Prep Friday : Division I Football Playoffs : Hard Hits Come Easily for Servite’s Greedy

The point is that Garrett Greedy would never hurt anyone, so don’t bother mentioning what he did to that coach’s ribs. People are bound to bend a bit when a guy 6-feet 3-inches tall and 220 pounds, playing with a mine-field intensity, starts doing the full-body bump.

The key here is he would never mean to hurt anyone. So altering the skeletal structure of Leo Hand, then the coach at Servite who was playing option quarterback during a drill, was not a premeditated act.

“Garrett didn’t think he was hitting me that hard, unfortunately my ribs did,” Hand said.

Servite’s Garrett Greedy plays clean. He plays hard, but clean. He’s always played. Right now, he’s one of the state’s best linebackers.

“In 21 years of coaching, he’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Hand said.

Greedy played when the local Pop Warner people wouldn’t allow him to suit up because at age 9, he weighed the maximum weight for 13-year-olds, 125 pounds. He played with the kids on the block. He played with his father, Joel, who played defensive back at Anaheim High for legendary coach Clare VanHoorebeke.

“If ever there was a kid born to play the game, it’s Garrett,” said Jerry Person, Servite coach.

It was Joel Greedy--who once played an entire game against Servite, no less, with a concussion and once came off the field in a game against Loyola, had 16 stitches put in his chin and went back in the game--who taught Garrett the basics of the game.

“I told him to hit the other guy harder than he hits you,” Joel said.

Hard and clean. In fact, as a sophomore, Garrett would hit so hard in practice that he would knock teammates clean out of the lineup. Now a senior, he has learned to tone it down, though he admits when he sees a guy coming across the middle, stretched out in an attempt to catch a pass, he feels “very tempted.”

Asked what he admires most in another player, he said: “The ability to go all out and make a good hit, then pick the other guy up and say, ‘Good play.’ I hate to hear people say they’re out to hurt another player. That’s not what the game is about. I know people get hurt in football, that’s natural, but if you go out of your way to hurt some guy, then he won’t be able to play. I don’t think that’s right.”

Especially since Greedy suffered a broken wrist last season. Forget that it was for just the last few minutes of the team’s last game--a quarterfinal loss against Crespi. The mere specter of not being able to play horrified him.

“I kept thinking that if we came back, I wouldn’t be able to play,” he said. “It was horrible.”

He long has played according to a code of ethics that says, “Thou shalt not talk trash or take cheap shots.” Joel, again, had a hand in teaching Garrett the lesson. It was when Greedy was 10 and pitching in Little League.

“He was creating a fuss on the mound, making a real spectacle of himself,” Joel said. “I walked down to the coach and said, ‘If you don’t bench the kid right now, I will.’ I don’t like that kind of stuff. I let Garrett know it.”

Applauded by his coaches as a fast learner, Greedy learned quickly that a prima donna in his family wouldn’t get much playing time. So when Garrett plays, that’s all he does.

Mike Milner, whose Fountain Valley team plays Servite tonight at 7:30 at Santa Ana Stadium in the Division I semifinals, simply calls Greedy, “dominant.”

Andy Szabatura, Bishop Montgomery coach, paid Greedy perhaps the ultimate compliment when he said that a sophomore linebacker named Mike Hall had so much talent that he had “the potential to be almost as good as Garrett Greedy.”

So, in the same way the Servite offense depends on the exceptional Derek Brown, the Servite defense depends on Greedy.

“He’s the guy,” said Miguel Olmedo, St. Paul coach. “Their entire defense is based around him. He’s got to make plays. When you’re preparing your offense to go against them, the first thing you have to consider is how you’re going to try and neutralize him.”

But as long as he’s playing, that figures to be a hard thing to do. Still, Greedy would appreciate the effort of anyone who would try. The effort and a good hit.