With a Victory, Titans Say Good Riddance

Yes, they grabbed ahold of the goal posts after Cal State Fullerton’s football game Saturday afternoon and, yes, they began to take them apart.

A big deal?

Well, yes and no. Fullerton won its football game Saturday, something it doesn’t often do, but it dismantles the goal posts after every game at Santa Ana Stadium, because at Fullerton’s home-away-from-home, the Titans bring their goal posts with them.

Being a municipal stadium that services Rancho Santiago Community College first and area high schools second, Santa Ana Stadium is equipped with goal posts made for community college and high school football. Division I-A football plays by different, narrower rules, so the Titans break out the PVC plumbing pipe and plastic clamps and jerry-rig their own regulation crossbars inside the existing ones.

The resulting contraption looks a little funny, but it can pick up Michigan and Notre Dame games with no static at all.

That’s Fullerton. Or, to borrow the verb Gene Murphy has been waiting to use for 10 years, that was Fullerton.

Saturday, the Titans played their last home game in Santa Ana. Fullerton 37, Cal State Long Beach 36 was the end of the line. No more bus rides home after home games. No more Fullerton fans getting lost on the way to home games. No more dateline confusion for the wire editors of the Midwest--Was that Cal State Fullerton playing at Santa Ana or Cal State Santa Ana playing at Fullerton?

The next Fullerton home game will be played at home, on Fullerton’s actual campus, when the 1992 football season opens inside the new Titan Sports Complex. Can Fullerton hardly wait? Murphy is so excited about the prospect that he held Friday night practice at the complex after giving half a mind to playing Long Beach there.

“There was an outside chance we could’ve played on it,” Murphy said, “but the ground was too soft. It’s not holding together yet. We had to go out there and practice in sneakers.”

Murphy’s tone is almost religious. He says the practice was held “for one group of people. Our seniors. We wanted to be able to say to them, ‘Now you have an opportunity to play in The Stadium.’ ” At Fullerton, The Stadium has become synonymous with the promised land.

Phil Nevin will probably never see it. Nevin is a junior kicker-punter, but because he’s also a major league prospect at third base, he expects to be drafted and long gone before next September. Friday’s practice was for him, too.

“I never thought I’d see the day where we’d even practice in it,” Nevin said. “That was a surprise in itself.

“It’s a nice place. It’s big-time. For Cal State Fullerton, it’s really big-time. They can do well there, recruiting can really skyrocket. If Coach Murphy can pull in guys who want to play in Santa Ana Stadium, just think of what he can do with the on-campus stadium.”

Santa Ana Stadium has a lot not going for it, as Saturday’s game reminded, once and for all.

During the fall, the place is hopelessly overbooked, attempting to accommodate Fullerton and Rancho Santiago, a half-dozen high schools and up to six soccer games every Sunday. By late November, the Grapes of Wrath look becomes complete, and the dusty plain causes drop-back quarterbacks to stumble, tackled running backs to bleed and trusty field-goal kickers to miss 19-yard chip shots, as Nevin did against Long Beach.

By late November, with Fullerton beginning the day with a record of 1-9, the plain becomes barren as well. Hard to locate without a map, hard to get to, Santa Ana Stadium isn’t worth the effort near the end of a fruitless season. Saturday, only an announced 2,123 showed up for the finale, which meant 8,000 people missed a very exciting game.

Possibly because it went his way, with Chad May’s 13-yard scoring lob saving the Titans with 38 seconds to play, Murphy chose to be charitable as he bid the old gray lair adieu.

“We played all of our home games here for the last eight years. It’s been fantastic to us,” Murphy said. “This gave us a place to play when nobody else wanted us.

“It’s going to be great to go play in our own place, but I’m not an ingrate. If not for these people here, we’d have been playing all over God’s green acres.”

Murphy paused for effect.

“Just because we had to move a few games because of a swap meet and a tractor pull . . . “

Murphy’s right. This is no time to be negative about Santa Ana Stadium. For eight years, for Fullerton football teams and fans, Santa Ana Stadium always meant:

--A chance to sit on the 50-yard line, even if you arrived at halftime.

--Plenty of parking.

--A real insider’s look at Division I-A football. Listen and hear coaches send in plays from the sidelines. Personally voice your approval or disapproval of said play calling. Be heard. Engage in a direct dialogue with the player or assistant coach of your choice.

--Such brain-teasing fun as Count Today’s Attendance and On A Sunny Day, Bet You Can’t Read The Scoreboard.

For eight years, Fullerton has played its home games across the street from the Orange County Jail, but the iron bars didn’t stop there. To the Titans, Santa Ana Stadium was an imprisonment of another kind--from competitive recruiting, from respectable home attendance, from the kind of familiarity that breeds year-in and year-out success.

Saturday, the Titans played Santa Ana for the final time. They won, too, although that’s almost beside the point.

The sentence is over.