Semipro Players Suit Up for a Dream With Doubtful Ending : Football: California Generals, a first-year club in a new league, are 5-3 but struggle for attention. The straight-shooting coach remains undaunted.

Paul Gonzalez, a 42-year-old offensive tackle for the California Generals, puffed on a cigar at Hart Park in Orange last week as teammates straggled into practice well past the 8 p.m. start.

“Minor league football lacks discipline,” said Gonzalez, who lamented that no other offensive lineman had shown up.

The Generals, who play their games at Wilson High School in Long Beach, are a first-year club in a new league with a wide range of characters. There are those such as Gonzalez who have never played organized football, and others, such as quarterback Paul Rodriguez, fresh out of New Mexico Highlands, who have played for years.

Some, such as unpaid offensive coordinator Harold Hines, think that they are serving apprenticeships that will lead to bigger and better things. For some, this is the end of the line after a year or two of junior college ball. Others just cheat time, seeking some measure of glory before their bodies give out.

At home games, the team gets one-third of the gate receipts to divide among the players--”about enough for a burger and a shake,” according to the Generals’ unemployed owner and coach, Lee S. Gliddon Jr.

“There’s a couple or three of them who may get a (professional) tryout from this,” said gruff-talking defensive coordinator Carl Babb, a teacher and football coach at Buena Park High School, who has been around semipro football for more than 20 years. “All of them have that dream, and to most of them that’s all it is--a dream.”

Putting the Generals in an economically depressed city such as Long Beach may have been the biggest dream of all. Gliddon, a cigarette-puffing good ol’ boy who played minor league football in his native Alabama, thought he could march right in and take the city by storm.

He first saw Long Beach in 1975 while attending the first Grand Prix auto race there and thought the city was a dump. But 13 years later, on a return trip to the redeveloped downtown area, Gliddon changed his mind.

He envisioned the Generals as a team that could become a franchise in the World League of American Football, the National Football League’s international experiment that ceased operation about the time the Generals began summer practice.

A straight-shooting former race car driver and debt collections agent, Gliddon is well thought of by the coaching staff and players. He remains undaunted but admits that things have not gone the way he thought they would.

“This looked like a natural place to play, especially with football folding at Cal State Long Beach,” Gliddon said. “I thought we could do well here, but I found out that these people are not all awake.”

In a town where prep games no longer fill stadiums to capacity and Cal State Long Beach had trouble drawing crowds even when George Allen was coach, Gliddon estimated that the Generals would lure 4,000 or more spectators a game. He rented Veterans Stadium for the team’s first three games, spent heavily on promotions, passed out free tickets and talked to merchants. Yet four would-be financial backers backed out before the opener and three opponents canceled games.

Attendance for the first three home games averaged just 258 spectators, so the Generals moved to the Wilson High field, where the rent is about a third of the $2,100 average charge per game at Veterans Stadium. The Generals play host to the Las Vegas Gamblers at 5 p.m. Saturday at Wilson.

Gliddon says he has spent $52,000 of his savings to keep the team afloat. He is looking for business partners, he said.

Will the Generals (5-3), who have played only four games in Long Beach, be here next year if larger crowds don’t materialize? Gliddon hinted last week at a mid-season move to Orange County but said he still hopes the team can be a hit.

“If you put a viable product on the field,” Gliddon said, “you give the fans something to enjoy, even if you don’t win all the time.”

But at least one competitor, who hopes that the Generals succeed, is not so sure the port city is the right place to be.

“I’m pleased with what he has tried to accomplish,” said Bob Martin, owner/coach of the Fresno Bandits, a rival in the Pacific Football League and the top-ranked minor league team in the United States. The Bandits have drawn as many as 4,300 fans to a game this season.

“But first and foremost, I don’t think you can practice in Orange County and play football in Long Beach,” he said. “You can’t draw support from the area if you are practicing an hour away or most of your guys live an hour away.”

Other league teams are located in Las Vegas, San Bernardino and Fountain Valley. Games against independents and teams from other semipro leagues fill out the schedule.

Big egos, grandiose expectations of owners and a lack of discipline have characterized semipro football for years. In founding the five-team PFL with teams from the more established Southern California Football League, Martin, Gliddon and other owners hope to overcome those obstacles by running their teams like businesses, not hobbies. The five PFL teams bought an insurance liability policy before they began play and agreed on a set of governing rules.

“The biggest problem with minor league football in the past has been that none of the owners have wanted to get together and work as a unit to improve the quality all over,” said Jim Steele, the PFL’s chief referee. “The Pacific Football League has made great strides this year.”

Steele gives the gregarious Gliddon high marks for his running of the Generals. In the past, Steele said, it was not uncommon for referees to show up for minor league football games and not be paid. That’s not the case with the Generals.

Gliddon, along with Martin, does not believe in charging players a fee to play, a common practice on many clubs.

The Generals also have a volunteer trainer who attends most practices and games, a luxury for other teams. “On a majority of minor league football teams, when a guy gets hurt, he just goes away. You never see him again,” said Gonzalez, who was nursing a sore back. “This way, if a guy is hurt we can keep track of him, not lose him.”

But some obstacles are difficult to overcome. Most players hold full-time jobs, so practice is limited to two or three nights a week. That hurts the timing in areas such as special teams. However, since salaries are minimal or nonexistent, owners and coaches have little leverage to force players to participate.

“Practice-wise, this isn’t what I’m used to,” said 6-foot-4, 285-pound nose tackle Erik Wright-Hay, who attended Texas El Paso and now works as a mason. “But that’s nobody’s fault. We only get to practice a couple of times a week.”

Wright-Hay, who sat out his junior and senior season, said he is having a ball on the field and hopes to get a tryout with a team in the Canadian Football League, which has sent scouts from time to time to watch PFL games.

The 6-foot Rodriguez, 30 pounds heavier than the 200 pounds at which he is listed, said he lives for game days.

“There is a lot of self-pride in this,” said Rodriguez, a waiter at a Santa Ana restaurant. “It’s shaking hands with the other guy after the game is over and just knowing that you did well.”

The 6-foot, 225-pound Gonzalez first attempted to play tackle football in 1987 with an Orange County semipro team, although he had no experience as a high school or college player.

“At any age, you should enjoy what you can do if you have the opportunity and ability to do it,” he said.

Babb said the game has been good to him.

“There has been a lot of reward for me out of this game,” he said. “I figure that being out here is a way to pay the game back, to donate some of my time.”

Gliddon, called “sharp” and “fair” by players and associates, said he will do whatever it takes to make the Generals a successful team.

It has been his dream to own a minor league football team and he does not want to see that dream vanish just yet.