Griffins’ Sagen Can Dish It Out, and Take It : Football: County’s top receiver has reckless style, and never comes off the field for Los Alamitos.

The news on the Los Alamitos sideline was as grim as the numbers on the scoreboard one night last season. Someone ran up and told assistant coach Barry Sher that George Sagen’s hands were swelling faster than the national deficit.

“He wouldn’t show them to me, so finally I had to grab the,” said Sher.

Sagen’s hands were bruised and battered, the result of a vicious tackle by an opponent. But he didn’t want to show his pain. Or come out of the game, for that matter. He knew his teammates were counting on him. After all, they were losing to Empire League rival Esperanza with him playing both ways, how could they possibly win without him? So, he played hurt.

Almost a year had passed when Sher, the receivers coach at Los Alamitos, heard a familiar story. This time a trainer got to Sagen first. “Broken,” was the trainer’s diagnosis, judging by all the swelling and tenderness.

Again, Sagen wouldn’t quit. “It’s OK, coach, it’s not that bad,” he told John Barnes, the Griffins’ head coach.

“We snuck him back into the game,” Barnes said. “Deep down, I knew that he knew it wasn’t serious.”

The gamble paid off when, first, Sagen intercepted a pass to seal a 10-7 victory over Fountain Valley, and second, X-rays showed no broken bones.

Sagen plays football with a reckless style that Barnes said he has seldom seen in his 13 seasons at Los Alamitos. Barnes also called Sagen a runaway freight train, fearless, competitive, mature and quite possibly the best wide receiver in school history. Time will tell if that last bit of praise comes to pass, but he’s got a flying start.

Sagen, Orange County’s leading receiver with 33 catches for 425 yards this season, is running with fast company. Robby Katzaroff set the Orange County single-season record with 93 receptions at Los Alamitos in 1985. Former Griffin Tyler Cashman, big and sturdy, is a redshirt at USC where his father, Tom, was a standout in the 1960s. Chad Milan and Ron Monninger were All-Southern Section receivers for Los Alamitos in the late 1980s.

Sagen is a 6-foot-1, 175-pound junior, who combines all the best attributes of past Griffin receivers and adds an extra element of toughness, according to his coaches. He seems to have magnets in his hands, catching everything that comes his way. He is fast enough to sprint past defenders when fakes alone can’t spring him.

As an added bonus, he is playing in an offense designed with passing in mind--the run and shoot.

“He got great a lot younger than the other guys,” said Sher, who has coached the best of the Griffin wideouts during his eight seasons as an assistant. “The other guys didn’t play varsity as sophomores.”

They weren’t mentally and physically ready for the varsity, Sher said, but Sagen was, starting at wide receiver and free safety last season.

“Have we ever had a sophomore start both ways?” Barnes asked Frank Doretti, defensive coordinator at the school since it opened in the late 1960s.

Doretti recalled a few, but most were names from the early 1970s, and none from Barnes’ tenure as coach.

“(Sagen) is such a valuable guy, he doesn’t come off the field,” Sher said.

There are many reasons why that is so. Sagen’s terrific athletic ability is the main one, but the underlying current is that he simply loves the game. Even if his team is losing and his hands are aching, he’s having fun. A running quarterback on his flag football team in junior high, Sagen has grown to love the contact on defense best.

“The most fun you can have is when you put a good hit on someone,” Sagen said, breaking into a devilish smile.

He had the ‘Hit of the Year,’ as voted by the Los Alamitos coaching staff, in a 1990 game against Cypress.

“It was a dump-off pass to their tight end,” Sagen said. “The guy turned around, I was running full speed and didn’t stop.”

Sagen leveled the tight end, jarring the ball loose. He looked up in time to see teammate Marco Dominguez gather it in for an interception.

“The award doesn’t really mean anything, but I was pretty stoked,” Sagen said.

However, some of the collisions Sagen likes so much have been the source of his hand problems. It seems he keeps his hands in front of his chest when he thumps an opponent, and the hands wind up taking much of the force.

Barnes finally gave up trying to teach Sagen a better method of tackling and bought the player a pair of padded gloves to cushion the blows.

Sagen takes the gloves off when on offense and tries to adopt a different frame of mind--finesse instead of brute force. Most important for Sagen is forgetting about getting hit as a wide receiver.

“If you think about it, you’ll lose your concentration,” he said. “You’ll get gun shy. If you’re going to get hit, you might as well catch the ball, Coach Sher always says.”

It makes good sense to Sagen, who has never been afraid of a little contact.