Tiger Tale

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 grew up in a house down the street from where Tiger Woods went to high school.

Which is to say I attended Anaheim’s Western High a few years ahead of the world’s current greatest golfer. Tiger graduated in 1994.

Certain colleagues and friends (who know far too much about my personal background, I have decided) will jokingly refer to me as “Western High’s second-most famous alum.” This is patently untrue, of course. Andy Messersmith is also a Western grad.

But it is something to consider: Modest Western High, known athletically for its overachieving football teams and undersized basketball players, once provided locker space for the top-ranked golfer on the planet. Not that Western ever was or will be considered a golfing dynasty. I remember receiving my first assignment as a sophomore sportswriter for the “Pioneer Press”--a story on the varsity golf team. My response at the time: “We have a golf team?”

Tiger’s arrival on Western’s campus was something of a harmonic convergence, a cosmic fluke. He could have landed anywhere, won his three CIF Southern Section individual championships (in 1991, ’93 and ‘94) at any school in the area. Western got lucky--and every student, teacher and alum knew it. Tiger’s eventual stardom wasn’t an if; it was a certainty, a mere matter of time, as anyone who surveyed that sweet swing at 16 could testify.

For four years, Western got Tiger tee times--and the school has been reaping the dividends ever since. Western High School: Home of the Pioneers, proud launching pad of Tiger, Inc.