South Has 101 Reasons to Beat Morningside : Girls’ basketball: On Saturday, Spartans make their first visit to Monarch gym since Lisa Leslie scored 101 points against them in a 1990 game.

Gil Ramirez has lived with the taunts, jokes and embarrassment for more than two years.

Everywhere he goes, and from everyone he knows, Ramirez cannot escape the memory of being on the losing end of one of the most controversial games in the history of school girls’ basketball.

“I hear it from people I work with, family members . . . even some people that I haven’t seen in years,” Ramirez said. “They say, ‘Hey, I read about you.’ People just won’t let it die.”

It was on Feb. 7, 1990, when Ramirez, low-key coach of the South Torrance basketball team, was thrust into the national spotlight. On that day, Morningside center Lisa Leslie scored 101 points in the first half against South in an attempt to break the national single-game scoring record of 105 points set by Riverside Poly’s Cheryl Miller in 1982.

Leslie, a former prep All-American who now plays for USC, certainly would have set the record if the second half had been played. But Ramirez, down to four players because of injuries and fouls, pulled his team off the court at halftime, incurring the wrath of a Morningside crowd that made it physically difficult for South to leave the Monarch gym.

“(Morningside’s fans) were badgering us and giving us hell for leaving,” Ramirez said. “The referee told the crowd to let us through, otherwise their team would have to forfeit. It was not a pleasant experience.”

South lost the game, 102-24. Yes, that was the halftime score.

Ramirez is hoping for a closer decision Saturday night when South returns to Morningside for the first time since that infamous day two years ago for a quarterfinal game in the Southern Section Division III-AA playoffs. The starting time is 7:30.

Actually, Ramirez is hoping for more than a close game.

“I like our chances,” he said. “We match up really well.”

South’s program has come a long way since Morningside and Leslie made the Spartans highly publicized objects of sympathy, or scorn, depending on your point of view. After going 3-18 in the 1989-90 season, South was 15-13 last season and reached the quarterfinals of the playoffs.

This season, the Spartans are 17-7 and coming off a 44-39 first-round playoff victory Saturday night over Lompoc, which reached the final of the Southern Section and regional Division III playoffs last season.

Ramirez says this is his best team in five seasons as coach.

But despite its success, South is still remembered as the team that walked off the court after giving up 101 points to Leslie. When Ramirez visited the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Ma., this past summer, he came upon a special section detailing Leslie’s historic achievement--the most points ever scored by a high school player in one half.

If that wasn’t enough, Ramirez said some of South’s players have received anonymous letters to their homes containing photographs of Leslie.

“It’s kind of a slap in the face,” Ramirez said. “People aren’t letting us forget it. We’d like to get over it.”

He realizes the best way to make people forget is by beating Morningside on Saturday night. He said the team’s motto this week in preparation for the game has been, “Let’s get the monkey off our back.”

Three of South’s starters--6-foot-3 senior center Jacqueline Brown, senior forward Rachel Ooms and junior guard Robee Papworth--played in the game at Morningside two years ago.

“We have a lot to prove on Saturday,” Ramirez said. “People at school ask me, ‘How much are you going to lose by this year?’ and ‘Are you going to walk off this year.’ We need to win this game.”

Ramirez said he doesn’t harbor any hard feelings toward Morningside for what happened two years ago.

“I don’t feel that way because the personnel is different,” he said, pointing out that former Morningside Coach Frank Scott is now an assistant at USC and the 6-5 Leslie is a player for the Trojans.

“We want to show Morningside and Southern California that we can play basketball,” Ramirez said. “There are no hard feelings, but I definitely want to win.”

Ramirez said he has no regrets about pulling his team off the court at halftime two years ago, although he would have done things differently if given a second chance.

“Because (Morningside) changed the game time on us, I could have protested,” Ramirez said. “But there were no (South) administrators there. I had no one to confer with.”

The varsity game was scheduled to begin at 3 p.m., but Morningside informed South after it arrived that the junior varsity game would be played first, at 3, because Sports Illustrated needed time to set up camera equipment.

“When I heard that, I knew something was up,” Ramirez said. “They wanted the media there because Lisa was going to try and break the (scoring) record.”

Morningside, which went on to win the State Division I championship that year, picked one game each season where it allowed its top player to break the school scoring record against an inferior opponent. In 1988, Shaunda Greene scored 61 points against El Segundo and in 1989 JoJo Witherspoon scored 68 against South.

In 1990, it was Leslie’s turn. In a remarkable performance, she scored 49 points in the first quarter, 52 in the second and ended the half having shot 37 of 56 from the field and 27 of 34 from the free-throw line.

Some questioned how Leslie, or anyone, could have scored that many points in two eight-minute quarters. The answer, some say, is that improper stops were made by the timekeeper. Ramirez said the game started at 4:45 p.m. and the half ended at 6:15, an unusually long time to play a half of high school basketball.

“Once we figured out what was going on, we tried to eliminate all our kids by fouling them out,” Ramirez said. “We knew what they were trying to do. (Leslie) wasn’t going to stop at the record (105 points). She had the opportunity to shatter the record. She could have scored 200 points.”

At the time, Scott defended his decision to allow Leslie to go after Miller’s scoring record.

“In our league, we’ve held back as much as we can, and it’s tough to keep holding them back,” Scott said of his players, who had not lost a league game in eight seasons in 1990. “We decided to let the girls go one game a year.”

However, after Morningside drew criticism for embarrassing a much weaker opponent, Scott said the tradition of “letting the girls go” would come to an end.

“After this year, we probably won’t go for any more records,” he said at the time. “I don’t feel that it’s worth it. It creates too many bad feelings between the schools.”

Saturday night’s game will be the second time South and Morningside have met since the 1990 season. Morningside beat the Spartans by 14 points in a nonleague game at South last season.

“It was a real low-key game, no hype,” Ramirez said. “This year it will be the first time we’ve played (at Morningside) since the infamous game. It’s quite a challenge to get over that mental block.”

South will have a tough time against fourth-seeded Morningside, the Ocean League champion.

But there is one thing you can count on, Ramirez said. The Spartans will stick around for the entire game this time.