The Best, Bar None

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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Ten years before I graduated from high school, I saw Steve Hug of Chatsworth win the 1968 City Section all-around gymnastics championship before a capacity crowd at Cal State Los Angeles.

It was a performance by a high school athlete that equals any I have witnessed in 15 years covering sports for The Times.

Unfortunately, most people today are unaware that Los Angeles schools once were regarded as the training ground for some of the nation’s best gymnasts, producing numerous amateur champions and 23 Olympians.

Los Angeles city schools incorporated gymnastics into the curriculum in 1926 and produced Olympians in every decade from the 1920s through the 1980s. The ‘40s and ‘50s were the sport’s golden era in Los Angeles, with almost every school fielding a team, some with more than 100 boys in their programs.

I was familiar with gymnastics when I went to the 1968 City finals because my father, Mel Klein, coached gymnastics at Hamilton, and my uncle, Arnie Klein, was a three-time City all-around champion at Roosevelt in the ‘40s.

But Hug’s performance was a revelation. He defeated his closest competitor by 13 points, the largest margin on record in City history, and scored 28 1/2 of his team’s 33 1/2 points to lead Chatsworth to the team title. Hug went on to compete in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics and won the 1974 NCAA all-around championship while attending Stanford.

Mitch Gaylord of Van Nuys Grant was a gold medalist in the 1984 Los Angeles Games, and Charles Lakes of North Hills Monroe and Jon Omori of University also became Olympians in the years after Hug’s dominating performance in the City finals.

Sadly, however, gymnastics programs as a whole in Los Angeles high schools began to decline in the ‘80s because of safety, budget and facility issues. More and more schools dropped their programs until gymnastics as an interscholastic sport in the City Section ended in the spring of 1991.