A Guard Ahead of His Time : College basketball: Aberegg, former Katella and Long Beach player, was 5 feet 10 in an era when NBA players were at least six feet tall.

Perhaps Rick Aberegg was born in the wrong era. Maybe if he hadn’t excelled in basketball during a time when people shorter than six feet didn’t play in the NBA, Aberegg would have had a different destiny.

Aberegg, who still holds the Katella High School single-season scoring record, started two seasons at point guard for Cal State Long Beach, on teams that were among the best in the nation.

At 5 feet 10, Aberegg played with abandon on each of those teams, averaging about six points a game, playing hard defense and mostly feeding the ball to All-Americans such as Ed Ratleff, Glenn McDonald and Leonard Gray.

Aberegg still holds the Long Beach single-game assist record of 15 he set in his first season playing for Jerry Tarkanian. The 49ers finished the regular season ranked third in both wire-service polls before losing to San Francisco in the semifinals of the West Regional.

In the 1973-74 season, Aberegg directed a 24-2 team coached by Lute Olson, who calls it the most talented team he has coached, including his teams at Iowa and Arizona that made the Final Four. The 1974 49ers, whose only losses were by two points to Colorado and to NCAA runner-up Marquette, didn’t get the chance to prove how good they were because Long Beach was in the first year of three years of NCAA sanctions that prohibited postseason play.

“They were a tremendously special team,” said Dwight Jones, who was an assistant to Tarkanian and Olson before taking over as head coach for four seasons after Olson left. “And (Aberegg) was one of the crucial reasons that that team had such great success.”

Even so, when four of Long Beach’s players--McDonald, Gray, and Clifton and Roscoe Pondexter--were taken in the 1974 NBA draft, Aberegg was left out.

It was Aberegg’s first rejection in a sport that he had thrived in since he was a third-grader on the Fullerton Boys’ Club’s sixth-grade team. The realization that his basketball career was over hit him with the force of an elbow to the face.

“There was a reason our team did so well,” Aberegg said. “And I felt I was a very big part of that team.

“Well, apparently nobody anywhere else did.”

Aberegg now lives about 10 minutes from his childhood home in Anaheim and runs his own tile-laying business. After working at various jobs after college, he got into the business about 10 years ago after moving back to Orange County from San Francisco.

“No, I never thought, ‘Well, I’m going to be a tile man,’ ” he said. “It just came easy for me. I’m good with my hands and I have a pretty good eye and you really need that in my trade.”

Business, which takes him to shopping malls throughout California--”There’s too many to count but I’ve probably been in just about all of them.”--is good, he said, although there has been a slowdown the past two months.

He and Cheryl, his wife of almost nine years, are going through a divorce, so their two children, Courtney, 8, and Brian, 6, are living with Cheryl.

He has stayed in touch with some of his 49er teammates: Ratleff sells him insurance, Aberegg put tile in McDonald’s house.

He often watches NBA games on his big-screen television, and still he wonders.

“I know I could have played, but I don’t know what I should have done to play in the NBA,” he said. “I don’t know but I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

It was such a devastating snub that he can still feel it 17 years later.

“I didn’t care what happened,” Aberegg said. “I didn’t play basketball for two or three years. I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t believe it. Because when I was a junior, Red Auerbach had seen me play in New York and he gave a lot of great quotes about me.”

Apparently, what the Celtics’ president was saying in public, after the 49ers won a tournament at Madison Square Garden, wasn’t what NBA executives were saying in private. If they were saying anything about Aberegg, they were likely saying he was too short to play in the NBA.

At the time, when 6-1 Nate Archibald was nicknamed “Tiny”--there was no room in the NBA for someone of Aberegg’s stature. Muggsy Bogues and Spud Webb need not apply.

After giving up the game for a few years, Aberegg tried a comeback, but he never was able to get a tryout.

But at the high school, junior college and NCAA levels, Aberegg was a fury and the memories of success at every level remain.

At Katella, his team advanced to a Southern Section final in 1969 before losing to Verbum Dei, which would win six consecutive titles. In his sophomore year at Fullerton College, which he attended so he could avoid the NCAA’s rule preventing freshmen from playing on the varsity, his team advanced to the state playoffs.

But it was all a prelude to playing for Long Beach. Tarkanian and Olson, two coaches who now rarely see eye to eye, agree about the value of Aberegg to their teams.

Said Tarkanian: “Rick was one of my favorite people. He was a real good point guard and a real fun guy. He ran the fast break as well as anybody during his time.”

Said Olson: “He had been a really big scorer in junior college and high school but he accepted . . . well, he performed the role of point guard well. He was sort of a character and he’d grouse a little about how he never got to shoot or score, but he was a real team player and he never forced shots.”