FOUNTAIN VALLEY : Bare Head Crowns Championship Win

As students peered through the glass door into teacher and coach Ron La Ruffa’s room at Fountain Valley High School on Thursday, they pointed and giggled at him.

La Ruffa grinned, walked to the door, opened it, and took off the baseball cap covering his newly shaved head.

“A dollar a rub,” the coach said musing, then turned and told his English class, “I’m a sideshow!”

For La Ruffa, this was pay-back time, the day he lived up to his vow that if his varsity baseball team became division champs, he’d shave his head. Last week, the Fountain Valley High School Barons won the Sunset League championship, the school’s third win in the last five years.

Before lunch Thursday and in front of the school’s student body, his players--armed with a razor--took turns shaving off his dark, thick locks.

“I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life,” said La Ruffa, 44, a baseball coach for 20 years. “But this has got to be the dumbest.”

La Ruffa, whose once full head of hair is now nubby, said it was one of those things he wished he had never said.

But at the start of the season, La Ruffa said some of his team members shaved their heads.

“I told them if we win the league, I’d shave my head too,” he said. “It’s typical that teen-agers never remember the important things, but you say something like that and they never forget it.”

Throughout the season, team members kindly reminded their coach about his vow. “It became more important than winning the title,” said La Ruffa, who has bought “a lot of hats.”

Senior Brian Ponchak, a baseball team member, said while he believed his coach would shave his head, La Ruffa tried to cop out on how close the shave should be.

“But we made sure he got it real short,” said Ponchak, who adjusted the blade for a shorter look. “It was just cool for the coach to go along with us.”

And for La Ruffa, bald isn’t so bad.

“At least mine will grow back,” he said, adding that it was an important lesson to the team that he keep his word. “But then I wasn’t getting out of it--unless I would’ve gone to Canada.”