THE COLLEGES / MIKE HISERMAN : Bottom Line on Northridge Softball Coach Torgeson: He Hates to Lose

His teams have won in all manner of ways, accounting for more victories in the past decade than any other NCAA Division II softball ensemble.

And, in the process, Coach Gary Torgeson of Cal State Northridge has drawn more than his share of critics.

Success breeds success. It also can breed contempt. Torgeson has experienced both.

There are those who say his teams are too brash, too demonstrative. Or that he is too intense, too singularly focused. They say winning has become his obsession.

Torgeson wholeheartedly agrees.

He tried being a good loser once--it just didn’t work out.

Before taking over the softball program in 1982, Torgeson compiled an 8-24-1 record in three seasons as CSUN’s football coach.

Predictably, he was fired.

Torgeson said he tried both eating and drinking his way through the miserable months that followed. Neither worked. Then came the opportunity to again be a head coach.

Never mind that the intricacies of football and softball are not even remotely intertwined. They became intertwined. With Torgeson as coach, some of the same elements apply.

Intimidation, for one. Torgeson can be credited with all but changing Northridge’s school colors from basic red and white to black with red and white trim.

Why? “Because adding black to the colors adds a little mystique,” Torgeson says. “You look tougher in black. The girls love wearing it.”

Not just any girls. His girls. Those who have braved the inch-thick playbook, daylong practices and psychological warfare that go with the territory when one plays softball for the Lady Matadors.

Their coach is honest. And blunt.

Early this season, Christy Alves, one-time star pitcher at Burbank Burroughs High, approached Torgeson because she was thinking of quitting the team.

Handling the uncomfortable confrontation with his own brand of diplomacy, Torgeson told her, “I’ve lost confidence in you.”

End of conversation. End of Alves’ career.

Torgeson is not intentionally cruel, but sometimes his drive to succeed can make him painfully shortsighted.

Comfortably ahead during a tournament game last season, CSUN continued to pinwheel runners around the bases using the hit and run. Later, after taking a ribbing from other coaches who watched the game, one of Torgeson’s assistants, swallowing hard, mentioned that perhaps it wasn’t wise to run up the score.

“Hey, I’m not out to embarrass anybody,” Torgeson said, stern-faced. “But we’ve got to practice some things under game conditions.”

If the other team wasn’t ready, well, that was their problem.

Torgeson once had a player whom he says emulated himself. Her name was Barbara Jordan.

Jordan, now a CSUN assistant, was a mercurial player who talked trash, batted .400, berated umpires, flung helmets and caught everything hit in the air within her ZIP code. She was a three-time All-American as a center fielder--arguably the best, and unquestionably the most feared and hated player in Division II softball.

When Torgeson talks about Jordan, he could just as easily be talking about himself. To a fault, the ultimate competitor.

“She was out of control sometimes, but yet she was under control,” Torgeson says somewhat wistfully. “She was a workaholic. She was intense. She was emotional. She loved the team. No detail was too small for her to perfect. She looked at videotape. She was a student. She was totally oblivious to everything that was going on except the game. Totally focused.

“Barbara’s whole life was softball and she would not let anything get in the way of her playing. And she let everyone know about it . . . and if they didn’t respond to her, she’d kick ‘em in the butt. She didn’t care what they thought of her. . . . She didn’t have many people like her, we’re probably in the same mold that way. But I loved her.”

One would think that after 450 victories and four national championships some of Torgeson’s passion for winning would have subsided.

If anything, the opposite is true.

“I expect it,” Torgeson says of winning. “It’s unfortunate. My wife tells me all the time, ‘You’ve won four national championships. Why can’t you be content with that?’

“I don’t know. I just can’t. I always want to win it again next year.”

The phone rang in the softball field house the other day and Torgeson answered immediately.

“You sitting on the phone?” the caller inquired.

“Just waiting for the call from Sacramento about the lottery,” Torgeson said.

“Did you win?” the caller asked.

“Nah, I don’t even play,” Torgeson said.

“Why not?” he was asked.

“Because I can’t stand to lose,” he said.

Two-liners: Jeff deLaveaga of Cal Lutheran averaged 26.9 points a game to finish second in scoring among NCAA Division II basketball players, yet when it came time for awards, Coach Mike Dunlap chose not to honor the sophomore as the team’s most valuable player. Instead, deLaveaga was recognized as the “hardest-working” member of the squad. . . .

Cathie Teobaldi of CSUN pulled a muscle in her right arm during the first round of last week’s Ojai Valley Tennis tournament, forcing her to withdraw. She is expected to be back to full health when Northridge meets top-ranked Cal Poly Pomona today in the first round of the Division II championships. . . .

The Times recently ran a feature on Valley College sophomore second baseman E. J. Pape and in it noted that his parents had attended every one of his high school and junior college games. That afternoon, Pape played third while his parents were vacationing in Idaho.