The Power Behind the Throw : Northridge Product Venegas’ Word Carries Weight Wherever He Coaches

John Frazier, the throwing-events coach for Cal State Northridge’s track and field team, still chuckles about his first encounter with UCLA assistant Art Venegas.

Frazier was in the midst of his senior season at Antelope Valley High in 1981, during which he would win the state shotput title. Venegas, then an assistant at Cal State Long Beach, was trying to entice Frazier to become a 49er.

“When I first met him, he told me he was the greatest throws coach in the world,” Frazier said. “He said it jokingly, but I thought, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”

Ten years later, Venegas is all he said he was: one of the top throwing-event coaches in the nation, if not the world.

Venegas, a 1974 graduate of Cal State Northridge, has coached nine men to 27 NCAA Division I All-American finishes during his first 10 seasons at UCLA, and five Bruin women have earned a total of 15 All-American honors since he began coaching them in 1985.

In last week’s Division I championships at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., Bruin throwers earned a total of seven All-American certificates. The contingent was led by Eric Bergreen, who was fourth in the men’s shotput and eighth in the hammer throw, and Tracie Millett, who placed second in the women’s discus and third in the shotput.

“Consistency is something I’ve always taken great pride in,” Venegas said. “The fact that when a kid thinks UCLA track, or Long Beach State track, or Northridge track when I was there, there was a good weight-events program. You never associate Art Venegas with a mediocre program. . . . No matter what year it was, 1976 or 1981 or 1988. I’ve always had good programs.”

Venegas, 39, might come across as brazen, but facts support his claim.

During Venegas’ four seasons as a Northridge assistant from 1976-79, Matador athletes won three Division II titles in men’s throwing events and earned nine All-American certificates.

In the fall of 1979, Venegas took over the down-and-out weight-events program at Cal State Long Beach. In 1980, two of his athletes qualified for the finals of the Division I meet and, in 1981, three of his athletes--including All-American Bill Green in the hammer throw--reached the finals.

Venegas has coached at least one All-American every year since his arrival at UCLA, including John Brenner, the 1984 NCAA champion in the shotput and discus, and his record with the Bruin women is equally impressive. Toni Lutjens won the 1986 NCAA title in the discus, and Millett was a double winner in the shotput and discus in 1990.

“One of the things that I think has made me successful is that I’ve never locked into any one concept being the best or the greatest,” said Venegas, who finished fourth in the hammer throw in the 1974 Division II championships for CSUN. “To me, perfect technique is the same as the perfect woman. You could take 10 guys to the beach and tell them to pick out the one they think is perfect, and you’ll never have 10 guys agree on the same one.”

Green, a former U. S. record-holder in the hammer throw who trained under Venegas from 1979-87, said that his former coach’s acceptance of different techniques comes from his diverse background in the throws.

“Art is a true throwing coach,” said Green, who placed sixth in the 1984 Olympic Games. “He’s a rare bird that can coach all four (throwing) events effectively.”

In addition to his technical expertise, the mustachioed, bespectacled Venegas is intensely competitive, and he expects as much of his athletes.

“There are two sides to Art,” Brenner said. “He is extremely friendly and easy-going away from the track, but he is very demanding on it.”

Venegas, whom Green described as “a joker and a very entertaining guy to be around,” said that he tries to make training fun for his athletes, but he has the last word when it comes to workouts.

“This is a complete, complete dictatorship on the track,” he said, “but the ultimate democracy off the track. They can come to me in my office and talk all they want about what we’re doing, but when I’m on the track, I want them to listen to me and do what I say.”

As Green said, “It was always Art’s way or the freeway.”

Bergreen, who won the shotput and placed second in the discus in the Pacific 10 Conference championships three weeks ago, characterized the squat, 5-foot-9 Venegas as a king and the UCLA throwers as his subjects.

“We are his little pawns,” Bergreen said. “He tells us what to do and we do what he says. What he says goes.”

Venegas’ totalitarian rule on the track and his engaging personality off it have inspired a fierce loyalty among his athletes.

Green, who finished fifth in the hammer throw as a Northridge freshman in the 1979 Division II championships, never balked at leaving CSUN for Long Beach when Venegas did.

Brenner, who had met Venegas during his senior year at Fullerton High in 1979, enrolled at UCLA in the fall of that year, transferred to Fullerton College and trained with Venegas in the fall of 1980. He then transferred back to UCLA when Venegas was hired there.

“It was a wonderful sport because of him,” said Brenner, who put the shot 73 feet 10 3/4 inches (seventh on the all-time world performer list) in 1987 before suffering a career-ending knee injury in 1988. “He made the sport fun. To me, the shot wasn’t that fun, but he made it interesting.”

Venegas, who lives in Northridge with his wife Marlene and daughters Jessica, 10, and Yvette, 8, is also very loyal to his athletes.

As a participant in the 1984 Olympics, Green was given two complimentary track and field tickets. He gave one to his father and one to Venegas, but when Venegas arrived at his seat at the peristyle end of the Coliseum, he decided it was too far from the hammer cage approximately 50 yards away.

According to Green, Venegas got a better seat by telling people in the section of seats near the hammer cage that he was the coach of the lone thrower from the United States in the hammer final and that he needed to be able to communicate with his athlete.

“People just took turns rotating their seats with him,” Green said. “They would go up to one of the tunnels and let Art sit down for a while, and then he’d switch with someone else. . . . He wasn’t supposed to be coaching me, according to the rules, but I really appreciated what he did. It made the Olympics feel like just another meet to me.”

Getting his athletes to perform well in the big meets has always been Venegas’ ultimate goal. No matter how well they might throw during the season, if they don’t perform up to standard in the NCAA or The Athletics Congress championships, he has failed as a coach.

“Art’s attitude has always been that in order to consider yourself a great thrower, you’ve got to score in the NCAAs,” Bergreen said. “The Pac 10s are nice, but the NCAAs are where you show your real worth.”

Said Green, who competed for the Stars and Stripes and Mazda track clubs after graduating from Long Beach: “Art conditioned us mentally to be our best in the meets that mattered most.”

To achieve that goal and keep his athletes from getting too cocky, Venegas would frequently let his charges know that no matter how well they did, they could do better, even if it involved informing them of that in the heat of a competition.

Green recalled a 1984 pre-Olympic meet at Mt. San Antonio College in which he had raised the U. S. record in the hammer throw to 247-7 in the third round.

“Art came up to me after the throw and said, ‘Well, congratulations on the American record, but you’re still in fourth place,’ ” Green said with a chuckle.

In the next round, Green raised the national record to 251-0 to win the event.

All this success could be pretty heady stuff for a guy who was born in Tepic, Mexico, moved to the San Fernando Valley when he was 11 and had modest personal bests of 48-2 in the shotput and 135-0 in the discus at St. Genevieve High. But not for the bear-like Venegas, who at 220 pounds is 35 pounds heavier than he was as a Northridge freshman.

“I always believed that if you worked hard and constantly tried to improve yourself, you would be successful,” Venegas said.

Venegas, a political science and Spanish major at Northridge, had planned to go to law school after earning his undergraduate degrees, but he caught the coaching bug during his sophomore season when he improved dramatically under the tutelage of Northridge assistant Frank Carl.

“What shocked me was I went from a guy who was really struggling to a guy that was dominating the (California Collegiate Athletic Assn.),” Venegas said. “That intrigued me more than throwing, actually, that one person could make such a difference with his knowledge.”

For the next three years, Venegas spent as much time studying the way Carl worked with athletes as he did working out, and it paid off.

When Carl left Northridge after the 1975 season, he recommended that Venegas take over for him.

Although Venegas initially felt that he wasn’t ready for the job, success came quickly for him--three Matador throwers earned All-American honors in the 1976 Division II championships, in which Northridge finished third.

After a disappointing 1977 season during which no Matador thrower was an All-American, Venegas realized that he had to start recruiting.

Joe Staub, a 62-6 shotputter at Montebello Cantwell High, enrolled at Northridge in the fall of 1977, and Green, a 181-7 discus thrower from Sunnyvale Fremont High, came aboard in the fall of 1978.

Staub, who still holds the Northridge school record in the shotput at 63-1, won that event and placed second in the discus in the 1979 Division II championships. Norman Finke won the javelin and Green placed fifth in the hammer, an event in which he had never competed until that season.

Powered by its throwers, Northridge finished second in the team standings.

What should have been Venegas’ finest hour, however, was tempered by the fact that he and Northridge Coach Bill Webb, were feuding.

Webb, who came to Northridge from Southern Illinois University in the fall of 1978, was a highly regarded weight-events coach, and he was unhappy that Venegas had remained in that capacity at Northridge after Coach Cliff Abel had resigned.

“My reasons for leaving Northridge were strictly personal,” Venegas said. “I felt that I was going to be stifled there because I had a guy who, no matter what I did, was going to feel that he could do better. . . . My attitude was, let this man, who is a good coach, do whatever he wants to do without me getting in his way, and I’ll do my own thing someplace else out of his way.”

Someplace else was Cal State Long Beach, where Venegas took what he called a bunch of “junior college rejects” and helped mold one of the better weight-event programs in the country.

“I really liked coaching at Long Beach,” Venegas said. “I would have stayed there forever. That 1980-81 group of kids is still one of my fondest memories.”

Cutbacks in scholarships and his salary forced him to move on, however, and he has been at UCLA since.

“I’m very happy (at UCLA),” Venegas said. “Without going into details, I’ve been offered some very good head-coaching jobs at other schools in the past, but deep down inside, I’m a throws coach.

“I know I could do a very good job as a head coach no matter if it was in California, the South, or in New York, because of the type of person I am. But there’s nothing I enjoy more right now than developing kids to the fullest in the weight events. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing right now.”