TRASH MASTERS

At a time when Muhammad Ali, the greatest trash-talker of all time, is near the top of everyone’s sportsman of the century list, high school athletes are told to keep their vainglorious and hurtful remarks to themselves.

Messages don’t often get more mixed than that.

But, as Ali often claimed, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”

So, then, slash your throat in a fit of “mad” grandiloquence, but only if the dunk was “crazy,” the touchdown run “stupid,” or the home run “loud.”

If you “gots handle” like Kobe or “the killer crossover” like Iverson or “ill range” like Reggie Miller, you get it.

Only then, apparently, is it not bragging. Only then, apparently, does trash-talking become the acceptable, universal tongue of our playing fields.

Only then can the impressionable high school athlete follow in the flouncing footsteps of Jordan and Barkley and Rocker and Bird and Deion and Keyshawn and Reggie, look you square in the eye and dare to say, “Hey, when’s the varsity show up?”

Only then are you not the “mouse in the house.” Above all, you do not want to be the “mouse in the house,” because that very likely means you’ve been “dropped off at school” and, basically, you’ve taken one “in your mouth.”

None of which is good.

“It [trash-talking] has gotten worse,” veteran high school football and basketball official Speed Castillo said. “It’s a lack of control. It’s the flower children, the baby boomers. The baby boomers don’t know squat. They want to mock people. Like Charles Barkley and Latrell Sprewell. That’s garbage. That’s disrespectful and rude, spitting in people’s faces. You do it in my ball game, I’ll spit right back in your face.”

At a high school football game in November, on a cool night when Long Beach Poly was to play Fountain Valley, a Fountain Valley player appeared to be in a near-rage an hour before kickoff.

As the Poly team assembled in a tunnel beneath the concrete stands, the Fountain Valley player stood on the field and summoned the heavily-favored Jackrabbits with a defiant wave.

“C’mon!” he screamed at them, his jaw rigid. “C’mon! Keep talking! C’mon!”

He continued the threats as Poly streamed from the tunnel and, during stretching, when the teams were separated only by the 50-yard line, he gestured at several opposing players.

Finally, he and a Poly player stood on opposite sides of the field and pointed menacingly at one another. They slashed their throats with staged exaggeration. And angrily. So angrily.

Though the field was thick with coaches and school officials, none moved to stop the trash-talking, even when it escalated into taunting. They evidently figured it to be harmless posturing, the inevitable fallout of a healthy competition.

That is, two teenagers threatening to cut the other’s jugular.

Castillo didn’t work that game. In 46 years as a football official and 44 as a basketball referee, however, Castillo saw many like it.

“It’s a big issue,” said Castillo, who, at 69, worked his final prep football game a few weeks ago. “Guys don’t want to officiate or coach anymore. Why put up with it? We have to make the rules tougher and enforce them. Then keep the parents out of it.”

In a Chicago hospital, Neal Goss, a 15-year-old hockey player, has a broken spinal cord. At the end of a game notable for the trash-talking, Goss took a sucker check from behind and slammed headfirst into the boards.

The reason? Goss later said it was that the officials failed to control the trash-talking, which he believed led to the over-the-top violence.

“[They] did nothing to cool down the ever-increasing emotional intensity,” he said.

We are a culture of trash-talkers, of course. A society that supports daytime television talk shows, sports-talk radio, gangsta rap, professional wrestling, “South Park,” Spike Lee, Governor Jesse Ventura, Jim Rome and Shannon Sharpe would have to be.

Sharpe, a particularly mouthy wide receiver for the Denver Broncos, drew a taunting penalty in his first organized football game. As an eighth-grader in Glennville, Ga., he scored a touchdown, then mocked the kid he beat.

Jerry Witte, football coach and athletic director at Saddleback High, has a pretty good idea where youngsters come upon such ideas.

“The TV camera focuses in,” Witte said. “If you watch a football game or a basketball game, you don’t see a lot of it during the play. But, it’s after the play. They look at the player’s face. They look at the coach’s face. The camera is right there. You can lip read, see gestures being made.

“The television camera has made it so visible for kids as they grow up, no matter what the sport is. You see the hits and then the reaction to them. Or the receiver makes a great play, bounces up and points to the other sideline. Kids copy that.”

One man’s playground poetry is another man’s woofing. Evander Holyfield talked so incessantly that Mike Tyson bit his ear. If it was symbolism Tyson was after, he might have gone for Holyfield’s tongue.

Four years ago, University of Virginia football player Maurice Anderson won a pickup basketball game on campus, and reportedly trash-talked through most of the experience. Minutes later, he had his face opened by a box cutter, swung by a kid who didn’t appreciate the yapping.

Ask Anderson if trash-talking is harmless. A doctor needed 75 stitches to put him back together.

While it is perhaps more often associated with inner-city playgrounds, trash-talking and taunting aren’t uncommon in Orange County, where “Oh, yeah? Your mom’s Jag doesn’t have an onboard navigating system” isn’t necessarily the only trash spoken here.

The degree of trash spoken changes with the neighborhood, according to those who receive and decipher it, dish and duck it.

In Orange County, mothers remain common targets, trite as those attempts are.

But, “up in L.A.,” according to Brea Olinda’s Ryan Moore, a basketball opponent once casually--but firmly--mentioned that he had a handgun, and he offered to show it to Moore in the parking lot.

Moore took the young man at his word, and then was the first to his car.

“It’s much softer in Orange County,” he said. “I laugh sometimes because some of the stuff they say is so stupid. They’ll start talking about your mother. I mean, that is so old.”

The man with the basketball is told he can’t shoot. Unless he’s very far from the basket, then he’s dared to shoot. The guy on defense is told he can’t defend. The coach is told to sit down. The referee is told to bear down.

Most often, it is the predictable you-can’t, oh-yes-I-can stuff that only occasionally escalates beyond words. Basketball teams from Villa Park and San Clemente poked at one another after a recent game, according to Villa Park forward Matt MacGinnis, but held their tempers.

“That was a team that started talking quick,” MacGinnis said. “They were talking the whole game, even at the end of the game. Then they felt like they had to get the last word in.”

After all, the very point of trash-talking is the final word. While it is best delivered in the form of (or immediately following) a dunk off somebody’s ear, a forehead-rattling stiff-arm or a Charlie Brown line drive through the middle, a simple, satisfying, “Scoreboard!” typically suffices.

“I love it when people trash-talk,” MacGinnis said. “There’s nothing better than showing up a guy who’s talking trash.”

Most players shrug at the practice and at the potential repercussions.

“Being at Brea, we’re up on the hill, so people think we’re rich,” Moore said. “We get a lot of that stuff.

“Personally, to a point, it’s part of the game. It can make it fun. They’re challenging me. I think it helps. It motivates me.”

The old “Your dad pulls down half-a-mil a year and has no tax shelter” just doesn’t devastate psyches like it used to.

“It’s not that big of a deal, really,” said Ryan Wilber, a teammate of Moore’s at Brea. “Sometimes, guys will say stuff they think is insulting, and it’s not. I laugh. They try to make fun of you, make fun of your family. Your mother. It’s funny.”

It is not readily tolerated in most high school gyms and fields, however, and particularly not by Jim Harris at Ocean View High.

“All of that [trash-talking] is part of what some people think is gamesmanship,” said Harris, Ocean View’s varsity basketball coach for 22 years. “But it’s not. It’s not the game. It’s calling attention to yourself, and it’s a team game.”

Harris had a player transfer into his program, and for several days in practice the player was quick to color his play with loquacious commentary. When his new teammates refused to respond, the behavior subsided.

“You know the saying, ‘It begins in the home?’ ” Harris said. “Well, this begins in your home gym. If you’re doing it in practice, then they’re going to do it in the game. The coach has a lot of control. If he doesn’t exercise it, then he’s out of control.”

The Southern Section requires that a player be ejected after a second taunting violation--though Castillo said officials have the authority to banish a player after one--and an ejection carries a one-game suspension. In 1994, the section’s Sportsmanship Committee mandated that athletes sign an ethics code that reads, in part, “Win with character, lose with dignity.”

A year ago, in the Santa Ana Valley girls’ basketball tournament, a Dominguez High player irked by trash-talking chose the ritual postgame handshake line as the time to punch a Westminster player.

A signature on a piece of paper did not dissuade the attacker.

Mary Mulligan, girls’ basketball coach at San Clemente High, maintains that trash-talking among high school girls is rare. In 14 years as a coach, she said, she could recall only a half-dozen such instances, and that each “created a tremendous amount of animosity.”

“I think women and girls do it much less than the boys,” Mulligan said. “They’re as competitive, but you don’t find that many girls with that much self-confidence on the court. If they do, they’re just not ugly about it.”

A week before Thanksgiving, Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre twice made throat-slashing gestures at the Detroit Lion bench. After the second, he drew an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.

“I’m not that type of player, but I guess I was today,” Favre told reporters afterward. “I always say, ‘Those guys shouldn’t do that. It looks bad.’ And them I’m out there doing it.”

Detroit players had taunted him weeks before, during a Lion victory. That’s the big thing now, the throat-slashing gesture, in football and basketball in particular. So big, in fact, that the NFL sanctioned its use in a video game that carries the NFL logo.

Perfect.

If Brett Favre can talk trash, then why can’t a high-school player? Michael Jordan talked. Deion Sanders talks. Ali, of course. Many of the best athletes ever, they talked. There are very few Wayne Gretzkys out there. What’s a kid supposed to do?

“Where you see [trash-talking] a great deal is in the colleges and pros,” La Quinta baseball Coach Dave Demarest said. “You get it somewhat in high school, though most of the coaches will control it. Unfortunately, the high school kids watch it on TV.

“I don’t allow it. I tell our kids to let me know if something’s said. I want to know if they’re hearing something. It is not acceptable at any level.”

Even Favre, whose cool psyche has been tested in the Super Bowl, wasn’t able to manage his composure in a singular moment of vengeful indulgence. If that game had been played under Southern Section rules, Favre would have been ejected from that game and suspended from the next one.

“I think it’s fair. In basketball, it takes two technicals to be ejected,” Mulligan said. “I think you’ve gotten a pretty fair warning. Even an out-of-control coach has to back off, because the cost isn’t worth it.”

Demarest said the rule is too harsh.

“If somebody’s booted because of trash-talking, that shouldn’t include a suspension for the following game,” he said. “They should reserve that for violence.”

With the occasional exception, trash-talking in the county has begun and ended with that--talking. Even that seems rare.

“There are some schools in Orange County that do a lot of [trash-talking],” Harris said. “But, again, it starts and ends--or doesn’t end--with who’s in charge.

“If you have to talk to [the athletes] every year, then something’s wrong. They should know. There are standards that become tradition. If they are not well-established, then every year you’ll have to reeducate your whole program. Something’s wrong there.”

Not everything can be controlled from the bench, a fact that has led to a handful of skirmishes in recent years.

“You have less problems on the field than you do in the stands,” Castillo, the long-time official, said. “The parents and fans are getting worse. They forget the respect. The game belongs to the kids. Parents don’t have the right to abuse people.”

It trickles down, though. From the professional players, from the college players, from the parents and, occasionally, from the coaches.

No one wants to be a “mouse in the house.” No one wants it “in the mouth.” So everybody talks. Well, almost everybody.

“Not in my game,” Castillo said. “You clean it up right now. [But] I think we’re pretty good here [in Orange County], compared to other places.”

If trash-talking has become an issue, according to those who play the games, then the issue belongs to other people, to those who watch and attempt to govern.

“If you can shake hands with a guy after the game,” Villa Park’s MacGinnis said, “it’s forgotten.”

Although, perhaps, not in the stands, where a 16-year-old’s jumpshot does remarkable things for a 40-year-old’s ego.

“I think adults talk more trash in the stands than the kids do on the court,” Wilber said. “They should just sit and watch the game and let the kids play.”