WINNING IN THE RAIN

High school sports serve as a rite of passage for the athletes who play them, the students, 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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The conditions were ideal . . . if your name was Noah and you just finished building an ark. The playing field the night of Dec. 4, 1987, at Santa Ana Stadium was a quagmire. I remember former Southern Section commissioner Stan Thomas wearing his duck-hunting boots.

It was pouring and most of the 6,000 rain-soaked fans in attendance wondered if host Santa Ana High and visiting El Toro would even play their Southern Conference semifinal football playoff game. Yet somehow, the two county powerhouses did.

Santa Ana, utilizing running back Robert Lee and a punishing defense, had controlled the game and appeared to have a victory wrapped up. But as time expired in the fourth quarter, El Toro quarterback Bret Johnson performed “The Miracle on Flower Street” when he completed a “Hail Mary” pass to Adam Brass.

Santa Ana’s Bobby Joyce, a 6-foot-7 defender, leaped high in an effort to intercept Johnson’s desperate pass. But he bobbled the ball and Brass, only 5-10, took it out of his hands and raced five yards into the end zone.

I remember turning to a fellow reporter and asking, “Did El Toro just score on that play?” Both of us were uncertain if Brass had caught the ball, so we raced down the sideline to the end zone to confirm that he indeed had scored on the 51-yard pass play. Ken Romaniszyn kicked the extra point and El Toro had a 13-12 victory.

Afterward, I asked El Toro Coach Bob Johnson, an avid horse player at Del Mar, if the play was comparable to a 100-to-1 long shot winning a stakes race. Without hesitation, he said, “More like 1,000-to-1.”

In 25 years of covering high school sports for The Times, this game tops my list of greatest comeback victories. It was certainly the most unlikely victory, but then Coach Johnson and his son, Bret, had a flare for pulling off the near-impossible those days.