Once-Assailed Coach Tries to Get Into a New Game

Heads turned as a tall man in a sport shirt and trim white shorts eased into a corner booth at a Laguna Beach restaurant on a recent morning.

“What’s happening, man?” Cedrick W. Hardman said amiably, as, one by one, friends approached the table to greet him.

Hardman--retired pro football player, former high school coach, and now at 40, a personal athletic trainer and actor--insists that he is really a private person.

But in Laguna Beach, he has become used to being the center of attention.

“When you’re one of the few big, dark people around, you kind of stand out like a fly in a bowl of milk,” said the 6-foot-4-inch Hardman, who is one of the few black residents in this town of 24,000.

Still, Hardman is less conspicuous now than he was 2 years ago. In September, 1986, while he was the popular head football coach at Laguna Beach High School, Hardman created a furor when he was arrested on a felony charge of cocaine possession and a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest.

Hardman enrolled in a drug diversion program rather than face prosecution for the felony. But when the local school board decided to let him continue coaching without pay, many residents were outraged.

The Laguna Beach Police Employees Assn. criticized the board for creating “a double standard on drugs. . . . It appears that a winning season is more important to you than your prior stand against drugs. What happened to ‘Say no to drugs’?” association members wrote the school board.

By November, angry parents had organized a drive to recall the school board. That effort continued even after Hardman, in February, 1987, wrote school Supt. Dennis Smith that he would not return for next fall’s season. And on Sept. 22, 1987, voters ousted school board members Carl Schwarz, Janet Vickers and board president Charlene Ragatz, who had voted to let Hardman continue as a volunteer coach.

Disgusted with the turn of events, Hardman said, he didn’t bother to vote in the recall election. Still, he said recently, he regrets “the ton of embarrassment” his arrest caused him and his family.

He had used drugs “occasionally” because “I was a pro football player. I was having fun, and sometimes that (drugs) came in the line of having fun,” said the former defensive end for the San Francisco 49ers.

But Hardman said he also understood that many parents were shocked that a high school coach would use drugs. “They reacted the way they should have reacted--with panic.”

After he resigned from coaching, Hardman said, he considered moving out of town but decided to stay on so his 17-year-old daughter could finish high school. Since then, Hardman said, he has tried to keep a low profile, keeping in touch with close friends, living off savings from his pro football career and attending high school football games on Friday nights.

Drawing on his heritage as a Southern Baptist, Hardman insists he is not bitter about the controversy that surrounded him. “I don’t have room in my heart to harbor hate,” he said.

And recently he has returned to a calling he loves almost as much as football: acting. Hardman, who portrayed a bodyguard in the Robert Redford movie “The Candidate,” has also played parts in several television dramas, enrolled in a summer acting workshop at South Coast Repertory Theatre and last month played a detective in the Laguna Moulton Playhouse’s spoof “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940.”

“I love the stage,” Hardman said. “It’s the real deal. . . . There’s very small margin for error on the stage.”

Although Hardman is between roles at the moment, Burton Moss, his Beverly Hills agent, expects that Hardman will find work in January when the next season of TV production begins.

Meanwhile, Hardman is biding his time. “Let’s just say I’ve survived,” he said, adding with a laugh, “and I haven’t been selling drugs.”