Forfeit by Fear

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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I started covering high school sports in Denver in 1983. In 1988, I moved to Southern California to become the prep editor of the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner and from 1990 to ’97 I had a similar position with The Times.

I walked up and down more sidelines than I can count. Often, the conditions were less than ideal: Temperatures greater than 100 degrees, snowstorms, driving rain, fields with no grass, goal posts better suited for soccer games.

I saw some extraordinary athletes and performances and was part of several investigative stories, but nothing compares to a football game I covered between City Section rivals Wilmington Banning and Dorsey in October 1991.

The teams were the best in the City and their regular-season matchup would determine which school would be the favorite in the playoffs. The week of the game, however, Banning Coach Joe Dominguez shocked everyone when he announced that his school would forfeit the game, rather than play it, for fear of gang violence.

Dorsey had been the site of two gang-related shootings that month, and Dominguez feared further violence when the teams squared off.

The decision was the first of its kind in Southern California and made national headlines. District administrators, politicians and even former Los Angeles police chief Darryl Gates tried to convince Banning to take the field, but to no avail. The game was not played.

I never saw high school sports in the same light after that incident.