PREP WEDNESDAY : Ofer the Adventurer Still Stirs Up Trouble--in Swimming Pools

Ofer Horn, Fountain Valley’s standout water polo player, would like to take this moment to apologize to those offended by his rather aggressive style of play.

Those head-butts he sometimes gives? Don’t take it personally. Those underwater kick-boxing maneuvers? Don’t give it another thought.

See, Horn, a senior, has an action-packed personality. He was born to be riled. He can’t help it, he says, if his enthusiasm is stuck on overdrive, or if his rambunctiousness runs full speed ahead. He kind of grew up that way.

As a young boy, Horn was Ofer the Adventurer, a kid who viewed the world from life’s lookout tower. Because his father, an architect, worked on a variety of international projects, Horn and his family lived and traveled throughout Europe, Israel and Africa. New adventures came with each passport stamp.

Now it should be noted that many of the more interesting moments that Horn experienced as a world-traveling tot are still swirling about in his subconscious. Lucky for him, his mother remembers everything.

Let’s start with the frog-leg episode. The Horns were living in rural Nigeria, where, because of the local cuisine, frogs avoid kitchens if they know what’s good for them. Miriam Horn says her son developed quite a taste for such amphibians (only the prime cuts, of course), though she herself refused to bake, boil or fricassee anything remotely related to Kermit.

That didn’t stop little Ofer from coming home one day and presenting to his mother a large pail of croaking frogs to fry. No chance, Ofer, his mother said. And with that, the frogs were tossed into the family garden, free to mingle with the escargot.

Not all inhabitants were so friendly. Mosquitoes represented potential malaria. The family’s back yard was populated by poisonous snakes; an antidote was always on hand in the refrigerator. Villagers a few miles down the road, Miriam said, were said to practice cannibalism. Caskets of prominent elders, she was told, were often decorated with human heads.

Ofer was always warned to avoid such troubles, so he found his own. He tried to befriend a local spider monkey, offering it a banana and a hug. The monkey thanked the boy by biting him on the stomach. Ofer decided to show his neighborhood friends how tasty the chewable tablets were that his parents made him take to ward off local intestinal worms. He chewed down the whole bottle’s worth, then learned what it was like to have his stomach pumped at the hospital.

Ofer got lost in an airport in Germany. He fell face-first out of a tree in the Ivory Coast. In Israel, where Horn was born, on-the-go Ofer managed to slip and crack his head against a coffee table not once, but twice in one week; stuck a magnet into a portable wall heater for an eye-opening shock, and rammed his bike into a stop sign that snapped in two and shattered the windshield of a nearby car.

He and his pals also decided to go cruising down a steep driveway in a neighbor’s car. But the car’s door, which someone forgot to close, was ripped from the body when it bashed into a cement post.

When the Horns moved to Fountain Valley in late 1984, Horn was most thrilled by the expansive grounds and playing fields at his new elementary school. He was so awe-struck that on the first day of school, he tripped and fell--splat--into a mud puddle. Welcome to America.

These days, Horn’s greatest adventures come in chlorinated pools where everyone speaks the same language--”CIF finals” and “college scholarship” being Horn’s favorite phrases. He and his teammates take on Cypress in a Southern Section Division II first-round match today.

Horn, a 6-foot 165-pound two-meter man, started playing water polo in the eighth grade with a club program at Golden West College. Now he’s one of the premier players in the county. The fact that he’s left-handed makes him tough to guard, coaches say. The fact that he’s quick, crafty and smart makes him a top quality defender. Need proof? Check the film from the Barons’ match two weeks ago against Marina.

The match, featuring a multitude of video cameras and a mass of Marina fans in the Golden West College stands, finished with Horn scoring the winning goal off a steal in the final eight seconds. The victory gave Fountain Valley (20-7, 7-0 in league) its first Sunset League title in seven years.

“The hard thing for me in that game was, I like to play aggressive, I don’t feel bad when I kick someone or head-butt them, but those (Marina) guys are the guys I played on the same team with in eighth grade,” Horn says. “I played aggressive, but not too aggressive, and that seemed to help.”

Horn hopes he can turn his skills into an athletic scholarship. He hopes his outgoing personality and smarts help him toward a career in lobbying or business management. But he’s not going to worry about it too much.

Not with what he knows about life’s little adventures.