1994 Was the Year the Curtain Fell : THE YEAR IN REVIEW. Only amateurs gave O.C. fans reasons to cheer.

First the baseball team stopped playing.

Then the hockey team.

Soon the football team is to be signed over, sealed and delivered to another city--banished to St. Louis for crimes against George Halas, the NFC West and the sensibilities of a community given to conspicuous consumption, except in those cases when the product goes 23-57 over the course of five seasons.

And that, on this first morning of the 1995 sporting calendar, leaves us with . . .

The Clippers, Orange County’s Reigning Professional Sports Franchise.

(Slogan: “Hey, We’re Better Than Nothing!”)

If Orange County government could file for bankruptcy in 1994, shouldn’t Orange County’s sports fans have been afforded the same remedy? Look, judge, no assets. No Angels since Aug. 12, called on account of strike. No Ducks since Oct. 1, by order of Gary Bettman. No Rams after Dec. 24, if John Shaw has his way. No Disneyland Pigskin Classic ever again, canceled due to idle turnstiles. Maybe no more Freedom Bowl, too, now that its life-giving TV contract has expired and the holder, Raycom, has 30 days to decide whether to (a) renew; (b) not renew, or (c) buy the game and move it to another locale where in-house crowds larger than 27,477 can realistically be expected.

St. Louis, perhaps?

We still have professional basketball, kind of, in the form of the Clippers’ six-game mini-package (plus one exhibition) at The Pond. Anaheim calls it its “14% Solution”--14% of a full NBA home schedule, played by 14% of real NBA team. Philosophers continue to debate the ageless conundrum: Is it better to have the Clippers play in your building 41 times a season--or six?

Beyond that, Orange County has the Salsa and the Splash and the Bullfrogs and the Dukes. All are members of professional sports leagues (meaning, they get paid), but in which pro sports do they participate?

Pop quiz:

With pen or pencil, try to connect the team with the sport it plays:

Bullfrogs: Indoor soccer

Dukes: Outdoor soccer

Salsa: Roller hockey

Splash: Team tennis

(Points will be awarded at the end of the essay. Winner(s) to receive tickets to the Rams’ 1995 Anaheim Stadium opener.)

Before the work stoppages, the Angels made news via traditional means (they changed general managers, they changed managers, they finished 21 games below .500), and the Ducks made bits of history here and there, tying the expansion record for most victories--33--during the 1993-94 season and finally signing their 1993 No. 1 draft pick, Paul Kariya, after a different sort of work stoppage that dragged on for 14 months.

Good news? There was some, most of it on the amateur level, or outside the mainstream, largely devoted to the bashing of narrow-minded stereotypes long past their pull date.

Age barriers fell; at 18, Tiger Woods of Cypress became the youngest golfer to win the U.S. Amateur.

Sex barriers crumbled; freshman Ila Borders of Southern California College became the first woman to win an intercollegiate baseball game, beating Claremont-Mudd, 12-1, on a complete-game five-hitter.

Cultural bias buckled, too, when the World Cup played to sellout crowds and record TV audiences in these supposedly soccerphobic United States. Team USA, housed and trained in Mission Viejo, garnered top-of-the-page headlines with its 2-1 upset of Colombia and respectable showing in a 1-0 second-round loss to eventual champion Brazil. (Still, if Dooley had caught the far post in the first half . . . )

Baseball and soccer teams from Cal State Fullerton traveled deep into the NCAA playoffs; Augie Garrido’s every-other-year College World Series regulars lost to Georgia Tech in the semifinals and Al Mistri’s half-scholarship heroes reached the NCAA soccer quarterfinals a year after advancing to the Final Four.

UC Irvine, despite 19 regular-season losses, made the final of the Big West men’s basketball tournament. Mater Dei High School won Division I championships in football and boys’ basketball, ranking first in USA Today’s final national football poll after defeating the previous No. 1, Bishop Amat, in the division title game. Brea Olinda High won its fourth consecutive girls’ basketball State championship. Cypress College swept a doubleheader from Rancho Santiago to win the community college State baseball title.

But the Orange County sports story of the year, for badder or worse, was the state of the Rams. Would it be California, Maryland or Missouri come 1995? The question annoyed us for 12 full months, with stories of Ram president John Shaw playing Baltimore off St. Louis, Anaheim off Baltimore, St. Louis off Anaheim and thumbing his nose at the frustrated Save the Rams coalition on a weekly basis.

Save the Rams, a well-intentioned but under-juiced task force formed to fend off the grubby paws of St. Louis and Baltimore, was organized by sports agent Leigh Steinberg and a variety of local civic leaders in mid-June, five months after Shaw notified Anaheim that the team was planning to invoke the escape clause in its Anaheim Stadium lease.

It was also a month after owner Georgia Frontiere, strategically breaking a lengthy ban on newspaper interviews, went on the record to say her Rams were losing money, “forcing” her to consider relocation for the sheer sake of economic survival.

If it wasn’t happening here, it would have been comical to watch--major players and political heavyweights such as House majority leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), former U.S. Senator Thomas Eagleton, Maryland Gov. William Donald Shaefer and Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos stepping over one another as they chased the NFC’s losingest franchise of the 1990s.

St. Louis moved into the lead early in the fall with its all-but-the-moon offer to place the Rams inside a new 70,000-seat domed stadium, charge them next-to-nothing rent, build them a new $15-million practice facility, pay $15 million in NFL relocation fees and shell out the $30 million required to buy out the Anaheim Stadium lease.

From there, the scene switched from the ridiculous to utter farce as Shaw, relishing his position with a bit too much gusto, began to toy with St. Louis, inventing new hoops for Eagleton and Co. to jump through.

How about a seat-licensing deal that would raise another $60 million for poor, down-and-out Georgia?

How about guaranteeing the sale of 55,000 seats per game?

How about painting those seats Ram blue and gold?

How about taking a flying leap, St. Louis ought to have told Shaw, but these are delicate negotiations, remember, and what would St. Louis be without the Rams? A fish without a bicycle?

Back home, Save the Rams scraped together the best counterproposal it could, including a $70-million stadium refurbishment, $15 million to $20 million in season-ticket and luxury-box guarantees and the purchase of a minority interest in the team, which would give Frontiere an additional $50 million.

Shaw turned up his nose at the offer, and Frontiere apparently never laid eyes on it. After a Dec. 8 meeting with Frontiere, Ram booster club president Frank Bryant accused Shaw of screening the Save The Rams’ offer from Frontiere. According to Bryant, Frontiere “expressed a great deal of surprise” when Bryant told her the proposal included guarantees and a potential minority investor.

By year’s end, Save the Rams was threatening legal action to block any franchise move, charging a lack of good-faith negotiations with the Orange County group. Steinberg also promised to lobby for the eight votes required to block a move at the NFL owners meetings March 12-17 in Phoenix.

Keep the Rams would have been a better name for Steinberg and his band of harried men. Save the Rams--that was Chuck Knox’s assignment. Turn the thing around, win some games, restore some enthusiasm among the fans and fill enough seats to render Shaw’s charges of “apathy” ludicrous.

This was Year III in a three-year program designed to land the Rams in the playoffs by 1994. It did not begin with a rousing start. First, all attempts to acquire a big-play receiver blew up in Knox’s face; Dallas teased the Rams but ultimately refused to part with Alvin Harper, free agent Haywood Jeffires verbally agreed to a Ram contract, only to contract cold feet at the 11th hour and 59th minute.

Shortly after Ram coaches returned from Jeffires’ Greensboro, N.C., home with an unsigned $1.1-million contract, Knox unveiled his draft strategy: Take Trent Dilfer, if he’s there. Cross his heart, hope to resign, we had his word on it.

Picking fifth, the Rams saw Dilfer dangling there, still unattached, and Knox blinked. He scrambled out of the pocket better than Chris Miller ever could, trading down not once but twice--all the way to No. 16, where he chose an offensive tackle , Auburn’s Wayne Gandy, proving once again that an old coach never changes his stripes.

Gandy became the new Jim Everett, the butt of Ram-based humor, of which there would be a quarry-full. The old Jim Everett moved on to New Orleans (for a future seventh-round draft choice), where he immediately turned the table on TV talk-show host Jim Rome, whose idea of “interviewing” Everett was to repeatedly call him “Chris,” an insult first to Everett but foremost to Chris Evert, one of the gutsiest performers ever to appear on any athletic stage.

Miller, brought in from Atlanta with a three-year, $9-million contract, was Everett’s replacement. Temporarily. Miller was damaged goods, held together by surgeon’s scars. The Rams knew this, but they coughed up six zeros anyway and prayed for Miller’s track record to change course miraculously.

It didn’t happen, of course. The Rams spent their 1994 season carting Miller off the field and replacing him with Chris Chandler, or carting Chandler off the field and replacing him with Miller. Seven times in 16 games, a quarterback other than the starter finished the game for the Rams.

The rest of the story was sadly too predictable: Ram defense holds it together for a couple months; Rams lose games by scores of 8-5 and 20-17; Rams fall to 4-7 after a near-miss in San Francisco; Ram defense gets demoralized; entire team goes through the motions in December, finishing the season with seven consecutive losses and a 4-12 record, Knox’s worst in 22 years as an NFL head coach.

It figured to be his last, too, regardless of where the Rams play their games in 1995. Knox made his reputation in the ‘70s, when his deadly conservative, bore-them-till-they-drop approach could still grind out 12-2 seasons. The game did a back flip on Knox in the mid-’80s, turning pass-happy, and he never really dealt with it, as his post-1986 victory totals will attest: 9, 9, 7, 9, 7, 6, 5 and 4 and over and out.

The Ducks and the Angels managed but half-seasons in 1994, which was bad news for the Ducks, who had hoped to build with Kariya upon their sensational rookie debut, but a positive development for the Angels. In fact, it can be argued that 1994 was the Angels’ best season of the decade, seeing that it was the shortest--only 115 games, sparing their fans seven weeks of misery once Bud Selig and Donald Fehr decided to play Dr. Kervokian on Aug. 12.

With those 115 games, the Angels wreaked their usual havoc. They lost 68, finishing with the worst record in the American League and only percentage points ahead of San Diego (.409 to .402), the most hapless outfit in major league baseball.

Along the way, the Angels’ rookie general manager, 36-year-old Bill Bavasi fired Buck Rodgers, the team’s best manager since Gene Mauch, on May 17, with the Angels 2 1/2 games out of first place, and replaced him Marcel Lachemann, who was and remains a fine pitching coach.

Under Rodgers, the Angels were a true-to-their-talent-level 16-23; under Lachemann, 30-44. Rodgers’ alleged sins were speaking too frankly, which hurt the feelings of several key players (such as Phil Leftwich) and “not working hard enough,” in the estimation of Bavasi, who had been observing Rodgers from his new position for all of four months.

For this, Rodgers got the ax, almost two years to the date of the bus crash that nearly cost him his life. What he really deserved were manager-of-the-year votes.

The Ducks, by pleasant contrast, committed no grievous front-office gaffes, although they teetered on the precipice during the Kariya holdout. Unwilling to yield to Kariya’s demand of $2 million per year, the Ducks let their star attraction sit while waging a race for the playoffs with an offense that averaged 2.7 goals per game.

Duck management maintained it was good enough being in the thick of it; this was, after all, an expansion team, even if they claimed to hate the term. Duck fans, who sold out 27 home dates, including the last 25 in a row, wanted more, and they had a point. At the prices they were paying, they felt deserving of immediate gratification.

Ultimately, the Ducks won 33 games, same as San Jose, but finished 11 points behind in the standings. The difference? The Sharks tied 16 games, the Ducks only five, and the Sharks swept their head-to-head series with Anaheim, six games to none.

Still, the Ducks quickly emerged as the glittering jewel among the county’s collection of professional sports franchises, shrinking though it may be. With little more than a resilient set of goaltenders and a nose-to-the-ice-shavings defense, the Ducks tied the NHL record for most victories by an expansion team and finished with 71 points, five more than the defending Stanley Cup finalists up the freeway.

During the summer, Duck General Manager Jack Ferreira finally took care of business, giving Kariya what he wanted (three years, $6.5 million) on Sept. 1 and signing the team’s top pick in 1994, defenseman Oleg Tverdovsky, as well. Hopes were high as the Ducks concluded training camp, but by Oct. 1, they were placed on the back burner--if not extinguished altogether--when Gary Bettman shut down the season, showing Selig that, yes, two can play the game of hara-kiri.

Three months later, the first puck of the 1994-95 season has yet to drop, and if it doesn’t fall within three weeks, the season, according to both sides, will be lost. That will turn the winter and spring months over to baseball’s picket lines and replacement players, where the Angels and 29 other franchises, formerly known as “big league” clubs, will attempt to pass off double-A prospects and projects as the real thing.

Better to buy the Rams’ 1995 Orange County season-ticket package than buy into that.

Or buy into the colleges and the high schools. Here is where Orange County experienced its highest highs in 1994.

Among them:

--Cal State Fullerton’s baseball team winning twice on the same day in Stillwater, Okla., to qualify for the College World Series, where it lost its opener to Georgia Tech, scored 20 runs to knock defending champion LSU out of the tournament and sent Florida State home as well before losing in the semifinals to Georgia Tech, 3-2, in the 12th inning.

--UC Irvine’s basketball team, dead last in the 10-team Big West during the regular-season, beating UC Santa Barbara, Utah State and the University of the Pacific to reach the tournament final, where it came within two Chris Brown three-pointers of becoming the first 11-19 team to qualify for the NCAA playoffs.

--Fullerton’s soccer team splitting with the then-top ranked team in the nation, Indiana--upsetting the Hoosiers on a foggy pitch at UCLA during the regular season, losing to them a month later in Bloomington, Ind., 2-1, with the winner advancing to the Final Four.

--Mater Dei winning the Southern Section Division I boys’ basketball and football championships.

--Brea Olinda tying the California record for most consecutive State girls’ basketball championships by winning its fourth in a row.

--Los Alamitos extending its unbeaten football streak to 47 games before losing in the Division I semifinals to Mater Dei, 28-24, in front of an Anaheim Stadium crowd of 30,065--or almost 5,000 more than the audience the Rams drew for their Christmas Eve sign-off against the Redskins.

--The inaugural John Wooden Classic, which turned the basketball teams of UCLA, Kentucky, Kansas and UMass loose inside The Pond one December Saturday to the enjoyment of 18,000-plus rapturous hoop junkies.

The Wooden Classic proved one point: If it’s quality, Orange County will support it--up to the roof, if not all the way through it.

The Clippers and their four sellouts at the Pond proved another: Sometimes, it doesn’t even have to be quality. Sometimes, being different--or at least not the same old thing--is enough to send the dollar bills flying out of the wallets and the purses.

So the Clippers are here, being wooed to one day make Anaheim a full-time gig, and the Rams are on the side of the road that leads out of town.

The Rams for the Clippers?

Is that a trade we’re willing to make?

Do we have any choice?