GOLDEN GOALS : Serge Mezheritsky, Moorpark’s Soviet-Born Wrestler, Has Dreams of Success--Both Olympic and Financial

You hear “Russian wrestler,” and images immediately burst forth.

You think of a grim, squatty guy clamping a headlock on a Bulgarian for the better part of an afternoon. You think of a guy who has short legs and dense patches of hair on his back and who speaks in broken English.

What you don’t think of is a guy like Serge Mezheritsky of Moorpark College.

He is a fairly hairless young man. He laughs a lot. He doesn’t put the English language into a blender and hit the puree button.

However, Mezheritsky does display a strong loyalty to the party . There was a wild one last Wednesday night at the apartment of a wrestling teammate. An interview the next day was postponed because he had overslept.

“It was the best party I’ve ever been to,” he said.

So, from a wrestler and a Soviet and a follower of the party line, let’s try to get the bottom line on this stereotype.

“People in the United States think about Russian wrestlers and they think about big guys, like bears,” Mezheritsky said. “They think of incredibly strong men, and mean-looking men. Like my father. He is big and strong and looks very mean. But he’s such a nice guy.”

Mezheritsky’s father, whose first name is Vilory but who goes by the name of Bill Mezh in his business as a car salesman in Van Nuys, was an alternate on the Soviet Union’s Olympic wrestling teams in 1964 and 1968.

“I guess I’m the same,” the son said. “Some of my opponents think of me as a mean wrestler, like a bear, because I’m Russian. But I’m a nice guy, too.”

Sure. Try telling that to the 32 wrestlers whose noses were introduced to the mat by Mezheritsky this season. He lost only 3 times in 35 matches, but 1 loss was inflicted by the state’s top-ranked junior college wrestler at 142 pounds, Antonio McKee of Cerritos College, in the state final last weekend.

Mezheritsky posted a school-record 140 takedowns during the season, breaking the 11-year-old record of 107 held by Gary Murphy. And despite the loss in the state final, he was voted his team’s most valuable wrestler.

“I felt I could beat McKee,” he said. “I just didn’t prepare correctly. I still believe I’m the better wrestler. I’m disappointed and I know I could have done better, but I think I need people to beat me once in a while to make me better. This will help.”

How much better does the 18-year-old Moorpark freshman want to get? An undefeated season next year, perhaps? A state junior college championship? Just good enough to turn McKee into a pretzel?

All of that would be nice, he said. But he has much higher goals in mind.

“First, I want to become a 2-time national champion,” Mezheritsky said. “Then, I want to make the 1992 United States Olympic team. Then, I will win the gold medal.”

Whoa.

National champion?

Olympic gold medal?

“Serge is very serious about wrestling,” Moorpark Coach John Keever said. “I don’t want to put any of the other kids down, but he has a great desire to be a champion. And not just a school or state champion.

“And he tells me that nothing will keep him from his goals. He will do anything to reach them. He has very high ambitions, and some people think he’s not very realistic at this stage. But he is very focused.”

Focus, of course, is nice. But perhaps Mezheritsky’s mind has set goals that his body can’t attain.

Perhaps not.

“In 20 years of coaching, he’s as good an athlete as I’ve seen,” Keever said. “He is a good enough athlete to achieve all of those goals.

“But there are questions to be answered. Can he stay focused long enough to reach the goals? Does he have the mental makeup of an Olympic-caliber wrestler . . . the mental toughness?

“I see all of those things in him, but he has to keep growing as an athlete and keep expanding his experience and technical knowledge. And his intensity has to stay real high through each stage of his development.

“But he does have, I believe, Olympic-caliber ability. He has all the quickness and balance and strength that he will need.”

And, Mezheritsky said, he has the incentive, too.

“A person always wants to be as good as his dad,” he said. “That’s what I want. He never really got a chance to wrestle in the Olympics, but I think I’ll get that chance. I think I can be as good as he was. That keeps me going.”

Vilory Mezheritsky brought his family to the United States 9 years ago. Serge was born in Siberia but lived mostly in Kiev, in the Ukraine. The family, which also includes Vilory’s wife and their daughter, 12, waited 7 months for approval of emigration papers.

They settled first in Cleveland but soon moved to California.

“My father wanted me and my sister to have a chance at success,” Serge said. “Our country was so economically depressed that we didn’t have much of a chance. Here, the chances are endless.”

It did not take the Soviet youngster long to pick up on the American dream. When asked if Mezheritsky approached life differently from his other wrestlers, his coach laughed.

“I don’t think of him as a Soviet kid at all,” Keever said. “He’s a true American already. He’s a capitalist. I think he wants to be famous and wealthy.”

Mezheritsky confirmed this.

“Right now, wrestling is my obsession,” he said. “It is everything. But after the 1992 Olympics, that will be it. Then I will turn to business. I want to make money. A lot of money.”

And although he said he still thinks often of the Soviet Union and will make a trip to his homeland next year as a member of the private California Jets wrestling team--if he can find a sponsor--he knows his father made the right decision 9 years ago.

“If I had to make a choice, I would stay here,” he said. “The United States is my home. This is the land I would die for in a war. The Soviet Union is where I was born, and my blood is from the Soviet Union. But my heart belongs to America.”