Jelso Swats His Disappointments Aside : Racquetball: Ventura resident won championship in Olympic Festival to finally earn a berth on the national team.

It is difficult to picture Tony Jelso as a quitter--a guy who would walk off the court in the middle of a national racquetball tournament saying he’d had it.

In the wake of his dominating gold-medal performance in the U.S. Olympic Festival last week, it seems unimaginable that Jelso would ever be eager to pack his bags and slip out the back door.

Jelso, 23, of Ventura, was running Chris Cole of Flint, Mich., ragged in his championship singles match last week in San Antonio until Cole aggravated a shoulder injury and couldn’t continue.

Jelso emerged with the abbreviated victory, 14-11, in what was scheduled to be a best-of-three-games showdown.

How ironic. It was about eight weeks earlier when Jelso walked out on Cole in Houston.

Still reeling from a loss in the quarterfinals of the American Amateur Racquetball Assn. national singles championships and playing a “meaningless” match against Cole for seventh place--and the seventh seeding for the Olympic Festival--Jelso quit.

“I told him, ‘Chris, I don’t want to play anymore,’ ” Jelso said. “ ‘I’ll just take eighth place.’ ”

Jelso couldn’t shake the disappointment of losing what might have been the most pivotal match of his career, a 15-12, 15-11 quarterfinal decision to John Ellis of Stockton.

A victory over Ellis would have earned Jelso an automatic berth on the U.S. national team--a goal that eluded him the previous two years and once again had slipped from his fingertips.

Most disturbing was that Jelso had only himself to blame. He was leading in the first game, 12-7, and in the second, 11-7.

“Coming off the loss to Ellis, the last thing I wanted to do was play another match,” said Jelso, recalling how he had quit against Cole. “I’ve wanted to make the national team for so long, and I’ve come close so many times. . . . “I’ve been a match away two times.”

Jelso earned yet another chance in San Antonio, but he never thought he’d finally triumph the way he did--ahead, 14-11, in the first game, with doctors hovering over Cole after he re-injured his shoulder and suffered convulsions after diving to return a shot.

Other players were quick to pull Jelso aside and ease any disappointment about winning the gold medal via an injury forfeit.

“(The injury) took a lot out of it; I felt real bad for (Cole),” Jelso said. “I wanted to beat him fair and square. But after the match, everybody said they felt I would win anyway. . . .

This is a big weight off my shoulders.”

And it was a weight Jelso long had been accustomed to carrying. From the time he was 10, growing up as a nationally ranked junior, Jelso had been told he was a future champion.

Such talk became more frequent by his senior year in high school when he had grown to his current height of 6-foot-3. Jelso (195 pounds) is big and powerful for a racquetball player. But as recently as June, he was withering in key matches.

After the wrenching loss to Ellis, Jelso was convinced he was taking the wrong mental approach. He faced a paradox. Jelso knew he could beat anybody, but he didn’t stand much chance as long he was beating himself.

Weeks later, he showed up at Racquetball World in Canoga Park for the Summer Sizzler, one of Southern California’s biggest tournaments, toting a psychological self-help book titled “Mental Toughness Training for Sports.”

Determined then to make a breakthrough in San Antonio, Jelso said, he was reprogramming his mind. Long known for his wisecracking, happy-go-luck demeanor, Jelso came to realize that fun on the court had been missing in recent years and that--without it--he was burning out in matches and losing his focus.

To avoid another intensity meltdown in the Olympic Festival, Jelso added a few laughs to his arsenal--not caring how his opponents might react to a little clowning.

And Jelso happily went on to win the Summer Sizzler championship, crushing Adam Karp of Huntington Beach in the final, 15-1, 15-5.

“I’m starting to finally put the whole package together,” said Jelso, back home in Ventura. “I had so much I was working on after the national amateur, and now it’s starting to fall into place.”

With his confidence restored, Jelso was feeling like a world-beater by the time he arrived in San Antonio.

He was.

Jelso lost one game in four matches--the first he played in a 12-15, 15-3, 11-2 (tiebreaker games end at 11 points) victory over San Antonio’s Lance Gilliam.

“I just wanted to get past my first two matches,” Jelso said. “And once I did, I was able to relax a little more.

Jelso beat top-seeded Tim Sweeney, 15-11, 15-9, in the semifinals to earn the right to play Cole, the 1992 amateur champion.

Finally, Jelso was becoming a champion, beating other champions in the process.

“The reason I won is I stayed mentally strong through the whole tournament,” he said. “I just knew I was going to win. I went to bed at night just feeling like I was going to win. I kept myself pumped.”

A gold medal in hand, Jelso also claimed his ultimate prize in San Antonio--a berth on the U.S. national team.