Kennedy Assassination

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.

*

Flash back to Nov. 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy is murdered in Dallas. Millions of us react with shock, grief, horror.

Suddenly the world of sports loses all relevance for the wet-behind-the-ears Times reporter a year out of college.

Surely the first-round football playoff game I was supposed to cover--defending champion Loyola vs. Santa Monica--could wait. Couldn’t we all stay home this Friday night to grieve over our fallen president?

Hardly. The games--at least many of them--must go on, the CIF told us.

I stood, head bowed, with others in a crowd that was asked to observe a moment of silence at Santa Monica City College. I paid only nodding attention to writing about a game won by Loyola and its single-wing tailback, Mike Bergdahl.

Today, JFK’s death aside, my brief but rewarding tenure of tracking 400-plus high schools for The Times in 1963 and 1964 flashed back like grainy old footage.

I’ll never forget Gene Washington and Earl McCullouch running amok in the same backfield for Long Beach Poly’s aptly named Jackrabbits.

Or Bobby Bonds of Riverside Poly long-jumping 25 feet years before joining the San Francisco Giants and becoming the father of a baseball superstar named Barry.