Youth Is Served

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 was talking to Pete Sampras a few months ago about the pros and cons of no-ad tennis.

He was against it. Sampras, after all, is mindful of tradition.

In passing, he mentioned that he remembered playing no-ad in high school. I thought he was kidding.

He wasn’t.

Three years before Sampras won the first of his 12 (and counting) Grand Slam titles, he played high school tennis, winning the Southern Section individual championship for Palos Verdes in 1987.

He is not the only local luminary to have been a Southern Section individual champion in the 1900s. Others include Ellsworth Vines of Pasadena (1927), Bobby Riggs of Franklin (1935) and Stan Smith of Pasadena (1964) to name a few. Jack Kramer of Montebello won the national interscholastic singles championship in 1938.

The first time I saw Sampras play was at the Newsweek event at Indian Wells in 1988. By then, the 16-year-old had left high school dual meets behind. Heads swiveled and eyes widened when he used his smooth backhand and powerful serve to fight off five match points in a first-round match against Ramesh Krishnan of India.

One round later, a poised Sampras beat fellow Palos Verdes resident and practice partner Eliot Teltscher in straight sets. Teltscher was then ranked 25th in the world.

Afterward Teltscher said he had teased Sampras beforehand, saying: “I asked him if his truant officer knew he was away from school.”