Violent Chess Match.”

O’Connor says he also plans to write technical epics on golf, football coaching and health, none of which have nearly as much dramatic appeal as a story he never wants to write, much less think about. Call it “Not His Way: The Authorized Biography of a Community College Athletic Director.”

O’Connor’s tale isn’t pretty. In two years as A.D. at Pierce College, he accumulated enough horrid experiences to keep Jackie Collins in plots for decades. Hardly anything went right and enough went wrong to convince him that when it comes to justice in junior colleges, there ain’t none.

“I didn’t apply for the job originally,” O’Connor said. “I was asked by others in the department to take it because they needed someone to market the program and raise money.”

There were the usual bureaucratic and administrative problems inherent in such jobs, says O’Connor, and he accepted the paper shuffling, the long hours and even putting out press releases and football game programs. What got to him was the continuous hustle for money and, ultimately, the losing battle to save the major sports at Pierce in the face of teacher layoffs and budget cutbacks within the L.A. Community College District.

“I was fighting the board all the time,” O’Connor said. “It wasn’t fun.”

In trying to rescue his endangered program, O’Connor had to resort to a tactic probably unprecedented in college sports: He says he spent about $12,000 of his own money to purchase equipment, pay officials and even keep his coaches afloat. If an ailing program or underpaid coach needed instant cash, O’Connor would write a check from his own checking account. He says he even paid an assistant coach’s car payments.

“My wife thought I was crazy,” O’Connor said, “but I felt personally responsible for everything. Last March, though, I decided, ‘That’s enough of that.’ ”

Although Pierce President David Wolf said he wasn’t aware that O’Connor had been underwriting the athletic program, it doesn’t surprise him. O’Connor has a reputation for being a maverick.

“I’m not going to tell you he doesn’t get me in trouble from time to time,” Wolf said with a laugh. “He seems to like to move rapidly without paying too much attention to standard procedure.”

The ending to O’Connor’s story isn’t a happy one. Last May, he suddenly became an athletic director without a major sport when Pierce dropped football and basketball. Three days later, O’Connor resigned. He said the school’s actions were not related to his resignation, that he wrote his letter of resignation a year before he turned it in.

“The only reason I stayed as long as I did is that I knew there would be trouble,” he said, “and I didn’t want to leave in the middle of a fight.”

So O’Connor, 54, put down the gloves and went back to more gentlemanly pursuits. He remained on the Pierce staff teaching health and coaching golf, which had almost been eliminated the year before, and water polo, which would have been had O’Connor not taken the job.

In addition, O’Connor found the time to write, teach drug and health classes about nine hours a week at Cal State Northridge and also do marriage counseling. About twice a week he helps coach the defense at Crespi High and also scouts opposing teams for the highly rated Celts.

“I love high school football,” O’Connor said. “The kids are eager and there’s no recruiting. I like the idea of taking a scrawny 10th-grader and developing him into a football player.”

O’Connor has felt the excitement of being a football coach for Cathedral High, Daniel Murphy High and Taft, as well as for a semipro team in Long Beach, and he wants to be in charge again. He applied for the vacant job at Canoga Park High last spring but wasn’t a finalist, he said, “because they didn’t want a part-timer,” preferring a coach who also taught at the school.

O’Connor, however, says he is “now ready to go full-time” back to high school and hopes to get a head coaching job at a Valley school next year. “There are some right situations around,” he said, “and a few sleeping giants out there.”

If he does wind up back at a high school, he’ll bring his creative instincts with him. At Pierce, O’Connor was known as a dreamer with high hopes and big plans. He shipped the Pierce football team to Finland for exhibition games in the summer of ’85 and also came up with the Brahma Bowl, a postseason shoot-out for local JC bragging rights. In the spring of ‘85, he maneuvered the United States Football League’s L.A. Express into an exhibition game at Pierce.

“It was just supposed to be a scrimmage with Portland,” O’Connor said, “but I started marketing it as a game. Portland wasn’t too thrilled about it, but the Portland coach was Dick Coury, an old friend of mine. I told him, ‘You owe me one.’ We played it. I think it was the first pro game in the Valley.”

The last pro game in the Valley also took place at Pierce. The Express, in the final stages of existence, drew about 8,200 curiosity seekers for a regular-season game in June of ’85. Had the Express survived, it is possible that Pierce could have been their permanent home, giving the Valley its first pro franchise and, eventually perhaps, a major stadium.

O’Connor’s biggest dream was to put a 70,000-seat stadium, as well as a 25,000-seat arena, on the Pierce campus. “We have more parking than the Rose Bowl,” he said. Wealthy Valley businessmen, he said, approached him with the idea in ‘85, and even went so far as to commission feasibility studies.

“But as soon as the Express died, so did the plan,” O’Connor said. “You can’t build a stadium without a pro franchise. You have to have a team first.”

A few months ago, O’Connor’s hopes for a stadium at Pierce were ignited again when a group of businessmen tried to start up another spring pro football league. They talked to him about playing at Pierce, but the league never materialized.

Some of the people he met through his pro football adventure have gotten him involved with another speculative enterprise, a series of pro football old-timers games to be played in England and Japan. The games will cost about $1 million each to stage, he says, and so far such former pro luminaries as Ken Stabler and Floyd Little have agreed to put their ligaments at risk once again.

All of O’Connor’s projects take time, which causes him, he said, “to work 14 hours a day, seven days a week.” But he has always been industrious. Sam Boghosian, the Raiders’ offensive line coach, was a fellow member of Delta Sigma Phi when both were undergraduates at UCLA in the 1950s. Boghosian, who was O’Connor’s link to Flores for the football book, remembers him as “always conscientious about his studies, always having his nose to the grindstone.”

Despite his nonstop pace, O’Connor manages to squeeze in daily workouts on his tennis court or in his gym at home. He also tinkers around his three-story house, which he designed and began building in 1964 on a mountaintop overlooking Malibu Lake. For a week after he moved in, he says, he didn’t have plumbing, electricity or water.

Which no doubt prepared him for his days as an athletic director.