Omalev Brought Crowd to Its Feet

Basketball season was quickly approaching in 1949 when Alex Omalev was busy preparing his Fullerton College drama class for the fall production of “Accidentally Yours.”

Omalev, the new Fullerton basketball coach, was asked by his players when they were going to begin practice.

He made a deal with them.

“Practice starts as soon as the five starters each sell 100 tickets to the school play,” Omalev told them.

“ ‘Accidentally Yours’ ” performed to a full house that year.

Omalev had come to Fullerton that summer to teach drama. Three months later, he was coaching basketball, too.

He had studied cinematography under Cecil B. DeMille at USC, and had spent two years as a wardrobe researcher and basketball player at 20th Century Fox Studios.

That same summer, Art Nunn, Fullerton’s basketball coach, died of a heart attack. School officials asked Omalev to find a replacement.

When he couldn’t, they asked him if he would do it. After all, he was qualified, having played at USC and having coached basketball while in the Navy.

He took the offer.

Forty-two years later, Omalev, 71, chuckles as he recalls his early days of coaching.

You can do that after walking the sidelines in Orange County for 23 years, 11 at Fullerton College and 12 at Cal State Fullerton. He will be inducted into the Orange County Sports Hall of Fame Oct. 29.

Known as an intense man with a quick temper and wit, Omalev coached Fullerton College to the 1954 State championship. He left Fullerton College in 1960 to organize Cal State Fullerton’s first basketball team, and a year later won the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics District 3 title.

Even after resigning at Cal State Fullerton in 1972, Omalev couldn’t stay away from basketball. He continued coaching clinics and teaching the sport in Mexico and his homeland of Yugoslavia, as well as teaching physical education classes at Cal State Fullerton.

Fluent in Slavic, Croat, Spanish and German, he worked as the language coordinator at the 1984 Olympic basketball venue, and was the interpreter for the Lakers’ Vlade Divac during his rookie season in 1989.

“The Lakers needed someone who had a basketball background and who spoke the language and could help Vlade,” Omalev said. “They didn’t want to keep stopping practice all the time to explain things to him.”

Omalev spent only three months with Divac, who learned English fairly quickly. But the two have remained close. When Divac’s son, Luka Andrej, was born last summer, Omalev was among the first people to know.

“I have a son, and he looks just like me,” Vlade told Omalev.

There was a pause before Omalev answered.

“You mean he was born with a beard like yours?” Omalev asked.

Omalev and Divac are Serbs. Born in 1920 in Hamtramck, Mich., a city within Detroit, Omalev never visited Yugoslavia until he did a coaching clinic there in 1968.

His father, Ziva, came to the United States from Serbia in 1908. He settled in Hamtramck, where he raised his family. Although a Serb, Ziva joined several Croatian fraternal organizations in the United States, as did his sons.

Every day, Omalev reads updates on the Yugoslav civil war. He is saddened by the news and how it has affected friends he made while doing several clinics with the Yugoslavian national team.

The team, which once consisted of Serbs, Croats and Montenegrans, is torn apart by politics.

“I think the sportsmen of the world could do a better job of solving political problems than the politicians,” Omalev said. “It’s an ethnic problem, one you can trace all the way back to World War II. It could go on for years. Thousands of people have been annihilated in this war, and that’s something that’s hard to forget.”

His basketball skills have taken him all over the world--Mexico, India, as well as Yugoslavia. But Omalev’s playing days began in dank gyms in the Detroit area.

Omalev was the youngest of three children. Although he was small, he was a good basketball player, practicing six hours a day as a kid.

“I was just a little skinny runt,” Omalev said. “I got sick all the time, too.”

But Omalev hit a growth spurt when he reached Northern High School. He grew six inches to his current height of 6 feet 1.

In 1938, Ziva Omalev gathered his two oldest sons in his dining room to discuss the future of the baby brother, Alex.

They decided since none of them had been to college, Alex would go. But first, Alex had to work in a local automobile factory for a year.

“They figured that if I started to goof off in college,” Omalev said, “that I would think back at the days at the factory. It would keep me in line.”

While working at the factory, Omalev joined a local AAU basketball team. Competing against former college players, he was the leading scorer, averaging 12 points a game.

It was during an AAU game that Omalev was discovered by USC. Former Trojan All-American football player Bill Radovich, who was playing with the Detroit Lions, wrote Trojan coaches about “this kid who shoots one-handed.”

“I was only one of two kids who were shooting one-handed at the time,” Omalev said. “That was before the jump shot. We had the set shot and the push shot.”

USC offered a scholarship and Omalev was on his way to Los Angeles in 1939.

Omalev played four seasons, earning second-team honors on Clare Bee’s All-American team in 1943. With World War II in full swing, Omalev joined the Navy in 1943 after graduating from USC with a bachelor of arts degree.

Omalev was stationed at the Los Alamitos Air Station for 1 1/2 years, then spent four months as a flight-deck photographer on the aircraft carrier U.S. Gilbert Islands. He played and coached a team while on the aircraft carrier, earning All-Pacific honors in 1945.

After the war, Omalev returned to Southern California. In 1947, he married Betty, whom he had met while playing for 20th Century Fox two years earlier. He went back to USC, graduating with his teaching degree in 1949.

Then he went to Fullerton College.

Omalev wasn’t worried when he took over the Fullerton basketball program. He inherited a talented group of players, among them Don Johnson, who went on to play at UCLA, and is now the coach at Cypress College.

Although Omalev was intense, Johnson said he found a soft side to his coach.

“He was a counselor of all of us,” Johnson said. “Alex was a parent, teacher, a friend and a coach. You seldom see all those in one person. Both of the coaches I played for--Alex and John Wooden--had those qualities.”

Omalev put his players to work in his drama classes, acting and working on the sets. His players also helped him dig and pour the foundation for his one-story home in Fullerton, where he and Betty raised three children, and now spend time with their five grandchildren.

Omalev’s Fullerton College teams dominated throughout the 1950s. The Hornets won the 1954 state title, and were runners-up in 1952-53 and 1959-60. In the 11 years Omalev coached, they had a 259-76 record, won eight conference titles and lost only eight home games.

After the 1959-60 season, Omalev was named head coach at what was then called Orange County State College, later Fullerton State and now Cal State Fullerton. Besides organizing the school’s first basketball team, he taught P.E. classes there, a job which continued until retiring for good last year.

He brought several of his junior college players with him, including Leonard Guinn, Edgar Clark and Terry Hermann, and added Jon Brettman from Santa Ana College (now Rancho Santiago).

Omalev’s first Titan team went 16-14. In 1962-63, they were 24-7 and won the NAIA District 3 title, reaching the quarterfinals of the national tournament in Kansas City, Mo. The Titans were 19-7.

During Omalev’s first three seasons at Cal State Fullerton, the Titans were 59-28.

Then the roof caved in.

His 1963-64 team was 9-16. They were 1-25 the following season. In Omalev’s final nine seasons, the Titans had only one winning season--13-11 in 1965-66.

Rumors of Omalev’s resignation began circulating in 1970, when the Student Senate passed a resolution, 15-2, to withhold $20,000 from the basketball program’s budget unless Omalev was fired. The resolution was later reduced to a censure, the money was restored and Omalev stayed put.

Omalev blamed the downfall on recruiting. Although the Titans benefited early from Omalev’s junior college connections, the well ran dry by the mid-1960s.

“It was very difficult to recruit at Fullerton back then,” Omalev said. “We had no gym, and we could offer only 2 1/2 scholarships a year.

“One year, I had four junior college players, all who would have been starters, who never even made it to the first day of practice. I had to go recruit players out of my gym classes.

“I think that’s where you learn the game, when you’re up against the wall like that and you have to scratch and fight your way out.”

Omalev resigned after the 1971-72 season, when Titans went 9-17. His record at Cal State Fullerton was 138-177, and his mark at both schools was 397-253.

He looks back fondly on his coaching days. He estimates that 90% of his players earned their college degrees.

He watched one of the students in his Theory of Coaching class, former Titan All-American Leon Wood, move on to play in the Olympics and the NBA.

Several of his former players have gone on to coach, including Johnson at Cypress, Jerry Pimm at Utah and UC Santa Barbara and Bobby Dye at Boise State and Cal State Fullerton.

“If it had not been for Alex, I never would have played for Coach Wooden,” Johnson said. “He put me into position to get that scholarship to UCLA, and he helped me get to where I am now.”

One of Omalev’s proudest moments came in 1978, when Dye coached the Titans to a 23-9 record and within a game of the Final Four. At that moment, Omalev realized what he had started back in 1960.

“I guess someone had to go through all that I had to so the other coaches down the line could benefit,” Omalev said. “What’s that they say at the beginning of ‘Wide World of Sports,’ when the skier falls down? The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat? I’ve seen both, over and over.”

Hall of Fame Banquet Facts

WHAT: 11th Orange County Sports Hall of Fame Banquet

WHEN: Tuesday, Oct. 29

WHERE: Disneyland Hotel, Anaheim

HIGHLIGHTS: Tickets, $100 each or $1,000 for a table of 10, can be secured by calling (714) 935-0199. The affair (cocktails at 6 p.m, dinner at 7) will include the induction of Homer Beatty, Bill Cook, Bobby Knoop, Pat McInally, Alex Omalev, Bruce Penhall, Dwight Stones, Bertha Ragan Tickey and Shirley Topley .