GOALS TO GOLDS

Pick a sports moment and say it was the best. Can you?

Pick an Orange County athlete and say he or she is the most special. Can you?

In this sparkling place by the ocean that offers us waves for surfing, mountains for climbing, parks for running and skateboarding, the fields and the weather to play basketball and baseball and football, soccer and golf and tennis all year long, which has attracted entrepreneurs and innovators who have created better ways to surf and climb and skate, how can we best define our sports?

Is the best moment when a movie cowboy packed up his Angels baseball team and headed to Anaheim, or when a millionaire’s widow presided over our transient NFL Rams, or when a Disney movie helped launch a Disney hockey team called the Mighty Ducks?

We have been blessed with many talented athletes and many goosebump-inducing moments.

We even had a team that changed a sport and created a culture. Mission Viejo Nadadore swimmers made a city famous, a way of life famous.

In 1965, Mission Viejo was a new built-from-scratch community. Matching houses, sparkling grass fields and bright blue swimming pools carved into the beautiful hillsides, offering an idyllic life where children were safe and healthy and life was perfect.

Mark Schubert arrived as a rookie coach in 1972. A 23-year-old from Ohio with, as he said, “goals but no plans,” he was hired as coach of a swim program still forming an identity. All he wanted was to build a team that was the envy of the world.

What he brought to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics was a group of swimmers that would win eight gold medals and a silver.

The golds were won by Mike O’Brien (1,500-meter freestyle), Richard Saeger (800-meter freestyle relay), Tiffany Cohen (400- and 800-meter freestyle), Mary T. Meagher (100- and 200-meter butterfly and 400-meter medley relay) and Dara Torres (400-meter freestyle relay). The silver belonged to Amy White (200-meter backstroke).

New diving coach Ron O’Brien helped the club add four diving medals. Greg Louganis, well on his way to becoming a legend, won gold on the platform and springboard, and Michele Mitchell and Wendy Wyland took silver and bronze, respectively, on the platform.

Mike O’Brien, now 34 and a swimming instructor living in Fountain Valley, recalls his Olympic year and his time as a Nadadore as “just an extremely special thing. Really, it was the swim team which made the city famous.”

Swimmers from all over the world came to Mission Viejo to swim for Schubert. O’Brien remembers being challenged in practice by boys from Brazil, Canada, Australia. He remembers how proud a Nadadore was to wear the custom-made blue bathing suits and the yellow caps to swim meets.

“The Nadadores would come to a meet and it seemed like we took over half the pool,” O’Brien says. “Other teams would march in in street clothes. Never us. We’d always be dressed in team gear, the kind of thing that sets a team apart.”

The Nadadores were trend-setting. In their training methods, in their international appeal, in their uniforms. “Whole countries like Australia modeled themselves on the Nadadores,” O’Brien says.

Becoming the best isn’t easy. Staying the best is even harder. The Nadadore way has been adopted not only by other countries, but also by swim clubs all over the country.

The Nadadores don’t always have the best swimmers and divers any more. Even in Orange County, there is a newer, trendier club in Irvine, the Novaquatics, which might qualify more swimmers to the 2000 U.S. Olympic team than the Nadadores. National champion diver Erica Sorgi, who grew up in Mission Viejo, recently moved to Orlando, Fla., for a final year of training before the Olympic trials in June.

If the Nadadores and Mission Viejo’s swimming success proved Orange County athletes and coaches could bring innovation to some lesser-known sports, the 1978 Cal State Fullerton basketball team proved Orange County teams could excel at more established sports too.

At that time, Fullerton was a state university of no particular reputation. There was no earthly reason to expect what happened to its undistinguished basketball team as the NCAA tournament began. Unseeded and unranked, the Titans--who won the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. postseason tournament--crafted miracle victories over No. 4-ranked New Mexico and No. 11-ranked University of San Francisco.

Against New Mexico, Mike Heenan, an El Dorado High grad who had to wear goggles because a month earlier a teammate had poked him in the eye, rupturing his cornea and nearly costing him the eye, scored 22 points in the Titans’ 90-85 upset. Go figure.

“Cal State Who?” people were calling the Titans. When they weren’t calling them “Cal State Disneyland.”

That was the problem with Orange County. In the rest of the sporting world, no one could quite put a finger on what this place was about.

The feisty Titans, who brought a noisy cheering contingent called the Titan Hellraisers--a rambunctious group of adults, school teachers and factory workers, students and just plain old basketball lovers--with them, seemed able to explain to the rest of the country that all of Orange County was not made up of surfer dudes and Republicans.

A week later, against a USF team which had been to the NCAA tournament 11 times to this first trip for Fullerton, against a USF team featuring a 7-foot center named Bill Cartwright who would eventually win some NBA titles with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, Keith Anderson hit a 20-foot jump shot with three seconds left to clinch the Titans’ 75-72 victory.

There were pep rallies in the streets. You think Orange County fans are blase? Not then, not about the Titans.

When Arkansas, with Sidney Moncrief and Coach Eddie Sutton, edged Fullerton, 61-58, in a quarterfinal in Albuquerque, N.M., it almost didn’t matter. The Titans were swamped again at the airport. Coach Bobby Dye was a hero. The whole county rode a monthlong euphoria.

What the country saw was that Orange County was like everywhere else. It could grab a sporting moment and go nuts. Its local university, even if it didn’t have the tradition of a UCLA or USC, could be a unifying force in the county, a little bit in the same way the 1999 U.S. women’s soccer team, with its three Orange County players, brought the country together for some cheering this summer.

Fullerton’s NCAA basketball run was the start of a grown-up and successful 10-year county sports heyday.

Between the ’78 Titans and 1988, when a swimming dynamo from Placentia named Janet Evans won three Olympic gold medals and cemented the county’s aquatics reputation that had so clearly been defined by the 1984 Nadadores, there were many brilliant moments:

Mater Dei winning its first Southern Section boys’ basketball title in 1983.

Cal State Fullerton winning NCAA baseball titles in 1979 and 1984.

Ram running back Eric Dickerson breaking O.J. Simpson’s NFL single-season rushing record in 1984.

The Angels coming within a strike of the World Series in 1986.

In recent years, it has been in the “other” sports where Orange County has continued to excel. In nurturing women’s soccer and softball players, in golf, in providing the best volleyball players--indoor and beach. In making sports like surfing and skateboarding and snowboarding popular everywhere.

Not bad. For starters.

*

Diane Pucin is a Times sports columnist. She can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

OC 2000 / SPORTS

In the 1972 and ’76 Olympics, Shirley Babashoff won six silver medals in freestyle events and anchored the United States’ gold medal-winning women’s 400-meter freestyle relay teams. She also set 11 world records as a member of the Mission Viejo Nadadores.

Clifford “Gavvy” Cravath was baseball’s home run king before Babe Ruth. Cravath (Santa Ana High) led the National League in home runs six times in seven seasons, starting in 1913. An outfielder for the Philadelphia Phillies, he hit 24 homers in 1915, a record that stood until Ruth hit 29 in 1919.

Janet Evans dominated distance swimming for nearly 10 years and still holds world records for the 400-, 800- and 1,500-meter freestyles. In the 1,500, she has the fastest four times in history. She won 45 national championships and 21 international titles, including the three gold medals she won as a 16-year-old at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

Defender Joy Fawcett and midfielder Julie Foudy started for the winning U.S. soccer team in the 1991 FIFA World Championships in China. In 1996, they won gold medals at the Atlanta Olympic Games. And Fawcett and Foudy played key roles in this year’s U.S. women’s soccer World Cup championship, an achievement that focused national attention on the sport. As teenagers in Orange County, Fawcett was a standout at Edison High; Foudy at Mission Viejo High.

Michele Granger was twice the U.S. Olympic Committee’s softball player of the year at Valencia High where she graduated in 1988 with national high school records of 1,687 career strikeouts, 509 strikeouts in a season, 21 consecutive strikeouts, 37 career no-hitters, 11 perfect games and 71 victories. She was the winning pitcher for the U.S. in the 1996 Olympic gold-medal game.

As an option quarterback at Mater Dei High, John Huarte passed for more than 1,000 yards in each of his three seasons. As a senior, he was the Southern Section player of the year. At Notre Dame, however, Huarte rode the bench for three seasons. But in 1964 Notre Dame went 9-1 and Huarte, who passed for 2,062 yards, became Orange County’s only Heisman Trophy winner.

In 1905, as a freshman at Fullerton High, Walter Johnson struck out 27 in a 15-inning scoreless tie against Santa Ana. A few years later, the Washington Senators signed him and made him a major leaguer at age 19. Johnson won 417 games, second only to Cy Young, including 10 consecutive 20-win seasons. He set a major league record with 110 shutouts, leading the American League in earned run average five times and in strikeouts 12 times.

By finishing first in the 110-meter high hurdles in the 1912 Summer Games in Stockholm, former Orange High standout Fred Kelly became the first athlete from the county to win Olympic gold.

Greg Louganis made headlines with his brilliant diving in the 1984 and ’88 Summer Olympics and his 1995 disclosure that he had kept secret he was HIV positive before hitting his head on the diving board during preliminaries at the ’88 Games in Seoul. Louganis is the only man to win gold medals in platform and springboard events at consecutive Olympics. Louganis won five world championships, four Pan-American championships and 48 national titles.

Pat McCormick won gold medals in the springboard and platform events in consecutive Olympics (1952 and ‘56). She also won 27 U.S. championships.

Ann Meyers Drysdale won letters in seven sports at Sonora High, but basketball took her around the world. She started for the U.S. team that won the silver medal at the 1976 Olympics. She was the first player drafted by the short-lived Women’s Basketball League, in 1978, and got a free-agent tryout with the NBA’s Indiana Pacers in 1979. She is an inaugural member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.

They called Eddie Morris the Blond Bullet--with good reason. As a Huntington Beach High senior in 1940, Morris’ time of 20.7 seconds for the 220-yard dash tied Jesse Owens’ world high school record. That was four-hundredths of a second faster than the top time at the NCAA championships that same year.

Surfer David Nuuhiwa, who moved to the county from Hawaii in the early 1960s, won U.S. titles in 1968 and ’70. “Nuuhiwa was like Nureyev. When he went out in the water, people would paddle in just to watch him surf,” said Steve Pezman, publisher of The Surfer’s Journal. He has retired from competition, but you can still see him regularly riding the waves near the Huntington Beach Pier.

Nolan Ryan’s fastball, once clocked at 100.9 mph, was once the best-known thing about the Angels. The Angels won their first division championship in 1979, after which the Houston Astros made Ryan baseball’s first $1-million-per-year player. Ryan retired in 1993 at age 46, with his fastball still topping 90 mph. His records include most no-hitters (seven, four with the Angels) and most strikeouts in a season (383, for the 1973 Angels) and in a career (5,714).

Mary Decker Slaney ran a 3:09:27 marathon at age 12, a 4:55 mile at age 13 and set the world indoor record over 800 yards at age 15. She was injured during the 1976 Games and kept out of the 1980 Olympics by the U.S. boycott. In 1984 she tripped on the heels of Zola Budd in the 3,000-meter final and tumbled out of the race. Slaney came back to set U.S. records in the 800, mile and 3,000 meters the following year.

Joseph Floyd (Arky) Vaughan was signed out of Fullerton High by the Pittsburgh Pirates, played 14 big-league seasons, and was elected to the Hall of Fame 43 years after his death. Among Hall-of-Fame shortstops, only Honus Wagner’s .329 lifetime average is better than Vaughan’s .318.

From University High to Saddleback College to Cal State Fullerton, Tim Wallach came up through the county ranks. In 1979, he led Fullerton to its first of three College World Series titles and was honored as the nation’s top amateur player. As a pro, Wallach was a five-time All-Star, playing for Montreal, the Dodgers and Angels.

By the time Tiger Woods left Western High in 1994, he had won three Southern Section individual championships and three consecutive U.S. Junior Amateur titles. By the time he left Stanford in 1996, he had added three straight U.S. Amateur Championships and an NCAA individual title. Then Woods took on the pros, and in his first full year on the PGA Tour won the Masters in 1997 by a record 12 strokes. This year, Woods won eight PGA Tour events, including his second major, and a record $6.6 million.

Before the three-point line, Mark Wulfemeyer fired away from long distances to set county scoring records that still stand. His career point total at Troy High (1971-74) was 2,608 points. Wulfemeyer twice led the state in scoring and average--774 points, 31-point average as a junior; 876 points, a county-record 36.5 average as a senior.

George Yardley, who honed his potent jump shot on a court in an alley on Balboa Island, started his NBA career in 1953, in Fort Wayne, Ind. Yardley was the first player in NBA history to score 2,000 points in a season, for the 1957-58 Detroit Pistons. He played seven seasons in the NBA and was an all-star six times.

TIMELINE

1900--A nine-hole golf course with “greens” of oil-soaked sand and fairways of native soil opens in Peters Canyon, near present-day Cowan Heights.

1910--Huntington Beach High’s Art Worthy scores 58 points in a basketball game, a county record until Loara’s Tes Whitlock scores 68 in 1990.

1922--Duke Kahanamoku, an Olympic champion swimmer from Honolulu, visits Corona del Mar and introduces surfing to the county.

1926--Delbert “Bud” Higgins makes the first surfboard--10 feet long and weighing 136 pounds--in the county out of a pine plank.

1935--Howard Hughes sets a speed record of 351 mph in his all-metal, low-wing monoplane at a course north of Costa Mesa.

1948--The first Newport-to-Ensenada yacht race takes place.

1951--Los Alamitos Race Course opens.

1966--The Angels play their first regular-season game at Anaheim Stadium on April 19.

1967--The Anaheim Convention Center opens.

1970--Clyde Wright throws the first no-hitter at Anaheim Stadium on July 3.

1971--A plane crash kills three Cal State Fullerton assistant football coaches who were traveling to scout a game at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

1973--Nolan Ryan sets the major league single-season strikeout record (383) in a 5-4 victory over Minnesota in 11 innings Sept. 27.

1978--The Cal State Fullerton men’s basketball team comes within one basket of reaching the NCAA Final Four.

1979--The Angels win their first American League West title and, on Oct. 5, their first playoff game, defeating the Baltimore Orioles, 4-3, at Anaheim Stadium.

1979--Ram owner Carroll Rosenbloom dies on April 2 and his widow, Georgia, becomes majority owner. The ballclub moves its offices and practice facilities to Rams Park in Anaheim and makes Anaheim Stadium its home field.

1982--The first Op Pro surf competition, with a purse of $25,000, is held in Huntington Beach. In 1999, the renamed Gotcha Pro’s purse is $120,000.

1983--Cal State Fullerton stuns the nation’s top-ranked men’s basketball team, previously unbeaten Nevada Las Vegas, 86-78, in front of an overflow crowd of 5,015 at Titan Gym on Feb. 24.

1984--The Olympics come to Cal State Fullerton’s gym for team handball, the streets of Mission Viejo for cycling and Coto de Caza for the modern pentathlon.

1985--Rod Carew becomes the 16th player in major league history to record 3,000 hits, on Aug. 4, at Anaheim Stadium.

1986--The Angels come within one strike of going to their first World Series. With a 3-1 series advantage over the Boston Red Sox, a 5-4 lead with two outs in the ninth inning and two strikes on batter Dave Henderson, reliever Donnie Moore gives up a two-run home run. Boston wins the game, 7-6, in 11 innings and ultimately the American League title.

1987--The UC Irvine men’s basketball team christens the $15-million Bren Center on Jan. 8.

1992--Walt Disney Co., venturing into professional sports for the first time, gains approval to establish an NHL franchise in Anaheim.

1993--The Arrowhead Pond opens and the Mighty Ducks make their debut Oct. 8 in front of a sellout of 17,320.

1994--Former Woodbridge High swimmer Chad Hundeby breaks the English Channel swim record, covering the 20 miles in 7 hours 17 minutes. . . .

The Rams play their last game in Anaheim Stadium on Dec. 24. They move to St. Louis.

1996--Gene Autry and his wife, Jackie, sell a 25% ownership share of the Angels to Walt Disney Co., handing over the reins of day-to-day operations.

1998--The Angels open the season April 1 in the newly renovated Edison Field in front of the first home opener sellout in team history.