Fade Away : Baseball, Basketball Stardom Beckoned, but Wulfemeyer Ended Up Without Either

No crowd roars when he swishes a 25-footer. No defender shakes his head in frustration.

These days, on those few occasions when Mark Wulfemeyer shoots a basketball through a hoop, no one sees him do it. He plays alone, not to relive past glories but to relieve the stress of life outside the clearly defined boundaries of the basketball court.

Ironically, this is where it all began more than 20 years ago, a capricious and sometimes vicious circle of fame and misfortune: a skinny kid alone in the fading light, shooting one more jump shot before darkness forces the end of another self-imposed workout.

During his first game at Troy High School in Fullerton, the 14-year-old freshman made 10 of 13 shots and scored 27 points, setting the tone for a record-setting high school career during which he averaged 27.5 points and eclipsed the state scoring record by almost 500 points.

And when the basketball season was over, professional baseball scouts were pointing their radar guns at his 94-m.p.h. fastball.

As a senior, Wulfemeyer averaged 36.5 points and made 53% of his shots. John Wooden took him to dinner. The Angels offered him $42,500 to sign a contract.

How could he go wrong?

He managed.

Wulfemeyer’s baseball career ended in 1979 after a season on a Class-A team that lost 23 games in a row. His can’t-miss basketball career ended in 1981 with him as a reserve at a Midwestern college that is no longer in business.

A decade later, Wulfemeyer is a partner in a fledgling air freight company and recently signed to do some scouting for the Kansas City Royals. Separated from his wife for the last four years, he lives in Corona in a house owned by his father.

“I just wish I knew what went wrong,” he said. “Coming out of high school, Phil Ford and I were supposed to be the best guards in the country. I could play with anybody.

“But you make your own bed, you know. They gave me plenty of opportunities everywhere I went. These people wanted me to make it. Maybe I wasn’t mentally tough enough. I remember reading stories about a high school star who had all these problems after high school, and I said, ‘That’s not going to happen to me.’

“But damn it, it happened.”

After Mark Wulfemeyer visited a 19th college campus, he was “totally messed up.” But all the travel did help him come to one realization. He knew he wanted to stay close to home.

So he chose to attend USC, even though it didn’t seem to make much sense at the time.

Wulfemeyer was the personification of a “gunner,” a free-lancer who sometimes shot 33 times a game, a high school player who considered 25 feet well within his range.

And he chose a program built around a highly structured offensive approach.

“I talked to Mark about it at the time,” said Nick Fuscardo, then baseball coach at Troy. “I wanted him to go to UNLV. If he would have played for (Jerry) Tarkanian, he would have been an All-American.

“Mark was absolutely the most totally amazing high school player you’ve ever seen. The guy could shoot the eyes out of a squirrel at 100 yards. But a disciplined, structured program like (Bob) Boyd ran was not the right way to go.”

Wulfemeyer enrolled in school and went through a few of Boyd’s practices, then decided to take the Angels’ bonus offer and report to their Idaho Falls affiliate.

“You’re 19 and you’ve got basketball pulling you one way and the Angels and money pulling you the other,” Wulfemeyer said. “It’s tough.”

It got tougher. On his second warm-up throw as a professional baseball player, Wulfemeyer felt something tear in his elbow. The injury healed, but his six-year baseball career went pretty much downhill after that.

He still had his 90-m.p.h. fastball, but the basketball player who thrived on accuracy was a pitcher who couldn’t shoot straight.

“Opting to play baseball wasn’t a bad decision except that I couldn’t throw a strike,” Wulfemeyer said, managing a laugh. “They sure gave me plenty of opportunities to make it.

“Between the ages of 14 and 18, I shot baskets eight hours a day. No kidding, eight hours a day. It was something I could do by myself. But it’s hard to go throw a ball against a wall. In basketball, I could tell you exactly what I did wrong if the ball didn’t go in. In baseball, I just couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel the release point.

“They’d tell me to visualize a box as the strike zone and visualize the ball going through it, and I’d visualize it going out of the box. Really. It was bizarre. We went to psychologists and everything, but nothing seemed to work.”

After two seasons in the minors, Wulfemeyer decided to give college basketball another shot. Oddly, he also decided to give Boyd and USC another try.

“I had the same choices I had out of high school, but I guess I liked Coach Boyd,” Wulfemeyer said. “Plus, I was looking at getting some exposure and having someone take care of me academically. I’m not stupid, but I needed some help. That’s the reason I didn’t go to Cal State Fullerton. That would have been a great school for me. I could have run the show and got to shoot it.

“To this day, I don’t know why I went back to USC. It just didn’t work out there. I didn’t fit into (Boyd’s) plans, and I got into the doghouse and couldn’t get out.”

Boyd had a 15-foot limit on shots, and Wulfemeyer had never hesitated in shooting from almost twice that distance. In fact, he was convinced he could shoot better from 20 feet than 15.

One day in practice, Wulfemeyer said, Boyd told him to prove it.

“I made six of 10 shots from around 15 feet and then made eight of 10 from outside 20,” Wulfemeyer said. “He got mad and said I did it on purpose. That’s the kind of relationship we had.”

Somehow, lost in the emotion of the moment, was the fact that Wulfemeyer had made 80% of his shots from beyond 20 feet.

“I had a pretty big mouth back then,” he said. “It wasn’t just him. I’ve said some bad things about him, but he’s a good coach and really a good guy, I think. I just didn’t fit into his plans. I wished I had known that before I went there.”

Boyd, now coach at Chapman College, declined comment, saying, “It was a long time ago.”

Midway through the 1976-77 season, Wulfemeyer quit the Trojan basketball team and went back to trying to find the strike zone. It, like the fame he seemed destined to acquire on the basketball court, continued to elude him.

Four years later, as a reserve at Marymount College in Salina, Kan., Wulfemeyer was ready to admit the quest was over.

“I had some problems when I finally realized it was over, but you learn to go on,” he said. “If you’re an artist, and you can’t paint anymore, there are going to be days when you’re pretty low.

“You just want to know what happened. You’re right there with these guys and all of a sudden something happens. You take different paths, and it just doesn’t work out.”

Fuscardo, now coaching at Fullerton College, was looking over the roster of a golf class he was teaching last year and noticed a familiar name.

“Turns out Mark was going to play in some golf tournament and wanted to get the fundamentals,” Fuscardo said. “We got to talking, and he said he wasn’t doing much, so I asked him to help our pitchers.”

Wulfemeyer, who says he never seriously considered coaching, accepted. But he recently quit to spend more time on his air freight business.

“To be honest, I didn’t know if I would have the patience to coach,” he said. “Without sounding real weird, sports just came so easy to me, and I sometimes have a little problem with my son (Mark, 11) when something doesn’t go right. So I had kind of stayed away from it.

“But I guess I’ve gotten a little more mature, and I was able to get across to the kids what to do.

“I still don’t know what I want to do for a living. . . . Maybe I should decide, since I’m 35.”

For years, he was the scourge of the outdoor courts at Laguna’s Main Beach.

But Wulfemeyer doesn’t play competitively anymore. Not even a little pickup game.

“I’ll go out and shoot if something’s bugging me and I still have some fun watching it go through the net, but that’s it,” he said. “I guess I’ve lost some of the competitive edge. I wish I could go out and have a good time, but I just can’t. I’m tired of getting bumped and having guys guarding me like it was the NCAA final.”

Of course, he can only wonder what that would really be like.