Splendid Memories

High school sports serve as a rite of passage for the athletes who play them, the student, friends and families that gather to watch them and the sportswriters who cut their professional teeth covering them.

High school football games in Los Angeles date to 1896, but it wasn’t until 1934 that the Los Angeles City Section was born.

The Southern Section was established in 1912 and held its first athletic competition in 1913.

This story is not an attempt to document the achievements of every outstanding athlete, coach and team that made a mark, for there are far too many to chronicle here.

Rather, it is a history lesson of sorts told by current and former Times staff writers who have written about Southland prep athletes. Most of the writers graduated from Los Angeles-area high schools. And while many have gone on to cover college and professional sports as beat writers or columnists, all maintain indelible images of the prep athletes they watched, covered and, in some instances, competed with and against on the playing field.

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It was impressive at the time when a skinny kid from San Diego Hoover High named Ted Williams pitched a shutout and hit a home run to beat my Pasadena High team in 1936, but in the years since, it has become even bigger as Williams played out his Hall of Fame career.

There weren’t many high schools from Santa Barbara to San Diego in the 1930s--San Diego schools were part of the Southern Section until 1960--and those that had baseball teams always looked forward to the Pomona 20-30 Club tournament. It was the unofficial Southern California championships.

Teams played doubleheaders, and on the final day Williams hit three homers, two in the morning--in the same inning--against South Pasadena and one in the championship game against Pasadena.

Pasadena didn’t play Muir Tech in those days because the school board did not want a cross-town rivalry, but we had a chance to see the Terriers in the 20-30 tournament. Their leadoff man was a catcher named Jackie Robinson, who was already a terror on the basepaths. Against Covina, he stole five bases.

Jackie and I became friends while taking a number of freshman classes together at Pasadena Junior College. On the field he was very aggressive, but off it he was quiet and shy, a normal guy unaffected by his athletic feats. He was an average student who might have done better had he not been out for football, basketball, baseball and track every day of the year.

One of my most cherished memories is of the night Jackie became the first black athlete to receive Pasadena JC’s most-valuable-player award in football at the Elks Club, where blacks were not welcome in that era.

Harpo Marx was the entertainment and as he played the piano he set the tone for the evening when he said, “It takes both the white and black keys to play the Star Spangled Banner.”