Titans Build Sports Complex a Step at a Time

By now, we’ve learned to accept Cal State Fullerton for what it is, a school of hard knocks. By now, we know that Titan is Greek for learning to live with less.

So no one was floored when the final draft for Fullerton’s on-campus sports complex--a mere 12 years in the making--was submitted this week missing such minor details as:

--A football locker room.

--Restrooms on the east side of the football stadium.

--Benches on the east side of the football stadium.

--Restrooms, concession stands and a press box inside the baseball stadium.

--A flat soccer field.

All of these luxury items will eventually be added, or so it is hoped, possibly during this century. But a budget had to be met and corners had to be cut, so for the moment, they are stashed away under the generic heading Additive Alternates. Future home improvements. A wish list, awaiting only a corporate Good Samaritan--or, knowing Fullerton, more creative fund-raising.

Buy a raffle ticket, help send a Titan to the showers.

Right now, the whole thing sounds more simplex than complex. Without a locker room, football players will have to trudge back and forth from Titan Gym before and after games. Without creature comforts, visiting fans will have to sit on backless concrete steps and wait in line outside portable toilets. Without the $130,000 Cambridge drainage system, the football/soccer field will be “crowned” instead of flat to allow for water runoff--as well as disappearing tailbacks on opposite-end sweeps.

Does this bother Fullerton football Coach Gene Murphy?

“Just put it up so we can play,” he says between sighs. “Just get it up.”

Murphy has been waiting more than a decade for something, anything, even one shovelful of dirt. “When I was hired in 1980,” he says, “Donald Shields (then the university president) told me there’d be a stadium up in ’83. Then I heard there’d be one in ’89. Then in ’91.”

And now, finally, it’s scheduled for ’92. With no frills attached.

“I’m just looking forward to the ground-breaking,” Murphy says. “I want somebody else to build a football stadium here besides me.”

In 1980, when Murphy was told he’d have to build the Titan football program from the ground up, he did just that. Renting some bleachers from the Long Beach Grand Prix and enlisting players and coaches as hard hats, Murphy constructed Fullerton’s first on-campus football facility, a 9,000-seat Erector Set.

It lasted two seasons.

“After the second year, it just got too much for the players and the coaches,” Murphy says.

So, for the rest of the ‘80s, the Titans went on the road. Even for home games. They played them at Santa Ana Stadium, which is about 30 minutes south of Fullerton and no man’s land for a program trying to survive in Division I.

One look at Santa Ana Stadium, according to Murphy, was enough to trash weeks’ worth of recruiting.

“Shoot, yes,” he says. “We lost lots of kids because of that. We lost kids within our own conference because of it.”

A new facility is no guarantee for better recruiting, as UC Irvine has shown. Check out Bill Mulligan’s won-lost record since his Anteaters traded dingy Crawford Hall for the Bren Center and its color-coordinated pastels.

Still, Murphy will take his chances.

“This year, we’re playing three games at home and nine on the road,” says Murphy. “To a high school (recruit), that’s not too attractive.”

The Titans are playing three home games this year because they sold two of them. When you’re drawing 2,000 and playing in Santa Ana, those gate guarantees in Fresno can get tempting. With a real home facility, the thinking goes, Fullerton will have more incentive not to sell out.

Not that anyone’s expecting the new stadium to do the same. Expectations, as always, are realistic. In 1992, the stadium will seat 10,000--it will have the capability to expand to 30,000--but the Titans will be happy if it’s half-filled.

“Two thousand fans sitting in a 30,000-seat stadium would be like a BB in a tin can,” says Sal Rinella, Cal State Fullerton vice president for administration. “At the start, 10,000 is more like it. We want to grow into this complex.”

Grow is the operative word here. Add a drainage system in ‘93, a baseball pavilion in ‘94, a locker room in ’95. They can call it Lego Field. Add a new block whenever you can afford one.

Murphy and Rinella point out that it has been done before, at Fresno State, which now plays host to the California Bowl in 30,000-seat Bulldog Stadium.

“When we were looking for a precedent, we looked at Fresno,” Rinella said. “Their support building wasn’t ready when the stadium was. The football players went to the locker room in the physical education building for halftime. They had portable toilets. Fresno did it the same way.”

Rinella insists that “even if we don’t raise another dime, we’ll still have a workable, successful facility. . . . We’ve been dealing with inadequate facilities for so long, it’s going to be terrific to have some place of our own.”

To be a Titan is to take what you can get. And what the Titans are getting in 1992 is one plain-wrapped, bare-boned, simply functional sports complex--featuring an on-campus football stadium with no additives.

If you ask Murphy, it’s the healthy alternative.