COLLEGE WORLD SERIES : Olsen Finally Enjoying Midwest Tour

D.C. Olsen is kicking back inside his summer home, the Omaha Marriott, lecturing a writer on his academic field of expertise, “Cal State Fullerton and the College World Series in the 1990s.”

D.C. was there in ‘92, the year the Titans reached the World Series final by way of rowboat, life raft, inner tube and pontoon, floating past Miami in a stormy semifinal before hitting the rocks the next afternoon against Pepperdine.

“I’ve never been through anything like that,” he says. “Never. It was pouring. Like a monsoon. But we had to get the game in because CBS was televising the championship game the next day.

“The game didn’t end until after midnight because of the rain and we didn’t get back to the hotel until 1:30 in the morning. Then we had to get up at 7 to play at noon. I got two hours’ sleep and we battled all day and lost by one run. It was devastating.”

D.C. was there in ‘94, the Gilligan World Series, when Fullerton had tying run on third base with no outs in the bottom of the 12th inning in its semifinal against Georgia Tech--and left Dante Powell stranded.

“That was devastating, too,” he says. “That was something we’d done all year--get the guy in from third. But it didn’t happen. We were too tight, too overanxious.”

D.C. casts no aspersions, because he appeared in that 12th inning as a pinch-hitter, as tight and overanxious as the next Titan.

“We had our fastest guy on third, no outs, all we needed was a shallow pop fly. I flied out to second base. I was too shallow.”

As for ‘95, D.C. can spin a few yarns there as well. Today, the Titans’ senior first baseman will play his 14th and final College World Series game, establishing a Fullerton record win or lose, although, for a change, Olsen is lobbying for an item from column A.

Three trips to Omaha in four years. That’s a lot of corn silos. D.C. knows his way around the town without a road map, knows all the hot spots, such as they are.

Where does one go for a little excitement in Omaha? Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium, of course, on the days the Titans are playing.

Where does one go for a little fun?

“Pauli’s,” D.C. quickly suggests. “It’s a place where a lot of fans go after the games. It’s downtown. A good place to go and just hang out.”

D.C. is also familiar with some of Omaha’s finest medical facilities. He took an early Monday morning tour of Methodist Hospital and was so impressed with the place he promptly made a donation.

He left behind a kidney stone.

D.C. passed the stone between 1 and 5 in the morning, with the aid of a flushing dye and several doses of Demarol, and was back in the starting lineup by 2:30 in the afternoon.

About an hour later, he homered during the Titans’ 11-1 romp over Tennessee.

D.C. describes the ordeal at the hospital as “excruciating” and “the most pain I’ve ever gone through” and says his teammates have told him they “want it to happen to me again.”

Of course. That’s the Titan way. You take one for the team. Or, on certain occasions, you pass one for the team. Whatever gets you to the final Saturday.

If this last trip to Omaha has been Olsen’s most painful, it has also been his most enjoyable. These Titans have played three games here, won three games, scored 28 runs, given up seven runs, reached the title game by taking the easy route, for once in our lifetime. And D.C., a career .164 hitter during the postseason before Omaha ‘95, is batting .462 this time through, tied for second on the team with six base hits.

Practice, practice, practice. D.C. was an overwhelmed freshman during his first visit to Rosenblatt, blown away by all the occupied chairs. He was an overshadowed platoon player in ‘94, just happy to fill out the bottom of the batting order behind Powell, Mark Kotsay, Jeff Ferguson, Bret Hemphill and Sal Mancuso.

Now, he is the grizzled senior on a precocious squad of overachieving underclassmen, providing freshmen and sophomores with his free travel seminar, “Omaha On A Victory Every Other Day.”

The trick, D.C. tells them, is crowd control.

“Naturally, you have to know how to deal with the crowd thing,” he says. “We love it now. Here, the crowd helps us, it doesn’t hurt us.”

Regular-season visits to Wichita, Kan., and Austin, Tex., helped prepare these Titans for Rosenblatt. “Those crowds were brutal,” D.C. says. “You have 8,000 or 9,000 people right on the field and they’re all over you. You’re out there thinking, ‘If I make an error, I’m done.’

“But here, the crowds are pretty much neutral. They cheer for both sides. They come out to see good baseball and great plays. We try to use it as a tool. The big crowds make us play harder, I think.”

Omaha can be a delightful place, D.C. insists, if you let it.

“I love it,” he says. “I love it.”

There’s only one place he hasn’t checked out yet: The champions press conference in the Hall of Fame Room at Rosenblatt.

For years, he has been meaning to stop by. Maybe today.