COLUMN ONE : She Offers a Sporting Proposal : Anita DeFrantz looks at vacant lots and empty schoolyards and sees a way to heal communities. As keeper of the Olympic surplus, she has the money to make it possible.

Through the covetous eyes of Anita DeFrantz, the woman who presides over Southern California’s $90-million share of the 1984 Olympic surplus, parking lots appear as soccer fields in waiting, locked schoolyards are wasted community parks, and gymnasiums in gang territory--these are untapped treasures, potential 24-hour shelters from the violence outside.

“I’ve heard about a program in Maryland called the ‘midnight leagues,’ where kids can play basketball through the night,” DeFrantz was telling the director of just such a gymnasium in Mona Park near Compton, scanning the rickety facility as she spoke.

“Yeah, but I tell you,” the gang-wise director said doubtfully, “that would be like putting targets on their backs.”

“What they were saying,” DeFrantz persisted, patiently but emphatically, “is it gave them someplace to go. It’s down the road, but it’s a possibility. It’s tough, but these facilities are here. And we ought to use them.”

DeFrantz, a 37-year-old Santa Monica resident, is widely recognized as one of the most powerful women in sports. A bronze medalist rower in the 1976 Olympics, DeFrantz led an unsuccessful fight to overturn the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow games. In 1984, she served as a prominent member of Peter Ueberroth’s team of Olympic organizers, and she since has been elected to the International Olympic Committee, one of two U.S. members on the prestigious panel. She also sits on the executive board of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

While her stature in sports is international, it is Southern California that has provided DeFrantz with a living laboratory to develop and test her theories on the societal possibilities of sport. For the last two years, DeFrantz has served as president of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles (AAF), the organization that manages the region’s share of a $250-million surplus generated by the 1984 Games--money that Ueberroth promised throughout would go only to “kids.”

With this sizable stake and her crusader-like zeal, DeFrantz has set out to demonstrate that sports, properly organized and executed, can unite cities torn apart by crime and poverty, and can rescue children who might otherwise be lost to street-gang warfare--or just simply lost. She intends to expand on the bromide that sports builds character: envisioning community sports clubs that become central forces within neighborhoods, and sports activities that are elevated into outdoor classrooms, teaching children mathematics as they score a baseball game, geometry as they race a sailboat.

At a time when children in Los Angeles all too frequently fall victim to crack cocaine or rifle blasts, the notion that salvation might somehow be found in dribbling basketballs or running wind sprints is not an easy sell, yet DeFrantz keeps selling.

“We know now that they take part in gangs,” she said in an interview. “We know now that they use drugs, that they’re teen mothers. So why don’t we try something that gives these kids an opportunity to choose? There’s much that can be done for our community through sports. Sports provides a basic tenet of our society, being successful.”

DeFrantz can transform venues as varied as an international sports forum in Athens, a dinner gathering in West Los Angeles and a high school in downtown Los Angeles into pulpits from which she makes her case. And whether she is speaking to one of the studio moguls that sit on her board, or a member of European royalty at an IOC function, or a South-Central Los Angeles community activist who has come seeking grant money, the message is always the same--what sports can do for our children.

Trained as a lawyer, DeFrantz speaks her mind softly but with authority, sprinkling the words and anecdotes of Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman and film maker Spike Lee with her own. At 5 feet, 11 inches, she has a commanding physical presence.

DeFrantz also advances her philosophy through the foundation’s awarding of grants to existing organizations and through the creation of its own programs, which include an effort to train coaches to bring children broader lessons about sport.

She travels Southern California in a black Buick Park Avenue, dropping in on programs the foundation has financed and exploring potential sites for more activities, and in her rounds DeFrantz has collected many horror stories. She has seen poor children who make do with a soda can for a baseball bat, who play soccer with a bundle of rags as the ball. She has seen children “with shoes that don’t come close to fitting, who don’t have the energy to play because they’re not getting enough to eat.”

These, more than anyone, are the children DeFrantz wants to reach with the Olympic surplus.

“You have to make the playing field level,” she said, “so anybody can walk on it.”

DeFrantz, a single woman with no children, seems to know a lot about kids, and gives them an uncommon measure of respect.

“I was once a child,” she said, laughing. “And I have very vivid memories of what that was like.”

She speaks softly of a childhood spent in segregated Indianapolis, Ind., of being a little girl of no more than 9 or 10, swimming on a team at the Frederick Douglass swimming pool. Her father, a community activist, held big dreams that his only daughter would one day plunge across the color line and into Olympic history by becoming the first African American to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming.

But there wasn’t much time to practice in a segregated pool closed nine months of the year, and DeFrantz remembers how difficult it was to compete with white children who practiced year-round.

“I knew that the kids at the Riviera Country Club had something I was being excluded from,” she said. “I think my passion comes partly from denial. . . . I know that I missed out on something. That’s why I crusade for kids to have it.’

It is a long way from Frederick Douglass pool in Indianapolis to the swank Sports Club LA in West Los Angeles, where on a recent night DeFrantz could be found addressing the Stanford Professional Women of Los Angeles County. The audience of about 30 career women, most of them white, had come expecting a feminist theme. DeFrantz, however, stuck mainly to sports, although she added some twists that seemed to draw in the crowd.

“I think we have to make sure the youth are taken care of,” DeFrantz told them. “I hope some of you in this room got the chance to take part in sports when you were young. If you did, you can think about that one moment when everything worked. When you caught the pass.

“Each man has that moment,” she continued. “We want to make sure no girl in this community is denied that moment.”

DeFrantz herself graduated with honors from Connecticut College, where, she recalled pointedly, she played her first organized baseball game. She earned a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the same time won a spot on the 1976 Olympic rowing team. She was also prepared to compete in the 1980 Moscow Games and her efforts to overturn the U.S. boycott gained her international notice and were honored by the IOC. It also prompted a call from Ueberroth, and before long DeFrantz was employed by the L.A. Olympic Organizing Committee. She has been a resident of Southern California ever since.

She works now out of the Britt House, a 79-year-old restored home on West Adams Boulevard that serves as the AAF headquarters. Since 1985, the AAF has provided more than $16 million worth of grants to 276 athletic organizations and programs, with an emphasis on sports activities that benefit girls, the poor and the handicapped. The grant money mainly has been drawn from interest and investments generated by the surplus, which remains intact at about $90 million.

DeFrantz, who was with AAF from the start and became president two years ago, was a leading proponent of the idea that the foundation should do more than simply pass out grants. Rather, DeFrantz believes, the Olympic legacy should be used to create what she and others call a “sports renaissance.”

It was a new concept to some, a little difficult to understand. “It took time to really come to grips with everything; it was a new approach,” said board member William Robertson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. Robertson serves along with television producer David L. Wolper, who is chairman of the AAF board, Mayor Tom Bradley, Los Angeles Dodgers President Peter O’Malley, entertainment executive Lew Wasserman and 12 others.

Steve Montiel, who worked with DeFrantz in helping create the AAF and now serves as president of the Institute for Journalism Education, recalled that she “talked about sport in a way I had not heard sport talked about before . . . (and) the light went on.”

One of the most ambitious elements of the DeFrantz vision is sports clubs, which she views as community centerpieces, “providing opportunities where there are none. (They can) bring communities together and develop traditions in communities that don’t have tradition; develop infrastructures in communities that don’t have infrastructures.”

The AAF sports clubs, to be situated initially in the Mar Vista Gardens and Jordan Downs housing projects, Mona Park near Compton and Southwest Community College, are based loosely on a club system prevalent in Eastern Europe, where children are exposed to sports at an early age and throughout their teen years.

But unlike their European counterparts, where children are often groomed to be Olympians, the primary goal of the AAF sports clubs will be to introduce athletics to communities that would normally have little opportunity for sports.

“It’s an era where kids are struggling to find things to tie them to a community,” DeFrantz said. “One thing I heard about Los Angeles before I came here was nobody knows their neighbors. Finding things that can bring people together is important . . . (and) education is one way. Sports is another.

“I think with such a culturally diverse community, you can’t expect everybody to go to the same church as they might in rural America. We need ties that run through and connect. And what better way to tie those people together than through our children?”

The clubs would operate out of existing facilities in low-income neighborhoods with a goal of economic self-sufficiency. Children could join for a nominal fee. They would receive membership cards, uniforms and coaching, and would be allowed to participate in organized competition. The clubs would be run by community members.

A special emphasis would be placed on ensuring that well-trained coaches supervise the activities, and that children be introduced to sports that otherwise might escape their interest. DeFrantz sees no reason why inner-city children should not be taught to fence, say, or even to sail.

At present, the only club in operation meets weekly at Los Angeles Southwest Community College, where early on a recent Saturday about 30 children had gathered to perform warm-up calisthenics in the cool morning sunlight. And by 9 a.m., braids flying in the breeze, sneakers beating against the dirt, the children were off and running around a former Olympic training track.

They had come from throughout south Los Angeles, with some of the mothers arriving in hair rollers and sweats, a concession to the early start. The club had been meeting every Saturday morning since late last summer.

“It’s a family thing over here at Southwest” said Barbara Edmonson, a mother who had brought five children, two of them her own, to the track.

Kathy Kelly, another mother, said she had noticed changes in her 14-year-old daughter and other children: “Things you thought you never could do they find they can. And when you accomplish small things, the bigger things get easier, and you go through life with the attitude that you can do whatever you want.

“They’re not ghetto-blasting, pants-sagging kids,” she said, proudly. “They want to look good. They have pride in themselves.”

It is DeFrantz’s dream that sports clubs like Southwest “will endure and eventually become intergenerational,” and that the system might one day be exported to other cities.

She believes that sports clubs offer something different than such established programs as the YMCA and Boys’ Clubs.

“The Boys’ Clubs and YMCAs have general programs,” she said. “Our sole focus is on sports. Our clubs belong to the community and represent the community’s desires. It’s not some association coming in and setting its philosophy down on a community. It’s a chance for the community to own something of its own.”

It is DeFrantz’s belief that sports are a mirror of society, and that athletics, like any other educational tool or service--be it good schools or decent social programs--are often denied to the poor.

“We’re trying to get the city to do what it should be doing in the poor areas,” she was telling one of her staff members at the Britt House one afternoon. “This system is designed to destroy the poor parts. We’re trying to show that anybody can do this with the proper support.

“You can look at sports and see how just a society is,” she later elaborated. “Sports initially were segregated by economics and they still are by virtue of access. . . . We want to make sure every young person in Southern California has a chance to experience what sports has to offer.”

Although DeFrantz has particular concerns about poor children, she believes that all youth should have access to sport, and AAF grants. The foundation, she said, attempts to spread the surplus among all Southern California communities.

“I call it a birthright,” she said. “It comes with being human. . . . Some kids with less may need it more, but they should all have it. That’s my philosophy.”

DeFrantz spends most of her time on the hunt for new program ideas, new ways to get children interested in a wide variety of sports, new places to put activities.

“Our vision,” she said, “is to have every sports facility being used all the time.” She gains inspiration from a basketball tournament staged in a Santa Monica parking lot. “I figured if they could do it, we could. . . . That’s another resource--parking lots--where we can put major events, like soccer which can be played on asphalt.”

Schoolyards locked shut over weekends and after dark trouble her: “We have schools that are locked up and closed as many hours as they’re open. The facility is there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and the community needs to feel it owns the school, (and should be allowed) to utilize its gymnasium, its playing field--when the administrators go home.”

The AAF lobbies schools to keep facilities unlocked and supervised after school hours.

In DeFrantz’s view, sports offers untapped educational opportunities. While she stressed that games are no substitute for schoolwork, the two can complement each other.

“The kid who is good in math,” she said, “could be superb in sailing, figuring out the vectors and angles. The kid who loves baseball and keeps the statistics may not know she’ll be the next physics whiz.”

Sports can also teach patience, she said, and other important lessons not taught in classrooms--or on the streets.

“Our kids grow up thinking everything is immediate,” DeFrantz said. “That’s one of the things about gangs. Gangs have no sense of the future. It’s all now because most of those kids don’t make it into the future.”

Given a chance to be a part of a team, she said, children “have a sense of history. They know things progress from one game to the next. And they are people who respect the human capability of excellence.”

So far, community reaction to the AAF approach seems positive, although everyone--including DeFrantz--agrees that the foundation has just begun to become a presence.

Recreation directors in low-income neighborhoods that have been chosen as sports club sites said they did not have to be sold on the value of athletics as an anti-gang tool. Even some of the gang members seem to respect the potential of sports.

“There’s a saying among the older guys that athletes are off-limits,” said Glenda Howry, who has been director of the Jordan Downs housing project recreation center for five years. “If they find out a kid is halfway good in a sport and trying to excel,” they leave the child alone. “I guess they feel that’s their only way out.”

DeFrantz, a patient crusader, said she sees an energy growing: “It becomes a synergy. This isn’t tomorrow or next month. It’s 10 years from now. But if we want the energy to go into the 21st Century, now’s the time to turn up the voltage.”

Reality, though, can throw up high hurdles. In Mona Park gym, director Winston Phillips still had trouble swallowing the notion of staging basketball games there in the middle of the night. He thought that at a minimum it would be necessary to post a police guard.

“We could (try) it,” Phillips said. “But we’d have to have a car stationed here, because if the rival gang members got the word, there could be trouble.”

That the gym director agreed to at least consider a midnight basketball league seemed to satisfy DeFrantz, for the moment. She walked outside the gym and watched as a swarm of tiny children played together on swings in the sand. She lingered over the scene of happy commotion for several minutes, smiling.